This leads to a situation where the most optimal way to farm XP is by not having any officers at all since they increase relative fleet strength and therefore significantly lower your XP gain, and the more and better officers you have the worse it gets. Instead you should just spam Brawler LPs(and/or carriers, since without officers the Leadership skill line will naturally push you towards them) with Support Doctrine.
Yes and no. The optimal way to farm XP, in terms of XP gained per minute of play, is actually triple Ordos using a full fleet of ships and officers. To max your XP gained per minute, you want to kill enemy ships as fast as possible, and to do that you want a bigger fleet which means more damage output which means more enemy ships killed per minute. Same with putting officers in those ships, since they add to your damage output. Triple Ordos is what's needed for the enemy fleet to be big enough to max out your XP bonus with max fleet and max officers, so you don't really need to fight anything bigger in vanilla.
However, what's
easier to set up is a smaller fleet. Smaller battle size, less chaotic, less chance of something going wrong. Also, less need to worry about multiple Radiants at the end. So if you're just going for a single Ordos fleet, then yes you'll be very limited in the DP you can spend. But that's because the fight is so small in the first place that it's even harder to make an effective tiny fleet to max out the XP bonus. The enemy fleet simply isn't difficult enough. Also, the biggest limiting factor is the "constant" term of you the player character: for your fleet, you as a level 15 officer count as 63.75 DP for XP bonus purposes. Rounding up to 70 DP to account for some support ships, this means you have roughly 130 DP to spend on ships and officers if you're going for single Ordos, 330 DP to spend for double Ordos, and 530 DP to spend for triple Ordos. You essentially get to quadruple your fleet (ships + officers) if you go against triple Ordos, but only need to churn through triple the amount of ships.
From some of my past testing, putting my LP Brawler fleet up against double Ordos instead of single Ordos increased my XP/minute by around 30%. It faltered against triple Ordos however because it became too hard to manage them in a larger battle without at least one dying. A triple Ordos-oriented fleet such as Gryphon spam could kill triple Ordos in about the same time that my LP Brawler fleet could kill double Ordos (i.e. around 50% more XP/minute than double Ordos). However, those types of fleets were hard to scale down to single or double Ordos (although double Ordos was somewhat doable) because of the above problem on DP available to spend; they really rely on quantity as a quality all its own. Also they were complete overkill for other fleets, just because other fleets are too small in vanilla. The ships can be put in storage if you don't need to carry around a death fleet, but the officers can't. So I support
being able to put officers in storage for when you don't need to carry them around.
For officers, a level 6 officer currently counts as 30 DP for XP bonus purposes. It's really a matter of whether or not the officer will increase the ship's power by that much for it to be worthwhile. Although keep in mind that while it affects the XP bonus, it does
not affect the ship's DP to deploy. You get a much more powerful ship that still counts as the same DP to deploy, increasing your power density, which may make the fleet more effective. For example, putting an officer on a Gryphon increases its damage output by roughly 75% (compared with Support Doctrine, which gives Combat Endurance inherently as well as other skills, so the damage output increase was actually bigger). So you can think of it as a 35-DP ship that you get to deploy for 20 DP, but will count as 50 DP for XP bonus purposes. Putting enough 35-DP ships that count as 20 DP on the battlefield is going to allow you to steamroll content, so it may be worth the effect on the XP bonus. So whether or not an officer is worthwhile really depends on your particular fleet.
Personally I wouldn't mind if the whole "more XP based on relative fleet strength" mechanic was completely removed since IMO it does more harm than good. I'd rather race to the top than to the bottom.
It's an incentive for the player to make the battles more challenging. Otherwise the game would be too easy if players just marched death fleets of capital ships around all day. Many other mechanisms in the game (different DP for different ships, supplies upkeep, etc.) serve a similar purpose. The aim is for the player to use a "right size" fleet, not a huge fleet.
FWIW, I do have a todo item to reduce the impact of player-side officers on this calculation. Other than that, though, I think it should be producing generally desirable results - unless I'm missing something?
I feel like a level 6 officer changing from its current 30 DP to around 15 to 20 DP for the XP bonus feels about right. However, I also think that a small fleet for single Ordos, medium fleet for double Ordos, and large full-size fleet and officers for triple Ordos as endgame challenge also feels about right, depending on if the player is looking for "more quicker battles", or "fewer but more epic battles". (Triple Ordos is about what I personally care for in terms of how long the battle is, bigger than that and it becomes a drag. Although people have posted videos of going beyond that for vanilla.) I don't know where you feel is right for the hardest challenge that vanilla should offer, where the XP bonus should get maxed out. But since officers count for a lot more XP for enemy fleets (around 60% of the fleet DP for XP bonus purposes for deserter bounties, around 75% for Ordos fleets) than the player's fleet (around 20-60%, counting the player character as an officer) it might be tricky to balance toward what you feel is reasonable. There's that *0.67 multiplier in the code which might be revisited to get the desired results.
