Another feature I would hoard story points for are officers, since unlike ships, they do not refund skill points when fired. Officers need to be tailored to the ship they will pilot (if player wants to fight Ordos), but if the player changes the fleet, he probably wants to fire them all and replace them to pilot new ships.
It would not be so bad if officers can respec like the commander, but as long as skills are locked with the officer, firing them when the player changes the fleet makes sense, provided the player has the time to level them all up.
I usually do not make skills elite for officers because it feels bad when I want to fire them when they become obsolete after a fleet change and not get any refund.
I still think there should be a way to remove/“bank” S-mods from one ship and transfer them to another ship. That way you don’t feel like you’re wasting them on early game ships. The SP itself is still locked into the S mod system but it’s not completely tied to a particular ship.
This would be nice for Ziggurat, since player cannot build or find another. Spending several story points to swap s-mods through BotB toggling is clunky and more wasteful than necessary. There should be an easier way to remove s-mods on exotic ships that are difficult or impossible to replace.
Expanded Missile Racks is no good on Ziggurat without missiles, and I do not want to use missiles on Z when limited to human weapons. Once I get AMSRMs and Resonators from Omegas, then I want swap ITU s-mod for Expanded Missile Racks s-mod for more Omega missile capacity.
Speaking of hoarding SP, another mechanic that encourages it is the Historian. I wish the cost of differently prized "treasures" was more streamlined. Currently I'm incentivized to hoard SP in case a colony item I'm missing gets dropped by the Historian. Perhaps the hint to a colony item should cost a closer amount of SP to that to a blueprint, but the gameplay path to the former should be more exhausting that that to the latter.
Blueprints always cost 1, no refund. Player will always need to spend one for the Legion XIV (no other way to get that blueprint). The rest are for convenience. Raiding for all of the rest of the blueprints is tedious, even after the player finds all of the basic blueprint packs.
Colony items is the insanity part, starting at 4 and doubling with each successive item, like colony improvements. This is not a problem for player who sticks with five or six planets and does not use more than one item per colony, but it can be annoying for the alpha abuser who has no problem playing whack-a-mole with cells and wants more and more items for his ever-expanding empire.
