Yeah, it's luck when you find one. I've often found one early; this current playthrough I haven't found any (to the point where I want to make sure they're not bugged, hah).
Got it. By the way something I want to know if you have time to answer - is it possible that we would get a finer control over leveling up hired officers in the future, like a skill tree of some sorts, or the somewhat randomized skill selection menu is also fundamentally a part of "make do with what you get" design for officers?
It's a possibility, I can see both sides of it and am not 100% set either way. I could e.g. see mentoring unlocking an extra skill pick or two, or some such.
"Taking what the dungeon gives you" is a cool design for games, but it only works well if the randomness is mostly frontloaded in the early game. Cryopod officers are something you will normally find quite late, after you've invested millions in your ships and s-modded them. At that point it would feel sucky to trash all that to take advantage of level 7s (which is a big enough power boost to bother).
Might also encourage unpleasant game patterns, where you scout the whole sector to get officers, and then build your fleet around them.
Not specifically talking about the officers here, it feels like Starsector in general makes switching playstyles in the late game rather painful. Yet the random drops are mostly lategame territory (colony items, cryopods, omega weapons).
I get what you're saying, yeah. I think with level 7 officers specifically, if I got one I wanted to build a ship around, it'd be exciting rather than annoying (and you can always scuttle the ship you're discarding to get a bunch of bonus XP). And it's designing just one new ship, so for me it'd fall under "interesting" rather than "tedious". Where things definitely do get annoying is if you're trying to switch fleet comps wholesale, though.
So in a sense, it's less that the skills specifically are random - although there is some variance among them - but more that it's the loadout types that are random. I think this is fine as long as the skills allocated are all suitable for that role. I would argue against being able to have a lot of the same style in a single play, but I can see the other side of that argument as well.
*thumbs up*
I personally would prefer a more specific choosing of skills, particularly since I can already obtain this via the savescum method (let the officer gain exp without leveling them until they're maxed, then save scum till I get the skill set that I want). This is a way of life for me as an officer enjoyer. Hopefully down the line there's a bit more of a better system in place, but I definitely respect the idea that you don't want players to have full control over this.
Oh, that works? Interesting! <makes notes> (No, but this is a hard thing to make save-scumming not work for. If you e.g. fix an RNG seed, that could still be gamed by picking skills in a different order and thus changing to skill pool for the next pick, etc.)
