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[intrinsic_parity]

Currently, you are sometimes given the option to promote an officer randomly from your fleet, but you have to pay a story point. I don't really see how that can ever be worth it (paying a scarce resource) when you can easily pay like 2k credits to get a low level officer by just flying around the core for like 2 minutes, or you can go exploring and find level 5/7 officers for free.

Either it shouldn't cost a story point, or there should be some bonus to promoting internally, like being able to get an extra level or something.

[Thaago]

Does it give bonus XP? I don't remember, but if it does that's a nice bonus. I've found it useful for before I have a full complement because I will often get candidates faster than I can find them at markets.

If it does need a buff, making it mentored for the same story point would be neat.

[Alex]

It does give 100% bonus XP, yeah, so it's effectively free and helps speed up your level-ups. Making the officer level 2 might be fun but would also make it less useful, maybe?

(Keeping in mind that past max level, bonus XP is used up much faster than it was originally - 4x instead of 2x. It felt pretty easy to use all of it up without anything that felt like grinding...)

[intrinsic_parity]

I usually have a big stack of bonus xp well into end game, so I don't get that story point back for a long long time (when I finally burn through all the bonus xp). I don't consider that free at all. I don't really think it's worth the opportunity cost of having an extra s-mod that whole time and a little less bonus xp, I would much rather just pay 2k credits or get a free pod officer.

[Wyvern]

I've used this option once or twice - there was a point in my playthrough when I was actually out of bonus XP.

That point was long in the past, and has not repeated.

I also feel it's important to keep in mind that, in practice, this isn't a one-story-point option, it's a two-story-point option, since you then need to separately 'mentor' them.

My preferred suggestion: An officer promoted internally should be level one, count as mentored without a separate story point expenditure, and have a personality and starting skill of your choice. That would actually be worth the combination of 'rare opportunity' with 'which also costs a story point'.

[Thaago]

I guess I'm weird in that I usually don't have a bonus XP surplus going? I guess I should be aggressively finding things to spend story points on. What do people usually spend them on to get that bonus?

[intrinsic_parity]

I just spam smods on whichever ships I think will be sticking around. I tend to grow my fleet pretty quick, so that is pretty much an endless story point sink along with officers.

[Farya]

Internal promotion would be useful if you actually get to choose personality of an officer and them starting out as mentored. So if you like mentoring officers into a desired build it would be better than hiring level 1 officers elsewhere.

[Megas]

I have promoted officers I did not need before because I did not have bonus XP, so I will promote, mentor, then discard if I do not need him.

[Serenitis]

I use internal promotion quite a bit, since all the characters it generates explictly pull thier portraits from player.faction, so if you have any non-standard stuff loaded it will show up here.
And that fits nicely when doing RP stuff with a modified faction.

For triggering bonus xp mostly I start off with promotions.
If I am given the chance to restore CR before a battle I will almost always take that as well.
Running away from stuff makes up a significant amount of my bonus xp in the early game, but later on I will deliberately bounce off a hostile fleet then carry on to wherever I was going if I feel the need to see green numbers.