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[Mishrak]

The whole point of this thread is discussing the game and its issues.  The fact that a mod exists has been mentioned in this thread before, and a lot of times people use that to white wash the fact that the game has issues.  "Just use the mod bro it fixes it."

It's not the point, the point is talking about the shortcomings of the current implementation of the officer system.

[Thaago]

Being able to "stable" officers, but still pay for them, would be nice.

Maybe a "Store officer along with ship?" option when storing a ship? That's a bit clunky but would get the job done.

[Mishrak]

How do they actually gain exp?  Do they get an amount from each battle?  Or is it only when they kill a ship?

I've tried to discern this without going deep into testing it.

Also big +1 for being able to stable them from me.  Would help tremendously.

[Killer of Fate]

here's how I would solve this then... And I did it only by modifying config settings... But again, my solutions are very stupid, and this could easily backfire in some way...

A - I've changed how you gain bonus experience. In vanilla game you gain bonus experience for retraining, mentoring and recruiting new officers (promoting). I've made it so that retraining doesn't give bonus experience. But made it so that giving elite points does. Now, why? This is cause I wanted the game to work in a way in which you want to rotate officers, rather than having an elite you hold onto for the rest of the game. And having a system where retraining is more encouraged than training may allow that.

B - I've made mercenary officers far more common, and gave them a shorter timer before they no longer work for you. With mercenary officers being ridiculously common, you may more easily assemble a proper fleet of high level officers that have specific stats you need. And in fact you may be allowed to have a fleet of high level officers way sooner, by substituting long-term officers with mercenary ones. Who are also going to rotate quickly, allowing you to rapidly change strategies depending on what kind of officers you have at the moment. With only a select few being permanent. At least until mid, late game where you have a large base of normal officers.

With this system however you are encouraged to fire and recruit new officers often. Because as I said, training officers gives you bonus experience for giving them elite skills, as well as mentoring. So you are no longer encouraged to just endlessly retrain the same officers over and over in hopes of somehow fitting them into rapid playstyle changes.

You are going to have significantly more bonus experience due to the fact that you will be recruiting a lot of mercenary officers (but will also have them leave you way more quickly, cause I nerfed their timer from 730 days to 180. So stacking large amounts of mercenary officers may still prove difficult). And if you choose to train and fire officers constantly, you will have an easy way to rapidly farm bonus experience... Which, I know... Sounds stupid. I need to know how this works at the highest possible level where experience values are so ridiculously high, only the strongest fleets give you anything. And at that point why even bother playing the game if all enemies are trivial?

[Mishrak]

I guess one thing I hadn't really considered is that, no matter what, we're losing combat power temporarily while we level them up to replace existing officers. Even if we had the ability to stable the officers, that's still a loss in combat power to train them up. 

I think the main issue there is the permanence of the change, and we have to make that decision without knowing fully if the new officer will be what we want them to be.  Assuming we don't use the save scum method described here:

Don't level up or train them. Just wait until they hit max XP. Save before leveling them up. If you get a bad set of level up skills, train them, this will reroll the level up skills. If you get a bad set despite the reroll, reload your save. Repeat until you have a good officer.

Which this is the method to use, because it's too much of a time investment to level them up, also take the temporary combat power hit, only to then take a subpar officer.

[Megas]

A - I've changed how you gain bonus experience. In vanilla game you gain bonus experience for retraining, mentoring and recruiting new officers (promoting). I've made it so that retraining doesn't give bonus experience. But made it so that giving elite points does. Now, why? This is cause I wanted the game to work in a way in which you want to rotate officers, rather than having an elite you hold onto for the rest of the game. And having a system where retraining is more encouraged than training may allow that.

Retraining is useful for changing behavior in case the ship needs it.  Like if I go from a brawler that wants Aggressive to a sniper with PD weapons that wants Steady (because Aggressive will wade in into PD range).

For respeccing officers, it is not just skills, but behavior too.

Another gripe I have with the officers is I cannot change behavior at max level unless I make a skill elite.  Until then, I cannot Retrain to change behavior (in case I have a generalist officer copying Support Doctrine skill package plus Gunnery Implants) until I make a skill elite, but I do not want to make a skill elite because it gives no bonus XP, which is a bummer when the time comes to fire the officer.

[Killer of Fate]

oh, I didn't have this issue, cause I increased the amount of overall officers spawning. So, you can actually pick one close to what behaviour you want, and then shift them once using mentor.

[Zenaria]

i see no issues about losing combat power when we training them.
cause that what training suppose to be.

unless you put that greenhorn into capital ship or train them with ramnant.

and since officer give a huge improvement to the ship they pilot. that mean they're core to your fleet.
having a reserve so you can replace them anytime also seem like a disrespect to me.

[Mishrak]

A - I've changed how you gain bonus experience. In vanilla game you gain bonus experience for retraining, mentoring and recruiting new officers (promoting). I've made it so that retraining doesn't give bonus experience. But made it so that giving elite points does. Now, why? This is cause I wanted the game to work in a way in which you want to rotate officers, rather than having an elite you hold onto for the rest of the game. And having a system where retraining is more encouraged than training may allow that.

Retraining is useful for changing behavior in case the ship needs it.  Like if I go from a brawler that wants Aggressive to a sniper with PD weapons that wants Steady (because Aggressive will wade in into PD range).

For respeccing officers, it is not just skills, but behavior too.

Another gripe I have with the officers is I cannot change behavior at max level unless I make a skill elite.  Until then, I cannot Retrain to change behavior (in case I have a generalist officer copying Support Doctrine skill package plus Gunnery Implants) until I make a skill elite, but I do not want to make a skill elite because it gives no bonus XP, which is a bummer when the time comes to fire the officer.

Something else that's worth noting is, while when use an SP to change them, it will give them gain boosted exp, this is undesirable to do while they're leveling because of the trick with retraining allowing us to get the skills we want.  This means that there's effectively no boosted exp rate for them.

I know the intent was to have them level up faster but it doesn't make sense to utilize it in that way.

[Mishrak]

How do they actually gain exp?  Do they get an amount from each battle?  Or is it only when they kill a ship?

It does look like they get big exp bonuses for actual kill shots.  I'm not sure if it's a system where they get exp every time they shoot at something, but the fights where I babysit my level 1 pilot and let it finish ships off, it gets like +50k exp, vs if I just let it tag along it ends up getting around 13k exp.

(Station was 60k exp)

It makes sense that it's like this, although I feel like having a more shared exp pool would be a smoother leveling process.  But that does open the door for just putting them in something that doesn't contribute (like a Kite) to level them, which I'm sure is undesirable.

[Vanshilar]

How do they actually gain exp?  Do they get an amount from each battle?  Or is it only when they kill a ship?

As far as I'm aware, the officers basically split the XP you get among themselves. So if a battle nets you say 50k base XP, and you have 5 officers, then each get 10k base XP. This can then be modified by any SP XP that they have. Also, even if an officer is already at max level, he still gets his share of the officer XP, even though it's "wasted" since he's already at max. But it means the other officers get less.

This only counts the officers that were actually deployed in that battle. So you can have max level officers stay out of the fight to help the other officers level up faster. Fastest of course is to only have 1 officer with you in battle (leave all other deployed ships unofficered), whereby that officer will get the same base XP that you get.

There's some other factors, such as the ship needing to be in combat long enough, but I don't think it depends on damage dealt, just purely how long they were deployed and how long that was relative to the whole battle duration I think. Never bothered to explore that in detail.

[Pizzarugi]

I'm not sure if it counts, but I did just run into a massive rogue Domain-era drone fleet bounty which had 2 guardians and more cruisers than my fleet has. Every single ship had an officer, granted they were gamma cores.

Hardest fight I've ever done.

[Rusty Edge]

It would be neat if officer skill pools were based on thier faction origin, rather than RNG. So that you know what skills will be available to a particular officer.
You may even have faction specific capstone skills that come into play at max level.

[SCC]

I think that ultimately officers are not more than just a few stat buffs to our ships. Alex should either develop them enough that it makes sense that you would never want to switch them (or, at least, not without some story reason), or make them easier to manage, with back-up officer slots or something else that lets you change them as quickly as you can change ships and skills.

[Mishrak]

I think that ultimately officers are not more than just a few stat buffs to our ships. Alex should either develop them enough that it makes sense that you would never want to switch them (or, at least, not without some story reason), or make them easier to manage, with back-up officer slots or something else that lets you change them as quickly as you can change ships and skills.

I mean those stat buffs are pretty big.  They also change the AI behavior.  Any sort of fleet that wants to go the pristine ship route needs to have good officers to punch up well, doubly so if the player isn't flying anything.  Having a 3 skill officer (with 2 subpar skills for the ship) vs a 5 skill officer can be night and day difference in ship performance.