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[ayckoster]

You can hire officers at stations & colonies and you can rescue them on ship wrecks.

A few versions ago a new feature was introduced to recruit them from your crew after big battles for story points.

I feel this is disproportionate and have never really use the promotion system as I think it is almost never worth a story point.

The mechanic is good, but make it it about resources and money. Here is how a small change will make people use the promotion system more often:

Officer promotion:

• The UI for promotions stays the same.
• The promotion costs heavy armaments and money for the "training" phase. Instead of 1 story point the player pays 4000 credits and 10 heavy armaments, which is more expensive than a normal hire.
• (Optional) The new officer starts without a skill and the player can chose the first skill similar to a level up from 1 to 2.

Why is this relevant? The new crisis system makes you stay at your colony more often. Combine this with exploration and you spend less time in the core systems at a time where you want to recruit more officers.

[Serenitis]

I use the promotion mechanic frequently and consider it to be one of the best uses of a Story Point, as it returns 100% bonus xp and you gain a valuable character at the same time.

[ayckoster]

I use the promotion mechanic frequently and consider it to be one of the best uses of a Story Point, as it returns 100% bonus xp and you gain a valuable character at the same time.

I guess I don't value a little experience and a pilot worth a story point. For me it's more important to invest the story points on things I cannot get with money or a small time invest in the game. I'd prefer an industry improvement or an S-Mod every time. Additionally, I need to keep some story points to get out of bad situations.

[Wyvern]

Yeah, the current promotion mechanic is mostly just bad. Sometimes, if I get one early-game, at a point where I'm low on bonus XP, I'll take it anyway.

...But it's absolutely not worth it otherwise. Especially when you consider that the actual cost of it is two story points, since you need to promote and then mentor them.

The only worse officer hiring mechanic in-game is the one where you can spend a story point to recruit a pather, giving you a level... I don't remember, two or three I think, officer, whose attitude and skills can't be seen until after you've chosen to hire them.

[Alex]

Since you do get 100% bonus XP for both of the options - the promoting, and the mentoring - this just seems like mostly upside, no?

You don't actually lose the story points, right. Consider if you do this (just for arguments' sake) at level 4, with zero percent progress to level 5. You spend two story points, getting 100% bonus XP for them. This means that bonus XP will run out by the time you reach level 5, exactly - you will get to level 5 by gaining half the XP you normally would, and when you get there, you will have gotten 4 story points instead of the 2 you would have had at this point if you didn't get bonus XP (in which case, you'd be halfway to level 5).

So: you gain half a level in exchange for temporarily investing those points. Unless you're scraping the bottom of the barrel on story points, basically you just level up faster with no downside.

After you get to level 15, this calculation changes a bit - you have a bunch more bonus XP to "work through" - but without getting into the math and all the details, the only time you'd really "lose" story points is if you 1) get to level 15 but then 2) don't play long enough to get through the bonus XP you have at that point. From personal experience - and since you use bonus XP faster when at max level - this is a fairly narrow range, it doesn't take much to get those points back at that stage, either. (This was more of an issue in earlier versions of the game, where this post-max-level bonus XP was harder to use up.)

[Kriby]

I love spending my points on all kinds of stuff because of the bonus XP and return on investment, but it seems like a reoccuring thing that the mechanics of that aren't communicated to players in a way that makes using them feel good. Not sure if anything can be done to alleviate that though.

Use the points, you'll have them back before you know it!

[Alex]

The game tries pretty hard to communicate this, but, open to suggestions You're right that this seems to be a point of confusion, though I suspect opinions also differ on how easy it is to burn through the bonus XP past max level.

Hm, maybe this should be called out in the tutorial more specifically, for 100% bonus XP options...

[Wyvern]

Since you do get 100% bonus XP for both of the options - the promoting, and the mentoring - this just seems like mostly upside, no?

It's upside if I'm low or out of bonus xp, yes. As I mentioned in my original post in this thread.

However, my personal experience is that it is very rare for me to be low or out of bonus XP. And if I already have bonus XP running through and past level whatever-level-is-next? Well, sure, I'll get those points back eventually, but right now it's a very real "this costs me 2 SP that I will then not have available for other things".

[Alex]

Ah - I mean, that's fair, but I suppose that means you are doing other things that give you bonus XP, so it's less that this is a bad deal in terms of story points, and more that you prefer other deals in terms of bonus XP? Hm, maybe too fine a distinction. I tend to pick up a bunch of officers and mentor them and use SP pretty freely and bonus XP is usually there, but not so much of it that another bar or half a bar's worth feels extraneous. I understand that this is going to vary, though (and, even within the same playthrough), and understand where you're coming from better now, thank you for explaining that.

[Wyvern]

Ah - I mean, that's fair, but I suppose that means you are doing other things that give you bonus XP, so it's less that this is a bad deal in terms of story points, and more that you prefer other deals in terms of bonus XP? Hm, maybe too fine a distinction.

You could probably make that distinction if officer promotion candidates were something you saw frequently? But they're not; I can't rely on them coming up, so yes, I get my bonus XP elsewhere, and then when they do happen to come up, I've already got bonus XP and they don't feel like a good deal.

[Alex]

Makes sense. IIRC in my main game a couple of promotions came up early, so that changes it a bit.

[Serenitis]

You could probably make that distinction if officer promotion candidates were something you saw frequently? But they're not

This is actually a good point - I found that promotion candidates felt far too rare and adjusted some numbers myself.
After a bit of trail-and-error (and prompting) I settled on:
"maxOfficerPromoteProb":0.5,
Which is a bit of a jump from the default of 0.1, but it seems to provide a decent chance of having a candidate turn up without saturating you with people all the time.

[Killer of Fate]

my issue with promotion is that is way too *** rare. It should be a mechanic in the early game that literally begs you to fill out your officers to the max. But instead it just appears once in a blue moon, and I mostly associate it with having the option to have a new officer when I already am on max officers...

Here's how I imagine this working...
Levelling up officers should be easy, but they leave you, eventually. They retire, get bored of working for you, or start hating you, because for eg. you've lost too much crew. Promotion along more common appearing of officers would then serve in you replenishing the officers you lost. Now that I think about it, officers should also be allowed to randomly die if their ship gets destroyed.

This system sounds like a pain in the ass. I can already imagine all the people trembling in their shorts going like "but, dude, what about my 10k hours of investing into perfectly tuning my officers, and all the story points I've used with 0% bonus experience to give them elite skills". I say, we fix that too...

Make the officer system work like this... Training them and mentoring them gives you bonus experience, including for stuff like giving them elite skills. Retraining them doesn't. And officers will eventually leave you, so you'll have to keep recruiting them. On top of that put way more mercenary officers around the world. This way, instead of it being like "okay, so I have this static amount of 10 officers that are going to work for me for the rest of my immortal life", you'll go like "okay, across this playthrough, I had about 100 different officer builds. I'm getting pretty good at this".

This way players will be forced into constantly changing builds, or at least be allowed to go with various different fleet compositions. Nowadays the way this works is that you either stick to your high tech brigade or low tech brigade, or missile brigade, or cookie-cutters brigade, or otter brigade. Or you pay ridiculous amount of s-points to get new guys their elite skills and then go bankrupt, cause gaining s-points slows down to a crawl in the late game, unless you are farming Remnants (this should be somewhat fixed too, but it's probably going to really complicated, so the game will just stay sad). Or you just rely on cores. Which is also random. And you probably have officers on top as well...

I say, make the game have officers be chaotic and random, but also way more forgiving, in that it doesn't matter what skill you pick. This guy is going to abandon you in six months, or you're going to fire him anyway, cause you want to hire someone else.

But eh, this is probably too much balancing and *** to program. So, let's just forget I said anything.

[Goumindong]

Since you do get 100% bonus XP for both of the options - the promoting, and the mentoring - this just seems like mostly upside, no?

This assumes that time is free. And it is not.

Suppose you’re level 15 and you spend a 100% story point. You do get that point back, but only after getting a half million XP (Vs the full million XP). As it were you’re still a half a million XP behind the point you would be in terms of fleet development if you had spent that in a permanent way like an S-mod for your end game fleet (iE the thing you are going to spend the next story point on)

The more bonus XP you’ve acquired the more it pushes this back, functionally.

So these things are not ever “free” even if they can be worth it. There is always a time trade off. Even if you put the % at 200 or 300 for some actions these would not be “free” since they would still be delaying the payoff 

Granted I think officer promotions are OK… but I don’t think they’re generally better than just flying around looking for officers. It’s going to be hard to tempt me with a 100% SP return officer when I can buy one at any planet for 4k ish. I would pay 4k credits for 100% bonus SP any day of the week. So it makes sense that I would not want to give up a SP “right now” for 4k credits. I would have to be paid an investment on my XP over 100% to make this worth it.

Edit: maybe if self promoted officers were guaranteed to be able to go up to a higher level this would make sense. But as it is now it’s not really worth it.

[Alex]

This assumes that time is free. And it is not.
...
So these things are not ever “free” even if they can be worth it. There is always a time trade off. Even if you put the % at 200 or 300 for some actions these would not be “free” since they would still be delaying the payoff 

I don't think that saying the cost here is *time* makes sense, in the long term. The point of the mechanic is that the cost very much *isn't* time - rather, it's making do without that story point for some amount of time after which you're caught up in terms of how many SP you'd have if you hadn't spent that one.

But that's probably a minor nitpick; I get what you're saying. They're obviously not completely free, there's an opportunity cost. There's just no long-term time cost, so you're not always behind where you would otherwise be.