I think we might be speaking at crosspurposes here. I can imagine that the civilian adminstrator of a comet mining colony is a directly appointed civil serveant, fair enough - picking the guy with the best mining skill is a no-brainer, that colony represents a commercial not political interest and this is clearly a job best given to professionals who may serve professionally in that role for a long period of time. However, the governor of a 100m colony on the moon is not a civil serveant but a political figure in charge of a very large nation in modern real terms. Under most democratic government, this bloke would serve limited terms. If I am roleplaying as a democracy, I can't really imagine what the civilian administrators represent - are they elected politicians or senior civil serveants? is the governor of earth a presidential figure or the equivalent of like permanent undersecretary of some ministry?
As a player, I might want a governor who is going to increase construction and pop growth, and I would want that guy to serve indefinitely and get better over time. However, under a political process, the 100m electorate of the lunar colony might want to prioritize something else for their own local reasons which may appear irrational to the player (brexit? the lunar colony clearly needs shipyard bonii even though there are no shipyards, thats a campaign promise you can believe in!). And then 5 years in the future, the agenda would change, and a different set of debately releveant priorities would emerge.
Under the c# command rules, ships can have multiple officers and we have several commands over them. It might be fun to add a similiar level of complexity to civilian adminstrators, with some delineation between permanent appointed civil serveants working in professional roles, and temporary elected roles for colonies with larger population, or both on the same colony.
Actually, that guy in charge of a comet mining facility that is appointed?
Might not have a mining bonus. He might have a big enough political bonus however that rates how good he is at convincing the people making the decision that he is either knowledgeable enough or
reliable and loyal enough to the people assigning him put him there for a variety of reasons, up to and including him being much less likely to cause a problem than mister rebellious mining genius who could also be assigned.
Or he might have screwed up so badly for whatever reason at a colony that despite his clear competence in managing shipbuilding projects he is kicked to a forgettable corner of the nation so that tempers can cool.
When political decision making gets involved, skill and competence often compete with how much the people making the decision think they themselves benefit or suffer from that decision. Assigning a mining genius to a colony whose main economical sector is mining may sound like a no brainer, but you may want them somewhere else for a number of different reasons.
That elected official of the Luna colony with the shipbuilding bonuses probably wouldn't be elected if he runs on a shipbuilding platform unless the Luna colony itself wants to do shipbuilding. It might also be that he ran on a manufacturing platform, which he may or may not be competent in but convinced enough people it was a good idea to elect him on that basis.
Simulating the political process and prioritization of a nation would be quite difficult and involved, while leaving it entirely randomized would be frustrating because of how powerful the bonuses can get, and how much a new roll of the dice can and most likely will skewer your long term plans. It's not helped by the fact that the game actually has a fairly slow pace on the strategic layer; ships often take a year or more to build, so you
have to plan ahead by several years at a minimum just to be confident that you will have what you need at that point in time. If an election in the middle of that period craters mining of a critical mineral you need to build and maintain your ships and facilities, or majorly slows down ship construction so that every slip you could use is occupied and yet need to do major maintenance and refits in slips that should've been cleared and idle months earlier, that gets really annoying.
And sure, if you can assign administrators long term to a colony they can keel over dead and leave you with the same problem, but in that case you at least have the option of reassigning other administrators to plug the gap and catch the damage. That's not something you can do with what's effectively a randomized bonus selection system that allows no attempt to mitigate the damage without needing to completely overhaul your entire nation's building and personnel distribution.
It'd be less bad if the bonuses couldn't stack up so massively. Losing a 5% bonus is inconvenient but something you can cover for. Losing a 20% bonus is crippling.
