Tinkering with VB6 last night and had an RP thought/suggestion:
I have never noticed but once Commanders die/retired/KIA, are they still viewable in an inactive file or are they gone forever? If possible, I wonder if it would be possible for those Commanders to shift to a past Commander tab so their accomplishments and lives (records, medals, comments) are still viewable? I tend toward paying a lot of attention to my Commanders to the point of entering in comments on their actions and lives essentially creating a fictional story/universe as I go with these guys and when they eventually move on, I would like to go back and see who came before the present generation and what they did. Maybe even name a new colony world or warship (ex: 'TFNS Steve Walmsley') off a past Commander of renown and this function would make the record keeping for such a lot easier.
This has been in and out a couple times, and the problem is always how to differentiate between the few dozen Officers you care about and the hundreds you don't. Do they get a tickbox while alive to mark them as special? Do all dead/retired officers go to a 'pool' for a couple of years before deletion to give you time to note their details? Do you manually confirm "save or delete" for each dead/retired officer?
The officers wouldn't be in the same listing as the active Commanders. The suggestion is they be moved to a separate tab for 'Past Officers'. Certainly, the list would eventually after a 100 years or so be a couple hundred (or more) names long but given the amount of effort I put into them and their backstories, I wouldn't mind having that long list. Besides, if they're inactive and separate from the active list - preferably on a different page/listing altogether - they aren't really taking any processing power or cluttering up the active screen
Using VB figures so C# specifics won't be exact given certain changes being made but:
Each Academy generate 5 Officers a year. So even just 5 Academies on your homeworld early on pushes out 25 Officers annually.
So in 10 years you'll be churning out 250 Officers, most of which will likely never have a position and be culled a short few years after being produced after the preset amount of time.
In 100 years you'll have produced yet another 2,500 Officers. Now your list contains probably approximately 2,200 past-officers at a minimum.
Imagine loading up that list of 2,200 names to take a stroll down memory lane.
And that's just from 5 academies.