It is normally not my type to suggest any development direction in private projects, so let's see this as mild stimulating exchange without any concrete ideas.
Also I can keep more officers in circulation.
This truly bothers me too. One of the reasons I now use some escort ships and much more fighter craft than before is to have training spots for officers.
I wish we could just assign more officers to our ships, for example like in this game, which I found really amazing in that regard:
There you have 4 ranks in which you can place commanders.
1. A real commanding officer, which is just a lieutenant to commander in case of fighters, then I think at least commander for corvettes to destroyers, and later must be a captain or commodore for the different cruisers and the battleship.(was long ago, so my memory might be leaky)
The commander improves the performance of all the other officers by 1/10th of the skill he himself has in that regard (like navigation), and somehow leadership mixed in too.(don't remember. actually feeling like playing this again for this)
2. and 3. Are navigation and tactical. Navigation improves turn rate mainly, and a bit also the maximum forward speed. Tactical is only for to hit rate. Officers here can not outrank the captain, and must otherwise be between ensign and commander.(on later capital ships also captains)
4. Is engineering, which is only available on ships larger than corvette (..or was it frigate?). Must have something to do with battle repairs, or might even improve hp. Cannot remember. Same rank rules as 2 and 3.
Then there are also the fleet command postions, in which you can place anything from commodore to fleet admiral. These admirals distribute percentages of their skills to the fleet's other officers as well, while I think Rear Admiral and Commodore had reduced gains. The Commodore is just as in real life one waiting and emergency rank to clarify who has the command in case of the actual admiral being hindered. They have not completed training and bring near to no bonuses, but
can at least be assigned.
I think Leadership is really important here, because it determined the maximum ship points that an Admiral could command. Also, the fleet admiral could be assigned to rule the headquarters and academy on earth, though I forgot what that did.
I fantasize that we could have something similar in Aurora too, with the added bonus that another officer could take over the command when the former C.O. died to some incident. How awesome would it be if we had a whole little staff on ships rather than just the captain, and everyone doing something?
The current rank distribution has so many crudities. ...I feel like listing the ones I can think of.
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Real rank distribution is around 1:7 I think in real life. Aurora does 1:3 because there are not enough spots anyway, but with multiple officers per ship, quite a portion of that could maybe be solved.
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"I am Admiral of this F22!" problems, where ships get commanded by the most qualified officers around, which sometimes leads to high ranking officers leading ridiculous ship types if you are in the situation of having too many commanders. (Though I must confess that I haven't seen this so much anymore since around 6.3, so maybe there is now something preventing this.)
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Too many Admirals anyway, and too little positions to place them on. Let's face it, the Fleet Headquarters usually only have an Admiral in the lead, because you actually need some rank there, and also the TFT score. Other positions are only rarely occupied by real admirals (unless you role-play it). Usually there are young, much more talented officers that take the position and then stay there for the rest of their lives, mostly in the same rank of lieutenant or maximum commander. ..That at least is my experience when letting the AI handle it.
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Too many low ranks, and also nothing to do for them. Aurora seems to have adapted to start with Lt. Commander ranks over time, but I still like my lieutenants. Other than fighters, there is rarely some good position for these masses of low ranking people. Just one captain means that you will have to come up with 9+3 other ships to place all the corresponding Lt.Cdr's and Commanders on if you want full employment. These ranks (and lieutenants) normally wouldn't even command any ship other than maybe gunboats and corvettes, and their natural position would be in some sort of support leading position on another ship, just like in the game above.
..It seems so strange to have so many commanders unemployed, and eventually getting fired from inactivity, just because they cannot be hired into their natural positions.
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Too few captains. (this had to come^^) Normally you would want most of your ships to be commanded by a captain, and not an Admiral, and rarely commanders. ..But the span of captains is so little that they get completely overmanned by all the high and low ranks.
I have found myself inventing extra ranks by now to expand the span of officers who are "captains" in some sense. Captain, Senior Captain and Commodore are current, but I also thought about giving real naval ranks like frigate captain, or "captain to the see" depending directly on allowed class. This corrects the issue partially, because captains get now chosen more often, though you still have no idea what to do with all the 10 times more numerous lower ones other than parking fighter zoos.
If both lower and higher officers find employment elsewhere however, then captains would finally be the main rank to be in charge of ships, like they should be.
