Tour times?

[Rich.h (OP)]

Is there any benefit or disadvantage to setting longer or shorter tour times for officers? I am at the stage now where I have quite a large number of ships floating around, and I still use the default 24 month tour. The problem is I dread seeing the assignment change event daye, mainly this is due to me having an rp medal system in place where certain classes get certain awards etc, this means that tour rotations chew up endless amounts of mouse clicks and times for me and I would love to be able to put them off for awhile.

So can I increase the length of tours without suffering any negative effects?

[MagusXIX]

As your officers' skills go up, they may become better suited in roles that they're not currently in.  Frequent tour updates help to keep everyone optimally placed.  It's mostly just a question of efficiency, and it's as hard to predict as it is to predict when skills will change.

I wouldn't worry about it too much, but setting it for longer than 5-10 years or so might be detrimental to your economy and military efficiency over time.

[Aloriel]

Setting it over 5 years will likely result in a loss of officers who did not get assignments. Remember that you will lose officers who have not had an assignment in 6ish years.

[Wolfius]

Remember that you will lose officers who have not had an assignment in 6ish years.

Only with auto-assign officers on. Leave it to manually assign officers and they stick with you until death or health issues or you fire them.

Of course, that means you have to manually assign officers, but often I like handling that myself. Can still toggle auto-assign on and off when you want, tho; can be useful if you want to clear out unused officers easily.

[Aloriel]

Only with auto-assign officers on. Leave it to manually assign officers and they stick with you until death or health issues or you fire them.

In my experience, this is incorrect.

In my current game in version 6.42, I have lost officers because I did not assign them a position somewhere. It mostly happened to my ground combat officers until I got enough ground troops to assign them all to. I seldom lose my space officers because I keep them assigned to fighters and/or task force HQs.

You can lose officers no matter what setting you have.

[Wolfius]

I'm still playing a campaign in 6.3, decades in, so that must be a recent change if people are being dismissed for inactivity now without auto-assignments.

[Bryan Swartz]

It's there in 6.2 as well FWIW.