All my useless officers...

[LizardSF (OP)]

In my prior game, I had 30 or 40 R1 officers and about 12 R2 officers. All of my ships needed R2 minimum. This led to the computer dismissing a lot of promising R1 from service, and since they never got promoted to R2, due to my empire not issuing promotions for "Sitting on your ass", I had many ships with no R2 assigned commanders and no way to get the R1s to do anything to get promoted.

What obvious trick am I missing?

How do I build ships for R1s to command?

[Steve Walmsley]

In my prior game, I had 30 or 40 R1 officers and about 12 R2 officers. All of my ships needed R2 minimum. This led to the computer dismissing a lot of promising R1 from service, and since they never got promoted to R2, due to my empire not issuing promotions for "Sitting on your ass", I had many ships with no R2 assigned commanders and no way to get the R1s to do anything to get promoted.

What obvious trick am I missing?

How do I build ships for R1s to command?

You can change the rank which is required for a ship. Look at the top left of the "DAC / Rank / Info" tab of the class window.

Steve

[LizardSF (OP)]

Ah. Thank you. Easy enough to do...

[Girlinhat]

You can also promote an officer at any time on the officer screen, and make them R2.

[sloanjh]

What obvious trick am I missing?

I set my reassignment time cycle to 3 years, then every cycle make sure to go through and assign all the unassigned ones to a single ship, in sequence.

This is because I like to use auto-assign and realistic promotions, but don't want up-or-out.  Unfortunately, up-or-out can't be turned off independently.

John

PS - Yes, this is a pain late in the game when I've got tons of officers.