Assignement of officers

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

I mainly use the automated system for assigning officers.

One thing I have noticed is that some officers seem to hang around and don't get assigned even if there are spots available to them. These are usually naval commanders.

I recently started a conventional start game and I have allot of missile complexes to assign those commanders too, but still a certain amount is not assigned. This might result in them leaving after six years and I usually want to keep them so I can see them rise in the ranks. Even after about ten years the highest ranking naval officer that I have is two Commodores. I have level 4 military academy at Earth.

I have also seen that Commanders don't seem to want to command my commercial freighter even though I set the lowest and preferred rank to just Commanders. Why is this?
I always have to assign a Commander to these vessels myself. By Captains seem to board my military vessels just nicely.

Also, a last question... where can I view a description of what the different bonuses for leaders does and do the personality traits of leaders do anything at all... or just being there for RP reasons?

[Erik L]

I mainly use the automated system for assigning officers.

One thing I have noticed is that some officers seem to hang around and don't get assigned even if there are spots available to them. These are usually naval commanders.

I recently started a conventional start game and I have allot of missile complexes to assign those commanders too, but still a certain amount is not assigned. This might result in them leaving after six years and I usually want to keep them so I can see them rise in the ranks. Even after about ten years the highest ranking naval officer that I have is two Commodores. I have level 4 military academy at Earth.

I have also seen that Commanders don't seem to want to command my commercial freighter even though I set the lowest and preferred rank to just Commanders. Why is this?
I always have to assign a Commander to these vessels myself. By Captains seem to board my military vessels just nicely.

Also, a last question... where can I view a description of what the different bonuses for leaders does and do the personality traits of leaders do anything at all... or just being there for RP reasons?

Make sure your missile complexes don't have a high rank minimum assigned to them. The personality traits are for RP only. The bonuses should be found in the Mechanics forum or the wiki.

[Hawkeye]

   Naval Commanders
Communication               Don´t know
Crew Training                Improves Grade Bonus for his ship, also important for Task Group Training
Diplomacy                     Used by Diplomatic Teams
Espionage                     Used by Espionage Teams
Factory Production                     Speeds up Jump Gate Construction/salvaging
Fighter Ops                           Speeds up turn-around time for fighters on Carriers
Fleet Movement                     Improves Initiative for Task Groups (manual setting on the F12 screen necessary)
Intelligence                        Improves Espionage points from captured enemy crew (just a guess)
Logistics                         Shortens load/unload time for ships
Mining                            Improves yield for asteroid miners
Operations                        Most important skill for Task Group training
Political Reliability                      Speeds up promotions
Survey                                 used for surveying planets and survey locations, also used by Geo Teams
Terraforming                        Increases terrafroming for terraforming ships
Xenoarcheology                    Don´t know

   Ground Force Commanders
Ground Combat                       Improves Combat Power of unit (stacks: Division + Brigade + Batallion)
Ground Force Training             Improves Moral which improves combat power --> put those in your Brigades/Divisions
Xenoarcheology                       Impruves success rate when restoring ruins (Engineering brigades only)

   Civilian Administrators
Administration Rating                            Basicly, his rank
Factory Production                            Improves Factory/Ordnance Factory/Fuel Refinery output
Ground Unit Construction Speed       Improves training of new ground troops
Mining                                           Improves yield of planetary mines/automines
Population Growth                       Improves population growth
Shipbuilding                                     Speed up ship building
Wealth Creation                             More money from taxes
Xenoarcheology                             Don´t know, perhaps increasing success rate when resoring ruins on this planet?

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

Make sure your missile complexes don't have a high rank minimum assigned to them. The personality traits are for RP only. The bonuses should be found in the Mechanics forum or the wiki.

I have tested to set the minimum level to 0 or 1... it does not seem to matter. The minimum rank is Commander.

@Hawkeye
Thanks for the info!   

[o_O]

I think commanders aren't assigned if they don't have a bonus useful to their assignment.   What is a commander with a xeno, diplomatic, survey and mining bonus going to do for a missile silo?  For general combat ships it seems to only assign commanders with crew training bonuses, however the freighters and colony ships generally use all those up first.   

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

Yes... this seem to be it. Unless the Commander (or other rank for that matter) does not have a trait that are suitable fo the job they don't get assigned. Kind of make perfect sense actually.

[Rabid_Cog]

Except that assigned commanders have a better chance of improving, or do I have this wrong?

[Hawkeye]

No, you are correct.
Personally, I assign all un-assigned officers manually after auto-assign.
This does two things:
 
One, as you said, it lets them improve. Officers without any skill often get the skill relevant for the job.
Two, it keeps them from being fired for not being employed and when my fleet building program kicks in (I normally play conventional start), I usually need every R2+ officer I can get my hands on.

Note: Ground Unit officers don´t imporve skills "on-the-job", only in combat.

[andrea69]

Operations                        Most important skill for Task Group training

Oh, that's interesting. I thought only crew training skill was important for that. It's only the task force operation officer skill that is important, or also the TG commander?

[Hawkeye]

Task Force. I don´t think Operations plays any role in the task group/individual ship. (Don´t quote me on this as I am not 100% sure)

[Garfunkel]

It seems that 99 is the maximum number of officers per rank. This seriously dampens my fighter operations. Is this correct or just a quirk of my current game, that might hopefully fix itself in near future?

[andrea69]

It seems that 99 is the maximum number of officers per rank. This seriously dampens my fighter operations. Is this correct or just a quirk of my current game, that might hopefully fix itself in near future?

At the moment I have 227 lieutenant commanders, 75 commanders, 25 captains, 8 rear admiral lower half and 2 rear admiral upper half.

[Garfunkel]

Yeah, I don't know why I asked that. Guess it was just a quirk in the officer generation system, that it didn't recruit any naval officers for a while. I'm at 115 now.