To piggyback off that idea, I'd love the option to set individual academies levels. Currently, the Training Level is and empire-wide thing. It's either 1, 5 or somewhere in between.
The ability to set a training level of an individual academy would allow some granularity to this. Giving the player a little more control over the quality / quantity ratio, while allowing them to create "elite academies" for their crews. Think Corbulo Academy of Halo, or the US Navy's Top Gun school for fighters. The latter perhaps having a fighter-centric officer at the head of it, so the officers that graduate from it are more fighter-oriented as well. The ability to rename academies with a local override, or just in general, would be a nice touch as well I think.
I think a good way to implement that would be to keep empire-wide training level as is, but just add a checkbox for enabling a colony to override it with a dropdown selector for 1-5. I don't know exactly how it's implemented right now on the back end, but I'd assume it takes a value of crew per academy, then multiplies or divides it by some number. Logically, having the game do it's current calculation, then check for overrides, then add or subtract that level of crew, would probably best performance wise if my assumption of how it works is right. IIRC, and this whole suggestion hinges on this, experienced crews are added back to the pool, and used first when new ships are built. So it's already possible to have mixed crew skills in the pool, now we're just adding to them.
On the subject of the RP options, and the quality / quantity ratio, having the Ship Design UI feature a dropdown for "Crew Level" with a 0-5 option would take that a step further if implemented alongside this. 1-5 would correspond to existing crew training, while 0 would be the default and indicate no preference. Conscript crews would function the same, but a checkbox for "Enforce Crew Level" could open two new options for staffing. Firstly, enforcing that level would allow the RP of various "elite guard" or similar forces, for all your future despot needs. Secondly, checking off Conscription with a "0" preferred crew training and also checking of the preferred level enforcement would allow simulating a wartime, "throw them at the enemy as fast as possible" type of scenario such as US drafts, where volunteers and conscripts are mixed and the training level degrades as demand for properly trained combatants outstrips supply.
Combined with this:
What do you think about adding a new Military High Education Academy?
We could look at it as a high specialization school, to improve a bit the abilities of the officers, when they come out of the basic Military Academy.
We could assign to it some officers, from both naval or ground specialization (let's say no more than 10 at the same time, and each one cannot attend for no more than 1 year, in total), for no less than 4 months and no more than 1 year, to increase one or two of their abilities (we could select them), at a certain rate (e.g., 2% or 3% per month), or to develop a new one (0.5% or 1% per month), at a slower rate.
It could be build one per sector, or one in a system having at least 500 million people.
Or some version thereof, and you could get a pretty robust officer and crew core (and a very RP flavorful one at that), with minimal extra work, since building and setting these things up would be very "set it and forget it"
