Quote from: Steve Zax on June 30, 2025, 11:02:24 PM

And while we are speaking of officers getting older; when will we get the chance to research age increasing technology?

Right after Steve changes the officer starting age to a number beginning with '3'.

In other words, heat death of the universe. 

Quote from: David_H_Roarings on June 21, 2025, 07:02:04 PM

...
In further as it stands one can build a 'mothball hangar' that would normally have an insane maintenance cost but can considerably cut down on the maintenance cost of other ships sitting in port, using one designed for the ship above we have:
...

In your example, you build a hangar that costs ~4k bp in order to save ~1.5k MSP per year, while requiring an additional 4,123 tons of maintenance capacity.
Assuming you need to build two maintenance facilities (60BP each) to provide the extra capacity, and with MSP costing 0.25 BP each, your annual savings represents a rate of return on your investment of ~9.1% while occupying 100k workers.

You also have an up-front cost of the shipyard needed to build that carrier (~11k bp, depending on your tech level), and the ongoing workforce that yard requires (almost 10m workers).
You are going to have to make (and use) a lot of these carriers and/or wait a very long time to recoup the cost of that yard.

There are simpler ways to get far better returns in the game.
For example, suppose instead of building that shipyard you build financial centers of equivalent cost.
Let's say 90 fincens. Costs 10.8k bp, and 10.8k corbomite.
Uses only 4.5m workers. Less than half what the yard needs.
Returns annual income equal to 27 times your "wealth per million workers" tech level.
Even if you are still at the starting tech level (100 per million workers per year), and have no wealth creation bonus from your governor or sector, that's 2.7kbp per year.
So a bare minimum rate of return of 25%, using half as many workers.
With a couple tech levels and a modest governor bonus, it's not hard to be making your investment back in two years or less.

And while we are speaking of officers getting older; when will we get the chance to research age increasing technology?

Quote from: SevenOfCarina on June 29, 2025, 05:44:54 PM

I apologise if this has been brought up before, but would it be feasible to implement a system where commanders also have a chance of losing efficiency bonuses once they reach a certain time in service?

I tend to treat my civilian administrators as abstractions of an entire government apparatus, and hence I assume the efficiency bonuses are tied not to a particular leader but rather to the entire colonial administration of thousands of civil servants. I find this better from a RP perspective because this leads to certain colonies being better than others at certain functions (which I RP as resulting from local expertise, incentives, and infrastructure), hence my colonies feel more real and unique. And it sometimes forces me to make sub-optimal decisions - like building up a new naval base not at the local warp point nexus, but one system over at a colony which is actually good at shipbuilding.

The problem, of course, is that immortal (story character) leaders tend to universally end up with sky-high bonuses of everything. I've been solving this by periodically randomising leader bonuses, but this gets tedious as the game progresses and I would really like an alternative. Essentially, past a certain time in service (say 20 years), I'd like to have commanders start rolling for a small reduction in their bonuses in addition to the usual rolls for an increase. Does this seem reasonable?

There is an East-West split in that assumption, Eastern cultures (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc.) place a high value on the elder members of society, deferring to their wisdom, moral authority, etc. In the West, older people are seen as less capable, out of touch, etc.

Partly that is because as you get older, your perspective changes (based on a lot more experience of life) and you value different things (time vs money for example). Younger people generally don't have the same frame of reference (less life experience) so they can't understand that different perspective. In the East, that is understood and the elders are consulted for their hard-earned wisdom. In the West, they just assume older people are 'out of touch'.

So, apart from actual age-related diseases that impair mental faculties, which is covered by the medical conditions in Aurora, I don't subscribe to the Western 'older people are less capable' paradigm. I am certainly far more capable and wise than I was at half my current age, because I have twice the life experience and I have learned from twice as many mistakes

I realise that in your above suggestion, you reference 'story characters' that can't get ill, but being extremely capable is the whole point of story characters.

• System Governor as another Admin level between sector and planet.
• Return of Tour lengths for automated assignments. So captains can have a couple ships underneath them before assuming a flag rank or Junior Officers can experience support/fighter and other roles before getting a major command
• Ground Force Admin Commands as beyond the Division level, it's impractical to create HQ units and the user may want to spread the Corps or Army Group between multiple bodies in the same system.
• Ability to retrain officers from Fleet/Army/Admin/Science to another type of officer, Mostly for Roleplay or to quickly increase officer numbers in one category. i.e. your overmanned on Administrators but have a pressing need for ground force commanders or your ground forces are small and you need to find a propulsion MacGyver among your grunts.
• Ability to designate a Fleet/Ground positions ± 1/2 rank for assignment would be a welcomed addition.
• Reintroduction of Staff Officers for admin commands. maybe just 2 positions but you choose the boni they will provide.
• Reintroduction of Missile Series system