Scientists

[Serpentine]

Which leads me to an entirely different question of why scientists and administrators are tied to a military academy?  I would like to see them separated out to being produced from a university.   While avoiding the minefield of subsidizing scientist specialization this would allow some granular control over the non military staff production rates. 

+ 1, there is definitely some low hanging fruit here that is easy to put in place and does not empower a human player over an NPR too much.

Another related topic that irks me is the age at which new personnel seem to join you, 21???
I do not see too many 21 year old lieutenant commanders or colonels going around, let alone administrators of whole planets
Surely an age of about 30 + a random number of years is more appropriate for senior officers, administrators and prominent scientists to become available.  Again low hanging fruit. . .

[hyramgraff]

Another related topic that irks me is the age at which new personnel seem to join you, 21???
I do not see too many 21 year old lieutenant commanders or colonels going around, let alone administrators of whole planets
Surely an age of about 30 + a random number of years is more appropriate for senior officers, administrators and prominent scientists to become available.   Again low hanging fruit.  .  . 

I don't mind the young ages of new recruits.   Desperate times call for lots of hiring.

[xeryon]

It's not unusual for officers to be young twenties.  Here in the USA they would graduate from a military academy at 21-22 and be given an initial command shortly after.  A colonel or general would be a bit odd but in Aurora that generally only happens at initial game creation since all staff start at 21.  As the game progresses the top brass are all senior.  An easy fix for thhis would be to put in an initial game creation age randomizer.

If separation of scientists and admin were to happen and they would come from universities it would be easy to have their starting age adjusted according to higher-education norms of being 24-26 after under-graduate and masters education.  Same thing applies here that the starting age is always 21 at initial creation but as Aurora progresses this issue is self-resolved as starting new staff are lower rank and lower skilled.

[ardem]

One thing that irks me is that you can only have human standard years for lifeforms. I would of liked to seen lifeforms who lasted either 10 years or 500 years.

But I have RPed where you cannot do research unless you have a scientist with that specialization, to basically simulate non consistent breakthroughs of research. You can get some interesting fleet results RPing like this.