Specialists

This idea explores specialists — named crew, officers, or experts a player assigns to fleets, holdings, or structures to boost specific stats beyond their empire-wide research base.

It does not describe final game behavior. It captures the current direction and unresolved design choices.

Goal

Give players a layer of placeable, scarce expertise that modifies outcomes locally — on a particular fleet or a particular planet — on top of the global baseline their research provides. Specialists turn a flat empire-wide tech level into a set of meaningful "where do I put my best people" decisions.

Secondary goals:

Let a player concentrate strength where it matters (a deep-survey fleet, a fortress planet) without raising every stat everywhere.
Create a human-scale attachment: named experts the player recognises and protects.
Open a soft economy and risk surface — specialists can be trained, lost, and possibly traded.

Core Problem

Specialists are already referenced across several idea pages, but never defined in one place:

Economy / Sectors and Economy Brainstorm — specialists are a scarce resource assigned to a sector / holding to boost its efficiency; slots are tied to one-time sectors or holding tier; they may degrade or burn out.
Fleet Identity and Fleet Lifecycle — specialists attach to a fleet, travel with it, and return to the empire's specialist roster when the fleet disbands. Fleet Identity explicitly defers the full definition: "Specialists are a separate feature to be defined in detail later."
Knowing the Universe Direction 9 — a specialist assigned to a fleet raises that fleet's surveying stats.

Each page invents the slice it needs. What a specialist fundamentally is, how it is acquired, where it can be assigned, how it progresses, and what happens when it is lost are unresolved and scattered. This page is the single hub those pages point to, so the concept stays coherent instead of forking.

Working Directions

1. A specialist is an assignable stat modifier with identity

A specialist is a discrete, named entity that, while assigned to a host (a fleet, a planet, a structure), grants stat modifiers to that host. Unassigned, it grants nothing. It is not a unit that fights or travels on its own — it rides a host.

Each specialist has a type that determines which stats it touches (e.g. a Surveyor boosts a fleet's Cloaking / Revealing; a Sensor Officer boosts a planet's Detecting / Hiding).
A specialist has identity — a name, a level, maybe a history — so players form attachment and recognise their key people.

2. Assignment targets — fleets vs holdings

Specialists slot into different host kinds, and the host kind constrains which types fit:

Fleet specialists — boost what a fleet does: surveying stats for its probes (Cloaking / Revealing), and potentially combat, speed, or cargo in other systems.
Holding / structure specialists — boost what a planet or station defends or produces: defending stats (Detecting / Hiding), and potentially production, research, or construction speed elsewhere.

A host has a limited number of specialist slots, forcing prioritisation.

3. Acquisition — recruit, train, find, hire

How a player gets specialists is open; several sources likely coexist:

Recruited / trained from a dedicated facility over time and resources.
Found as rare rewards from exploration, events, or ruins.
Hired from a market or from other players (an economy hook — see Direction 5).

4. Progression — specialists level up

A specialist improves with use:

Gains experience while assigned and active (a Surveyor levels by surveying; a defender levels when its host is probed or attacked).
Higher level = larger stat boost, and possibly new sub-abilities or a second stat.
Progression creates a reason to protect veterans rather than treat specialists as disposable.

5. Scarcity, loss, and risk

Specialists are valuable precisely because they can be lost:

A specialist on a destroyed fleet may be killed or captured by the victor — a real cost to committing your best surveyor to a dangerous expedition.
A specialist on a conquered holding may transfer, flee, or die.
This risk is what makes "where do I place my best people" a genuine decision, not an obvious min-max.

6. Trade and poaching — specialists in the economy

If specialists can change hands, they become a market:

Players hire out or sell specialists, creating a talent economy alongside the intel economy.
Rivals might poach or capture specialists, making counter-intelligence and escort relevant.

Open Questions

Slots: how many specialists can one host carry, and is the limit per host kind, per level, or per empire?
Stacking: do multiple specialists of the same type on one host stack, hit a cap, or only the best one counts?
Base vs modifier balance: how large should a specialist's boost be relative to the research base — a small edge, or a game-changer?
Permadeath: are lost specialists gone forever, or recoverable / ransomable?
Capture mechanics: when a host is destroyed or conquered, does the specialist die, transfer, or escape — and who decides?
Cross-system reach: beyond surveying and defending, which other systems (combat, production, research, construction) should specialists touch — or should the concept stay narrow at first?
Identity depth: are specialists fully individual (unique names, traits, histories) or lightweight typed tokens with a level? This drives both attachment and implementation cost.
Attachment model: Fleet Identity frames three options — specialist attached to a fleet (travels, bonuses apply wherever it goes), to a stellar object / holding (governs local operations, does not travel), or to the empire (passive bonuses applied universally, no host). This page assumes host-attached (fleet or holding); whether an empire-wide passive form also exists is open.
Burn-out / degradation: the economy pages float specialists degrading or burning out over time. Is that a core mechanic (ongoing management pressure) or dropped? Reconcile with the leveling model in Direction 4.