[Tietäjä]

In fact, this is one of the more interesting ideas of lately. Why? It provides an alternative use for the XP. It allows the XP to gain a "use" and an attraction to gather XP besides score - in fact, with refining the idea you could totally forget about XP contributing to score at all. What you would need, though, is to find a balance in it all. And definately, allowing "commanders" continue from round to another is most obviously a bad choice as it leaves new players behind the existing ones, and generally breaks the scheme where a round gets reset and everyone starts over again. As the commanders would bring "benefit", it's obvious that allowing the benefit to stockpile exponentially over rounds is a bit of a dead end.

What comes to the idea itself, as Kenny mentioned, the poster probably has little clue about how the fine tuning should be implemented, but that doesn't destroy the idea itself, necessarily. Commanders wouldn't require anything to be implemented into the combat engine specifically, so it wouldn't necessarily directly involve balance issues there (as what comes to adding new "ship types"). Here's a few "more realistic" options for a "commander".

Scales up as you pay more XP.

Perhaps one that increases salvage gains by 2, 4, 6, 8, 10%.
Perhaps one that increases the distortion in unit scans by 3, 6, 9, 12, 15%.
One that increases maximum asteroid cap by 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5%.

These are technically "outside" the combat core.

Inside the combat core, you could implement minor extras. Obviously, altering initiative is way too heavy, but increasing armor by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5% isn't that massive. Or maybe a two-bladed sword. Increases damage by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5%, decreases armor by 2, 4, 6, 8, 10%. By giving a variety of different options, you'd make different types of commanders situational. Race specifics. Maybe one that regenerates 2, 4, 6, 8, 10% of ships that die stealing after combat. Or a 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.25% reduction in E/R of the enemy ships.

By limiting the amount of commanders available, and limiting the development, and making it "costly" you'd come down with having to select between one great commander or a few lesser ones. There's restrictions and refining in the idea that need to be done, but overall it sounds like an interesting idea to me.

And I'm usually very critical.