Star Trek Online recently changed how bridge officers (BOFFs) learn and use skills: any single officer can learn all skills, has a default set used when first stationed on a ship, and remember any combination of active skills in each starship loadout. This is a great improvement, and it allows captains to build better, shorter BOFF rosters. In response to a question on reddit, I posted the following more as a way to think through building a better roster than a TLDR response to the OP:
I’m still playing with the recent changes to BOFF training and trying to figure things out, but it definitely reduces the number of BOFFs you need to cover all the skills. I wish I could return the extra BOFF slots I bought now! Here’s how I’m redesigning my BOFF roster based on these changes:
For space, I think you need 4 of each career to cover the maximum number of stations you could have for each career, and IIRC no ship has more than 1 CMDR or LCDR station of any single career. So my plan for each career is train one BOFF to have all skills, one to have all skills to up to LCDR, and two to have all skills up to LT. That should cut down on the dilithium costs of making manuals or scrolling the BOFFs on the exchange. Ideally these BOFFs should all have space traits, so by default human (their trait does indeed stack again) and then swap in aliens with better space traits as they are acquired.
For ground, you may want a few extra BOFFs based on their role and racial ground traits; i.e., damage dealing traits for dps/tactical officers and damage resisting traits for tank/engineers. Of special note, some races (e.g., Betazoid) have a threat reduction trait that is good for healers, and some races (e.g., Human) have ground traits that benefit the whole team. The value of threat generation traits is debatable: no BOFF can tank a target your captain attacks, but such traits can help them hold threat over other BOFFs like your healer/SCI while your captain’s attention is elsewhere.
With the 4-each for space, you can already create any combination of landing party (all one career or any mix), so more ground BOFFs is really optional. I tend towards landing parties of 2 SCI, 1 TAC, and 1 ENG; one SCI is for offense and the other is the medic, so I’m thinking of adding 4 BOFFs based on ground traits to the 12 for space as my default, then suppressing my inner min/maxer and using the space BOFFs to build specialty landing parties.
The other consideration here is that, without the station mechanic, any BOFF on a landing party could use any skill, so I’d train my default landing party BOFFs in all skills and likely substitutes in all skills available from the trainer (i.e., no crafted/dilithium-costing skills). The EC cost of trainer manuals is low enough that over time I’ll probably train every BOFF in every skill available from trainers.
Finally, for alts I will probably target 12 BOFFs total, 3 of each career for space (fully space trained to 1 CMDR, 1 LCDR, and 1 LT) and 1 of each career for ground (fully ground trained to CMDR). Needing 4 of any one career in space is really an edge case; I could do that in a Bird of Prey but never have because I always want at least some of each career’s abilities.
