[dogscoff]

Nice idea.

The Captains and Admirals will have a built in attrition or retirement rate. Say a maximum of 100 turns.

This retirement age should be adjustable both pre-game and by tech research, so researching medical technology should extend the retirement age slightly- after all, better medical tech allows people to live- and work- longer.

This would make medical technology marginally more useful than it is.

Of course all this should be mod-on and mod-out able.

Personally I'd love to see ship crews counted . Every component would add a certain crew requirement, and the ship's crew quarters requirement would be adjusted as appropriate. Planetary populations would have to be counted individually (ie, population 10,987,345) and crewing a ship would reduce that number.
"Supremacy" on my Amiga used to work a bit like that. That was a fine game, in its time.