Eh, I'm still skeptical from a game balance perspective. Balancing militarization is one of the defining challenges of the quest system. There doesn't seem to be much benefit in allowing this. I mean, look at what you said:
A little too much easier. We've already seen that exploration missions have big returns. They provide resources and political will when our Explorers are successful. We definitely want to keep as much exploration going as we can, and the balancing factor is that it means if all our combat potential is tied up in that, defenses at home are correspondingly weaker. If we can have lots of Exploration and still have high combat potential at home, it's a no-brainer. Saying that their Combat would count for full when we bring them home and that we'd only bring them home in the event of a war means that there's no penalty, because you know Threat Level would go up massively in the event of a war.
