what's the reason my HQ manager leaves when reaching 4 stars?

[Dirk-Jan]

what's the reason my HQ manager leaves when reaching 4 stars?

Every time (twice untill now) my HQ manager leaves when reaching 4 stars.

Is this default behaviour?
Will this happen at other playerstations too?

[Alan Phipps]

[Joking] They had learned enough professionally to realise that your HQ was going nowhere tradewise; so they upped and left to find better employers. [/Joking]

Seriously, I don't think I have seen this reported before, but I could be wrong. There are a few 'Manager Disappears' types of thread (Advanced Google it) but not with these circumstances.

Can anyone else confirm this promotion behaviour in the vanilla game?

[Imperial Good]

Mine is 4+1/3 stars (only morale left which levels slower) and still working happily. I am guessing you ran into whatever is causing other people's managers to randomly leave which took your manager and is potentially unrelated to its current skill level.

[Dirk-Jan]

But...
Is a high level manager leaving default/accepted/allowed behaviour in the game, or is a manager supposed to stay at his/her post? I don't see any other player owned npc's leaving their post.

[Imperial Good]

But...
Is a high level manager leaving default/accepted/allowed behaviour in the game, or is a manager supposed to stay at his/her post? I don't see any other player owned npc's leaving their post.

Managers of any skill level are meant to remain working for the player until the player reassigns them or fires them. They should not be leaving automatically at any skill level, be that 4 star, 2 star or even 0 star.

You are not the only person to report such an issue, except no one has stated it is specifically because they reached 4 stars before. Players like myself have many 4+ star managers, including assigned to the headquarters, and none have ever spontaneously left. Unless you have had this happen to a lot of managers which you know for certain have just reached 4 stars when it happened then there might not be enough evidence to assume that them leaving is caused by them reaching 4 stars, and instead they are spontaneously leaving irrespective of their skill level for other, still a bug, reasons.

[Alan Phipps]

We need a wider sample of players reporting; just one saying promotion is indeed a trigger and one saying it isn't will not cause the devs to investigate that aspect.

@ OP: if you can upload and link two reasonably close vanilla saves, one with your 3 star manager in place and the other with the manager gone after promotion, they may give the devs something to look at.

It occurs to me that the wider manager disappearance issue might possibly be better explained if the issue were somewhere in the promotion process (any level) but was only occasional or under specific circumstances.