Fleet headquarters

[Rawb (OP)]

Hey there another question.

What exactly do I do with the Fleet HQ? I've assigned Officers but I have no idea what it does or what I need to do with it.  Should I put it on a ship or leave it on Earth?

Thank you in advance .

[metalax]

Fleet HQ provides it's bonuses to any ships in it's task force that are in the same system as the HQ. Leaving them on earth is fine, but you may want to make a new taskforce, assign it new officers and ships and put the taskforce HQ on a ship with a flag bridge when you send a force to another system.

If you are playing with the fleet training needed option you may want to create this taskforce some time before you are ready to leave and assign the taskgroups within it to training. The purpose of the task group will also effect which officers you assign to it, a task force that will contain no fighters for example does not need a fighter ops officer assigned to the HQ.

[Rawb (OP)]

So i assign TG's to the HQ and then it gives the TG's bonuses dependent on the officer in charge of that specific area? Also, I take it Public Affairs = Diplomacy?

[metalax]

Yes. Not quite sure whether it simply adds to relevant officers skill to that of each ships commander for each ship in the taskforce or if it is a partial bonus.

And yes diplomacy for public affairs. You also want your operations officer to have crew traing in addition to operations if possible for training your task groups. The taskforce commander adds a portion of all of his bonuses to the relevent area.

[Rawb (OP)]

Ok thanks a lot .

[Rawb (OP)]

What's the best traits for the Commander?

[Charlie Beeler]

What's the best traits for the Commander?

Traits have no game affect.  They are there for roleplay flavor.

I presume that your really asking about commander bonuses instead.  Then the answer(s) are subjective dependent on what the officers job.

[blue emu]

I think he means the overall commander of the Fleet Staff.

[metalax]

For the commander of a task force, crew training is the one that has it's full bonus used. Other bonuses of the commander add part of their value to the bonus of the assigned officer for an area. The operations officer also adds half of his crew training bonus to the total.

[Goron]

Do you folks hand assign staff officers? or let the game do it for you?
I originally handled staff officer assignments manually, but recently I've been using (too) many Task Forces and it got tedious so I let the game handle staff officer assignments once I put the commander in place.... (it WILL auto-assign staff officers at that point, right? if not I am without a lot of potential bonuses )

On that vein, do you guys handle ship assignments manually? or use the auto-assign?
I have auto-assign turned on with a 2 year rotation, but I manually assign officers to my 'ships of the line'.

And lastly, do you folks use automatic promotions? or do you manually do them?
I have only ever had promotions turned on so I don't even know how to promote.

I am just trying to get an idea of any pros/cons of manual vs auto in those cases.
I think with my next big game -I'll probably do an AAR or community-involvement game with it- I'll try more manual control over things to add roleplaying/community flare.

[blue emu]

I always handle all that stuff manually... but that's partly because my first big game was a community effort on the Paradox forum, involving nearly a hundred players.

[metalax]

I always do it manually, but thats partly because I always leave the lowers rank of officers as the pool of 'don't have any use for you' officers, like the ground forces officers who have no skills whatsoever. that way if I see a officer has died/retired due to ill health in the events list, I don't need to care about it if they are the lowest rank.

[Goron]

This is a rather dumb question but...
Is it 'hard' to do it manually? and by hard I should say time intensive and/or confusing?

I have a hard enough time managing my Naval Organization and civilian appointments, I can hardly imagine taking the time to appoint all of my officers and handling their promotions.

Then again, how often do you need to intervene? now that I think of it it seems like a front loaded task that once set is relatively easy to manage- you only need to step in when you build new ships or officers die, right? Well, for appointments at least... what about promotions? How often do you promote officers and what criteria do you use to do it?
Again, I am asking so I can get an idea of how(/if) to do it myself.

[metalax]

Once you get the hang of the officers screen it isn't particularly time consuming or confusing. Make good use of the search fuctions on the right of the screen. One thing to note, you need to assign the commander of a task group HQ before you can assign the individual area officers for that HQ. Also teams only show up in the assignments list if they are not full.

My usual criteria for ranks

r1 - Entry rank, useless officers stay at this rank
r2 - Promoted to this if assigned to any position. Primarily commercial vessels and fighter/FAC commanders will remain at this level.
r3 - Promoted to this is member of a team, or commander of lead vessel of FAC/corvette taskgroup. All commanders of destroyer and heavier vessels are also at least this rank.
r4 - Promoted to this if head of a team, or commander of central vessel of a destroyer/cruiser taskgroup. All commanders of battleship and heavier vessels are also at least this rank.
r5 - Promoted to this if assigned as an officer of a taskforce HQ. Also commanders of central vessel of battleship/dreadnaught taskgroups.
r6 - Promoted to this if commander of taskforce HQ.
r7+ - Only used if I want to distinguish particular officers

For ground force officers it is simpler

r1 - unassigned officers
r2 - assigned to units
r3 - assigned to Brigade HQ's
r4 - assigned to Divisional HQ's

I'll promote/demote to match the rank of the task that the officer is assigned to. Usually I'll promote to the rank at the time of assigning an officer and every 10 years or so will do a overview and may unassign all officers of a type and reassign them to posts by their bonuses, promoting or demoting them as neccessary.

[Goron]

Every 10 years 
Oh, I think I could handle that! I was thinking every year you'd have to review, maybe more.
But I only based that assumption on the auto-promote/assign stuff, which, I think, is yearly. That said I guess its obvious I don't need to follow that pattern.