Is there any point to infantry other than cheap garrison units?

[Panpiper (OP)]

If I have a dedicated attack force whose job it is to wait around until there is something to attack and destroy, is there any reason other than RP I would want to put infantry in that unit? I am again thinking in terms of how difficult I hear it is to repair unit formations. Would I take more damage if I only field superheavy tanks and such?

Also, is there any reason I should have a deep and complicated hierarchy of units? Could I not just field the smallest unit I might want to individually deploy, like a brigade element of 100 superheavy tanks, 40 artillery, 10 AA guns, 500 supply trucks, and an HQ, all in one unit? That might be a heck of a lot easier to repair any losses from afterwards.

[RougeNPS]

Besides RP? Probably not. Except for the fact that its a massive amount of time spend actually making that unit. Aurora isnt good with small unit tactics.

[Jorgen_CAB]

The smallest units you use in the game should probably be between 5000-10.000t which should roughly be a battalion size units. This is roughly where you will find that most of your "Major" (lowest level) ground commanders can command without any negative effects.

I usually then structure my battalions into either Regiments of around 20-25kt or Brigades of 30-40kt formations.

A brigade are usually a self sufficient formation while a regiment is part of a larger division which is why the differ in size and the brigade usually have one or two more combat battalions as well.

But that is obviously up to your overall doctrines and role-play... but those sizes will do well with the type of officers you want to assign to those formations.

There actually can be a reason to attach infantry to formations of vehicles as that will make the formation slightly less susceptible to anti-tank formations, you will be less screwed by chance sort of speak. If you are dropping troops on a planet you might as well put all the troops in attack mode anyway as it will take a while for your infantry to build up a defensive bonus and while in attack they reduce hits made on them from the start to some degree.

Infantry is not really terrible on the attack so you can use them to "protect" your other attacking forces. If you build a purely defensive force you want to separate vehicles from infantry and static formations as the infantry is better when fortified and you can use armoured formation to counter strike by putting them on attack rather than defence. The benefit of attacking though is that you can hit enemy support and rear forces and there is a possibility to make breakthrough attacks so infantry can still be useful on attack even though vehicles is better at it. But it you can repeatedly make breakthrough attacks you can throw infantry at them as well at that stage.

[Zap0]

Infantry still has a ton of hp spread over tons of targets for their size. They're good meatshields, effective at sucking up that AT fire that your heavies can't handle.

Also, is there any reason I should have a deep and complicated hierarchy of units?

I'd very much encourage keeping ground forces as simplistic as you can. The micro involved with using them is a terrible mess. Technically you get more commander effects applied to your troops by having a hierarchy, but unless you really like managing your commanders by hand for every unit, don't bother - the rank requirements of formations and size limits of commanders make auto-assignment for ground troops terrible.

Could I not just field the smallest unit I might want to individually deploy, like a brigade element of 100 superheavy tanks, 40 artillery, 10 AA guns, 500 supply trucks, and an HQ, all in one unit? That might be a heck of a lot easier to repair any losses from afterwards.

You want the supplies and support weapons on the supporting/rear positions, at least.

[Panpiper (OP)]

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean about 'anti-tank' formations. I do not see any sort of weapon combo other than the anti-armour weapons I would myself put on tanks. Do you mean my superheavy tanks would be vulnerable to someone who fielded lighter vehicles with anti-armour weapons? Would that not make them every bit as vulnerable to the anti-armour fire of my superheavies? Are such lighter vehicles 'more' vulnerable to swarms of infantry?

I could name my superheavies something like Ogre APC and give each of them (conceptually) a compliment of power-armoured Gatling infantry. They should be survivable enough and do wickedly insane damage to lower armoured foes. Would that be something you would recommend? I am looking to simplify my order of battle as much as possible if the granularity would not otherwise aid their performance.

I do very much appreciate the advice, especially the alert as to paying attention to commander ratings. (That was utterly outside my newbie thinking.) Could I get away with my smallest formations being 10,000 tons, or would there be any reason to have some units lower (other than special case utility)?

[Panpiper (OP)]

Do units in lower in the hierarchy stay out of front line combat? Would flagging them with 'avoid combat' keep them from doing so? Or would that mean that the bombardment guns don't fire and the AA guns don't engage fliers?

[Jorgen_CAB]

Formation in support and rear echelon formation are much less likely to get hit. Troops in defensive line can not even hit those troops at all only troops set in offensive line can.

When we talk about anti-tank that is formations that have lots of anti-vehicle weapons, that can be either static or vehicles. If your formation have only vehicles then all the weapons will target the vehicles and you will suffer proportionally more losses from that one attack. If you have infantry in the formation then the randomness of targeting formation means you are less likely to suffer losses on the armour from bad random rolls. On average you should suffer equal losses but the random nature can make it way worse if you are unlucky.

In general I tend to only mix infantry with light and medium vehicles. I keep heavier armoured formation as pure armoured formations.

Medium vehicles make excellent anti-tank with dual anti-vehicle cannons in a mechanised formation. Keep them in reserve (rear echelon) until most of the enemy infantry have been whittled down and then they have a bigger chance to randomly target enemy armour.

[Panpiper (OP)]

Ok, beginning to get the picture here. The choices as to whom to attack are literally random, so the infantry might futilely poke at a tank or the heavy gun might waste itself on an infantry. Clearly then, defensively you do want infantry to soak fire, basically to just be targets. Offensively then, infantry is also a problem. Investing too much in just tanks means you can't kill the heavy stuff fast enough because you are too busy wasting fire on infantry.

I think my earlier idea stands, My formation will include infantry, ten or twelve to a tank. This will significantly cut down on hits to the tanks, while they last. To counter the opposite problem, my tanks wasting fire on infantry, all my infantry will carry Gattlings (Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel). This way not only are my tanks vastly less likely to get hit, but the enemy infantry won't last long enough to be a hindrance to my tank's fire. The two in combination should make short work, hopefully without too much attrition from my infantry. To make sure my infantry don't die too fast from enemy infantry fire, they will wear the best power armour.

I suppose a case could be made to throw in (in addition) a bunch of unarmored light infantry with light weapons (which would cost virtually nothing), just to do lots of dying. They could soak vast numbers of hits to prevent the Gatling troops from having to soak too much. But here my roleplaying genes kick in to overrule my wargame genes. I am too reluctant to be so wasteful of human life.

Edit: Relooking at the numbers and figuring odds, I might actually make my infantry compliment ten Gatling and twenty Power Armor with improved personal weapons per superheavy tank.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Ok, beginning to get the picture here. The choices as to whom to attack are literally random, so the infantry might futilely poke at a tank or the heavy gun might waste itself on an infantry. Clearly then, defensively you do want infantry to soak fire, basically to just be targets. Offensively then, infantry is also a problem. Investing too much in just tanks means you can't kill the heavy stuff fast enough because you are too busy wasting fire on infantry.

I think my earlier idea stands, My formation will include infantry, ten or twelve to a tank. This will significantly cut down on hits to the tanks, while they last. To counter the opposite problem, my tanks wasting fire on infantry, all my infantry will carry Gattlings (Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel). This way not only are my tanks vastly less likely to get hit, but the enemy infantry won't last long enough to be a hindrance to my tank's fire. The two in combination should make short work, hopefully without too much attrition from my infantry. To make sure my infantry don't die too fast from enemy infantry fire, they will wear the best power armour.

I suppose a case could be made to throw in (in addition) a bunch of unarmored light infantry with light weapons (which would cost virtually nothing), just to do lots of dying. They could soak vast numbers of hits to prevent the Gattling troops from having to soak too much. But here my roleplaying genes kick in to overrule my wargame genes. I am too reluctant to be so wasteful of human life.

From an efficiency (industrial cost) then you should basically use the cheapest troops around as mathematically more troops is better then high quality troops. Outside light personal weapons which are trash against infantry it is not worth the industry to use power armour unless you have a good lead in tech versus penetration. The same is true for artillery and tanks too...

The reason you want quality troops is officer bonuses and troop carrying capacity on your ships that is limited. But defensive formations can easily be cheap troops. But if you role-play then lives matter so if you can reduce casualties that might well be worthwhile even during defence.

It still make sense to use cheap troops with light personal weapons for defence as the main idea is to keep the enemy busy for reinforcement to arrive to counter attack the enemy. The role of the garrison is not to directly defeat a serious invasion. This make sense from a role-play perspective as well.

If you want to game the system you put all your anti-infantry formations in the front on attack and keep the anti-armour in the back until most of the enemy infantry is destroyed, you then bring out the anti-tank. This will not only save logistics (anti-tank is very expensive to fire) but will save the anti-tank for when they will be effective. This make tanks with mixed weapons sub optimal for any reason but role-play.

For infantry then CAP weapon is superior to regular infantry because they kill infantry faster than they themselves are killed. Infantry a basically only to pad losses of more valuable forces if you are the underdog and wait for reinforcement.

I never really game the system because that is no fun but it also is good to understand how the system work.

[Zap0]

Could I get away with my smallest formations being 10,000 tons, or would there be any reason to have some units lower (other than special case utility)?

You can get away with a size like that, I use 10k and 4-5k units as my smallest units, albeit in a game with pretty small empires. I'm not sure what the rank tresholds are for formations exactly, but a 5k size formation will automatically get a R7 commander, while 10k ton formations already need a R6 commander.

Do units in lower in the hierarchy stay out of front line combat? Would flagging them with 'avoid combat' keep them from doing so? Or would that mean that the bombardment guns don't fire and the AA guns don't engage fliers?

Indeed, only flag HQs, FFD and supply units as non-combat basically.

Ok, beginning to get the picture here. The choices as to whom to attack are literally random, so the infantry might futilely poke at a tank or the heavy gun might waste itself on an infantry.

Exactly!

I think my earlier idea stands, My formation will include infantry, ten or twelve to a tank.

I also tend to have my armor seperate from infantry divisions, the main reason for that being so that I can keep the infantry fortified while the tanks go on the offensive.

There's another piece to the puzzle: Artillery. They're good at killing things, but since you're likely to deploy them in support or rear positions, they don't present themselves as targets on the front-line and help with tanking.

For Reference: Here's the C# rules index from the changelog of C# development. Since ground combat was entirely redone with this version, this should be a largely complete listing of ground combat rules. There are quite a few entries about ground mechanics.

[misanthropope]

i didn't note it being said straight out, but:  infantry are efficient killers of enemy infantry.   your enemy is likely to have quite a lot of infy of his own, and even ignoring costs you can get an outright larger volume of anti-personnel fire by mounting it on PBIs instead of treads.

[Garfunkel]

You need infantry for boarding.

[Panpiper (OP)]

You need infantry for boarding.

Is it necessary to board? Is there some benefit to boarding other than it being a useful way to end a fight? Does your fleet not need to be purpose-designed to board, meaning containing weapons meant more to disable than to destroy, so you can purchase the opportunity to board?

I suspect it might be easier to make the case to have a complement of marines on board a ship to help 'repel' enemy boarding attempts.

[Jorgen_CAB]

You need infantry for boarding.

Is it necessary to board? Is there some benefit to boarding other than it being a useful way to end a fight? Does your fleet not need to be purpose-designed to board, meaning containing weapons meant more to disable than to destroy, so you can purchase the opportunity to board?

I suspect it might be easier to make the case to have a complement of marines on board a ship to help 'repel' enemy boarding attempts.

To be honest I don't think the AI ever board you... it is mainly meant for the player and many people play multiple factions at the same time and rely heavily on role-play. In those instances then boarding can be an important part of the game.

You can use weapons such a Microwaves to disable their sensors and then board them, but reducing their speed by using energy weapons are still needed at times for successful boarding.

If you board a ship you get to claim the ship and all of what that can mean with gaining new technology and all that, or just a new ship.

[Neophyte]

Boarding is good if you are facing giant bricks o' armor or otherwise heavily defense oriented ships that would otherwise take lots of firepower to take down.

You do need good fast boarding shuttles to get them on the enemy ship without exploding or tumbling off into space, but once they're successfully transferred they will stick like a tick onto the hull until they blast their way through.  Additional armor on the enemy ship only delays the inevitable, and iirc shields do nothing to prevent boarding.  You don't need to disable the enemy, but it does reduce attrition in your boarding parties and ships.

You also need to be okay with that attrition, and also the increased micro associated with juggling boarding ships and troops in your fleets.

I suspect it might be easier to make the case to have a complement of marines on board a ship to help 'repel' enemy boarding attempts.

This is useful for RP purposes mostly in my experience, though NPRs theoretically can board and at least one SPOILER I know of does.  This is also the reason boarding can work so well for the player, as the only enemy ships you might have to fight more than crew are carriers and troop transports.  And crew, even with the fortification bonus, are pretty garbo in combat.  If there's an NPR out there who designs ships with on-board defense troops I haven't seen it yet.