Hello again, folks. I'm quite a fan of the current ground mechanics, but it being the newest of the major features added to Aurora, much newer than the ship design system, I feel it's still a bit rough around the edges. A couple days ago me and some folks from the Discord channel were talking about how much we like the ground combat, but there's a couple of QoL features we would all like to see.
First thing relates to replacement. For example, say I have an infantry battalion which is supplied by infantry supply units, I then train a front line battalion and a reserve battalion that it can draw reinforcements from. In most combat situations, supply will be depleted much earlier than the infantry units will die, which means the reserve formation will have its supply units drained much faster than its infantry units; this creates an issue where I end up having several reserve formations with no supply infantry but plenty of infantry troops. This situation kind of negates the usefulness of infantry supply units, as now I need to have my supply at Brigade level, and then train a couple of extra reserve brigades that consist only of HQ and supply units, so I can replace my spent supply. My normal divisions then have four 25.000 tons Brigade formations, each with four 5.000 tons infantry battalions and a 5.000 ton brigade formation which contains supply trucks. I then have another 4 spare 5.000 Brigade formations marked for reserve, and then a 5.000 tons Division formation to create my OOBs. This still leaves an issue where I have several reserve brigades with a couple of HQ units but no supply trucks.
What I suggest is for the replacement system to function in a way that either a single formation can draw reserves from more than one formation, allowing me, in the aforementioned example, to have one reserve formation comprised of only supply infantry and another comprised just of normal infantry troops, or for us to have some way to automate to a degree the replenishment of forces. Dragging and dropping each formation element over and over for every formation under standard level is very time consuming, micro heavy and click intensive, to me it's one of the least fun moments of Aurora. Adding to this, I would like to add to the chorus of people who suggest this, that I'd like an option to select an existing formation and order a ground construction facility to replenish it to standard levels, this would reduce and ungodly amount of micro.
The main body of my suggestion, however, whilst it encompasses my first point, takes in account other things. Let's say I create a division like the aforementioned one. That's 25 inidividual formations I trained, that's 25 drag and drops I have to do, with the ground force menu moving around as I do it. Given a homeworld can have several such formations in my games, I'd easily need to drag and drop a hundred or so times. Now let's take in account marines, and boarding shuttles with small weight. I have 18 boarding shuttles in my assault carrier class, and two of that class currently deployed. That's me clicking the "load ground unit" order in the fleet movement orders 36 times, and that's a single fleet. There's no other moment in Aurora when I need to do so much mindless clicking. The second most click-heavy moment is normal movement orders, but then you have godsends like order delay, cycle orders and repeat orders. This plus the replacement micro makes it so whilst I love deploying ground forces and the mechanics behind combat, actually keeping them in order is a pain, not in a fun, logistically challenging way, but in a monotone way where I have to click and click until my fingers hurt.
What I suggest is making the ground formations more like ships. You already design a formation with several elements. Why not have elements be like ship components? When a ship is damaged, you don't have to manually build each component, the shipyard will do that for you with two or three clicks, even more so now with repair yards (thanks Steve!) So why not have nested formations, like say I want to build a Brigade like the ones I talked about, I could just order the construction of a brigade like I would for a ship, and that brigade would come as a unit that has the battalions and battalion formations as components to it. Perhaps this might hamper me taking formations from one brigade and reassigning them to another, but this could be worked out in some way. I'd like it if the construction facilities worked more like Industry, where you have a BP capacity and can allocate a percentage to each formation you're building. The capacity to build with percentages plus the capacity to build your OOB already organised from scratch would take most of the micro out of the ground units game.
Another thing I'd like to talk about is how ships have an MSP storage dictated by their maintenance supply bays and engineering spaces. Well, I think supply shouldn't be handled by the logistics units just disappearing. Each formation should have a GSP storage that's dictated by the capacity of supply units they hold. Ground facilities could produce GSP much like maintenance facilities produce MSP, and the troops could drain MSP directly from their reserves, then you could set a "supply base" of sorts that you could supply with supply ships carrying GSP, and subordinate formations could drain the GSP from it each production cycle or combat phase. This could, albeit I don't know whether it's that good of an idea, also work for replacements. Many games represent replacements as a resource, and well, Ground Units are made of Vendarite, GSP could be made out of Vendarite, logistics wise you're just shipping vendarite converted into GSP around, much like you ship MSP and ordnance for ships. When the production cycle or combat phase ticks, the formation could convert a portion of its GSP into new units, with the efficiency and speed of that being dictated by tech levels, whilst keeping a general rule that an unit generated by GSP replacement would be a lot more expensive than one built at a facility.
I also realise the whole "formations as ships" thing could be rendered moot if we could just shift click and drag formations in the ground forces window, even more so if we could drag boxes like we can do for ships. Those features are already present for ships, it should be okay to extend them to ground formations. Anyway, these are just my two cents. Steve, if you're reading this, I love that you've made pretty much the most in-depth system of army management that any 4x I know of has, I really love it!
