I love ground force management in this game. Yes, I do painstakingly rename each and every non-garrison unit, but boy, is it great. Theres a simple interface. You can click troops, move them from unit to unit, reorganize things, and double click the levels of headquarters to collapse long lists into easy to manage formations. When you want to pick them up and order them around, you can include subordinate units. Need a single regiment somewhere quick? Pick up the Valhallan 597th HQ and the four units attached to it come with. Uh oh, its time to purge the unclean, put X number of division sized transports in a task group, then order them plink plink plink to pick up x number of divisions, then grab replacements from wherevers nearby, then drop em all off on location.
To summarize; management, movement, and manipulation of ground forces is easy, accessible, and works quite well even for dealing with large numbers of forces spread over multiple planets.
This being said, I don't understand task forces at all. You have a flag bridge, and you like, put it on a ship. And then you like, put the navy office staff in there. That way, you have all the joy of the top brass actually being with you wherever you may roam. The task group cannot train properly unless there is an office staff somewhere (because we all know that none of us can do anything effectively without bureaucrats nearby) either in the system the ships are at, or on the flag ships. You put ships in different task forces through a drop down, but this doesn't seem to reorganize the task group lists in any meaningful way. Once you have the ships in the task force, if you move them out of the system in which the office staff is, they don't know what to do anymore, and act like fools and fail to train. And having separate task forces doesn't really seem to help anything, because all commands are given through the task groups window anyway, so one might as well just put all ships in a single task group and just forget about TF management all together. In stark contrast to the way ground forces work, I find TFs bulky, difficult, and not particularly accessible (yeah yeah, aurora is supposed to be inaccessible). I find them further irrelevant, because I can't design a TF, and then order them to "COME TOGETHER, where they would attempt to path from wherever they are in the empire to the TF center.
Im sure theres something about task forces I'm missing. But I simply do not know how to use them. Post in this thread with tips and pointers!
So what I wonder is, why not organize ships in much the same way as ground forces? You might remember MoO3 -- which was weird-- but one thing they tried to do was have mission ships and support ships and point defense all mixed in a logical way. I can do that sort of management myself-- if I want a grossly incorrect fleet formation, I can have it by golly-- but if I could click together a task force that would then fly as a cohesive unit when the FORCE was ordered somewhere, but that I was able to launch sorties-- for instance sending a beam squadron on a different trajectory without messing with the primary TF-- that would be really cool. It might also be interesting to have actual physical formations, where ships take up locations related to the center of the task force, but then they need not be running complex arrays of orders in order to do so. I suppose I can make use of the follow commands and some of the formation stuff to enable true area defense, but its awfully bulky. I'd love to be able to design a fleet from the bottom up, and then have the fleet be able to fly and fight the same way all the time. Regardless of how it would look, the idea of having levels of ships with levels of officers, and then assembling them for both movement and their relative positions in space are quite powerful and interesting.
My ideas here aren't really thoroughly shown, but I wanted to get some discussion going.
edits:
When i build a division, it has personality. I have legions that are composted of entirely heavy assault troops, and divisions that are composed of a more modest mix of offensive and defensive units. When a unit is lost from the division, it can be replaced, but never forgotten. I just don't think fleets work this way, and I think thats a shame, because this is primarily a fleet game-- not a ground force game.
