Touching back on the topic of ground unit techs. I would really like to see more depth to the ground forces tech tree and separation of armor/damage/penetration dependency on naval weapon techs. As it stands now the ground combat research tree is wide with lots of capability, base unit, and weapon techs, however, it lacks depth. Once you get through those base options the only true multi step progression is construction rate, leaving our GC scientists mostly jobless till its time to upgrade the unit series. Its not too difficult to reach this point either, even with limited admin and reduced research rates, you can power through the whole tree in a few decades, and this has been further exacerbated with the recent RP cost cut. And honestly in most of my campaigns, I usually use a good chunk of starting RP or even just SM most of the techs as I want the flexibility and wide choice of design considerations early on, and most of my GC scientists get converted to other fields.
So, I propose the following tech lines, the first 2 groups being Armor and Penetration Techs which cover the current progression system but disconnects them from the naval weapon techs. Id also like to propose 3 additional groups to increase Rate of Fire, Hit Points, and Damage for additional unit design diversity
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Armor Techs - I think these could have a relationship with the naval Defensive Systems Armor techs akin to powerplant/engine techs though would be fine stand alone. If related I think the RP cost should be half of the requisite DS tech.
- Personal Armor - Infantry Armor Techline
- Vehicle Armor - Affects Light and Medium vehicles, but the current Light/Medium Armor Type retains its relative modifiers
- Heavy Vehicle Armor - Heavy and Super/Ultra Heavy Vehicles, I chose to separate these from the other vehicles as I always felt the "light" armor on a "heavy" vehicle should be comparably stronger to a smaller vehicle, therefore this tech line should be slightly cheaper per level.
- Static Fortification - Armor line for Static, slightly different name to the rest just to break up the monotony and better represent them as emplaced weapon systems
Penetration Techs - Standalone tech lines, I like it this way as opposed to the Armor tech for when you come across a more advanced NPR/Spoiler you can attempt to rush design stronger weapons to close the gap.
- Personal Weapon Penetration - Affects PW/PWL/IPW (Also side note, Id like to see IPW renamed to Heavy Personal Weapons and given a +1 DMG buff, frees up the Improved title for techs and gives the weapons a decent little buff)
- Crew Served Weapon Penetration - CAP/HCAP pen tech line
- Anti Vehicle Penetration - LAV/MAV/HAV/SHAV
- Autocannon Penetration - LAC/MAC/HAC (And could LAC could a base +1 or +2 AP buff to make it stand out a little better in comparison to HCAP)
- Anti-Air Penetration - LAA/MAA/HAA
- Bombardment Penetration - LB/MB/MBL/HB/SHB
Rate of Fire Techs - These should be very expensive techs with only 1-3 tiers
- Personal Weapons RoF - PW/PWL/PWH Increases number of shots by 1 per tech level but would also increase transport size by 1 ton each. Gives some roleplay options to say have a 3 shot PWL submachinegun equivalent to 1 shot PW in size but differing capabilities, or a slightly heavier 2-3 shot PW to represent an Automatic Rifle like the M1918 BAR or M27 IAR that isn't a full on machinegun like CAP.
- Crew Served RoF - I would drop the the baseline to 4 or 5 shots and increase by 2 per tech level as well as increase transport size by 2 tons
- Autocannon RoF - Increase 1 shot and 3 or 4 Tons per tech level.
- Bombardment RoF - I'm not too sure on adding this one, maybe just a single level that increase shots to 5 but doubles transport size
HP Techs - I think it would be neat if increasing health was a possibility and could make battles more dynamic against different races. The problem is trying to figure out how to justify it besides the Infantry Genetic Enhancement. There could be a fixed racial modifier that makes larger/smaller species harder/easier to put down, but that still doesn't really give vehicles a good justification. So my suggestion is to implement shields for ground forces. Like suggested for the armor techs, these should be paired with the Shield Strength techs, with a little caveat that smaller shields for Medium/Light Vehicles and Infantry require higher tech level.
- Static Shields - Unlocks with Alpha Shields
- Heavy Vehicle Shields - (Super/Ultra) Heavy Vehicles, Unlocks with Gamma Shields
- Light Vehicle Shields - Light/Medium Vehicles, Unlocks with Delta Shields
- Personal Shields - Infantry, unlocks with Theta Shields (The pretty high requirement here is because infantry already have their genetic enhancement)
Damage Techs - Nothing to extravagant here, just corresponding techs to increase damage to off set HP increases and follow the same groupings as the aforementioned Penetration Techs
- Personal Weapon Damage - PW/PWL/PWH
- Crew Served Weapon Damage - CAP/HCAP
- Anti Vehicle Damage - LAV/MAV/HAV/SHAV
- Autocannon Damage - LAC/MAC/HAC
- Anti-Air Damage - LAA/MAA/HAA
- Bombardment Damage - LB/MB/MBL/HB/SHB
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This comes out to a whopping 24 new Tech lines which would greatly expand the Ground Combat list, probably too much fit under the one category. It might be best to have the Armor and HP/Shield Techs in the Defensive Systems, and I would also move all the Troop Transport techs to Logistics. To further declutter I would like to see a couple of the base and weapon techs moved into the base research like was recently done for AUX and FLAG Bridges, namely Heavy Vehicle Base Unit, Heavy Vehicle Armor, Heavy Anti-Vehicle, and Long-Range Bombardment. I find the lack of Heavy vehicles and associated armor and weapons to be disappointing for the the initial diversity of an army, as well the MBL would give game start armies the ability to have rear echelon fire support.
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Bonus suggestion!This isn't directly related to the previous talk on ground force techs but just some other things I think would be pretty great
Personal Support Weapons - Because of the transport size, I always found LAV/LB/LAA for infantry to be akin to crew served weapons along the lines of TOW/Kornet Missiles, WWII Light Anti-Tank guns, Mortars and what not, which might be a little excessive for your Armies needs and maybe you want something closer to a Carl Gustav, RPG-7, under barrel grenade Launcher, or Stinger Missile. So I think it would be neat to add infantry exclusive support weapons that are more compact but a little less capable. I'm not a big numbers guy so I dunno how well these would calculate into the current meta but something along the lines of
These would get improvements by the aforementioned AV/B/AA tech lines