For Commanders to give their Bonus they must have a strict heirarchy (eg R1-R2-R3-...) in the Naval Organisation, right?
Well right now I have the problem that my ship officers keep getting promoted so ALL my admin commands must be highest rank, but then I cant have
Whole Navy Command
L Survey Ships
L Survey Ship 1
L Survey Ship 2
L Attack Ships
L Attack Ship 1
L Logistics Ships
etc because the "Whole Navy Command" is not a higher Rank, so I wont get its bonus.
How can I solve this? I already turned of "Realistic Promotions", and manually flagging 3500+ officers as "Do Not Promote" wont happen. And manually demoting every X days is tefious as well.
(AFAIK I cant just make all my naval commands highest rank and get the bonuses from the "Whole Navy Command" and "Survey Ships", is this true?)
I have one clarification and four possible solutions for you.
To clarify: the commander ranks in the Naval Admin Command hierarchy must be strictly descending down the tree, but you are allowed to skip ranks at any node.
In other words, it doesn't have to be R1-R2-R3. You can have R1-R3-R5, for example, and any fleet under the R5 command that has no commanders higher than R6 will receive the stacked bonuses.
(This means, to answer your specific question, that a fleet under Survey Ships won't get the bonus from the commander of Whole Navy Command unless the commander of Survey Ships is of lower rank than the commander of Whole Navy Command, and the commander of the fleet is of lower rank than the commander of Survey Ships. If Whole Navy Command does not have an assigned commander, then the commander of Survey Ships can be of the highest rank.)
So, how to make this workable when your commanders keep getting promoted, pushing their fleets out of the appropriate command range for their naval command?
Some approaches:
1) Turn on auto-assignment for commanders.
Besides the obvious benefit of assigning all newly arrived commanders for you, this will also cause promoted ship commanders to be unassigned from their current ship. This prevents promotions from messing up your command hierarchy, but is in some cases a bother--there are times when you would like a particular commander to remain with a particular ship. In those cases you can manually reassign the commander, and the auto-assignment won't remove that commander again (until the commander's next promotion).
2) Build a deeper admin command tree.
If you generally want commanders to stay with their ships as they get promoted, then build a deep enough tree that you can move the fleet of a promoted commander up one node to satisfy the rank requirements. Of course, this doesn't help if the commanders that you want in charge of fleets are of your highest rank. It only helps keep things in line as officers are climbing up from the lower ranks.
3) Build more academies.
Building more academies will give you more commanders. This gives you more flexibility in assignments, but, again, doesn't really solve the problem if you like to assign the highest-ranked commanders to ships. And if you have 3500+ commanders, I think you have already done a lot of this.
4) Forget all that, just keep promotions from happening without spending an entire Sunday clicking a checkbox.
If you like, I will write a SQL script that will uncheck that box for you, for all your commanders.
If you just want a one-time fix, you can send me your DB and I will run the script on it.
If you would like to be able to do it on an ongoing basis, I can send you the script and explain what you need to do to execute it.
Send me a PM if you want to go this route.