On to the Army! Because, while the Navy can bring it, only the Army can take it.
There are almost as many effective ways to organize an army as there are players of Aurora, which speaks volumes about the highly flexible unit type and formation designer and the excellent balance of many parts of the ground combat system. In no two games have my armies looked the same.
However, Aurora ground unit design and organization does have some very definite limitations, some outright bugs, some decided expectations, and several hidden "gotchas". I will therefore provide more detail in this section than I did for the Navy.
Bugs:
If you apply any special capabilities that are not infantry-only to an infantry unit, all special capabilities for that unit are removed ... not just visually, but in battle as well. Their cost is retained; you pay, but don't get. If you apply only infantry-only capabilities to such a unit, it will keep the special traits. So genetically enhanced mountain troops or marines work just fine, but try using extreme temperature or low gravity, and you'll just get plain infantry.
Missing features:
Officers commanding superior formations have no effect on the performance of subordinate formations. At a minimum, they provide no training, offensive hit chance, defensive hit chance, artillery, or construction bonuses. At a blow, the most important reason to have any formation hierarchy at all disappears.
"Gotchas"
The "Avoid Combat" checkbox is always waiting to trip you up. Do not apply it to AA or artillery; they will both hit in all forms of combat much less often. Apply it only to non-combat HQs, forward fire direction, logistics, construction, xenoarchaeology, and geosurvey units. Double check every unit you design; to forget this would cripple them.
Misfeatures:
Briefly, officer Combat Command stats and rank structure mesh poorly with the sort of formation hierarchies modern armies have. Combat command stat is assigned at officer birth; officers without sufficient stat are useless in higher ranks, regardless of other skills. Increases, if any, to this stat over time are entirely insufficient to change this analysis. Other problems with officers include the rigid 3 subordinates to 1 superior (so, 9 MAJ to 3 LTC to 1 COL) and the lack of sufficient officers with decent bonuses to fill out a corps-scale formation hierarchy or larger, even after years of specific training for such bonuses in dedicated academies.
Morale bonuses from training are extremely advantageous in combat, as they affect both hit chance and chance to be hit. However, if an officer commanding a formation is replaced for any reason, and if the next commander lacks a sufficient bonus to training, then all morale above the cap for that commander is reset to 100 in the next build phase. What takes a year to earn is lost in five days. There is, in fact, no such thing in Aurora as training; there are only temporary boosts.
Expectations:
Aurora expects officers to command formations of specific sizes. This is not stated anywhere, and you do have the option of manually assigning ranks to formations, but nevertheless it is well worth recording what these expectations are:
Major; up to 5k in size
Lieutenant Colonel; 6 - 10k
Colonel; 11 - 20k
Brigadier General; 21 - 50k
Major General; 51 - 250k
Lieutenant General; 251 - 1000
General; 1001 and up
Field Marshal; (no formation sizes found)
As you might imagine, the impact of all of these issues - and others not mentioned here but discussed in posts elsewhere - has combined to make each of unit, formation, and army organization very much a matter of "negotiating with the game".
Sometimes negotiations went well. My (mechanized) artillery didn't get gimped, because I learnt that I must not assign the non-combat trait to units with bombardment weapons.
Sometimes negotiations went poorly. My infantry-type units, including most of my artillery, are both madly overpriced and fairly ineffective because my attempts to provide Extreme Temperature and (for footsoldiers) Advanced Genetic Enhancement gave me units that fight like basic grunts, but actually cost me three and a half times as much. I weep bitter tears, because infantry are truly my favorites. To see them struggle after I have taken such pains over them ... brings out the despair of the hard-used grunt in me and again makes me realize that "War is smeg" [Ed: no, it's not "smeg", war is *s_h_i_t* you hand-wringing, mealy-mouthed, knockoff Puritan forum!].
If unit design is tricky, army organization is - to speak frankly - an exercise in frustration. After playing three full conquest games, I frankly have no clue what sort of hierarchy the game is intended to accommodate ... nothing works particularly well!
So. For this game, I've cobbled together something that looks vaguely like a American-style formation hierarchy, complete with at least some general-grade officers that actually grant bonuses. For the first time, I've made a real effort to make use of officer bonuses, and to do so without exploiting the game. However, like all of my attempts at formation hierarchy organization, it simultaneously attempts to look like an army, and also tries to cooperate with the various demands made by the game, and consequently "falls between two stools", truly succeeding at neither objective.
I'm too ashamed to show you my infantry, so here is my list of formation types, with the Mobile [light vehicle] Cohort featured. A "cohort" is a half-battalion, commanded by a major. It is 5k (or a little less) in size, and is the basic building block of my army. It is represented by a symbol half-way between those for companies and battalions.
As with all of the various ground forces I've fielded, this army multiplies the basic building block to build a hierarchy. A troop transport will always be able to load at least 1 cohort for every 5k in troop transport capacity it has.
A battalion is a double cohort, 10k or just a little less in size, and commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel. So, why do I have both cohorts and battalions? Because I don't have enough officers with suitable Command Size and decent bonuses to represent both in an organic fashion, I divide up my formations types, making some one, and some the other, so I can effectively use the officers I've got. In this army, artillery, anti-air, infantry, garrison, mobile, and support units go into cohorts, and medium and heavy vehicles into battalions. This is - again, to speak frankly - a bit "gamey", for reasons discussed above and elsewhere.
Cohorts and battalions have units of only one general class, but a mix of weaponry. Front-line field formations have only a small amount of organic supplies, enough HQs to probably survive a battle, no field observers, AA, bombardment, or other support units, and are therefore all about hitting and hanging hard with the size allocated to them.
While you see HQs for regiments of 20k size, I couldn't find enough suitable officers to command them. So my army has no regiments.
Brigades of 40k size do feature, and are the only superior-level formation type in this army that actually allows superior officers to contribute as they do in a real army, while carefully not abusing the Aurora game design. A brigade is commanded by a brigadier general (I had to manually promote suitable officers to this rank). A brigade is a front-line formation, directly commands ~10k worth of combat troops, and oversees other 30k worth of front-line troops and supporting artillery. The standard loadout is 10k brigade direct attachments, 2x 5x light artillery, and either 2x 10k battalions or 4x 5k cohorts. A brigade lacks significant supplies or various other supporting elements; it therefore is always commanded by a superior HQ.
Here is a transarmor [super heavy vehicle] brigade.
Minor note: Artillery cohorts have battalion HQs to allow them to support battalions as well as cohorts. Because artillery doesn't fire at all if not supporting another unit (!), and won't support a unit with an inferior HQ, we need to work with the system a bit here.
A bit of an issue relating to this is the fact that, while it is convenient to attach artillery directly to a superior HQ, and then set that HQ to support or rear echelon (depending on artillery type), you thereby forfeit the services of officers with good direct-fire skills and high Command otherwise very suitable for general slots. This sort of thing, where Aurora prevents you from working with the ground combat system as a harmonized whole, is something I find both very frustrating as a player, and very confusing as an army organizer. The game offers me abundant tools, but I cannot make use of some without breaking others.
Brigades are always commanded by divisions. I have no HQs superior to brigades other than divisions, except for a few odds-and-sods "combat commands", because a) I lack the officers to command enough HQs of suitable sizes, and b) fielding high-capacity HQs, especially those duplicated or up-armoured to survive a battle, gets very costly in both research and production.
The American army therefore has ten divisions, of which seven are currently active duty. Each division has a fair amount of mobile supplies, several heavy bombardment cohorts, a single heavy AA cohort, and a combined-arms mix of front-line brigades, battalions, and cohorts with an emphasis that varies by division. Here is the 1st Armored division:
This, like all of our divisions, has sufficient supplies for at least another 20 combat rounds under normal conditions, some HQ duplication ... and nothing else directly attached.
If we attach artillery, we force our general officer to be an artillery specialist. I've done this several times before, but in this game, we're rebelling against such confusion of purpose.
If we attach direct combat units and set them to attack, our supplies (and HQs) will come under much more effective fire. We cannot realistically do this; somebody has to store and distribute the supplies. We could set up a corps command, but all of the questions we've been asking here about the use of high-ranking officers would simply repeat, just with a new HQ.
Additionally, we would be forced into the following conversation with ourselves:
"We're adding combat units to fairly take advantage of an important officer's skills. First question: 'How much advantage may we fairly take?' My answer is: roughly 20-25% of the total size of the formation hierarchy."
"OK. Problem: We know that, the larger the front-line formation, the better it does per unit size in battle, as long as enemy front-line formations are not very much (something like a couple 10s of times) smaller, because of (at a minimum) improved chance for overruns. How large a collection of units can be attached directly before we start breaking the game design unfairly in our favour?" My answer to this second question is 'Very roughly 20 or 30k.'."
With a brigade 40k in size, we can happily add 10k to the HQ without qualms. The brigadier general is basically turned into a battalion [10k formation] commander. However, with a division 200k in size, it would definitely be an abuse of the game to directly attach 40 or 50k. So we have refrained.
Our third option, and the one we've chosen for divisions in this particular game, is to throw all the skills of one of the American Army's most important officers, one we hand-groomed for this job, straight into the trash. This cannot be the right answer. Patton would be furious ... and rightly so.
Above the division, there is no higher command in an expeditionary force. A collection of divisions (plus any spare combat commands) is provided with a sufficiently large supply dump and sent out to fight. Here is the full list of the units that conquered the first enemy homeworld:
This force contains 55 infantry cohorts, 50 light artillery cohorts, 30 mobile cohorts, 15 mechanized battalions, 15 armored battalions, 10 transarmored battalions, 10 ultra-armor battalions, 8 heavy anti-air cohorts, 27 heavy artillery cohorts, and 50 sustainment cohorts, for a total size of roughly 1.57m.
It was carried by sixteen of these:
Geronimo class Troop Transport 247,474 tons 1,829 Crew 21,124.4 BP TCS 4,949 TH 39,600 EM 0
8000 km/s Armour 17-351 Shields 0-0 HTK 567 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 25 PPV 0
MSP 1,333 Max Repair 550 MSP
Troop Capacity 100,000 tons Drop Capable Cargo Shuttle Multiplier 50
Commander Control Rating 2 BRG AUX
Intended Deployment Time: 3 months
Excelsior AM 110 (18) Power 39600 Fuel Use 1.60% Signature 2200 Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 2,803,000 Litres Range 127.5 billion km (184 days at full power)
Lidded Eye of the Lynx [missile] (1) GPS 48 Range 22.1m km MCR 2m km Resolution 1
Lidded Eye of the Lynx [ship] (1) GPS 5760 Range 109.1m km Resolution 120
Ships in Service:
Bradley
Eisenhower
Geronimo
Grant
Harrison
Jackson
Knox
Lee
Mattis
McAuliffe
Patton
Powell
Scott
Sherman
Sitting Bull
Taylor
Tecumseh
Wainwright
Washington
