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Posted by: Paul M
« on: April 21, 2009, 01:53:24 AM »

I've put my suggestion through a 33+ year test.

Currently I have a lvl 1 academy.
Leader totals: R1: 150, R2: 50, R3: 17, R4: 5, R5: 2, R6: 1
I have been using: R1&R2 Retire on age 46 or anytime if health fair; R3 retire on 51 or health poor, R4 etire on 56 or health poor, R5+ retire mainly due to health.

The results have been as you can see a smallish officer pool but the advantage is that a lot of the senior officers are young, most are healthy and generally all of them are skilled.  Clears out the deadwood in the R1 and R2 pool before they can get promoted just for being there.  I am running into a manning problem on the ships though since there is a limited amount of R3 officers to go around.  Time wise it is not so bad, I check 2-3 times a year and that works out good.  I just hit retire and paste in "Is granted a time in service discharge."

In order to automate this you would need to select for each rank retirement criterial based on age, health status, and if you wish this to apply to govenors.  Teams under 4.0beta do run into a problem.
Posted by: Paul M
« on: April 16, 2009, 08:20:35 AM »

After the big yearly reshuffle I go into the commanders screen and first weed out the dead wood.  Low rank, age 60 and any health out you go.  Higher rank age >60 and poor health out you go.  I also will remove people who are older but without much in the way of skills.  Doing this has kept my officer pool much healthier looking and seems to produce better quality officers as the juniors are more often given commands.

I then go in and assign officers to commands that the automatic system doesn't (the civillian fleet) this is a time consuming mess but it gives my junior officers command experience.  It would be nice for a "vancant commands" check box to exist to allow only commands of the right rank and that aren't filled to show up so scrolling isn't necessary.

The one thing I have noticed is that I can use the civillian fleet to encourage promotion of better quality officers by giving them commands.  But I have also noticed that as your fleet expands you need to  expand your naval accademy as the senior officer pool doesn't grow very fast.  What I have seen is now I have younger senior officers.  The clearing out of the older ones causes a chain reaction of promotions down the line.  Also going in and manually assigning the officers to the civ fleet has the effect of further promoting the better officers upwards as that gives them more promotion points.  One interesting effect is orginally my fleet command required R7 now it is down to R4 (seems to be tied to 3 ranks below your highest officer).

But the pool of mid-level commanders (R3) is not as big as I would think it should be.  There seems to be a 1/3 rule in place R1: 240 R2: 75 R3: 24  which seems a bit odd given that R3 is pretty much required for ship commands it would be better to be R2=0.33R1 and R3=0.5R2 or there abouts to give R1: 240 R2: 75 R3: 36.  I am not sure what R1 is supposed to represent in a modern equivelent.  Also it might be good to have seperate tour durations for rank brackets: R1: 6 months, R2-R3: 12 months, and R4+: 24 months.

One other effect has been my highest rank is R7 and my upper range of officers R7(1), R6(3), R5(9?) is also not large but at least for the most part they are never un-assigned.  I should probably go with an age cap of R1(45), R2(45), R3(50), R4(55), R5-R7(60), and R8+(any age).  And any one with less than fair health goes regardless of age.  I'll try this next campaign and see what happens.  

One thing though is what is done with the crew numbers?  In principle they should retire after a certain time in service and demand.  I can't imagine that there is much sense in training people that will not get employed.   But exactly the best way to approach this is hard to say.

I may also create a couple of different commands and see what this does.

It is good to have crew to limit fleet sizes though, getting rid of that in Starfire resulted in fleet bloat as then fleet size became tied to maintenance and since income grew over time allowable fleet size grew over time at essentially the same rate.
Posted by: SteveAlt
« on: April 10, 2009, 10:26:05 AM »

Quote from: "adradjool"
I looked through this thread, but couldn't find any definite changes for service length limits.  Have there been changes or is that on the back burner for now?
No changes have been made yet; mainly because I wanted to get NPRs done and v4.0 released. It is still something I want to do before my next campaign so something along these lines will be in either v4.1 or v4.2.

Steve
Posted by: Erik L
« on: April 09, 2009, 09:30:33 PM »

Hmmm nope. I was misunderstanding you. As far as I know, that's not configurable.
Posted by: schroeam
« on: April 09, 2009, 09:08:18 PM »

The only thing in the upper left that is configurable is a check field for automated assignments and a drop menu for tour lengths, but a field to limit a commander's length of active duty service is not there.  Just to make sure, when I check my version, it says 3.3.  Is that the version that is actually 4.0b?

Adam.
Posted by: Erik L
« on: April 09, 2009, 05:54:57 PM »

Upper left corner of the F4 officer window
Posted by: schroeam
« on: April 09, 2009, 05:46:42 PM »

Quote from: "Erik Luken"
Quote from: "adradjool"
I looked through this thread, but couldn't find any definite changes for service length limits.  Have there been changes or is that on the back burner for now?

Adam.

Isn't that still a configurable field?
Where?
Posted by: Erik L
« on: April 08, 2009, 10:16:31 PM »

Quote from: "adradjool"
I looked through this thread, but couldn't find any definite changes for service length limits.  Have there been changes or is that on the back burner for now?

Adam.

Isn't that still a configurable field?
Posted by: schroeam
« on: April 08, 2009, 09:56:05 PM »

I looked through this thread, but couldn't find any definite changes for service length limits.  Have there been changes or is that on the back burner for now?

Adam.
Posted by: Bellerophon06
« on: January 21, 2009, 01:00:08 PM »

I like the idea of having a realistic service length for officers.  The current idea that has officers forced to retire after a certain period without promotion is good, but I am not fond of the idea of their being immediately moved in to "retirement" status where they cannot be used any more.  I think that it might be better to have officers placed in a "non-active reserve" status for x number of years before they are placed in retirement status.  This would more closely emulate some modern militaries that place personnel in the inactive reserve where they can be called back to duty if necessary.  It would be bad to get in to a war with a significant lack of officers when there are a number of them in a "retired" status and you cannot recall them to duty.
Posted by: welchbloke
« on: January 09, 2009, 04:54:58 AM »

Quote
mavikfelna said:
You might look at also making freighter captains gain skill in Logistics, since that's a vital skill for any freighter or passenger ship captain. You might make that skill affect load/unload times too. Trade, Operations and Wealth Creation are also areas that might be improved if you want to expand it even more.

This seems like a sensible suggestion to me.  This way a group of officers become logistics specialists just like you have survey specialists etc.  Modern militaries are extremely reliant on logistics and specialists are a necessity.
Posted by: mavikfelna
« on: January 08, 2009, 11:17:08 PM »

Quote
Assuming the freighter is unarmed, the main benefit is to the officer rather than the freighter. Officers gain experience based on the current role so an officer commanding a freighter may increase his crew training or initiative attributes whereas an unemployed officer will never gain experience. Think of freighter commands as basic training and experience for future warship commands.

Steve

Quote
Father Tim wrote:There are occasional discussions about adding some sort of carge handling skill to improve loading & unloading times. Crew experience might also affect (un)loading times.

You might look at also making freighter captains gain skill in Logistics, since that's a vital skill for any freighter or passenger ship captain. You might make that skill affect load/unload times too. Trade, Operations and Wealth Creation are also areas that might be improved if you want to expand it even more.

--Mav
Posted by: schroeam
« on: January 08, 2009, 09:01:48 PM »

Quote from: "Father Tim"
The officers become better ship captains, and if they have crew training the ship crews become better.  A high initiative might just let a freighter escape from an enemy warship.

I started writing this to request a change to the task group initiative based on the senior officer's initiative, but I started wondering whether it should be based on one officer, or a multiple, or average of the group of officers in the TG.  Either way, I think the TG's initiative should be automatically changed based on the initiative of the CO's.  Opinions, yea, nae?

Adam.
Posted by: Steve Walmsley
« on: January 08, 2009, 11:07:14 AM »

Quote from: "jfelten"
Is there some sort of primer on how the whole officer thing works in Aurora?  I've been kind of groping the dark with it so far.  I researched and built the sector HQ or whatever it is called, but did not see any new appointments appear to assign an officer to.  Also, I can't seem to assign an officer to the colony I built even though it is up to about 25m pop now.  Is that because I don't have any officers ranked high enough for those posting to show up as options?  
Possibly. Each assignment has an R value, which is the rank needed for an officer to fill that post. The more likely situation is that you need to click a checkbox under the assignment list which is "Assign to any Location". The default in Aurora is that you can only assign officers to commands in the same location as the officer. If you want to assign them to a far-off colony, you have to put them on a ship and take them there. I think the Assign Any should probably be the default instead so I'll change that for v3.3. Also, if you click on Automated Assignments (under the Empire dropdown), the program will assign everything for you and then you can manually override as you see fit.

Quote
Is there anyplace that shows the actual benefit being derived from current assignments?  I see officers with skills such as +20% shipyards and I can't really tell if they are doing anything.  I suppose I could write down how long it takes to build the same ship with and without them, but that is quite tedious.  
The benefit provided by the officer is built into the production figures of populations. If you want more detail about the calculation you can hover the mouse over the production amounts and a popup will give you the breakdown. For example, move over the Annual Production label for ordnance factories in the Industrial Production tab or the Annual Ship Building Rate on the Shipyard Tasks tab. For warships, the benefit is that their grade points will increase over time based on the crew training skill of the commander. You can see this on the Ship window. Grade points translate into a grade bonus that can also be seen on the fleet window. This is a modifier for combat. Other types of ships, such as Terraformers or Jump Gate Construction Ships will perform their tasks more quickly with appropriate commanders. If you switch automated assignments on, you will quickly see what type of commanders are best for different types of ships. When an automated assignment is made, the associated event show the skill that was used to determine the assignment.

Quote
In the "real world" if there is a slot, someone will be promoted to fill it.  They may not be great at the job, but they'll do it.  Perhaps for open slots for which there is nobody of high enough rank yet, a lower ranking office will be moved up as "acting _____" (perhaps based strictly on seniority/age), but will automatically be bumped when someone is promoted to that level, even if that newly promoted officer has lower ratings.  
That is one option I was considering, although I think I am going to go with John's suggestion about civilian leaders to solve that particular problem.

Quote
I missed that option to limit rank per ship class.  That will help. I was wondering why high ranking officers were getting stuck on freighters and such.  

That will still happen in v3.2 as you can only limit ships by minimum rank. Once v3.3 comes out, no officers will be assigned to ship class that has a min rank more than 2 below their own rank.

Quote
Is there any benefit whatsoever to having any officers on freighters?
Assuming the freighter is unarmed, the main benefit is to the officer rather than the freighter. Officers gain experience based on the current role so an officer commanding a freighter may increase his crew training or initiative attributes whereas an unemployed officer will never gain experience. Think of freighter commands as basic training and experience for future warship commands.

Steve
Posted by: Father Tim
« on: January 08, 2009, 07:57:06 AM »

They help with colonists too.