Posted by: Ektor
« on: February 17, 2021, 05:53:25 PM »Oh my god, this changes EVERYTHING! I did not know of this! By the gods, Steve thank you a thousand times for this feature!
The way I understand it, you need your replacement template to be the same as the unit you're replacing from, no? If not, this significantly improves my experience in Aurora. If I tag two different units as replacement, will a third unit take from both?
Start here with Steve's developer post on the topic and if that's not clear enough (play around with it in a test game, that's what I ended up doing) I'm sure the forumers will help clarify any confusing bits.
The other great thing about LOG as a ground unit is flexibility. Your proposal, if I read it correctly, would require every formation to carry integrated supply elements, however in many cases this is not realistic from a perspective of formation design. In real-life militaries a company or battalion often does not have organic supply elements but rather these are provided under a higher HQ e.g. held at brigade level.
Yeah, makes sense. I did not know it was like this in real life.
This is in the game, you must use the Unit Series tab to make it work however which can be unintuitive at first.
Really? Could you explain to me how it works?
What does this accomplish that the current LOG units do not already accomplish? Practically, there's not much of a difference between building several thousand tons of LVH+LOG elements and building several thousand tons of GSP under your proposal. The LVH+LOG are actually easier to use as they use the same mechanics as every other ground unit - no need to fuss around with yet another new class of supply ship, and in my mind this is a Good Thing™ as bringing fleet logistics into ground combat muddles and complicates ground combat for no real gain in terms of gameplay depth.
In my view it reduces micro and a lot of clicking and dragging, which are my main complaints of the current system.
Shift-clicking would be wonderful, though I suspect the reason it isn't implemented has to do with the "smart" system that differentiates between hierarchy and support assignments.Perhaps there could be a better way to do the support assignments? The game could just use the same system of HQ capacity to determine whether the shift clicked units get assigned or not. If parent formation's HQ < total shift clicked units size, then return an error and cancel the order.
This is in the game, you must use the Unit Series tab to make it work however which can be unintuitive at first.
In the fleet movement orders, you can use the Load Sub-Units checkbox to reduce micro for loading large formations. For the Marines sadly there is not much else that can be done currently.
What does this accomplish that the current LOG units do not already accomplish? Practically, there's not much of a difference between building several thousand tons of LVH+LOG elements and building several thousand tons of GSP under your proposal. The LVH+LOG are actually easier to use as they use the same mechanics as every other ground unit - no need to fuss around with yet another new class of supply ship, and in my mind this is a Good Thing™ as bringing fleet logistics into ground combat muddles and complicates ground combat for no real gain in terms of gameplay depth.
The other great thing about LOG as a ground unit is flexibility. Your proposal, if I read it correctly, would require every formation to carry integrated supply elements, however in many cases this is not realistic from a perspective of formation design. In real-life militaries a company or battalion often does not have organic supply elements but rather these are provided under a higher HQ e.g. held at brigade level.
Shift-clicking would be wonderful, though I suspect the reason it isn't implemented has to do with the "smart" system that differentiates between hierarchy and support assignments.Perhaps there could be a better way to do the support assignments? The game could just use the same system of HQ capacity to determine whether the shift clicked units get assigned or not. If parent formation's HQ < total shift clicked units size, then return an error and cancel the order.
What I suggest is for the replacement system to function in a way that either a single formation can draw reserves from more than one formation, allowing me, in the aforementioned example, to have one reserve formation comprised of only supply infantry and another comprised just of normal infantry troops, or for us to have some way to automate to a degree the replenishment of forces. Dragging and dropping each formation element over and over for every formation under standard level is very time consuming, micro heavy and click intensive, to me it's one of the least fun moments of Aurora.
The main body of my suggestion, however, whilst it encompasses my first point, takes in account other things. Let's say I create a division like the aforementioned one. That's 25 inidividual formations I trained, that's 25 drag and drops I have to do, with the ground force menu moving around as I do it. Given a homeworld can have several such formations in my games, I'd easily need to drag and drop a hundred or so times. Now let's take in account marines, and boarding shuttles with small weight. I have 18 boarding shuttles in my assault carrier class, and two of that class currently deployed. That's me clicking the "load ground unit" order in the fleet movement orders 36 times, and that's a single fleet. There's no other moment in Aurora when I need to do so much mindless clicking. The second most click-heavy moment is normal movement orders, but then you have godsends like order delay, cycle orders and repeat orders. This plus the replacement micro makes it so whilst I love deploying ground forces and the mechanics behind combat, actually keeping them in order is a pain, not in a fun, logistically challenging way, but in a monotone way where I have to click and click until my fingers hurt.
Another thing I'd like to talk about is how ships have an MSP storage dictated by their maintenance supply bays and engineering spaces. Well, I think supply shouldn't be handled by the logistics units just disappearing. Each formation should have a GSP storage that's dictated by the capacity of supply units they hold. Ground facilities could produce GSP much like maintenance facilities produce MSP, and the troops could drain MSP directly from their reserves, then you could set a "supply base" of sorts that you could supply with supply ships carrying GSP, and subordinate formations could drain the GSP from it each production cycle or combat phase. This could, albeit I don't know whether it's that good of an idea, also work for replacements. Many games represent replacements as a resource, and well, Ground Units are made of Vendarite, GSP could be made out of Vendarite, logistics wise you're just shipping vendarite converted into GSP around, much like you ship MSP and ordnance for ships. When the production cycle or combat phase ticks, the formation could convert a portion of its GSP into new units, with the efficiency and speed of that being dictated by tech levels, whilst keeping a general rule that an unit generated by GSP replacement would be a lot more expensive than one built at a facility.
I also realise the whole "formations as ships" thing could be rendered moot if we could just shift click and drag formations in the ground forces window, even more so if we could drag boxes like we can do for ships. Those features are already present for ships, it should be okay to extend them to ground formations. Anyway, these are just my two cents. Steve, if you're reading this, I love that you've made pretty much the most in-depth system of army management that any 4x I know of has, I really love it!