Post by: Steve Walmsley on December 14, 2008, 10:30:36 AM
I am open to advice on what the term of service should be. I am considering a couple of options. The first option would be a standard term of service, perhaps twenty years, after which an officer would retire if he was still in the bottom three ranks (maybe bottom four). HIgher ranks would stay until they retired through ill health or accident. The second option would be terms of service based on the current rank. So a bottom rank officer would leave after maybe ten years, whereas an officer currently at rank three officer would leave after perhaps 16 years and an officer currently at rank 5 after 24 years of service, etc. Exact numbers to be determined. I would like to hear some comments on the idea in general, on the options I have mentioned and any other options that you can suggest.
As this will result in an officer corps that does not increase anything like as fast once the first retirements kick in, if more officers are required overall then the size of naval academies can be increased to create a greater throughput or recruits
Steve
Post by: schroeam on December 14, 2008, 11:20:23 AM
Commander - 40 years
Captain - 45
Commodore - 50
Rear Admiral - 55
Vice Admiral, Admiral and Fleet Admiral - No limit as they would probably be looking at poor health in the future, would be retired as the result of some "incident", and are few in number anyway.
The first time I did this I reduced the corps by 1/3. I go back every two years or so and weed out those who have passed their limits. If I run across someone who still has usefulness, I will just promote them to the next level. Making this automated will definitely raise the realism, as well as keep down the overhead. A few "random" retirements due to family death, business venture, scandal, etc. before the age limit would be useful. This way officers just don't disappear without dying or coming close to dying.
Also, is there a way to have an entry made into the officer history stating that he has joined a team, and maybe list the team members in the team section of the F2 screen?
One more thing, what is the arranging method for the No-longer-active officers? I've noticed during the random purgings that when I retire an officer he just goes into that list in some "random" position. I'm sure the program ranks them somehow, but chronologically by date of retirement or death would be useful.
Thanks,
Adam.
Post by: Erik L on December 14, 2008, 12:47:50 PM
Post by: welchbloke on December 15, 2008, 03:11:28 AM
Commander – Age 45
Captain – Age 45
Commodore – Age 55
Rear Admiral – Age 55
Vice Admiral and above – Age 65
This still caps the time any officer can spend in the officer corps and gives 3 bands of officers; essentially ship COs, small task group COs and CINCs.
Alternatively, why not make the retirement ages a percentage of racial life expectancy? Add a tech line for medical research and it would be possible to improve the life expectancy of the race (and your officers). This might appeal to some races/players.
Welchbloke
Post by: Randy on December 15, 2008, 09:29:14 AM
However, in practice it wont work unless you change the ratios required for promotions.
Usually you need R3 for ship command, R6 for a planet governer, higher for sector commands. Eliminating numbers of the lower ranks then means you will have fewer high ranking officers available for these positions. If you change the ratios to 2:1 all the way up then you can have fewer low ranking officers, but that just feels wrong...
The suggested solution of just building more training centres for more high ranking officers doesn't work. Thats merely just "fixing" the issue by re-creating the issue (more training centres means more officers - and thats just what you were trying to reduce...).
Note that at present there is some bug in officer generation in that you get about double the expected number of officers recruited every year...
Personally, I would not use this option because I need the high ranking officers and this proces will just seem to reduce the number available...
Post by: welchbloke on December 15, 2008, 10:10:43 AM
Welchbloke
Post by: Erik L on December 15, 2008, 02:54:51 PM
I've always found that after 5-10 years of gameplay, you've got a few hundred lower level officers that are just sitting there collecting dust. The auto-assignment works to some extent, but I've also seen the same officer posted to the same slot 3 or 4 rotations in a row.
Maybe something to add junior officers to ships. I.E. an armed ship needs a gunnery officer (or two or more), so that slot gets filled with a junior officer. The XO slot. I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of. The same for engineering and communications. Maybe not have these slots have any gameplay effect other than having officers assigned to ships.
Post by: IanD on December 18, 2008, 06:17:12 AM
Quote from: "welchbloke"
Usually you need R3 for ship command, R6 for a planet governer, higher for sector commands. Eliminating numbers of the lower ranks then means you will have fewer high ranking officers available for these positions. If you change the ratios to 2:1 all the way up then you can have fewer low ranking officers, but that just feels wrong...
There was a thread not that long ago about the possibility of separating the civil and military command structures. Thus you would not need your military officers for planetary governor positions. I would certainly favour retirement for the military combined with a civil command structure ranked according to what size of population you could competently govern, (but that bit doesn’t happen in real life so perhaps not!
just a free-for-all with political influence having most effect). Regards
Ian
Post by: welchbloke on December 18, 2008, 01:25:36 PM
Welchbloke
Post by: Sotak246 on December 18, 2008, 02:10:06 PM
Mark
Post by: schroeam on December 18, 2008, 08:42:26 PM
Adam.
Post by: Erik L on December 18, 2008, 08:52:42 PM
Quote from: "adradjool"
You can always use the "Grant Title" button on the Officer Corps screen to give them an Army title. I've used this for officers assigned as commanders of ground units. They generally do not get assigned to ships. The program likes to segregate them somehow. You could set up your officer ranks as O-4 thru O-10 (assuming O-1 thru O-3 are the junior officers and the Naval Academy is actually some sort of command school) and grant the title based on their career path. It would just be an awful lot of work to update whenever they got promoted.
Adam.
It puts officers into slots according to their skills, and modified by Political Reliability. So a survey ship will get an officer with a high (or any) survey skill. The same follows for other ships.
Post by: schroeam on December 18, 2008, 11:26:19 PM
Quote from: "Erik Luken"
It puts officers into slots according to their skills, and modified by Political Reliability. So a survey ship will get an officer with a high (or any) survey skill. The same follows for other ships.
Which is fine, it just gives you something to explain away as "needs of the service" or "due to his superior skills" or "blah, blah, blah..." You know, write a little fiction to make it fit. Survey officers aren't expected to be your first rate line officers anyway, so if they happen to come from the ranks of those who spend a little more time on the ground in the first place, meh.
Adam.
Post by: Erik L on December 19, 2008, 12:22:41 AM
Quote from: "adradjool"
Quote from: "Erik Luken"It puts officers into slots according to their skills, and modified by Political Reliability. So a survey ship will get an officer with a high (or any) survey skill. The same follows for other ships.
Which is fine, it just gives you something to explain away as "needs of the service" or "due to his superior skills" or "blah, blah, blah..." You know, write a little fiction to make it fit. Survey officers aren't expected to be your first rate line officers anyway, so if they happen to come from the ranks of those who spend a little more time on the ground in the first place, meh.
Adam.
I was commenting on your statement of "it segregates them" which I probably misunderstood
Post by: schroeam on December 19, 2008, 05:25:39 PM
Adam.
Post by: Erik L on December 19, 2008, 05:52:45 PM
One thing I do to suck up some excess officers is to create commands. That is 8? 9? officers per command. Have a survey command per task group. Yes you will need a flagship for them, but that just means a flag bridge on a ship.
Post by: Steve Walmsley on December 31, 2008, 09:15:54 AM
Quote from: "Erik Luken"
Maybe in addition to the minimum rank required for a ship, there should be a maximum rank. After all, you don't want a fleet admiral commanding a freighter.I have added that for v3.3 - see the other thread on commanders.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on December 31, 2008, 09:48:12 AM
Quote from: "Randy"
Conceptually, an interesting idea.Its not the quite the same. At the moment the officer corps keeps expanding. What I am try to accomplish is get it to a reasonably stable number. If I place a limit on service time then officers retire much sooner and the officer corp is smaller. If you add more training centres then the number of new officers will increase but so will the number of retirements and you will move to a larger officer corps but one that is still stable in terms of numbers. It will be up to the player to decide how large an officer corp they need whereas at the moment it just grows by itself. A side-effect though would be a huge number of retired officers. The intention of the "retired" rank was really in case someone had a favourite officer and they wanted to ignore his death and restore him to life. That doesn't require a long-term record so I could delete retired officers after a short period - maybe 3 months.
However, in practice it wont work unless you change the ratios required for promotions.
Usually you need R3 for ship command, R6 for a planet governer, higher for sector commands. Eliminating numbers of the lower ranks then means you will have fewer high ranking officers available for these positions. If you change the ratios to 2:1 all the way up then you can have fewer low ranking officers, but that just feels wrong...
The suggested solution of just building more training centres for more high ranking officers doesn't work. Thats merely just "fixing" the issue by re-creating the issue (more training centres means more officers - and thats just what you were trying to reduce...).
That still leaves another point. If players wanted to spend the time and money, they could create a huge number of training centres for a very large officer corp that would not be realistic compared to the size of their forces. I can see two potential solutions. One is to limit the size of the officer corps based on the number of available commands. Say 3x the total number of ships, ground units, planets, staff positions, etc.. A second is to add some cost to the officer corps. perhaps I wealth per officer per year, or something similar.
Quote
Note that at present there is some bug in officer generation in that you get about double the expected number of officers recruited every year...I think someone else has confirmed this but I am struggling to recreate it. I have stepped through the code line by line and it seems to be fine. I'll keep looking.
Steve
Post by: sloanjh on December 31, 2008, 12:26:35 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
The intention of the "retired" rank was really in case someone had a favourite officer and they wanted to ignore his death and restore him to life.So where is the "Spock" button?
Quote
That still leaves another point. If players wanted to spend the time and money, they could create a huge number of training centres for a very large officer corp that would not be realistic compared to the size of their forces. I can see two potential solutions. One is to limit the size of the officer corps based on the number of available commands. Say 3x the total number of ships, ground units, planets, staff positions, etc.. A second is to add some cost to the officer corps. perhaps I wealth per officer per year, or something similar.I don't think anything is broken here that needs to be fixed, and I'm afraid that fixing it will break governorships.
I usually start with 1b population, and crank up my academies to ~10 very early in the game. The reason for doing this is to get governor candidates - the rank requirement for governor of a large pop is so high that there are usually only a few qualified candidates, and with the exponential falloff of number of officers as a function of rank, it takes a LOT of low-level officers to create a new R5 or R6. If the total officer pool were limited to some multiple of available commands, then that would cut into the ability to generate a decent population of high-level officers (unless someone gamed the system by creating a bunch of garbage commands to inflate the number of staff positions).
In addition, I don't think the current system is broken; if a player wants a large officer corps, then he invests in building a lot of academies. The "extra" officers can be viewed as wastage - it's equivalent to culling them out by an "up-or-out" policy. In other words, the "wasted" officers are the mechanism that allows the same strategic decision as the "training level" for the enlisted ranks, where you trade off between number and quality of trainees. It's the same way here - one is trading off between number of officers used and the quality of officers with assignments. Since academies are expensive, this seems to be the sort of trade-off you're looking for in the design of the game.
The one thing that does seem to be a bit broken is the initial size of the officer corps. If we assume that an average officer lasts 30-40 years, then there should be ~150-200 officers per academy in the intitial set-up; I suspect that the actual number is a lot smaller. This leads to over-building academies early on, in order to quickly get the officer corps built up enough to have more high-level governors.
John
Post by: Steve Walmsley on December 31, 2008, 12:57:06 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"The intention of the "retired" rank was really in case someone had a favourite officer and they wanted to ignore his death and restore him to life.So where is the "Spock" button? :)QuoteI don't think anything is broken here that needs to be fixed, and I'm afraid that fixing it will break governorships.The objection to making the officer corp a more realistic size and introducing more realistic retirement system (i.e. Lieutenant Commanders don't serve for their entire natural life) seems to be that a huge officer corps is required just to get 1 or 2 decent R6 or R5 officers for colony commands. In that case, perhaps the underlying problem is either that the rank requirement for colonies are too high or that a planetary governor should have a staff in the same way as a task force commander so they don't need uber-stats to make a good governor.
I usually start with 1b population, and crank up my academies to ~10 very early in the game. The reason for doing this is to get governor candidates - the rank requirement for governor of a large pop is so high that there are usually only a few qualified candidates, and with the exponential falloff of number of officers as a function of rank, it takes a LOT of low-level officers to create a new R5 or R6. If the total officer pool were limited to some multiple of available commands, then that would cut into the ability to generate a decent population of high-level officers (unless someone gamed the system by creating a bunch of garbage commands to inflate the number of staff positions)
In addition, I don't think the current system is broken; if a player wants a large officer corps, then he invests in building a lot of academies. The "extra" officers can be viewed as wastage - it's equivalent to culling them out by an "up-or-out" policy. In other words, the "wasted" officers are the mechanism that allows the same strategic decision as the "training level" for the enlisted ranks, where you trade off between number and quality of trainees. It's the same way here - one is trading off between number of officers used and the quality of officers with assignments. Since academies are expensive, this seems to be the sort of trade-off you're looking for in the design of the game.
The one thing that does seem to be a bit broken is the initial size of the officer corps. If we assume that an average officer lasts 30-40 years, then there should be ~150-200 officers per academy in the intitial set-up; I suspect that the actual number is a lot smaller. This leads to over-building academies early on, in order to quickly get the officer corps built up enough to have more high-level governors.
I agree that the cost of naval acadamies is a deterrent to building lots of them but I would prefer the number of acadamies to be directly related to the size of the officer corp. At the moment the size of the officer corps is based on not just the number of academies but how long they have been in operation. For example, the number of officers in the US Navy doesn't continue to grow every year because Annapolis has been around for a while. Assuming the intake each year is constant, the officer corps should remain relatively constant too as existing officers retire. I want to try and create a realistic system. If players want to retain an unrealistic system because some other part of the game means they need it, then I think that other part of the game is broken and needs to be looked at.
Steve
Post by: mavikfelna on December 31, 2008, 01:25:24 PM
Quote
The objection to making the officer corp a more realistic size and introducing more realistic retirement system (i.e. Lieutenant Commanders don't serve for their entire natural life) seems to be that a huge officer corps is required just to get 1 or 2 decent R6 or R5 officers for colony commands. In that case, perhaps the underlying problem is either that the rank requirement for colonies are too high or that a planetary governor should have a staff in the same way as a task force commander so they don't need uber-stats to make a good governor.
I'd really like to see the rank requirements be settable on an individual ship/colony level. Most of the time, I can't get qualified officers into posts I need them in because they're not of sufficient rank and those of higher ranks usually suck for what they are needed for compared to what they qualify for. Perhaps it's just me, but most of the time when I start a game, I have 1 so so officer that gets to be the governor and the rest get put into teams or just left because they're not very useful and ones I want in command are always R3 or lower. Reducing the ratio of higher to lower officers would help a little so you could move up lower ranking officers faster, but I'd really hate to be stuck with even fewer officers and fewer choice than we have now.
--Mav
Post by: Hawkeye on December 31, 2008, 02:42:39 PM
Quote from: "mavikfelna"
I'd really like to see the rank requirements be settable on an individual ship/colony level. Most of the time, I can't get qualified officers into posts I need them in because they're not of sufficient rank and those of higher ranks usually suck for what they are needed for compared to what they qualify for. Perhaps it's just me, but most of the time when I start a game, I have 1 so so officer that gets to be the governor and the rest get put into teams or just left because they're not very useful and ones I want in command are always R3 or lower. Reducing the ratio of higher to lower officers would help a little so you could move up lower ranking officers faster, but I'd really hate to be stuck with even fewer officers and fewer choice than we have now.
--Mav
Well, for ships you can set the requiered rank allready in the design screen (DAC/Rank/Information Tab)
I usually set the survey ships to Rank 1, smaller warships like FG/DD/DE to Rank 2 and leave only CL+ at Rank 3
Post by: sloanjh on December 31, 2008, 04:15:59 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
I agree that the cost of naval acadamies is a deterrent to building lots of them but I would prefer the number of acadamies to be directly related to the size of the officer corp. At the moment the size of the officer corps is based on not just the number of academies but how long they have been in operation. For example, the number of officers in the US Navy doesn't continue to grow every year because Annapolis has been around for a while. Assuming the intake each year is constant, the officer corps should remain relatively constant too as existing officers retire. I want to try and create a realistic system.
I agree completely. In case I wasn't clear, the thing I was concerned about was limiting the size of the officer corp to the size of the fleet, rather than the number of academies.
As I see it, there are two reasons that the size of the officer corp is based on how long the academies have been in operation (rather than how many there are):
- The initial setup has too few officers compared to a "steady state", and those officers don't have a steady state age/time-in-grade distribution.
Players don't have the opportunity to decide how many academies they want during set-up; if one wants a larger officer corp (than is available at setup) he needs to build academies early on, which leads back to the non steady state situation.
The second one seems harder to solve than the first, because it makes the set-up sequence even more yukky and it's unclear how to manage the resource trade-off (maybe by trading off against construction factories?)
As for the first, for a long time I've thought that one way to get a realistic distribution would be to run the academies and promotions for 50 years or so during setup (long enough for the early officers to have all retired out) and take the final distribution as the start distribution. I suspect this would be yukky to set up, or not performant, though.
A few of random historical thoughts - I don't know if/how they should be applied to the game:
- Governorships have also been drawn from the ranks of nobility and/or politicians. This gives a large and different talent pool to draw from. I don't know how to work this in terms of game mechanics, however.
ROTC programs: pre-WWII the US officer corps was very small; it was greatly expanded by recruiting college graduates. Again, I don't know how this makes sense in terms of game mechanics.
I've been playing AGEOD's Civil War game a lot recently. They have a cool way of modeling political ratings - each officer has a cost associated with him; if someone is jumped over him in a promotion it costs victory and/or morale points. If an army is formed and the most senior 3- or 4-star general without a command is appointed commander of it, then a big victory/moral point cost is incurred. Similarly if a general is removed from command and a higher-ranked general doesn't replace him.
John
Post by: schroeam on December 31, 2008, 05:02:17 PM
Quote from: "mavikfelna"
I'd really like to see the rank requirements be settable on an individual ship/colony level. Most of the time, I can't get qualified officers into posts I need them in because they're not of sufficient rank and those of higher ranks usually suck for what they are needed for compared to what they qualify for. Perhaps it's just me, but most of the time when I start a game, I have 1 so so officer that gets to be the governor and the rest get put into teams or just left because they're not very useful and ones I want in command are always R3 or lower. Reducing the ratio of higher to lower officers would help a little so you could move up lower ranking officers faster, but I'd really hate to be stuck with even fewer officers and fewer choice than we have now.
--Mav
Steve has fixed the promotion bug allowing you to promote anyone (heh, except retired
) at any time. If you don't have someone of sufficient rank to be a governor, make the executive decision and promote him. I've found that I've promoted someone two or three ranks just to get the right guy in the right place. Sure this chokes up the promotion routine, but maybe the issue is that governorships need to somehow be taken out of the normal promotion routine. Since they don't ever get automatically reassigned, they are in some sort of super command. Somehow, maybe it could be reflected where governors are taken out of the ratio for determining promotions. I like the idea of gubernatorial staffs, and maybe instructor billets for the acadamies. Those billets would affect the bonuses of the new officers. Say an instructor with a higher survey bonus will result in more officers with survey bonuses, and the same with Xenology, Trade, Espionage, etc. This could lead to avoiding those long (sometimes years) dry spells for an officer with a specific bonus. I went through one campaign where I went ten years without being able to fill an espionage team. Having a direct impact in the bonuses of graduating officers would lead to not having so many useless officers and therefore, the need to purge would not exist.
Adam.
Post by: Father Tim on January 02, 2009, 03:23:46 AM
P.S.: Those of you reporting double the number of expected officers check the 'Training Level' vaue on the Ctrl-F2 'Races' window. For the 'Player Race' Govt. Type this should be 1, but if you chose (or were randomly assigned) another government type this might be 2, and thus academies will generate double the number of officers & crew.
Post by: MWadwell on January 02, 2009, 07:55:27 AM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
The objection to making the officer corp a more realistic size and introducing more realistic retirement system (i.e. Lieutenant Commanders don't serve for their entire natural life) seems to be that a huge officer corps is required just to get 1 or 2 decent R6 or R5 officers for colony commands. In that case, perhaps the underlying problem is either that the rank requirement for colonies are too high or that a planetary governor should have a staff in the same way as a task force commander so they don't need uber-stats to make a good governor.
I agree that the cost of naval acadamies is a deterrent to building lots of them but I would prefer the number of acadamies to be directly related to the size of the officer corp. At the moment the size of the officer corps is based on not just the number of academies but how long they have been in operation. For example, the number of officers in the US Navy doesn't continue to grow every year because Annapolis has been around for a while. Assuming the intake each year is constant, the officer corps should remain relatively constant too as existing officers retire. I want to try and create a realistic system. If players want to retain an unrealistic system because some other part of the game means they need it, then I think that other part of the game is broken and needs to be looked at.
Steve
What about (in addition to retiring those who haven't been promoted in a while) also retiring those officers that haven't been assigned to a position for a while?
This would replicate those officers in dead-end jobs moving to private industry, and result in your officer pool reflecting the size of your navy.
Post by: Randy on January 02, 2009, 02:29:08 PM
In an established emopire with 6 large planets, 3 sectors, you will need 3 R7 commanders, and 6 R6 commanders. Unless I got the ratio wrong, you need 327 officers (all ranks) for each R7 officer needed - a total of 981 for 3 R7 officers...
The only way to make the officer pool smaller and still useable is to either change the ratios, or lower the required ranks or both. If you change the turnover rate, then all you have effectively done is required more training centres to get the required number of officers generated...
Also, does training level affect officer production? I thought it only affected crew production. I run with training level 4 (yah, its a nice peaceful Spartan empire...)
Randy
Post by: Steve Walmsley on January 07, 2009, 11:51:21 AM
Quote from: "adradjool"
Steve has fixed the promotion bug allowing you to promote anyone (heh, except retiredI think the instructor billets is a great idea. With the automated assignments in v3.3 excluding the highest ranked officers from ship commands unless you manually assign them, having those officers assigned to academies to influence the stats of new officers would make them very useful.
I like the idea of gubernatorial staffs, and maybe instructor billets for the acadamies. Those billets would affect the bonuses of the new officers. Say an instructor with a higher survey bonus will result in more officers with survey bonuses, and the same with Xenology, Trade, Espionage, etc. This could lead to avoiding those long (sometimes years) dry spells for an officer with a specific bonus. I went through one campaign where I went ten years without being able to fill an espionage team. Having a direct impact in the bonuses of graduating officers would lead to not having so many useless officers and therefore, the need to purge would not exist.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on January 07, 2009, 11:51:52 AM
Quote from: "MWadwell"
What about (in addition to retiring those who haven't been promoted in a while) also retiring those officers that haven't been assigned to a position for a while?Yes, that's a good idea too.
This would replicate those officers in dead-end jobs moving to private industry, and result in your officer pool reflecting the size of your navy.
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on January 07, 2009, 11:58:35 AM
Quote from: "Randy"
If you change the turnover rate of officers (increase retirement, reduce production), you won't solve the problem.Yes, I agree that changing turnover rate will not help unless I fix the underlying problem, which is too few senior officers. The question is how to fix that. I am definitely going to add some sort of term limits so that officers have more realistic service careers. However, I am not going to do it until I decide how to fix the problem you describe above.
In an established emopire with 6 large planets, 3 sectors, you will need 3 R7 commanders, and 6 R6 commanders. Unless I got the ratio wrong, you need 327 officers (all ranks) for each R7 officer needed - a total of 981 for 3 R7 officers...
The only way to make the officer pool smaller and still useable is to either change the ratios, or lower the required ranks or both. If you change the turnover rate, then all you have effectively done is required more training centres to get the required number of officers generated...
Also, does training level affect officer production? I thought it only affected crew production. I run with training level 4 (yah, its a nice peaceful Spartan empire...)
I am not too keen on changing ratios as I think they work well except in the case of very senior officers. Lowering the rank requirements is an option. Just dropping it by one rank would reduce the officer corps by two thirds. A third option may be to override the normal promotion routine to ensure there are sufficient senior officers. In other words, if you need 3 R7 commanders and 6 R6 commanders, the program will make sure enough officers are promoted to fill those roles, or perhaps the number of roles plus 50%.
Training level doesn't affect officer production
Steve
Post by: Steve Walmsley on January 07, 2009, 12:17:11 PM
Quote from: "sloanjh"
As for the first, for a long time I've thought that one way to get a realistic distribution would be to run the academies and promotions for 50 years or so during setup (long enough for the early officers to have all retired out) and take the final distribution as the start distribution. I suspect this would be yukky to set up, or not performant, though.A very interesting idea. Yes, it would be performance intensive but something along these lines would at least produce a realistic starting officer corps.
Quote
A few of random historical thoughts - I don't know if/how they should be applied to the game:I mentioned in an earlier answer about an option to override the normal promotion requirements for the higher ranks to ensure sufficient commanders were available. Your above comment suggests an alternative which is that perhaps senior civilian officals appear in the higher ranks without regard to the normal military command structure. Those senior civilian officials could be added to the command structure as needed when there are insufficient military officers to fill the available posts, or perhaps added anyway as an extra source of senior commanders. The civilian stats would be restricted to those applicable to planetary or sector government and they would follow a different "career path". Their terms would be much shorter, perhaps only a few years, before they moved on to other civilian roles outside the scope of the game. They would be placed in the commander window for convenience but would be flagged as civilian and would not affect the military command structure or the promotions of military officers. I would have to play around with the mechanics but how does that sound in principle?
Governorships have also been drawn from the ranks of nobility and/or politicians. This gives a large and different talent pool to draw from. I don't know how to work this in terms of game mechanics, however.
Steve
Post by: Father Tim on January 07, 2009, 01:01:07 PM
In reference to adding additional 'civilian' leaders, I'm curious whether they might be statistically 'better' at the job: that is, generated with an equal number of skills as military leaders but no chance of skills that are of no benefit to a planetary governor - say, Fighter Ops. Of course, having civilians be better at the job is not neccessarily a bad thing, especially if they disappear after three years. It simply means more turnover in the top jobs. Currently I appoint a few carefully chosen specialist to governerships, and then ignore them for thirty years (or more) until they die. Occasionally I chastise my security troops for letting the scetor Viceroy participate in the sort of "training" that results in mortal acidents.
Post by: sloanjh on January 07, 2009, 11:10:12 PM
Quote from: "Steve Walmsley"
Those senior civilian officials could be added to the command structure as needed when there are insufficient military officers to fill the available posts, or perhaps added anyway as an extra source of senior commanders. The civilian stats would be restricted to those applicable to planetary or sector government and they would follow a different "career path". Their terms would be much shorter, perhaps only a few years, before they moved on to other civilian roles outside the scope of the game. They would be placed in the commander window for convenience but would be flagged as civilian and would not affect the military command structure or the promotions of military officers. I would have to play around with the mechanics but how does that sound in principle?
Sounds like a way to work the observation into game mechanics, which is why you're the game designer and I'm not
So it sounds like the proposal is to count the number of high-rank governor slots available (e.g. R4 or R5 and higher), and "flesh out" the population with civilans up to e.g. 1.5x the number at each rank. I think I like it - it solves the "pyramid" problem.
Here's a more extreme thought - for governor slots for which civilian governors are being produced this way, require that any officer who's going to be the governor to retire out into civilian status (e.g. what happens in the Mote in God's Eye). This would emulate a "civilian control of the military" philosophy, and presumably wouldn't apply to worlds in the more oppressive political states (e.g. those that really would have a military governor). Also, you might want to couple it to government type (with switches to turn on or off for the "player race"?). If you went down this road, I wouldn't want my favorite senior military officer, whose career I'd followed for years, to suddenly disappear though due to quick civilian retirement.
Another thought - a pair of government skills for quelling unrest, one through oppression (e.g. internal police skill) and one through popularity (e.g. charisma). The oppression one could improve the productivity numbers at the expense of slower motion to the next political state (or even motion away), while the popularity one could move a population in the direction of rebelling against the empire (once you put internal political dynamics in place).
The "player race" switches comment above gave me an idea - why not change "player race" to a flag which adjusts the stats of the government type, rather than making it a government type of itself. That way, there could be differentiation within the game (not just within the role playing) between running a democracy vs. autocracy vs. communist state. This could be useful once you put political dynamics in place, or even if you want to assign advantages and disadvantages (beyond those during setup) to particular government types.
John
Post by: sloanjh on January 07, 2009, 11:16:22 PM
John
Post by: jfelten on January 08, 2009, 06:33:21 AM
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.
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.
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. Is there any benefit whatsoever to having any officers on freighters?
Post by: Father Tim on January 08, 2009, 07:15:22 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?
You might have to go to the 'Sectors' window and assign systems to your new HQ, but Aurora shoud automtically assign all systems in range that are not currently part of another sector to the new sector HQ.
Quote from: "jfelten"
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.
Yes, right at the top of the 'Summary' tab on the F2 'Population & Production' window are two lines listing the planetary & sector governors. If you meant showing the actual amount of increase, the production bouses (mining, factory, research, etc.) are already calculated in the displayed values, but adding/removing the governor will show the changes. The time-based bonuses (GF const speed, shipyard speed) do not show, but the 'expected completion date' will change (growing closer) with each 5-day increment.
Quote from: "jfelten"
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.
The nice thing is that an officer in a job will improve in the skills appropriate to do the job. That is, an officer assigned to command a ground division will increase in GFTR, ground combat & political reliability bonus. An officer in command of a ship will learn crew training, initiative, and perhaps suvey or terraforming (& political reliability). A planetary governor will improve any of the 'governor' skills, & political reliability.
Quote from: "jfelten"
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. Is there any benefit whatsoever to having any officers on freighters?
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. 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.
Post by: jfelten on January 08, 2009, 07:21:09 AM
Quote from: "Father Tim"
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.
That would make sense. But cargo load/unload times is something else I have no good grasp of. I can see it takes some time of course if I advance time in small increments. Again, I could calculate it all out by observation if I wanted to invest the effort. Currently I just include a cargo handling system on all freighters even though I have no real idea how much it helps, but I suspect that on trips of any decent length that adding another engine would be of more net value. Same with the value of investing research in better cargo handling systems.
Post by: Father Tim on January 08, 2009, 07:34:13 AM
Quote from: "jfelten"
That would make sense. But cargo load/unload times is something else I have no good grasp of. I can see it takes some time of course if I advance time in small increments. Again, I could calculate it all out by observation if I wanted to invest the effort. Currently I just include a cargo handling system on all freighters even though I have no real idea how much it helps, but I suspect that on trips of any decent length that adding another engine would be of more net value. Same with the value of investing research in better cargo handling systems.
It's listed on the F5 'Class Design' window, and again on the F6 'Ships' window in its own little slot under Capacities - Load Time (displayed as Days:hours:minutes). The Basic cargo handling system cuts this time by five, the improved version by ten. In short, a five-hold cargo ship takes ten days, ten hours to load without CHS; two days, two hours with CHS; and one day, one hour with ICHS. I find the basic CHS essential to any freighter or colony ship, but the ICHS not so much and the ACHS mostly irrelevant.
Post by: jfelten on January 08, 2009, 07:39:51 AM
Post by: Father Tim on January 08, 2009, 07:57:06 AM
Post 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
Post 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.
Post 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
Post 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.
Post by: Bellerophon06 on January 21, 2009, 01:00:08 PM
Post by: schroeam on April 08, 2009, 09:56:05 PM
Adam.
Post 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?
Post by: schroeam on April 09, 2009, 05:46:42 PM
Quote from: "Erik Luken"
Where?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?
Post by: Erik L on April 09, 2009, 05:54:57 PM
Post by: schroeam on April 09, 2009, 09:08:18 PM
Adam.
Post by: Erik L on April 09, 2009, 09:30:33 PM
Post 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
Post by: Paul M on April 16, 2009, 08:20:35 AM
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.
Post by: Paul M on April 21, 2009, 01:53:24 AM
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.