Length of Service for Commanders

[Erik L]

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.

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.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

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

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

Conceptually, an interesting idea.

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...).

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.

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.

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

[sloanjh]

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?

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

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

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?

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.

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

[mavikfelna]

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

[Hawkeye]

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

[sloanjh]

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

[schroeam]

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.

[Father Tim]

The vast majority of the problems listed here are things I fix in 'SM Mode' at the start of each game.  Want more Naval Academies?  Use 'SM Mods' on the F2 'Population & Production' screen to get them, and pay for them however you choose (Direct removal of the appropriate amount of minerals, removal of other buildings, upping the Empire's military level, etc.)  Want forty years of officer corps?  Use the 'Replace All' button on the F4 'Officer Corps' window to generate a brand new crop (a dialog box asks you how many years' worth of officers to create; expect it to take a couple minutes for 200-300 officers).  Want a decent Governor, not a politically reliable appointee?  Use the 'Promote' and/or 'Demote' buttons.  Want a decent Governor, in a pre 3.2 game?  Exit, go to Game Options, turn off realistic promotions, save the game, select the game, use the 'Promote' and/or 'Demote' buttons, exit, go to Game Options, turn back on realistic promotions, save the game, select the game.  Prior to version 3.3 you can 'open up space' at the top of your officer corps by assigning political appointees and other high-ranking 'undesirables' to 'managerial' teams - teams you uhave no intention of using.

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.

[MWadwell]

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.

[Randy]

If you change the turnover rate of officers (increase retirement, reduce production), you won't solve the problem.

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

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

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.

I 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.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

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.

Yes, that's a good idea too.

Steve

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

If you change the turnover rate of officers (increase retirement, reduce production), you won't solve the problem.

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...)

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.

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