Real life military organizations, equipment and personnel.

[Jorgen_CAB]

@Marski

The only thing I wonder about this pretty nice formation is how you find commanders to lead them all. I suppose you have a huge Academy program going as well...

Level 10 academy at earth, level 6 at Luna, level 10 at Venus. All with ground force commander as academy commandants.
I can just about fill the three regiments I have, but I've left a suggestion in the suggestions thread to Steve regarding rate of new officer navy/ground officers being relative to the amount of ranks.

Yes... I think the whole system should be changed into more of a points system so you can get the officers that you need and promotion is based on demand rather than any set rate or ratio, this is a pretty limiting system.

If you need more ground officers than naval officers you should be able to use the academies to do that, the academy should just produce a certain amount of possible officers every year but the player should pretty much decide what type of officer they should get and how they promote should be more about demand than anything else.

[Droll]

@Marski

The only thing I wonder about this pretty nice formation is how you find commanders to lead them all. I suppose you have a huge Academy program going as well...

Level 10 academy at earth, level 6 at Luna, level 10 at Venus. All with ground force commander as academy commandants.
I can just about fill the three regiments I have, but I've left a suggestion in the suggestions thread to Steve regarding rate of new officer navy/ground officers being relative to the amount of ranks.

Yes... I think the while system should be changed into more of a points system so you can get the officers that you need and promotion is based on demand rather than any set rate or ratio, this is a pretty limiting system.

If you need more ground officers than naval officers you should be able to use the academies to do that, the academy should just produce a certain amount of possible officers every year but the player should pretty much decide what type of officer they should get and how they promote should be more about demand than anything else.

A while ago I posted in the suggestions thread an idea which would split the military academy into multiple installations. One for scientists, one for ground officers, another for naval officers and one last one for civie admins. They would each only create characters of that profession and the academy commandant would instead specialize it by skill / specialization for scientists.

So a missiles/kinetics scientist commandant increases the chance more scientists of that field come.
A GO with ground artillery skill at high levels trains officers with better artillery skill.
A NO with high tactical bonus trains other officers with higher tactical bonus.
A civilian admin with strong mining skill trains admins with more mining skill.

Although this would extend the overall number of installation I think it would confer much better control to the player and work well with the way academy naming works. Right now I have a civilian admin who is graduated from the Mars Ground Combat Academy with a ground officer as commandant which feels somewhat weird.

[Dfuzzed]

http://niehorster.org/000_admin/000oob.htm

Various countries during ww2, some more detailed then others.

Holy sh--- that's really helpful!

[SevenOfCarina]

I'm not sure if this has been posted before, but here is a primer on the force structure of the US Army and the composition of the standard Brigade Combat Teams.

[IntusMortuum]

I have done fairly extensive research, combined with personal experience, to create the most in-depth Order of Battle for a United States Marine Corps Division that you can find without reading pages of Marine Corps Orders.     Feel free to use it to create as in depth of an OOB ingame as you would like.     

Enjoy!!

[Marski (OP)]

I have done fairly extensive research, combined with personal experience, to create the most in-depth Order of Battle for a United States Marine Corps Division that you can find without reading pages of Marine Corps Orders.     Feel free to use it to create as in depth of an OOB ingame as you would like.     

Enjoy!!

Excellent contribution, thank you.

[Marski (OP)]

So in V2.2.0, radiology decontamination will be an actual thing, meaning this section in the OP file will actually become part of the game;

[Marski (OP)]

Even greater news, making realistic ground forces will receive a massive quality-of-life improvements;

Ground Force Organizations

A new tab called Organization has been added to the Ground Forces window.

This has two tree view controls. The first, on the right, lists all existing formation templates and their elements. The second, on the left, is for creating organizational hierarchies for ground forces.

To create an organization, you press a button called Create Org and enter the name of your organization. This creates a node without any units that acts in a similar way to a naval admin node. With the top level in place, you can drag and drop formation templates from the right hand side to create any depth of hierarchal organization.

For example, you could create an organization called Infantry Division. Under that you would drag the template with the divisional assets (which might also be called Infantry Division, or Division HQ, etc.). The admin nodes are green, like naval admins, while all nodes containing an actual template are yellow-white. Under the divisional assets, you might drag your infantry regiment template four times, plus perhaps an STO regiment.

You might also drag several battalions under each regiment, but there is an easier way to do that. When you drag nodes on the treeview, anything with an existing parent is moved, but anything without a parent creates a copy instead.

That means, you can create smaller, or lower level, organizations and then drag copies of that entire org into a different org.

For example, you could create a regiment org with a HQ formation template directly under the admin node and then four battalions under the HQ. Then you create a division org, add a division HQ formation template, then drag-copy three regiment orgs under the divisional HQ. When you drag-copy an admin node into another org, the admin node itself is not transferred, so in this example the regimental HQ formation templates of the regimental org would move directly under the divisional HQ (along with their subordinate battalions.

You can set field positions for formation templates in the organization in a similar way to active formations.

Once you have the org created, you can choose a population and add everything in the org to the build queue. The build tasks will retain the organizational hierarchy and the resulting ground formations will assemble into the same org once they are built. They will adopt the specified field positions. Even if you change or remove the organization after issuing the build order, the build tasks will remember the hierarchy and the field positions. The build order will work down the hierarchy so each new formation should have the correct parent waiting when it is built. Changing the build queue manually may prevent this working correctly.

There is also an 'Instant Build' option that can be activated by the SM and will build the entire org instantly with hierarchy and field positions.

The reason for having the admin node is to allow different configurations of similar formations. For example, if the division HQ formation was the top node, you would only have one org under that division HQ. With admin nodes, you can re-use the same top-level templates in multiple similar nodes. You could also have more than one formation directly under the admin node. For example, you could have ten boarding forces under the admin node and build them all with one click.

Using Copy + Update (see earlier post) to create new formation templates based on improved technology will replace the existing templates in the organizational structures with the updated templates.

This screenshot shows simple regimental and divisional organizations, but these could be made very detailed. The 'Infantry Regiment' org was dragged on to the 'Divisional Assets' three times.



The second screenshot shows the OOB view after using the Instant option on the 'Infantry Division' org.

[ArcWolf]

Invicta just released a great new video on the US Army (WW2) Rifleman Company size & organization.

[Garfunkel]

I have done fairly extensive research, combined with personal experience, to create the most in-depth Order of Battle for a United States Marine Corps Division that you can find without reading pages of Marine Corps Orders.     Feel free to use it to create as in depth of an OOB ingame as you would like.     

Enjoy!!

Thanks to you, I managed to create this for my upcoming story:

[ranger044]

Thanks to you, I managed to create this for my upcoming story:

Does the new organization system make it viable to make units this granular? I know smaller unit sizes aren't the best for combat, but I just started up a new conventional playthrough and paused now that I'm about to design and deploy my first colonial forces. Does it work well enough to let me design all the way down to company and lower without giving me carpel tunnel and bloodshot eyes? 

[doodle_sm]

Does the new organization system make it viable to make units this granular? I know smaller unit sizes aren't the best for combat, but I just started up a new conventional playthrough and paused now that I'm about to design and deploy my first colonial forces. Does it work well enough to let me design all the way down to company and lower without giving me carpel tunnel and bloodshot eyes? 

I feel its more physically viable since you can set formations to have a default field position as well as have entire organizations be produced + placed in a formation. Off the top of my head I can only imagine issues with the actual gameplay mechanics of ground combat.

[nuclearslurpee]

Does the new organization system make it viable to make units this granular? I know smaller unit sizes aren't the best for combat, but I just started up a new conventional playthrough and paused now that I'm about to design and deploy my first colonial forces. Does it work well enough to let me design all the way down to company and lower without giving me carpel tunnel and bloodshot eyes? 

I feel its more physically viable since you can set formations to have a default field position as well as have entire organizations be produced + placed in a formation. Off the top of my head I can only imagine issues with the actual gameplay mechanics of ground combat.

Mechanically, small formations like this are extremely vulnerable to breakthroughs. Usually a formation size above 5,000 tons or so is enough to mitigate this.

In my experience, the bigger issue is commanders: you need multiple millions of tons of ground units to invade an NPR homeworld, and you can only generate so many generals to command those formations. It makes more sense to build 20,000-ton brigades than 5,000-ton battalions if the latter means a large fraction of your units will not benefit from a commander.

Also, note that if you use small formations like companies, you still need to manually assign supports for each e.g. artillery company, which can still be a lot of clicking and dragging. With large formations this is minimized.

[Garfunkel]

Yes, note that for artillery I did not go below battalion size so that in combat I only have to assign 4 formations per Marine division. As for breakthroughs, the risk is real but it isn't extremely decisive. When I ran those tests back at C# launch, bigger formations trumped smaller formations thanks to breakthroughs but the statistical difference was small enough that even a single tech level difference in armour and weapon will completely negate it. Heck, probably even having good generals over bad ones could be enough.

Big help with Organizations is that you only have to create them once. Then, just build from top level and the game does the OOB for you as the formations are built.

[ranger044]

With the limited number of commanders, what if the company level (or whatever low-level you choose) doesn't have a HQ element? Can they still benefit from the higher formation's bonus, or is it like naval admin command where they need an unbroken chain?