Question about organizing your ground forces.

[Bremen]

1.13, none. 1.14 it will be I think 30% from scrapping the formation.

Also, I forgot to ask 1 last thing - do these tiny formations at least get bonuses from officer assigned directly to them?

I believe it works like this:

Any formation gets 100% of the bonus of its immediate CO
If there's a formation above them, they also get 50% of the bonus of their superior formation's CO
If their superior formation has a superior formation, they get 25% of the bonus of that CO
And so on

So in theory, and assuming unlimited available officers, having a thousand tiny formations with a chain of command all the way up to one high ranked commander at the very top is slightly more efficient than having just a few big formations. Though the diminishing returns and increased micromanagement mean you probably don't want to go too crazy to the point of individual squads.

[Blogaugis]

- Yes. However, when you say "tiny" do you mean formations that are less than 1,000 Tons? If so, they're going suffer a terribly high number of breakthroughs...

The smallest one is below 100 - 99, with 33 PWL infantry.
Most others are 250, and 500 as of late...
636 was the one with 2 construction vehicles...

From wiki, emphasis mine:

7) HQ: The headquarters capacity of the component in tons. This is the total size of the formation (or formation hierarchy) that can be effectively controlled by a commander based in a unit with this component. To assign a commander to a formation, one of the units within that formation requires a headquarters component.

So you should not be able to assign an officer to such a formation, and if you can it is probably a bug(?) and at any rate should not confer any bonuses. That said, the ground units systems are known to have a fair amount of bugs remaining so it is not impossible for that to be the case.

So, a bug..?

You are correcting a mistake made by a misunderstanding of the rules so just design the new formations, delete the old ones and use SM to replace them with the new units .
Or design new slightly larger formations with the added command element, build new formations with just the command element and use the existing troops to reinforce these new units. I'd use SM its easier

Designing a slightly larger formation is not ideal, since they are tied to a troop transport component size...
I'll have to delete them and recreate them with Space Master...
Or, perhaps, keep them and throw them away in some combat.

[xenoscepter]

- Yes. However, when you say "tiny" do you mean formations that are less than 1,000 Tons? If so, they're going suffer a terribly high number of breakthroughs...

The smallest one is below 100 - 99, with 33 PWL infantry.
Most others are 250, and 500 as of late...
636 was the one with 2 construction vehicles...

 --- These will likely be slaughtered via repeated breakthroughs. Heavy casualties to be expected at minimum. Breakthrough mechanics don't take into account your overall numbers, only the size of the formations themselves.

[Blogaugis]

 --- These will likely be slaughtered via repeated breakthroughs. Heavy casualties to be expected at minimum. Breakthrough mechanics don't take into account your overall numbers, only the size of the formations themselves.

These tiny formations breaking through, or being the victims of an enemy breakthrough?

Also I've found a way to fix my problem in an easier way:

In the Ground Forces window, on the (default) Order of Battle tab, click the "Show Elements" box. You can then expand the formations in the oob tree to show elements. These can be click-dragged to other formations. If you don't want to move an entire stack (for whatever reason), you can click the "Amount Popup" box and when moving elements it will prompt you for the amount moved.

[xenoscepter]

 --- Your tiny formations will be broken though and your Support / Tear line attacked often as a result. You will likewise almost never breakthrough the enemy's Frontline.

[Droll]

--- These will likely be slaughtered via repeated breakthroughs. Heavy casualties to be expected at minimum. Breakthrough mechanics don't take into account your overall numbers, only the size of the formations themselves.

I did not know this, that seems incredibly wrong as it penalizes people for having in-depth OOBs, which often have small combat formations.

[nuclearslurpee]

--- These will likely be slaughtered via repeated breakthroughs. Heavy casualties to be expected at minimum. Breakthrough mechanics don't take into account your overall numbers, only the size of the formations themselves.

I did not know this, that seems incredibly wrong as it penalizes people for having in-depth OOBs, which often have small combat formations.

Frankly, the entire ground unit system punishes people for having in-depth OOBs - it simply is not designed for modeling down to the platoon or squad level for anything other than boarding forces - not only in the breakthrough/morale mechanics but also things like the micromanagement of such OOBs or the difficulty to generate enough officers to place a commander at every level for every formation. Which honestly makes sense, Aurora is primarily a game on the planetary/galactic scale, and for planetary invasions we really should be talking about armies on the millions of tons scale, not companies on the 1000-ton scale.

Personally I choose to accept the game for what it is and satisfy my inner OOB nerd by making snazzy TO&E graphics that show the platoon or squad levels that only matter in my headcanon. 

[Droll]

--- These will likely be slaughtered via repeated breakthroughs. Heavy casualties to be expected at minimum. Breakthrough mechanics don't take into account your overall numbers, only the size of the formations themselves.

I did not know this, that seems incredibly wrong as it penalizes people for having in-depth OOBs, which often have small combat formations.

Frankly, the entire ground unit system punishes people for having in-depth OOBs - it simply is not designed for modeling down to the platoon or squad level for anything other than boarding forces - not only in the breakthrough/morale mechanics but also things like the micromanagement of such OOBs or the difficulty to generate enough officers to place a commander at every level for every formation. Which honestly makes sense, Aurora is primarily a game on the planetary/galactic scale, and for planetary invasions we really should be talking about armies on the millions of tons scale, not companies on the 1000-ton scale.

Personally I choose to accept the game for what it is and satisfy my inner OOB nerd by making snazzy TO&E graphics that show the platoon or squad levels that only matter in my headcanon. 

Then why is the lowest rank major? That's why I started doing detailed OOBs, I assumed that's the sort of granularity the system was made to support.

[nuclearslurpee]

Then why is the lowest rank major? That's why I started doing detailed OOBs, I assumed that's the sort of granularity the system was made to support.

This really needs to be changed. It didn't even make sense in VB6 when the ground formations were battalions and we had to like it or Steve would shoot us.

[Bremen]

Then why is the lowest rank major? That's why I started doing detailed OOBs, I assumed that's the sort of granularity the system was made to support.

This really needs to be changed. It didn't even make sense in VB6 when the ground formations were battalions and we had to like it or Steve would shoot us.

You can rename the lowest ground combat rank whatever you want. It also depends on naming theme; in my current game the lowest rank was Captain by default.

Until the latest version, commanders had Ground Force Command Rating that limited how much tonnage they could command optimally (and generally scaled up with rank). This set up a sort of optimal formation size for each rank, though of course how many soldiers per unit was never really specified. However, as of the latest update this has been removed and it's entirely up to you if the lowest rank of ground force commander commands a 100 ton unit or a 25000 ton one (Though obviously you would need more officers per ton depending on the size).

[nuclearslurpee]

You can rename the lowest ground combat rank whatever you want. It also depends on naming theme; in my current game the lowest rank was Captain by default.

I think the question is more about why the in-game rank name systems usually suggest by having lowest ranks like "Major" that the company is a good formation size to build, when it really isn't. More of an internal consistency thing as well as a way to mislead new players I suppose.

[Bremen]

You can rename the lowest ground combat rank whatever you want. It also depends on naming theme; in my current game the lowest rank was Captain by default.

I think the question is more about why the in-game rank name systems usually suggest by having lowest ranks like "Major" that the company is a good formation size to build, when it really isn't. More of an internal consistency thing as well as a way to mislead new players I suppose.

I think the issue is more that there is always going to be a default, and if the idea of the ground forces system is that your units can be of any size there's no way to establish what that default should be, so it's probably fine to just go with whatever.

Also, it was probably what fit best given the number of ranks in descending order.

[LuuBluum]

Out of curiosity, does the "very detailed OOB = bad due to morale/breakthrough" apply in, say, situations where it's too very-detailed OOBs fighting each other and not something like NPRs and whatnot?

[xenoscepter]

Out of curiosity, does the "very detailed OOB = bad due to morale/breakthrough" apply in, say, situations where it's too very-detailed OOBs fighting each other and not something like NPRs and whatnot?

 -- No, well kind of no... If both sides are roughly equal, then the penalty is moot as both sides are "bad". If you want to do multi-faction player led stuff, than this issue has little to no bearing overall...

[nuclearslurpee]

Out of curiosity, does the "very detailed OOB = bad due to morale/breakthrough" apply in, say, situations where it's too very-detailed OOBs fighting each other and not something like NPRs and whatnot?

In theory there shouldn't be much noticeable effect, and as xenoscepter said it should work equally badly for both sides. However in practice I'd expect to see a higher variance leading to more breakthrough events per deployed ton.