Required Commanders

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I've started to look at the idea of promotions being based on need, rather than a set ratio. For example, for naval officers that requires identifying the rank requirement for every position on every ship, plus the various admin commands. This will result in a list of ranks with the total number of officers required for each. That is the easy part

The question is what to do with that information. A simple option might be to setup a ratio system based on requirements vs available. For example, if there are a total of 500 officers needed and 800 available, then the number set for each rank would be Required x 1.6. Equally, if there were insufficient officers available - say 300 - then each rank would be Required x 0.6. Promotions would be made from over-subscribed ranks (those with more existing officers than Required x 0.6) to under-subscribed ranks.

However, if you have a ratio system and too few officers for everything, having a lot of freighters or fighters that need lieutenant commanders will reduce the number of more senior officers needed to command warships.

Another option is to fill the highest ranks first and then work down. Promotions would be made until the highest rank had the required number, then the second highest etc., but that may create a situation with minimal numbers of officers in the lowest ranks, which would look odd.

Perhaps ship classes could be excluded from having commanders (and being included in the required numbers per rank) until more are available.

At this point I am opening up the subject for debate to help me find a sensible solution. All comments and suggestions welcome.

[dsedrez]

Perhaps ship classes could be excluded from having commanders (and being included in the required numbers per rank) until more are available.

I think this would be great! With the exception that if you manually assign a commander it would stick and they wouldn't be removed (sometimes I want this for RP purposes). But the system wouldn't try to assign commanders for them or include them in the calculations.
For example, I don't need commanders for all my sensor platforms, but I'd like commanders for my fighter leaders.

[hyramgraff]

I like the idea of having the number of officers at each level based on the number required instead of purely how many officers you have at the next lower rank.

I'd like to suggest an alternative way to deal with not having enough officers to fill all of the available positions. What if you implemented an "accelerated officer training" as a construction project? This would simulate an empire realizing "We need officers, NOW!" and investing resources to a one time push for extra entry level officers. (If you think that this idea has merit, I'll let everyone else debate over what the inputs and outputs of this need to be for it to be balanced.)

[nuclearslurpee]

While I'm on the record as liking the current system well enough, I do still have thoughts. 

I think it makes the most sense to start from the top and work down the ranks as a starting point. To avoid the problem of a lack of low-rank officers, some minimum rank ratio could be enforced - the current 2:1 (naval) and 3:1 (ground) would be fine IMO, but if you want to be more flexible for players 1:1 and 2:1 would probably be fine and I think most people would prefer this - even 1:1 globally would be okay just as long as some limit is in place so we don't have 500 generals commanding three colonels.

A ratio system would probably just be awkward and not entirely realistic. On one hand, I think most militaries tend to promote people if there's an important higher position that needs to be filled, like anything requiring an admiral rank for example, so if a race has not enough officers and admiral-level positions are unfilled this is not very realistic. On the other hand, for a very undersized rank structure using strict ratios could lead to having numerous jobless admirals "commanding" a navy of 5 ships in a conventional start. Thus, I think it is better to promote upwards as needed subject to minimum ratios.

The potential challenge I see is that you need to find the right balance between, essentially, commercial/auxiliary ships, fighters, and command modules (AUX, ENG, etc.) without unduly limiting how the players can set up a rank structure. Commercial ships are a particular problem because the relevant bonuses are often rare, particularly the Logistics bonus which is the only one needed for freighters, colony ships, transports, etc. which also tend to be the most numerous commercial classes - I wouldn't want a large fleet of freighters to throw off the numbers when I only have a handful of qualified commanders for them anyways. My first thought here is to fill all the military ship rank requirements first, then the commercial ships.

The tricky bit is then how to handle the auxiliary modules, because as things currently stand a commander will be taken out of a sub-command position if there is a ship command available for which they qualify. If we fill the requirements for military ship commands first, then (military) sub-commands, then commercial ship commands (and sub-commands I guess), we can have situations where the sub-commands will not actually be filled if some of the officers in those roles are pulled out to command freighters or whatnot. I'm not sure how big of a problem that would be in practice, though, especially if the minimum rank ratio is chosen reasonably.

I would also suggest after thinking about it having a rule that no more officers will be auto-promoted to a certain rank if there are already, say, 10% of officers idle at that rank. This will prevent an issue like the following:

• Rank structure starts at Lieutenants (LT) who are expected to command fighters, and advances to LCDR who are expected to command freighters, small military craft, and sub-command jobs.
• Due to large amounts of freighters, many LTs are promoted to LCDR who are then idle as they lack any Logistics skill.
• Player ramps up fighter production, and lacks LTs to command them while dozens of LCDRs stand around the water cooler complaining about their boring jobs.

That being said I am not sure if this rule would really fix a problem, or just create a new problem, so it may not be needed. I would say try the basic idea (fill from top, minimum rank ratios, fill military jobs before commercial) and then see if it needs tweaking.

For ground forces I think it is easier - fill from the top with a minimum rank ratio. Not having sub-command jobs or commercial formations makes this a lot easier to manage.

I would also appreciate being able to exclude ship classes from having commanders (and ground formations too!). Designs such as sensor probes/platforms, small rescue shuttles, etc. don't really need commanders and I'm sure there are other special cases players have come up with over the years.

I think this would be great! With the exception that if you manually assign a commander it would stick and they wouldn't be removed (sometimes I want this for RP purposes). But the system wouldn't try to assign commanders for them or include them in the calculations.

This is another good point, sometimes I don't want a commander to be removed from their role for any number of reasons, maybe they still receive the promotion but remain in their current ship command (obviously this wouldn't work for sub-command jobs).

I'd like to suggest an alternative way to deal with not having enough officers to fill all of the available positions. What if you implemented an "accelerated officer training" as a construction project? This would simulate an empire realizing "We need officers, NOW!" and investing resources to a one time push for extra entry level officers. (If you think that this idea has merit, I'll let everyone else debate over what the inputs and outputs of this need to be for it to be balanced.)

I am not a big fan, mainly as no matter how big you make the "FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY!!" sign this is probably something that people will build all the time since academy output is usually an important bottleneck (especially once retirements are at full speed). I prefer to leave this bottleneck in place as it motivates interesting decisions about shipbuilding and class design.

[Migi]

As a related problem, you can have ships without commanders even if there is a surplus of commanders, due to the remaining commanders not possessing a relevant trait. I find this mostly affects freighters, tugs, and colony ships because I might have 100 freighters but only 10 low ranked officers with the Logistics trait.

In principle the navy should recruit enough officers to fill the positions they have, and a little more. But only having a few more is no good if they don't have relevant traits to get an assignment. The way you build academies in Aurora doesn't really allow you to target the number of positions you have.

Maybe part of the problem is that the specialised command components aren't used on a wide enough scale, because the research and tonnage cost make them a low priority to obtain and a luxury to install (a science department costs 5k RP which is the same cost as the Grav sensors you need to do the survey at all, the CIC module is 10k RP).

Maybe you could have an automatic or toggleable slackening of recruiting/graduation standards to bring you up to full strength. So you could have academies provide 12 candidates per year if you have at least 10% unfilled positions, 10 per year while you have 9% unfilled to 9% excess, and 8 per year if you have more than 10% excess? Then provide some sort of penalty like -5% to a single trait to the officers recruited during the slack period.

Or could you manually input a target ratio for your officers?

[ArcWolf]

I'm going to quote my post from august:

3:Custome promotion Rules.
- This is admittedly much more complex then the previous two suggestions, but i think would be much appreciated.  Some examples of custom rules would be the following:
--Limit the number of officers at certain ranks. 

--Stop "auto-promotion" beyond rank X
Example would stop auto-promotions beyond CAPT.

-- Only Promote above Rank X when there is an open billet.

-- Custom promotion Ratios.
For example, say i wanted to do a Roman Campaign where Each Cohort is commanded by a Centurion, the First Cohort is commanded by a Primus Pilus, and the over all legion is Commanded by a Legatus.  That would require 9 Centurions, 1 Primus, and 1 Legatus.  So a Ration of 9:1:1 would be used as apposed to the current 9:3:1

In addition, does the commander priority apply to just the CO or also "bridge" officers? If the former, could the code be tweaked to fit the latter so that your most powerful ships (with the highest priority) gets first pick of officers, and the lower priority ships make due w/o if necessary?

I still like the idea of customizable promotion ratios, but having a toggle for "stop auto-promote at Rank X" or "Only promote to fill open billet" might be easier to code.

[Sebmono]

I very much like the idea of promotions based on required posts, and would suggest including fit for the job into the requirements. My biggest annoyance comes from having a battle hardened Captain getting autopromoted out of the chair of my finest battleship just to sit idle not contributing anything because of an enforced ratio. This leads me to manually disable promotions ok certain individuals and essentially brings back a need for micro that defeats the purpose of the automation to begin with.

The "fit" portion of the requirement would combine with this, preventing a great logistics officer from being promoted out of a lower rank command to then not be able to take a military seat because he doesn't have any matching traits and once again sit idle.

So the outline of what I would like to see is.

• Fill posts top to bottom in rank.
• At each level of rank, the posts are divided by traits needed to be filled, minimum one match required (Tactical, reaction, etc).
• Commander gets promoted to fulfill only posts they are fit for that are open.
• Commanders can jump multiple ranks if needed in one go.
• Each rank should never have fewer members than the rank above it.

This way you can ensure close to "full employment" of your best talent, minimize idleness, optimize for the right Commanders in the right seat, and all with in a realistic way of upward mobility when opportunity presents itself

[Droll]

Perhaps ship classes could be excluded from having commanders (and being included in the required numbers per rank) until more are available.

Even a simpler "exclude class from auto-assignment" button would go a long way to alleviate weird officer shortages though this solution would be even better as it would direct "overflow" officers into less important roles like freighters.

To give an anecdotal example, I use small fighter-sized weapon platforms for PPV. Due to their nature, I often built 100s of them to provide the needed PPV for large colonies in particular. Of course, this makes me run out of LCDRs for bridge crew and small warships very quickly. With this exclusion rule I can make it so that those defense platforms never receive officers.

I would also likely prefer to not have officers on my commercial ships. Sometimes it feels weird from an RP perspective to have commissioned military officers derping about in state-owned freighters. You wouldn't spend all that money training someone with naval strategy, tactics and complicated military maneuvers just to make them move oxygen tanks from earth to mars. (Though in irl space missions astronaut pilots were often former military pilots, emphasis on former).

There maybe some merit to designating such classes to be commanded by junior officers instead of just "no commander". Maybe a junior officer in command wont have any skill bonuses whatsoever but if they've been commanding a freighter for x amount of time they might pick up some logistics skill and potentially become the next recruit out of the academy with their new found logistics prowess + whatever they learned at the academy. This would get around exploiting the game to get infinite officers without an academy as your officer training rate is still capped on the academy.

More importantly it would introduce some form of decision around keeping around and maintaining very old warships/freighters as training vessels. You pay the resources for maintenance but in return get an improvement in officer quality. Is that a big enough deal for it to be a significantly meaningful choice? Maybe yes, maybe no. But I don't think aurora needs it to be a massive deal for it to be an interesting mechanic.

Edit: For military ships you could force the use naval training for junior officers to have a chance at gaining extra skills. This way you also have to pay the fuel cost, thereby not making academy commandants obsolete to such training.

Finally, this isn't relevant specifically to this but to the commander menu. When the game gets old and the player has around 4000+ officers in their roster, opening and interacting with the commander menu becomes very time consuming. This is because when opened, the game will automatically filter all naval officers from the lowest rank to the highest for crew training which as you might imagine, can take a while with 3000+ naval officers. Would it be possible to make it so that the filter is either manually activated, or more simply, have the filter options default to the highest rank, where there won't be nearly as many officers for it to run through. I don't want to filter commanders by crew training every time I open the commander tab.

Edit2: I notice that auto-demotions are not being talked here which might be an option to alleviate potential unbalance in the structure. Granted, you wouldn't want the rank system to literally be ad-hoc, with officers doing parkour across the entire hierarchy, so perhaps you can make use of promotion score averages for each rank.

Let's spitball and say that the officers who are in the bottom 10% percentile of their respective rank are eligible for auto-demotion. If and only if their rank is above the number of required officers as defined in the OP post and the rank below them has less officers than the defined requirement, then the officer is auto-demoted to the rank below.

A character who is a story character or marked as "no promotion" is excluded from auto-demotion. This might require some rebalancing on how promotion points are calculated (maybe not though?) but given how medals work it means that decorated officers aren't going to be randomly demoted even if their skills are less than most their peers, which I imagine is quite realistic.

[Arwyn]

If it wouldnt be a coding nightmare Steve, there is something like this that plays out in real life.

In RL militaries, there are established rank structures for commands, and then Personnel is tasked with filling them. So for example 16 captain slots, but only 14 captains;
4 admin commands                                 Priority 1
8 combat commands (ships)                    Priority 1
2 combat commands (fighter groups)       Priority 2
2 logistic commands                               Priority 3

So Personnel is going to slot the 1st priority groups with the best rated captains, then the 2nd priority, and then 3rd priority. If there are no captains, the logistic slots go unfilled.

In RL, those logistics slots would be filled by the next rank available, say commanders, until an recently promoted captain becomes available.

So, from a game perspective being able to set a priority on an admin command or ship class may realistically slot commanders into open high value roles, and leave lower tier roles unfilled.

Also in RL, every officer has a performance review annually (good old Officer Efficiency Reports). The ones I was familiar with, OER's got tallied every promotion cycle and the promotion board filled open ranks based on the tallied performance scores. Then they added up any awards, citations, or medals that would affect promotion score. So, lower being better, any Commander with a score below threshold got promoted to captain. Anyone above threshold was passed over and they had to wait until the next promotion board cycle. Go too many cycles without promotion equaled retirement or dismissal. It was up or out.

During wartime or in large expansions that had lots of open slot, the threshold for promotion went way up (they needed butts in seats) so even marginal officers who would never get promoted otherwise, got a freebie.

Since Aurora doesnt have anything like OER's, you could look at a promotion score based on medals awarded + tonnage destroyed/ruins recovered/jump points discovered/ect since you already track them. Then you can look at slots available vs. number of officers and the more free slots, the higher the likelihood of someone getting promoted to fill the role. Conversely, if everything is filled, promotions slow way down. Rockstars and top performers still get promoted, but everyone else languishes.

Thats pretty much exactly how the real life military does it (vastly simplified). When things are growing fast or there is combat attrition, promotions come fast. During downsizing, reductions in force, or just stagnation, promotions only keep up with attrition and folks get pushed out of service early as surplus to needs.

[serger]

1. Make promotions as a part of auto-assignment procedure: if no suitable officer of the required rank found, make another run through the lower rank, promoting instantly if found (additional filter of "no less then a year in route" required here to avoid too quick sequential promotions, or we'll have permanently fleet admirals in their early twenties and strange sequences of one promotion-and-assign instantly after another). This way we'll avoid strange masses of autopromoted idlers while post are not filled until system is broken completely.

2. Use stop-ratio: no autopromotion run if there is more than say 2:3 rank ratio already reached, to save command pyramid.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

So, from a game perspective being able to set a priority on an admin command or ship class may realistically slot commanders into open high value roles, and leave lower tier roles unfilled.

You can already set a commander assignment priority for different ship classes. It is on the Misc tab of the Ship Class window.

[alex_brunius]

IMO the key goals with improving the promotion system should be:

- Ensure that promotions happen to such a degree that you have higher officers for all "Reasonable" slots so your never have an appointment you can't assign anyone at all to due to lack of rank ( "Reasonable" here meaning everything except max rank slots created by intentionally making a huge naval admin command hierarchy ).
- A bit more flexibility so your not sitting with massive shortages of officers in one rank and then massive overflow in the next rank.
- Keep plausible promotion stories / paths working without requiring more micromanagement.


Edit: Something else to consider is if the academy graduation of naval vs army officers should be flexible and adapting depending on if your empire has a huge need for army officers but small navy needs or vice versa. ( Commendants already give some flexibility here but in extreme cases that might not be enough )

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I've added a 'No Officers' option at the class level. That should improve both the existing system and any new system resulting from this thread.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I looked up the current number in each rank for the US Navy. The ranks from Lieutenant up to Captain have a progression that is not too dissimilar to the Aurora 2:1 progression and the same is true from Rear Admiral (LH) to Vice Admiral. The very noticeable gap is from Captain to Rear Admiral.

With this in mind, perhaps a minimum ratio of 3:2 should be enforced for each rank to ensure we don't end up with an odd structure. I think the top end will work itself out if there are only a small number of flag positions needed for admin commands.



https://www.statista.com/statistics/239345/total-military-personnel-of-the-us-navy-by-grade/

[Jorgen_CAB]

One thing that I think would be good is if you could assign a commander even if they have a zero in a relevant skill but they are quite likely to aquire that skill if assigned in such a position. Say you need a commander for a cargo ship but there are no Logistics commanders. An available commander are still going t be assigned with a zero in that skill, over the course of a few years that commander should gain some skill in Logistics.

This way we can tailor our commander to some degree into the jobs we want them to have.

They should basically be weighted to gain some minimal skill in the relevant skill the less they have in it. But all commanders should have a higher chance to get skills in those areas where they are assigned.

This would also "fix" the lack of engineering officers that often is a problem for me... I like them on survey ships and larger military ships and I always seem to be lacking them allot.

A skill progression system like this would work better with a system that simply promote based on need as you can assign a commander with a zero skill in the needed skill but they will gain some skill in that area eventually over time. This way you don't need any large forced ratios and can keep that at close to 1:1 even.