Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => C# Suggestions => Topic started by: LuuBluum on June 26, 2021, 08:18:24 PM
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It's come up a few times across various suggestion threads (and it's something that I want as well), so I figured to give it a thread of its own. Suggestion is to make some mechanism for ground forces so that, alongside the assignment of a commander, you can also assign various staff officers akin to the staff officers already available on ships. Mechanically they'd operate the same as the ship equivalent. There are two ways that I thought this could possibly work:
- Make it so that, alongside "headquarters" for a unit, it is possible to build similar things for those staff officers, like "logistics offices" or something.
- Allow the divvying up of a formation's total headquarters usage for particular officers; after the commanding officer is allocated using some number of headquarters points, allow dolling out the rest to other officers. So, it'd work like a pool, with each officer (including commander) subtracting their required amount from the pool.
Personally I think the second would be the better-functioning, and not require redesigning ground force formations as they currently exist.
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It's come up a few times across various suggestion threads (and it's something that I want as well), so I figured to give it a thread of its own. Suggestion is to make some mechanism for ground forces so that, alongside the assignment of a commander, you can also assign various staff officers akin to the staff officers already available on ships. Mechanically they'd operate the same as the ship equivalent. There are two ways that I thought this could possibly work:
- Make it so that, alongside "headquarters" for a unit, it is possible to build similar things for those staff officers, like "logistics offices" or something.
- Allow the divvying up of a formation's total headquarters usage for particular officers; after the commanding officer is allocated using some number of headquarters points, allow dolling out the rest to other officers. So, it'd work like a pool, with each officer (including commander) subtracting their required amount from the pool.
Personally I think the second would be the better-functioning, and not require redesigning ground force formations as they currently exist.
Oh boy...
Imagine we have 5 different ground force HQ modules to choose from, all but 1 requiring research in ground control...
Frankly, with the way I go for smaller size ground units (1000 tons, for the lowest ranking commander), I'd run out of ground force officers even faster... And I already have problems getting enough ground force officers.
But, okay - maybe it's not as bad as I imagine..?
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If you're doing a full OOB all the way down to the platoon level (which in my mind is the lowest you can reasonably go, because anything lower and you're not even dealing with officers anymore), then you aren't actually having all of your platoons have all offices filled. Generally speaking, the first level of the OOB that actually has any of these slots filled in is a company, and they only have an XO. Additionally, most of the ranks assigned to these positions aren't ranks that would normally lead by themselves- a first lieutenant is generally an XO for a company, etc. So if you have all of these officer ranks filled out in your officer hierarchy, you're mostly just gaining places to stick them all.
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It's come up a few times across various suggestion threads (and it's something that I want as well), so I figured to give it a thread of its own. Suggestion is to make some mechanism for ground forces so that, alongside the assignment of a commander, you can also assign various staff officers akin to the staff officers already available on ships. Mechanically they'd operate the same as the ship equivalent. There are two ways that I thought this could possibly work:
- Make it so that, alongside "headquarters" for a unit, it is possible to build similar things for those staff officers, like "logistics offices" or something.
- Allow the divvying up of a formation's total headquarters usage for particular officers; after the commanding officer is allocated using some number of headquarters points, allow dolling out the rest to other officers. So, it'd work like a pool, with each officer (including commander) subtracting their required amount from the pool.
Personally I think the second would be the better-functioning, and not require redesigning ground force formations as they currently exist.
Oh boy...
Imagine we have 5 different ground force HQ modules to choose from, all but 1 requiring research in ground control...
Frankly, with the way I go for smaller size ground units (1000 tons, for the lowest ranking commander), I'd run out of ground force officers even faster... And I already have problems getting enough ground force officers.
But, okay - maybe it's not as bad as I imagine..?
There is general agreement that Ground Officers have been in short supply ever since Ground Units got their overhaul. Previously they spawned at an adequate rate but now with the ability to make units as small as you want and many players modeling down to the company level its clear they should be spawning much more often.
Presumably if Steve goes back over GUs and adds staff officers for HQs he'll adjust Ground Officer spawn rates accordingly. In my opinion they should be the most numerous of officers spawned; the Army IRL doesn't requires as high a test score as the Navy or Airforce and the space forces you command in Aurora are more complicated than all those branches combined.
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Lets be clear here.
We are separating NCOs and COs right?
Not everyone who has an officer position is an commissioned officer.
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There is general agreement that Ground Officers have been in short supply ever since Ground Units got their overhaul. Previously they spawned at an adequate rate but now with the ability to make units as small as you want and many players modeling down to the company level its clear they should be spawning much more often.
It is obvious that here lies the rub. Overhauling the ground forces was not followed by a spawn overhaul of the ground officers. However, if you think about it, you'll run into the same issue if your fleet is fighter based. Following the new structure you are going to require an officer per fighter and it could be "expensive" especially at the beginning of the game.
2 Things have been said many times:
Restructure of the amount of officers generated
Restructure of the ratio for promotions
I personally manual intake officers from time to time (liquidating all scientists and civilian administrators) so I am not bothered nor consider it cheating as I know each government decides the amount of officers and soldiers are subjected to be recruited every cycle, so why wouldn't I?
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Hell, it'd be particularly nice if we could specify the promotion ratios, even. "X percentage of this rank should be promoted in Y time. "
That, coupled with having some form of staff officer arrangement for ground units, would make this game perfect to me.
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There is general agreement that Ground Officers have been in short supply ever since Ground Units got their overhaul. Previously they spawned at an adequate rate but now with the ability to make units as small as you want and many players modeling down to the company level its clear they should be spawning much more often.
It is obvious that here lies the rub. Overhauling the ground forces was not followed by a spawn overhaul of the ground officers. However, if you think about it, you'll run into the same issue if your fleet is fighter based. Following the new structure you are going to require an officer per fighter and it could be "expensive" especially at the beginning of the game.
2 Things have been said many times:
Restructure of the amount of officers generated
Restructure of the ratio for promotions
I personally manual intake officers from time to time (liquidating all scientists and civilian administrators) so I am not bothered nor consider it cheating as I know each government decides the amount of officers and soldiers are subjected to be recruited every cycle, so why wouldn't I?
It irritates me that the ground officer rank ratio was changed in the same way as naval officer rank ratio - ground officer rank ratio was reduced from 4:1 to 3:1, naval was reduced from 3:1 to 2:1. However for the case of naval officers this was compensated with staff officer types of roles, but for ground officers no such change was made. Then why make the change anyways?
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At this point, I don't know how many times I've start and abandoned a post to sum up my thoughts on this topic. So I guess it'll be easier to actually get something readable if I avoid the ongoing problem of ground officer shortages and go back to the first post:
It's come up a few times across various suggestion threads (and it's something that I want as well), so I figured to give it a thread of its own. Suggestion is to make some mechanism for ground forces so that, alongside the assignment of a commander, you can also assign various staff officers akin to the staff officers already available on ships. Mechanically they'd operate the same as the ship equivalent. There are two ways that I thought this could possibly work:
- Make it so that, alongside "headquarters" for a unit, it is possible to build similar things for those staff officers, like "logistics offices" or something.
- Allow the divvying up of a formation's total headquarters usage for particular officers; after the commanding officer is allocated using some number of headquarters points, allow dolling out the rest to other officers. So, it'd work like a pool, with each officer (including commander) subtracting their required amount from the pool.
Personally I think the second would be the better-functioning, and not require redesigning ground force formations as they currently exist.
In short, I disagree.
The second option may be more appealing to some, but I can't get behind a rewrite of the ground headquarters mechanics at this point. Certainly not on that scale. Steve's time is limited. There are always bugs to track down and fix. There are plenty of unimplemented features (like genetic modification) still on the backburner. And he certainly has other things to do with his free time than work on the code.
The first option is more reasonable. It's already been implemented for ships, so it should (in theory) take less effort to implement for formations. But I still don't like it. Since ground officer shortage is a more common experience than ground officer surplus, being able to assign multiple officers per formation feels like a niche interest, for those that commonly make very, very large formations. But if the option exists, I fear it could lead players unaware that it's only viable in that case to expend time and effort into building staff posts into all their formations only to find they won't ever have the officer pool to fill them.
If the desire isn't specifically for multiple officers per formation, but just a meaningful ground officer hierarchy of any kind, I'd rather see a top-end solution than a bottom-end one. That is to say, something that resembles naval admin command rather than ship command posts.
While I'm on the topic of ground hierarchy and unfixed bugs... my memory tells me that the original intent was for higher ranked officers assigned to superior formations to pass on a portion of their bonuses to attached formations, but that this never worked and was never fixed. And for the life of me, I can't find the posts referencing any of this. Did this happen? Did it ever get fixed, or officially moved from bug to feature? Did I imagine the whole thing? (These are not rhetorical questions. It would be appreciated if anyone who knows what I'm talking about could point me to the posts about this.)
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The second option may be more appealing to some, but I can't get behind a rewrite of the ground headquarters mechanics at this point. Certainly not on that scale. Steve's time is limited. There are always bugs to track down and fix.
I don't like it when people use this as an argument against a suggestion, it's true that Steve can't just rewrite the whole game overnight but whether Steve decides to do something major that takes a lot of his time is up to his judgement when looking at a suggestion not ours.
While I'm on the topic of ground hierarchy and unfixed bugs... my memory tells me that the original intent was for higher ranked officers assigned to superior formations to pass on a portion of their bonuses to attached formations, but that this never worked and was never fixed. And for the life of me, I can't find the posts referencing any of this. Did this happen? Did it ever get fixed, or officially moved from bug to feature? Did I imagine the whole thing? (These are not rhetorical questions. It would be appreciated if anyone who knows what I'm talking about could point me to the posts about this.)
Honestly these are good questions because I wonder too, it seems to be such a minor or hidden effect that people will give you both answers and confuse you even more. I think at this point only Steve can really say whether or not there is any code that makes CO bonuses filter down.
In my experience though the answer is no, I say this because GC training does not filter down to any formations that are subordinate to the COs formation and I would expect the training to raise the morale of other formations if that were the case.
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The second option may be more appealing to some, but I can't get behind a rewrite of the ground headquarters mechanics at this point. Certainly not on that scale. Steve's time is limited. There are always bugs to track down and fix.
I don't like it when people use this as an argument against a suggestion, it's true that Steve can't just rewrite the whole game overnight but whether Steve decides to do something major that takes a lot of his time is up to his judgement when looking at a suggestion not ours.
That's a fair point, and I know I don't dictate to Steve anything he does.
And looking at what I wrote again, I see that while I meant what I wrote literally, the phrasing I chose is the same as phrasing that is often used passive-aggressively (or otherwise coded to a harsher intent). That was not my intent.
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So on one hand I hate it when someone tells someone else that they are playing a game wrong when what they are doing is playing it their way. On the other, I do feel like building out a ground OOB down to even the company level is missing the scale that aurora is working on. There was a reason that the standard unit size in VB6 was a battalion, that is, units smaller than that are not worth deploying on their own unless they have some specialist skills.
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So on one hand I hate it when someone tells someone else that they are playing a game wrong when what they are doing is playing it their way. On the other, I do feel like building out a ground OOB down to even the company level is missing the scale that aurora is working on. There was a reason that the standard unit size in VB6 was a battalion, that is, units smaller than that are not worth deploying on their own unless they have some specialist skills.
For what it's worth, the suggestion here would apply regardless of what granularity someone's OOB is.
If anything, representing things at the batallion level makes sense, if your units are companies (as in, literal units, making up a batallion formation). That way your "headquarters unit" is literally a HHC.
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As for me, the problem is that without staff officers we just cannot make any other ground force story except for some form of Warhammer-like "New Medieval".
But it's the setting Steve likes the most and nearly the only he likes, so it's absolutely understandable why he doesn't bother with GF HQ officers, and so I think it will be so for years.
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Well, I can always hold out hope at least.
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I think it is likely to come Soon™. ;)
Reason being, the ground commanders rank ratio was changed (from 4:1 to 3:1) along with the ship commanders rank ratio (from 3:1 to 2:1) in the move from VB6 to C#. For the ship commanders the rationale was that there are now command modules for junior officers to serve in, however for ground units the rank change was made without the corresponding command "modules" being added.
The parallel makes me hopeful that Steve would consider doing such a thing, otherwise why make the change at all? Certainly as it stands the 3:1 GC rank ratio makes no sense compared to the previous 4:1, actually even 2:1 would be better but we are stuck with what we have for now.
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Apologies for bumping my own, rather old thread, but given that we now have (for 2.0) automated naval command positions, could this possibly be looked at as a possibility? Even if it is something as simple as providing an XO position to HQs a particular size greater than their minimum size necessary for the divisions under them.
I know, it isn't something looked at too often, but I think it would be a great boon— coupled with increasing the number of ground officers in general— to have ground forces officers with a bit more of a similar structure to naval forces.
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Apologies for bumping my own, rather old thread, but given that we now have (for 2.0) automated naval command positions, could this possibly be looked at as a possibility? Even if it is something as simple as providing an XO position to HQs a particular size greater than their minimum size necessary for the divisions under them.
I know, it isn't something looked at too often, but I think it would be a great boon— coupled with increasing the number of ground officers in general— to have ground forces officers with a bit more of a similar structure to naval forces.
The 1:3 ratio of officers problem (that with autopromote option on, once the amount of lower ranking officers reaches 4, 1 of them immediately gets promoted) gets in the way... I already have a shortage of officers. If such a feature were a thing, we'd need to turn off automatic promotions.
Another thing is - I've heard reports that even now (at least, in 1.13 version) the higher ranking officers do not provide their bonuses to formations assigned below them. Adding yet another type of officer position, while the main one is not fixed is... well... WHYYY??!
If these issues are fixed in 1.14, I could see a point in that.
Other than that, ground forces still needs at least a minor rework...
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Fair. Hopefully Steve's next campaign is ground forces-focused.
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I'm going to double the number of officers produced by academies for v2.0, as there are a lot more positions available now. I'll keep the number of admin and scientists stable, so the increase will be in naval/ground.
In regard to the ground forces ratio, I am tempted to go back to a 4-1 promotion ratio, but happy to take suggestions.
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In regard to the ground forces ratio, I am tempted to go back to a 4-1 promotion ratio, but happy to take suggestions.
I prefer the 4-1 over the current 3-1 as it fits my current and probably future OOBs much better.
However I think for ground officers it might be a good idea for the player to configure the officer ratio to a limited capacity. Eg. having options in the race menu ranging from 2-1 to 5-1. Similar configuration could also be applied to naval officers as well. It's probably exploitable but it would grant people more freedom to play around with fleet and army hierarchies and overall structure.
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I'm going to double the number of officers produced by academies for v2.0, as there are a lot more positions available now. I'll keep the number of admin and scientists stable, so the increase will be in naval/ground.
In regard to the ground forces ratio, I am tempted to go back to a 4-1 promotion ratio, but happy to take suggestions.
I don't know how much work it would be, but I've seen it usually be a "X percentage of rank should be promoted each Y years". I don't know to what extent you could make that player-configurable per rank (including having ranks have no automatic promotion at all, if we so chose?), but I think at the very least having a configurable ratio, if not outright a configurable ratio per rank, would be ideal.
Icing on the cake would be the ability to specify the ratio to promote and how long they should serve before being promoted. Truly the best, most over-the-top would be ratio to promote, how long they've held that rank, and how long they've served overall. That would probably be a lot of work, though. Even going by rank might be too much.
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In regard to the ground forces ratio, I am tempted to go back to a 4-1 promotion ratio, but happy to take suggestions.
My suggestion is, in no uncertain terms, to do exactly this.
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In regard to the ground forces ratio, I am tempted to go back to a 4-1 promotion ratio, but happy to take suggestions.
My suggestion is, in no uncertain terms, to do exactly this.
Back to 4-1 for v2.0. I may look at configuration options in the future.
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I wonder if just an option alongside auto-promotion saying "Auto-promote only as needed" would be useful. If I need a lot of lieutenant commanders but not many commanders, rather than the auto-promotion siphoning everything upwards into eternity, "Auto-promote only as needed" would only promote the couple of commanders to fill commander-required appointments and then cease. Likewise for ground forces. This, actually, in its own way would allow the player to specify their own "promotion formula", as promotions would only follow the available appointments in the player's OOB.
For example, let's say I have 4 battalions to one brigade, 4 brigades to one division, 4 divisions to one corps, and so one, then auto-promotion would effectively follow a 4-1 promotion formula. Whereas for another player who has, say, 2 battalions to a brigade, 2 brigades to a division, 2 to a corps, and so on, then their formula would effectively be 2-1.
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I wonder if just an option alongside auto-promotion saying "Auto-promote only as needed" would be useful. If I need a lot of lieutenant commanders but not many commanders, rather than the auto-promotion siphoning everything upwards into eternity, "Auto-promote only as needed" would only promote the couple of commanders to fill commander-required appointments and then cease. Likewise for ground forces. This, actually, in its own way would allow the player to specify their own "promotion formula", as promotions would only follow the available appointments in the player's OOB.
For example, let's say I have 4 battalions to one brigade, 4 brigades to one division, 4 divisions to one corps, and so one, then auto-promotion would effectively follow a 4-1 promotion formula. Whereas for another player who has, say, 2 battalions to a brigade, 2 brigades to a division, 2 to a corps, and so on, then their formula would effectively be 2-1.
This would also allow for more complex OOBs. 4 battalions in a brigade, 3 brigades to a division, 4 divisions to a corps, 2 corps to an army and have officers fill in as needed. You could then manual promote lets say a general to an academy and next production increment their old post is already filled.
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I wonder if just an option alongside auto-promotion saying "Auto-promote only as needed" would be useful. If I need a lot of lieutenant commanders but not many commanders, rather than the auto-promotion siphoning everything upwards into eternity, "Auto-promote only as needed" would only promote the couple of commanders to fill commander-required appointments and then cease. Likewise for ground forces. This, actually, in its own way would allow the player to specify their own "promotion formula", as promotions would only follow the available appointments in the player's OOB.
For example, let's say I have 4 battalions to one brigade, 4 brigades to one division, 4 divisions to one corps, and so one, then auto-promotion would effectively follow a 4-1 promotion formula. Whereas for another player who has, say, 2 battalions to a brigade, 2 brigades to a division, 2 to a corps, and so on, then their formula would effectively be 2-1.
This would also allow for more complex OOBs. 4 battalions in a brigade, 3 brigades to a division, 4 divisions to a corps, 2 corps to an army and have officers fill in as needed. You could then manual promote lets say a general to an academy and next production increment their old post is already filled.
Yes, agreed, the 4-4-4-4 thing was just for easy visualization. I, personally, don't see a reason as to why a rigid formula should be enforced to be quite honest. Now, I am just a layman so I could easily be wrong, but in my mind no real, sane military would unnecessarily promote talented lower level officers to higher ranks where they might not even be used, depriving lower ranks of officers that they need, just to have a neat pyramid of officers when they can just skim the cream of the crop from each rank as needed.
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I wonder if just an option alongside auto-promotion saying "Auto-promote only as needed" would be useful. If I need a lot of lieutenant commanders but not many commanders, rather than the auto-promotion siphoning everything upwards into eternity, "Auto-promote only as needed" would only promote the couple of commanders to fill commander-required appointments and then cease. Likewise for ground forces. This, actually, in its own way would allow the player to specify their own "promotion formula", as promotions would only follow the available appointments in the player's OOB.
For example, let's say I have 4 battalions to one brigade, 4 brigades to one division, 4 divisions to one corps, and so one, then auto-promotion would effectively follow a 4-1 promotion formula. Whereas for another player who has, say, 2 battalions to a brigade, 2 brigades to a division, 2 to a corps, and so on, then their formula would effectively be 2-1.
This would also allow for more complex OOBs. 4 battalions in a brigade, 3 brigades to a division, 4 divisions to a corps, 2 corps to an army and have officers fill in as needed. You could then manual promote lets say a general to an academy and next production increment their old post is already filled.
Yes, agreed, the 4-4-4-4 thing was just for easy visualization. I, personally, don't see a reason as to why a rigid formula should be enforced to be quite honest. Now, I am just a layman so I could easily be wrong, but in my mind no real, sane military would unnecessarily promote talented lower level officers to higher ranks where they might not even be used just to have a neat pyramid of officers when they can just skim the cream of the crop from each rank as needed.
Finally, I will also say that this stuff could also apply to naval officers, though the problems of rigid officer hierarchy is often less extreme than in ground forces they are still present on the naval end.
Though for naval the main thing I think is missing is control over bridge crew allocation. I have a problem where my commercial ships will have priority over bridge crew assignments on combat ships. (Honestly an exclude class from auto-assignment button would also fix this problem)
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Personally, I prefer the current rigid auto-promotion system as it gives the player an interesting challenge rather than simply bending to the player's will. This applies to both naval and ground forces. For naval commanders the automatic promotion ratio forces the player to consider how to balance the command ranks and number/types of command modules on their ship classes to maintain a well-staffed fleet. For ground forces this level of complexity is not there (and adding it would require some major rebalancing as ground commanders are currently a major limiting factor for ground forces unless you use really massive formations like 50,000+ tons) but we have the OOB feature which is not really present in the naval game. Furthermore, it is somewhat realistic IMO, not so much because real militaries are so rigid but because it is a simple mechanic to represent the career ambitions of your leaders - in a real military, your LCDRs and LTCs are not content to remain at their rank for 20 years just because you as the player have decided that it would make your life easier, to use an extreme example. The rigidity itself is not necessarily realistic but as a force to push upward mobility even if the player would prefer otherwise I think it works quite well for gameplay - modeling political pressures very simply without requiring a whole new political minigame mechanic is good design IMO.
One thing to keep in mind is that you will not have neat ratios between ground force ranks especially for the lowest 2-3 ranks. When designing your OOB structure you have to account for various detachments - isolated garrison regiments, CON/GEO/XEN formations, STO battery commanders, and so on. Even at higher ranks you may have for example some independent Corps separated from the main Army or Theater HQs. IMO this makes the 4:1 ratio much more flexible and desirable for modeling a variety of rank structures, since you can have 4:1 formation command ratios which are not uncommon but equally well you can model 3:1 ratios and still have some extra commanders at most ranks who can be spun off for these more independent duties outside the main chain of command. With the 3:1 ranks I have always found it challenging to maintain a well-rounded OOB and also staff these more distributed commands without some rather convoluted structures.
I will also note in passing that we do have the option to promote officers manually, which is additional micromanagement but is an option nevertheless. In this case you can probably just promote from the top of the rank list once or twice a year to cut down on how much checking-up you need to do.
The one downside is now I need to rework my planned ground forces structure for my v2.0 campaign... grumble grumble
Heed not the whinging of the grognard, for he actually likes this nonsense. :P
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Furthermore, it is somewhat realistic IMO, not so much because real militaries are so rigid but because it is a simple mechanic to represent the career ambitions of your leaders - in a real military, your LCDRs and LTCs are not content to remain at their rank for 20 years just because you as the player have decided that it would make your life easier, to use an extreme example.
IIRC that the US army uses this promotion points system (idk if they still do tbh). The whole point of which is to modify the difficulty of getting promotions based on demand. If there aren't enough sergeants for example, the required promotion points for corporals/specialists to get to sergeant goes up and vice versa. This results in many soldiers ending their military careers I imagine.
In aurora we don't use promotion points to this capacity so we can do something simpler and leverage the retirement mechanic instead. Officers who haven't been promoted in x-many years have a chance to retire which increases every year the longer they stay at the same rank. This means that your officer core will gravitate towards whatever structure you have organically and more realistically. You could make this less of a factor the higher up the command chain goes (or since we love micromanagement so much just use story character) so that generals leading armies aren't retiring because they are already at max rank and they want to go further beyond.
I'm not going to comment on the whole "challenge" aspect of officer (micro)management as clearly you enjoy it and I don't and there isn't anything to say besides that.
One thing to keep in mind is that you will not have neat ratios between ground force ranks especially for the lowest 2-3 ranks. When designing your OOB structure you have to account for various detachments - isolated garrison regiments, CON/GEO/XEN formations, STO battery commanders, and so on. Even at higher ranks you may have for example some independent Corps separated from the main Army or Theater HQs. IMO this makes the 4:1 ratio much more flexible and desirable for modeling a variety of rank structures, since you can have 4:1 formation command ratios which are not uncommon but equally well you can model 3:1 ratios and still have some extra commanders at most ranks who can be spun off for these more independent duties outside the main chain of command. With the 3:1 ranks I have always found it challenging to maintain a well-rounded OOB and also staff these more distributed commands without some rather convoluted structures.
I think there's been a misunderstanding here. No one here thinks that the 4:1 change is too flexible. I think we all agree that this is overall a good change, and so yeah the things you say here are accurate. The but the whole suggestion regarding "promote as needed" is an expansion of that which exemplifies all of the advantages you have correctly pointed out with the 4:1 change.
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Having an optional system that promote based on demand seem like something I would get behind. I also think that this is like most military actually work in real life as well. In the real world we obviously have allot more staff officers than what we do in Aurora, but that is beside the point.
I also would like a junior officer corp as well as a crew that you train. The junior offices would be assigned to ships based on the starting experience level of the ship, that way you could decide that some ships start with more officers than others for a higher basic experience level. You spend these crew pools differently and could set every ship class individual how many junior officer they will use.
I also would like crew to be more of an actual resource so we have drafting periods, that is crew will eventually be replaced and retire... Every time a military ship comes in for rest some percentage of the crew is replaced with new crew, lowering experience and fleet training to some degree. The more officers a ship have the more you will mitigate this drop in experience and fleet training.
The academy train crew and the officer corp, as crew and officer are retired you then need to maintain it. The pool is the crew and officers you have available AND who currently serve on your ships. This would make crew a more valuable resource, especially highly skilled and trained ones. You also can have policies such as service time that impact the retirement rate but also impact the cost in wealth to maintain it. The cost increase probably should be a bit more than linear, but in a crisis you might raise the service time and in peace time you lower it to save costs, the same with training level of the officer corps.
Commercial ships probably should only use conscripted crews in this model and be exempted from the military crew and officer corp model. No need to know when these crew retire or are replaced.
Some problems that I have, especially in pre-TN games with low tech progression you build up such a vast crew pool it is NEVER ever going to be a problem, even at the highest training level. In my current campaign I have nearly 50000 crew and that is at level 5 training while I have nearly no military ships built yet as I play on rather slow tech and survey speeds. If my academies instead maintained a level or pool my crew would be maintained the same over time depending on the number of academies that I have.
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As it was part of the discussion: I was dreaming of control about officer promotion ratios since old Aurora. I would prefer 4:1 in general, but some of my games required a steep ranking throughput thanks to many sub ranks (e.g. starting with sub-lieutenant), while others were much more simple and could have gone with 7:1.(had a game with "7 divine generals" and one leader, Deus, modeled after Asura's Wrath's fleet. After that only lowly officers who didn't command much)
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Another feature in this vein of promotion based on need would could also be a toggle for a certain rank to not automatically be promoted into. I don't really have a need for 4 Grand Admirals in my OOB :)
Overall I would be keen for promotion as needed if it's not too complicated to adjust.
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Personally, I prefer the current rigid auto-promotion system as it gives the player an interesting challenge rather than simply bending to the player's will.
I personally find it less of a challenge and more of a nuisance, one which forces a player to adopt a command that they may not necessarily want to use, but this is a matter of perspective I suppose. :P
it is a simple mechanic to represent the career ambitions of your leaders - in a real military, your LCDRs and LTCs are not content to remain at their rank for 20 years just because you as the player have decided that it would make your life easier, to use an extreme example. The rigidity itself is not necessarily realistic but as a force to push upward mobility even if the player would prefer otherwise I think it works quite well for gameplay - modeling political pressures very simply without requiring a whole new political minigame mechanic is good design IMO.
I believe this is what the optional political reliability bonus is intended to represent, at least in part - all factors, excluding skill/bonuses, that have no tangible effect on an officer's command that can still get them promoted to a higher rank.
IMO this makes the 4:1 ratio much more flexible and desirable for modeling a variety of rank structures, since you can have 4:1 formation command ratios which are not uncommon but equally well you can model 3:1 ratios and still have some extra commanders at most ranks who can be spun off for these more independent duties outside the main chain of command. With the 3:1 ranks I have always found it challenging to maintain a well-rounded OOB and also staff these more distributed commands without some rather convoluted structures.
I don't personally see how having to abide by a certain officer ratio is more flexible or desirable than officers automatically being promoted and assigned on an as-needed basis, which would quite literally accommodate any and all rank structures a player desires. If they have several formations requiring a certain higher rank, then good officers from the lower rank are promoted and assigned to fill the empty ranks. Realistically, they would find a competent and promising brigadier general and then promote them. Now, if a player wants to use the 4:1 ratio for whatever reason, that's fine, but they could still easily do so under a "promotions as officers are needed" model. The only difference is that promoting as needed, at the very least, seems infinitely more flexible to all players' needs and desires and, in my opinion, seems more logical - both in terms of reasonability, and, more importantly, fun.
I will also note in passing that we do have the option to promote officers manually, which is additional micromanagement but is an option nevertheless. In this case you can probably just promote from the top of the rank list once or twice a year to cut down on how much checking-up you need to do.
I would argue it is unnecessary micromanagement, and officers promoted this way are oftentimes not replaced upon perishing. If I have a pool of 400 majors, 100 colonels, 25 brigadier generals, but I need a total of 150 colonels and 50 brigadier generals, assuming 4:1 and 10 officers a year for one academy, I'm going to have to wait 40 years before the ratio naturally meets my army structure. This means that, for 40 years, I would have to monitor and manually promote officers in order to maintain the desired ranks of officers.
Another feature in this vein of promotion based on need would could also be a toggle for a certain rank to not automatically be promoted into. I don't really have a need for 4 Grand Admirals in my OOB
Well, if you only have 1 assignment available to the Grand Admiral rank, then an "assign as needed" model would only promote one person to Grand Admiral and promote no one else to the role, as there will be no further available assignments.
This system would completely minimize "officer waste" where you get too many officers of any rank above the lowest. At worst, you'd have too few of the lowest rank as they're constantly being picked for higher ranks, though this could be prevented by requiring a minimum time in rank or something similar. For example, a new major would have to remain a major for X years before they're eligible for promotion to colonel, then X years before they're eligible for promotion to brigadier general, then X years before they're eligible for major general, and so on.