A review and critique of ground forces in Aurora v1.93
Having played several games involving armies and ground combat, it's worth sharing some thoughts about both how ground forces currently work in Aurora (as of version 1.93) and to consider what adjustments might profitably be made. I apologize in advance for any errors below; I'm confident that you'll find at least a few! Places where I know my knowledge is especially weak are marked with [check this].
Designing and fielding ground forces in Aurora tickles all my grognard bits and I'm not the only player to feel this way. I love the control now on tap, the generally excellent balance now served out, and the extreme customization now made possible. It's just great.
There, are, however, some parts of the new system that I will suggest are imperfect and consider ways to improve upon. Note for newbies: This is not a guide to ground forces, but (as indicated) a review and critique.
General:
Ground forces are built in the Economics interface and managed in the Ground Forces interface. This is a bit of a disconnect.
Proposal: Move production to the Ground forces interface, Order of Battle tab. If this is done, perhaps show factories on the left side and show current production on the right side when a specific formation element is not selected.
Ground forces do not automatically upgrade. Once built, they slowly become obsolescent. Given the time required to set up elements, research elements, and set up formations, I agree with other players in proposing that this is the single biggest issue with ground forces at present.
Proposal: Ground forces should automatically upgrade over time.
Relatedly, non-STO ground force maintenance is very low compared to fighters or STO units. Proposal: Maintenance for non-STO ground forces should be multiplied by between three and five.
The Unit Class tab:
Unit elements are designed here. For the most part, I believe the choices on hand to be quite well balanced, agreeing with others who have analyzed this previously. That said, there are some over-all winners and losers. We start off by noting that formation survivability and battle-winning power depends on the inclusion of elements with at least one of the following advantages: Large numbers, high dodge or fortification, heavy armour, high hitpoints, and/or suitability for battlefield conditions. This extensive list enables a great many types of elements to strut their stuff. Each can outperform against an enemy without enough suitable weapons, and each can be mown down by a foe tailored to defeat them.
My comments here:
1. Infantry genetic enhancement is more costly compared to its benefits than are most other options (fielding more men, up-armouring, using a different unit type). Space marines, however, might well consider getting cuddly with the geneticists.
2. Adding armour to infantry can be a major win. The bugbears of infantry are machine guns and bombardment and both are effectively hindered by armour. Adding HPs to infantry is comparatively less valuable except in shipboard combat.
3. The most efficient threat to armoured infantry ought to be autocannon. But this is not the case, and we here repeat a point previously made by others: autocannon are weak. Why are they weak? Their mix of penetration and damage is a imperfect match for most element types, they are a bit too big, and they are a bit too costly.
4. Heavy AA is disproportionately effective for its cost compared to medium AA, which in turn is more cost-effective than is light AA. Why? The combination of much greater anti-fighter damage and greater area of influence. I suggest that the former needs to change quite a bit in order to balance things out.
5. Bombardment is a bit of a mixed bag. It's not very lethal to most units for its size or cost, and what it kills effectively most other weapons also can kill just fine also, but bombardment does have the advantage of being able to fight from supporting and rear-echelon positions. I'll put in a case for Heavy (and long-range) Bombardment being most cost-effective in this category, because the combination of higher stats plus the ability to hit rear-echelon units is quite powerful.
Other comments on the unit class design tab:
1. It is not obvious that units may be given more than one special Capability. This is done by shift-clicking; this, while a Windows-standard action, is unusual for Aurora, in which most interfaces do not recognize multiple selections. Relatedly, I submit that capabilities increase cost too much when combined. Perhaps add the multipliers rather than cumulatively multiplying them?
2. More philosophically, I propose that many of the special Capabilities ought to be allowed as retraining and re-equipping options for existing units as well. Once we field our lovely space marines / legions of doom / fluffy ninja kitties, we ought to be able to prepare them for new glorious conquests / dreadful defeats instead of having to build new every time.
3. The four values shown on the top of the window, starting with Racial Armour Strength, should a) not be coloured like a user-editable value, and b) should indicate what technologies affect them.
4. Researching all of the desired unit elements for a full-fleshed army can get tedious, even the first time this has to be done. Consider the balance of gameplay value versus player time: How about we drop the unit element research requirement and make up the difference by raising the cost of high-end unit and weapon types and of capabilities?
5. As discovered by other players, it is not obvious how to adjust Headquarters Capability. Why? The dialog to do this is not close enough to the choice of Headquarters as a Component Type. Perhaps the Headquarters component type might, when selected, pop down a sub-option displaying Capability and enabling it to be modified?
Supplies:
We comment on supplies here, because here is where we first notice that there are (as described in the game design notes) two kinds of supply: Infantry-type and Light Vehicle type. The first is half the price, but can only supply within a formation. The second can supply any formation in its hierarchy. This distinction makes some sort of sense logically, but I'm not seeing it actually adding enough to gameplay to make up for the complexity. What I do in my own armies is a) include infantry-type supplies in every combat formation, b) add additional infantry-type supplies in independent rear-echelon formations, and c) transfer from these to thr fighting formations as they run short. This saves expense, saves on command span, and - most importantly - makes sure I keep tabs on supply availability.
I would prefer it if the game:
a) at least made mobile supplies less costly compared to infantry supplies and ideally removed the distinction altogether,
b) had units use their own supplies by preference, auto-replenishing from other sources if available,
c) allowed this to happen from any mobile supply on the battlefield, with hierarchy acting only as a preference, and most importantly,
d) showed rounds (or days) of supply remaining in the Order of Battle view.
The Fighter Design window:
We jump to fighter design here in order to discuss them in comparison to ground units. Briefly, I don't think fighters are good enough for the price. Why?
1. They are (very) expensive compared to ground units mounting equivalent anti-surface weaponry. Bombardment kills for less. AA guns are much less expensive and heavy AA does serious damage. Heavy bombardment hits everything fighters can.
2. The mix of penetration and damage provided by fighter pods is a non-ideal match for most ground units, although any lightly-armoured superheavy vehicles will suffer.
This said, if fighter speed is sufficiently effective against AA, that could change things substantially. At present, I lack any information on this point. [check this]
The Formations Templates tab:
Here is where Unit Classes form Elements within ground force Formations. A Formation is comprised of Elements, each consisting of a number of units of a defined Class.
We, as players, will have some sort of notion of the sort of army we want. The interface for making formations isn't terribly taxing (with a few caveats - see below). What we aren't really provided with by the game is a sense of how large to make Formations, and how to organize them.
Formation size is important. Transports carry a certain size of unit. Headquarters allow Commanders effective control up to a certain total formation size. Perhaps most importantly, and least well understood, is how formation size impacts battles. If I understand both the game design notes and my own battlefield experience correctly - and there's a "if" there - then, in every combat round, a formation may only attack up to one other formation (plus one more in the case of a breakthrough). This means at least two things: Firstly, a large formation can "overkill" a sufficiently smaller one, wasting shots. Secondly, the overrun rules massively favour large formations. Not only do they win the one-on-one fights the game uses, but a huge formation can break through the hole a routed tiny one leaves in the line.
I propose that both are unrealistic and unnecessary "gotchas" in game design. How about we try out the following changes?
1. A formation with remaining shots attacks other formations, repeating the same selection randomization as previously, until its shots are used up. Any formation may be attacked by any number of formations in this way, but both large and small formations get to use all of their eligible shots exactly once, and therefore have equal effectiveness.
2. Overrun occurrence is calculated entirely based on defending formation integrity and cohesion. The choice of formation to conduct the overrun is made based on the number of kills it made on the beaten defender. If this formation is less than two-thirds the size of the defender (possible in the event of greatly mis-matched formation sizes), then pick additional attacking formations, in descending order of the kills they made, until the defender's size is matched. If the formation is larger than the defender, then it may only overrun if it passes a check against defender size / attacker size. Why? You can't squeeze a Soviet Tank Army through a space of a single battalion - you need to clear a bigger gap than that.
How to organize formations?
Every army has a hierarchy. Armies command corps command divisions and so forth. Aurora clearly want us to set up a hierarchical arrangement, in which formations command other formations ... and, equally clearly, desires this to happen only within close limits. Let's list the arguments Aurora makes, pro and con:
In favour of hierarchy, Aurora:
1. allows formations to command other formations without obvious limits on nesting,
2. provides ground commanders with a variety of ground command ratings,
3. lets commanders of superior formations share their skills with subordinate formations, and
4. has a supply distributions system that works only within a hierarchy, and
5. lets you load a whole hierarchy at once into a transport (happy !)
Other arguments pro may occur to you.
Against hierarchy (or, at least, against deeply-nested hierarchy):
1. HQs get expensive (and large) when asked to command a sufficiently large unit size. This is multiplied if you want any redundancy or armour, and it's terribly easy to kill a single unarmoured HQ. Worse, Aurora [check this!] requires a sufficiently large HQ *at every level of the hierarchy*. If you have a corps of 330,000 commanding divisions of 100,000 commanding brigades of 30,000, then all of these need HQs with (at least) that command size in order for commanders to avoid penalties. This means, if you have one corps commanding three divisions commanding nine brigades, you have to supply a total of 330k + 3*100k + 9*30k = 900k worth of HQ capacity. Multiplied by any redundancy, this - to repeat ourselves - gets expensive. [again, check this]
2. Commanders only share 1/4th of their skills with units in any immediately subordinate formation. I do not know what happens to deeply nested formations; do subordinates of subordinate formations also get the 1/4th bonus? Aurora poses you with a difficult and - so I propose - unfair choice: Do you take that hit, or do you lump their whole command into one formation and risk "overkill" against possibly much smaller enemy formations? How do you make that choice when you have no idea how large a prospective enemy might be making their formations?
3. Commander command capacity bears no relation to their rank. Make a big HQ, and the game - reasonably - will set the commander rank higher. But do you have a commander of that rank, with sufficient capacity, and with sufficient skills to make it worth your while to find and appoint them? The game, in short, features commanders who want you to give them an (ideally, unified) formation tailored to them personally, rather than your idea of a well-organized army.
I am about to make some proposals. I will assume that Aurora actually DOES want nested hierarchies (or, at least, that it does not want to penalize them) and that evidence to the contrary should generate requests for reform. So here goes:
1. HQs in nested hierarchies need to be a lot cheaper. I don't have a clean way to accomplish this. One possible solution is to allow for two command values: capacity, and subordinate capacity. The first allows directly attached elements to be effectively commanded. The second allows command of any subordinate elements, however nested. The second is 1/10th the price of the first.
2. Ground leaders should be delivering more to their subordinate formations. We could adopt the powerful navy admin system, in which a fraction of the bonus is multiplied at every level, as long as superior ranks command inferior at every level. That would *strongly* encourage nesting!
3. Leader command capacity should be a function of rank. I'd go so far as to say that it should ONLY be a function of rank. Now, if this is done, then the game will become much more explicit about the recommended sizes of formations than it currently is. I favour this, especially given how combat works, but not all players will appreciate the loss of customizability. An ambitious proposal is to allow the player to specify the command size for each rank. If the player chooses a much higher size then normal, drop the maximum leader bonuses a bit. If much smaller, nudge the maximums up a notch or two.
This monograph is getting a bit long. I apologize. But it's good to have the whole system critiqued as a whole system, so let's wrap it up and head for...
The Order of Battle tab:
Here is where we organize and review the formations we build. In general, this interface looks good and works well, but I do have some (mostly minor) requests:
1a. Light bombardment should not require a supported formation in order to fire in battle. A bombardment element without an assigned supported formation should perhaps fire in support of the weakest or a random front-line formation in combat, with formations within the same hierarchy being preferred, but not required.
1b. I have not figured out how to un-assign a support relationship.
2. As with the Naval Organization listing of fleets, there is more information I would be glad if this interface showed for each formation. Lack of supply and command limit exceeded are the biggies here.
3. It would be great if there were a way for formations to be automatically brought up to strength, based on an existing formation template, by drawing units from a specified formation. In other words, I'm requesting replacement battalions.
4. At present, each formation has to have a Field Position manually set. It would be great if this were set for each formation template, leaving only adjustments for particular circumstances to be made later.
5. Planets should show their terrain, climate, temperature, and pressure, if not normal.
... And this completes this review. I'm sure I've left a bunch out, but this missive taps me out for now. I look forward to reading the on-going discussion of ground forces and combat, of which this is just a small part.
