New Concept For Troops and Fighters

[Atrocities]

I have this idea.

What I propose is a simple system for Troops. Right now we like to break them down into sub-catagories, Light Infantry, Medium Infantry, and Heavy Infantry. Light Armor, Medium Armor, Heavy Armor. Light Air Support, Medium Air Support, and Heavy Air Support.

Currently to design an Troop, in an unmodded game, one must select either small, medium, or large troop. Then manually add all the weapons and other components manually to creat ONE single unit type.

Mods however break the Troops into the above mentioned unit groups so that a player can have a semblence of true Infantry, Armor, and Air units.

What I propose is kids simple, based upon the model used in Rise Of Nations. Instead of designing a single infantry unit, you would design an Infantry Group. These groups would be unit sizes such as Squad, platoon, regiment, division, and say corp/army.

For the Infantry Group "squad" the playe would simply choose between many differant single infantry components. These components would not be weapons as they are now, but rather single troop images that have specific weapons abiities. The Riflemen Component would be a basic short range less damage component, the Heavy Machine Gunner would be more powerful, the missile/anti trooper would be another one. A communication specialist (multi tracking, ecm, etc), an engineer (a shield / armor ability, etc) and so on.

A player would simply choose their Groupings, which would be a specific KT size, and add the infantry components as desired. For say a Squad size Group or Unit, the KT size would be 12. The play could had 6 riflemen components at 2kt each, or mix an match them. 4 rifelmen and 2 bazooka men. The larger the Infantry Group, Platoon for instance, the more types and number of infantry components can be added.

In combat they would be shown as a single unit or as a group of say three (Kinda like Combat Group). Each individual group, be it a squad or platoon, or greater, would have its one distinct look. This way you know at a glace that you have a six 12 kt squads and 1 200kt regiment deployed.

The same thing can be done for mechinzed or armored vehicles, and air units.

As to fighters the concept would be about the same except that instead of squads it would be air unit types like wings, air wings, and such.

In Empires At War each X-wing Group has 12 x-wings. In this case to serve our purposes, an Wing Group could consist of 12 seperate fighter components. Attack Fighter Components, Defense Fighter Components, Support fighter components, and tactical fighter components, coupled with support craft to make up one wing group.

Plants would be defeneded by 1 group which could = 12 fighters (By current standards that would be one fighter with 12 guns.) By mixing and matching these wing groups, a player could add say 6 fighter components, 2 bomber components (They would basically be anti ship missiles) and 1 support craft that offers shielding, To Hit, and other bonuses.

I am working a model of this system for use in an SE IV mod that have been working on, but think that it would also work well for SE V.

Instead of individual fighter images in combat, the traditional fighter image would be replaced by say a small group of 3 fighters. Larger groupings would have more fighters or other distingishing markers to denote large groups of fighters within a single unit.

[AAshbery76]

On the Galactic level surely it would be corps,army sized units at the least.

[Atrocities]

Yes, and you would have dozens and dozens of armies spread over hundres of worlds. A simple way to get mass scaling without the bugginess of designing and constructing one troop at a time.

Instead of one unit, you would be designing one entire army or smaller depending upon your needs.

It would also aid in combat because there would be fewer objects to render assuming that an army sized unit would be several hundred or even thousands of kt in size and take a truly long time to build/construct. Thus a player wouldn't have dozens on each planet because of size limits and resource restrictions. Make them cost a lot of organics to maintain and you have a good working model for a simulated army as opposed to a single troop.

[Spectarofdeath]

I like the idea for the ground troops. Where you have small medium and large troops you could have Regiments, Divisions, Corps and Armies. Rather then having to build hundreds of small troops you just build several armies and then invade a world that only has a few divisions to oppose you. I think this would make more sense. Not to mention it would also allow you to simulate more accurate mixed arms. Not sure about fighters though. It does make more sense to have 12 fighters in a group rather then 1 fighter with 12 guns, but would this effect space combat? 1 fighter on screen represents 12 fighters? Your light carrier launches 120 fighter 120 * 12 = 1440 That might just be a little much. And I think the 120 is even a low. Last time I played I thought I was able to get 200 on my first light carrier.

Edit: Now that I think about it though, 12 fighters could be in the Heavy fighter, you could start the light with like 4. That would make that more realistic.

[President_Elect_Shang]

I think At means the scale would be shifted in accordance with the unit shift. So for fighters 1 unit on the screen might represent 12 fighters but the amount of space they take and the launch capability would be scaled up to count as 12 fighters too; instead of just the one you see on the screen. You follow what I mean?

[Atrocities]

PES - That is exactly correct.

And the nice thing as PVK mentioned, would be that instead of loading hundreds of invidual troops units onto a transport, which with the current UI is teadous at best, the transfer would be only a few clicks.

And the cargo capacity of any planet or ship would govern the size of the Army's, Squads, Platoons, etc that a player could have present.

As to the damage, that is a good question, but I think that components would be damamged much like they are now, thus reducing the overall effectiveness of the unit.

For example a Platoon Group (A single unit) with say 60 riflemen, 20 mortor men, 2 engineers, and 1 commanding officer components, go into battle and suffor damage, the overall battle efftiveness of the group would be determined by the amount of components, in this case rifelmen and such, that were damage.

Now scale that up, you drop an Army of 2000 onto a planet with its own defense army of 2000 and the battle it out one on one. In the end the best overall designed army would win, but suffor significant damage. The damage would represnt the attrition rate. So if they lost 800 troop components the combat effectiveness would be reduced but the army would still be a signifcant combat force.

The repairing of the Army Group is repaired, assuming it can be, would represent the rebuilding of that armys capablity.

Again the same thing can be done with fighters.

[PvK]

But does SE5 allow appropriate losses and costs from losses to larger units?

Example: If a unit represents a unit of 10,000 men and 1,000 vehicles, and it gets 30% damaged in combat... well that would mean on average 3,000 casualties and 300 vehicles knocked out. If that's one unit in SE5, doesn't it just magically repair at the repair rate of the sector, for zero cost? Seems like a flawed model for representing casualties and replacement costs.

But, at least it would solve the utterly horrible UI in SE5 for having to deal with many units...

PvK

[Kana]

Atrocities said:
These groups would be unit sizes such as Squad, platoon, regiment, division, and say corp/army.

I've already considered this for my SFB mod...or any other mod I might make...It just seems easier...

[PvK]

Actually that's not what I was saying. In SE4 it would suck for that reason too. I assume SE5 is better and tracks damage to each component, so as Atro says, you could have one 2000 kT unit with 2000 1-kT components (or maybe 20 100-kT components, or whatever) that would degrade with damage and could be made to only repair kind of slowly so damage would mean something.

Which would be kind of cool and solve the micro-management nightmare...

But, I think there would still be another issue with the damage, in that I assume there is no way to mod in a resource cost to repair damaged components (except for the maintenace cost of damaged components as you wait for them to repair). So the problem is that large-sized units would regenerate with no real cost in resources.

Two examples of where this would not make sense:

You attack with ten Divisions, and they all take about 80% damage. It only costs you time to repair them all up to full. Then in a second battle 8 of your ten Divisions are destroyed, and two unhurt. You have to reconstruct those divisions at major cost, and no repair time is involved. The same damage was inflicted, but for arbitrary reasons, the repair cost and time can be either huge or small. Some units representing major forces of thousands of men and their equipment could be practically wiped out and yet recover to full strength for no cost at all.

Even worse would be if you do this for fighters, which I assume in general would tend to be destroyed in combat. Some squadrons could be almost wiped out in combat, and then restored fully for free, even though the losses should represent nearly all of the fighters being blown to shreds.

PvK

[shinigami]

Ah..., now I see what you're saying, PVK, and you are quite right.

But, if we shift our thinking a little bit, the initial cost of a unit could also be considered laying out the unit's support network, personnel, supplies, replacement parts, and actual replacements. Maintenance costs (which would be scaled up too) maintain that network.

Sure it is unrealistic to think that an army that has been almost completely wiped out would bring enough stuff with it to replace all losses but if the repairs per turn numbers are low enough it would encourage a player to scrap the unit and build a new one, especially if he needs the cargo space for an effective combat unit.