Standard Military Hierarchy and Formations.

Hey Everyone! Brokenshakles here, and I want to talk to you all about Standard Military Formations. Why? Because blobs are un-epic, and we as strategy gamers deserve to use the tools that tacticians have been using on the battlefield for the last 5000 years in real life to organize our robot militaries!

Now you may be asking yourself, "Why should I care?". The answer is of course that a small organized force can be mightier than even the largest of swarming hordes, ask Bouddicca if you don't believe me. Military organization is the art of multiplying the power of your numbers as effectively as possible, and the topic deserves some deep consideration.

So lets move on to the basics! For reference, I am going to use some screen shots from a much older game called American Conquest. Its a Pike and Musket Era strategy game, and its the closest any game has ever come to successfully simulating grand historical battles outside of the Total War series.

Militaries, now and throughout history, have been formed with a complex organization to make them easier to manage and command. To this end, individual units within militaries are placed within a top-down Hierarchy known as the Order of Battle. Now, currently within PA, this organization is as follows: You have the Commander Unit, and then you have everything else. Units have no suborganization under the commander, and must each be dealt with individually. This is the most absolute extreme of suboptimal command structure possible. Essentially, the command structure of PA is almost completely flat and atomized.

This makes large numbers of units difficult to command and maneuver in a coherent and co-ordinated way, especially if the player has to split his attention over multiple fronts. This situation could be remedied quite simply by the addition of 4 levels of hierarchy to the current command structure. The first is the Squad. A squad consist of a small force of 20 units that would be the basic unit of command. Squads cannot engage in full formations, but can be ordered to skirmish. At the next level of organization, 5 squads could be combined together into a Centarius (Century, which was a unit of 100 men before Marius, and 80 men afterwards.)
After this, 5 Centuries can be combined into a Cohort, and 5 Cohorts in a full Legion. Note that each of these divisions should have a "Command Unit" associated with it, and selecting that unit should select all the units under its command. Note that command units are not commanders, and do not have any extra stats than a normal unit, their selection is just used as shorthand for the selection of the entire unit. This is basically how the command system in Scourge of War: Gettysburg worked, and it was simple to use and highly effective. Note the above presumes land based tech 1 units, tech 2 and special/large tech 1 units (like the flame tank and any sort of indirect combat unit) would be counted as more than 1 unit for the purposes of this organization. Note that this does not cover the orginization of the navies, air force, or space forces, as that is a subject for a followup post if anyone is interested.

In regular battle, the Centarius would be the basic unit of formation, and should be able to take up the following formations:

First off, we have the Line formation:


Of all military formations, the line is the most basic, and the most essential. It allows for a minimum number of units to cover a maximum amount of linear battle frontage. They are typically formed of no less than two and no more than four ranks of units, with the number of files determined by the number of units in the line formation. Lines are placed end-to-end in front of an enemy during an assault or defense, forming the Front of Battle. Note that lines can be tightly packed, or they can be formed loosely for skirmishing.

Second is the Block formation:
Pictured above, this formation is useful in disrupting and deforming enemy lines, but cannot effectively expose all of its firepower all at once.

Third is the Column formation:


The Column formation has 2 uses: Moving units over long distances in a relatively secure and expedient way, and piercing enemy lines. Note that line formations can be converted into a column by a simple 90 degree turn of the constituent units in either direction. If a Centaruis is moving a long distance and is not near an enemy, it should move in column.

Fourth is the Square formation:

This formation is useful when you are surrounded by enemy flankers, as it makes sure that the formation has no effective flank to assault, at the expense of the ability for the unit to direct all of its firepower in one direction.

This is just a basic idea of how organizing units in PA could work, and I would like to note I chose 16th-18th century line combat as a model for its similarity in circumstances to the way units in PA fight already.

Not entirely true, inferno are at the front of the pack, with ants behind, units with high health are pushed to the front, whiles units with low health, or long range follow behind them.

Not had a chance yet but does anyone know if naval formations work well? You know correct ship positions based on type of weapons and range?

Squishy, as I said before, the math works out better if you count an inferno as multiple units, it essentially is a siege engine.

I'm sorry, but the Commander is an AI from several thousand years in the future and you're comparing its ability to command and you're comparing it to the Civil War era...why? Formations are nice and all but no AI needs lieutenants and captains.

Nicely worded and formatted post!

Have you used the 'Draw Formation' tool yet? It could be used to create some of these, if a little labour intensively (squares wouldn't be easy).

Some interesting ideas here, and some issues to overcome. Control Groups might provide a better, more malleable/scaleable way of organising units, rather than creating 'Centurions'.

Eh, the draw formation tool takes too much time to use and is too cumbersome. Total war got it better. I was trying to keep with the Roman theme that the Uberent has going, so I based it on the historical Roman army post Marius. And the Officer units are just a way to select all the units under them, they don't do anything special beyond that, and its nice flavor wise.

I agree, it's nice if you have time but if you need to react quickly a few stock formations would be useful in the heat of a battle.

Would these officer units be actual in-game units? If so, what happens if one dies? Would we appoint/recruit them, Total War style? If so that might be distracting - TW has the benefit of a Risk-Style Campaign Map in which time is no object and we can devote more attention to strategy and logistics. PA is tactics-focussed.

On a side note, it'd be awesome if we could set up custom formations outside games to use in-game. It'd also be cool if we could control unit type placement in formations - do we want Grenadiers in the vanguard, or Infernos?

We're missing 'cavalry' units at the moment too (Lightly Armoured Tanks).
As the unit roster expands we might need formation controls more.

What I want right now are hotkeys for selecting bot armies and tank armies on-screen individually. Oh, and the ability to assign Factories to Control Groups so the units they produce join that group. Oh, and an infinite build-queue... And a pony. With sprinkles.

The Roman theme is only one faction you know.

eroticburrito, if an officer dies one of his subordinates would automatically take his place. An officer would be created at the time of unit creation, the officer would be chosen randomly from the bots assigned to create the unit. And you should be able to give build orders for entire formations from factories. Also, all the factions have a Roman theme to them, half of the factions have old Latin names.

Note that using this command structure would not be mandatory, you could ignore it completely and do things as they are done now, its just a layer of interface on top of individual unit commands. It is intended to be a stock unit and command structure, a bit more comprehensive than you desire erotic, but its meant to serve a larger audience. I'm hoping the modding tools will come with what will be needed to implement a proof of concept.

I like the idea of formations that keep, typically I'll set my blob up in a formation and then it'll re-blobify as soon as they move. Blobs, while impressive in their own right, are not half as cool as units moving in sync.

What I desire and what I realistically expect in the near future are two different things xD
If this were a mod I'd certainly give it a play to see if it worked for me
I hear the UI is pretty moddable.

Not having a go, just playing devil's advocate and asking questions here to run with the idea.

What happens when we have two half-depleted Squads/Centuries/Legions? Do they meld?

How do we decide what units are in Squads, if we want two Grendiers and three Doxen for instance?

How would having Squad Leaders/Centurions/Generals go beyond the UI? If it doesn't, is it necessary to have 'leaders', and could we not just have numbered squads?

Anything more than unit grouping would be silly. Why would there be generals and so forth? What's the point? From a lore perspective: Why does a super-advanced AI need help to control what are essentially lemmings with laser guns?

Formations? Fine.
Unit grouping? Sure.
Chain of command? No.

TA (or maybe it was TA Kingdoms) has units that "ranked up" due to kills. I could click any unit and see how many kills it had and the veteran units would get gold artwork. This kind of ranking up could substitute for the chain of command; non-veteran units could hover and guard veteran units or form default formations around them and attack as they do.

there is a hierarchy already ...
it is a factionleader commander and his robot minions or a subcommander and his minions, we don´t need it any more complex than that

yea thx, no .... i rather not have that in PA were hundreds of units die in seconds

I think everyone is getting hung up on the idea of the officer unit here.


I think there more important idea being conveyed, is the idea of auto-squads.




The officer unit could simply be the lead unit of said squad, and be exactly the same as every other unit. It is only used as a reference to select the entire formation.

Think total war, and the unit banners that hover above each formation. You can click those to select the squad, or you can click the squad itself. The banner just lets you know that there is one (or more) squads there.


The tiered unit hierarchy here seems to just be a method to quickly scale up the size of your formations.




I think an example of this working would be as follows.


You have a blob of units fresh from the factory. You bandbox half of them, and send them for a walk. The unit auto-squads and a little banner forms over them.
To quickly select all those units again, you click the banner.

Back to our factory. You bandbox the remaining units, send them somewhere else. They auto-squad, and now we have two separate squads that you can easily select by clicking on the banner.

This also applies if you stack the two squads on top of one another. Simply click the banner to select what you've pre-designated, instead of having to zoom in and try and pick out what you want.

Units could remain in separate squads, until you decide to join them with some unspecified UI function.

The hierarchy structure is just a simple way of differentiating the amount of units in each blob, for both friend and foe (example: the unit banner could change style with the # of units, or the size level reached in said formation)




I think this is a fantastic idea. Many props.

But due to the default assassination mode of gameplay, commanders rarely go into battle.
Not only that, they are incredibly slow so are not very useful in battle outside of the 10 minute mark.

What if any mobile unit could gain sub-commander status due to kill stats? No need to give them any buffs in HP or firepower, just give them some command ability in their area of influence to form auto formations.

They work. but like everything else with naval, it's slow and riddled with clipping issues.

Lucid, thank you, you are the first person get get the main thrust. But what people are also missing, is that this arrangement Groups Squads into higher levels of command as well as units into squads, so you can select an entire squad by selecting any unit in the squad, or you can select a leader unit that has multiple squads attached to it in order to give a command to them globally. The idea is that the leader units quickly allow you to choose the scope of how many squads/centuries/cohorts you want to select at once. At times you will want to break off a singe squad from a large force to deal with minor issues around your flank, or you will want to quickly select the entire army, all of which may not be visible on the point on the planet area closest to you.

Please note that this idea is intended towards the more hardcore end of players who want to enjoy a game that lasts all day on a massive planet with thousands of units.

Addendum: If we were to look at a troop formation at the century level, they would look like this on the ground in a four rank line formation:

A A A A A B B B B B C C C C C D D D D D E E E E E
A A A A A B B B B B C C C C C D D D D D E E E E E
A A A A A B B B B B C C C C C D D D D D E E E E E
1 A A A A 2 B B B B 3 C C C C 4 D D D D 5 E E E E
--------------------------- M --------- X

Key:
12345 - Squad Commanders
ABCDE - Squad Members
M - Centurion (Century Commander)
X - Color Bearer

(Dashes are because the BBCode murders whitespace.)

then wait for mods ... i don´t see any real need nor use for leader type units that couldn´t be managed by inteligent formations coding ...