Not necessarily everyone have a definite idea on how theirs should look, so this thread will be an information dump to give inspiration and templates to work with.
Generally, there are two extremes to dealing with ground combat:
Those who aren’t leaning too strongly on the latter will find this thread useful.
Public archive where you can read it, extremely well-detailed document that shows how 80’s soviet frontline formations were structured, with invidual elements and their equipments displayed.
There is no restriction how large or how small your formations should be. Do keep in mind that the smaller formations you include, the more micromanagement this will cause.
Here is what an army structured down to invidual squads can look like.
And here’s one with company as the smallest formation, with specialized units such as decontamination, construction and anti-air platoons being exceptions:
One convenient tip to managing ground force supplies is to put supplies (preferably “light vehicle” ones for less micromanagement) into their own formation and then piling them under a unit with HQ element, this cuts down on visual clutter, makes it easier to keep track of remaining supplies and you can then easily pick up supplies from one planet and transport them to another.
If you wish to recreate modern USMC, this PDF will help.
For more WW2-themed organizations, the Niehorster site has you covered in great detail for both Table of Organization and Equipment as well as for Orders Of Battle:
And a convenient website for making your own ground force organization charts, these are especially useful if you want to ‘build’ your forces from squad level up but in-game only want to use 5,000 or 25,000 ton formations as the smallest level:
I believe Nuclearslurpee is the one who introduce the Battle Staff Tools to us, thanks Nuclearslurpee!
Welcome. Still working on trying to get something like it to work with other icons as well so can have actual STO’s and also Naval. On backburner for now though…
I’ve tried to add that style of icons to the ground forces window but could never get it working properly with the Microsoft Treeview. At some point, I will look for a third party control that allows me to do it.
And to add for anyone new to Aurora - while you CAN model down to the squad… it’s micromanagement hell and ineffective in combat. Homeworld invasions are million+ dropton affairs. The regiment/brigade equivalent should really be your smallest unit. Think more in the direction of a Paradox Grand Strategy game where you direct divisions, corps, armies and army groups, not companies and battalions.
Nonsense. Recreating IRL motorized rifle company puts them just shy of 2000 tons, which is the current minimum viable size for a frontline unit. Small enough for a dropship design that’s still fast enough to permit high degree of survival when carrying out opposed landings.
I personally consider formations below 5,000 tons to be questionable mechanically, but only due to the difficulty of generating enough commanders for them all. Otherwise there’s no reason why 2,000-ton companies aren’t a reasonable approach, though.
People who model down to the platoon or squad size (except for boarding parties) are probably in for a rough go of things, though.
Same basic problem I’m having. I can get the icons to display correctly, individually, but trying to do a multi-level tree continues to stump me. It does not display in a classic “horiztontal”/“vertical” tree with nice sharp 90 degree lines and in neat rows and columns, but either with “everything extra” or “all wavy”.
Something is bound to work, and if it doesn’t I’ll sub-license the commercial-wear and get something to work for all.
The thing that gets in my head about this is the desire to have parallel alignment (since we can now adjust starting commander ages) between the Navy and Army officers.
I guess if it’s reasonable to not have navy officers below lieutenant commanders, then it becomes possible to not have any army officers below lieutenant colonels and you don’t need to go below battalions at the ground forces level. Does it make for some reasonable logic to have your fighters be piloted by lieutenant commanders, and the lowest officer for any ship, commanding or otherwise, being lieutenant commander and not lieutenant?
I tend to tick the No Officers box for fighters. I usually end up with hundreds of them in a given playthrough - officers that I would much rather not be strapped into what often amounts to a nuclear armed tin can coffin sent on mostly one way trips.
Actually, I guess OF-3 would be major, not lieutenant colonel. Those don’t normally command a battalion, but the game doesn’t really represent any sort of military assisting officers, so I guess it could be reasonable to suggest that they’d command a battalion of infantry used mostly to secure home planets and are unlikely to ever see conflict.
I guess if you don’t bother slapping commanders on your especially small ships at all and just leave them for “rated warship” sorta things, you could get away with having the lowest rank be commander (and hence lieutenant colonel for the army). However, I think that’d leave you in the awkward position of having flag officers be in command of any ship with something as banal as a main engineering.
So, I don’t think you can go up to commanders and lieutenant colonels as your lowest officer rank, without having some weirdness. Which means having majors lying around in need of something to do.
I think the way I’ve come to terms with this is that, at the end of the day, the primary purpose of planetary defense is the defense of STOs. Once the STOs are lost, losing the planet is an inevitability since there is nothing your ground population by themselves can do to apply attrition to your would-be conquerors. Those conquerors could mount an invasion… or not. Bombard on occasion, maybe. Really up to them what to do, but at that point the most you can do is merely make it more desirable on their end to simply blow you into oblivion or just ignore you completely as you have been completely rendered irrelevant.
So, in that regard, the primary purpose of ground forces is to defend STOs, since it is only with those that you actually provide meaningful deterrence to an invading force. In that regard, one does not need an entire planet-proportional army to defend the STOs of a planet; the scale of one’s defenses is based on STO quantity and defense doctrine. This makes it much more reasonable to have a “smaller” army, relatively speaking, for defense of an entire planet, because they aren’t defending the entire planet; that’s the STO’s job. Hence, it becomes possible to work at the OF-2 level and have companies as the smallest officer-managed component of your armies.
Obviously this doesn’t hold up at all when considering invading an NPR homeworld, which will have millions of ground forces, but in a campaign where you’re “playing all sides” so to speak, this sort of logic can work for justifying a universe where planets might be defended by a division or two rather than several corps each, depending on how many STOs you decided to place there (which depends of course on the purpose of defending that planet). Once you have that, it becomes far more reasonable to have a deeper order of battle that you have to maintain with a sufficient number of officers.
Tip for those who want to re-create vehicles that resembles conventional IFV’s and APC’s as close as possible in size and firepower:
Use “Medium Vehicle”, to create APC that’s close to something like BTR-80, use “Heavy crew-served Anti-personnel weapon” and add “Crew-served Anti-personnel weapon” as secondary.
Why autocannon for IFV? because it’s just slightly larger with better DMG. Anything more and the IFV will suddenly jump into Main Battle Tank weight class.
