What's the trick to loading troops?

[Ridinroun]

Most recent troop loading on my ships I show troop space 18,600 and equip space 30,648. I used 11,868 troop and 17,667 equip and when I verify the load it shows I don't have room for 1430 troops and about 1576 in equip. I end up with fragmented units. Turning on "load troops only" doesn't help any. End up with same numbers.

[Numdydar]

That is because the number you call 'equipment space is the total capacity of the ship. So you are tying to load 30K of troop on a 30K ship. So with no slack space only about 80-90% of your troops load. So add a few more AKs or xAKs to the TF and you should be fine.

As a FYI, the game does not like trying to shoehorn stuff into a TF. So always try and and exceed what is needed by 20% or so.

[CT Grognard]

Remember that troops in Strat mode take up less space than troops in Combat mode. IIRC the modifier is 80 per cent, i.e if the load cost of a unit is say 1000 troops, actual space required is 1000/0.8 = 1250. Troops can be accommodated in cargo space, but use three times more space.

Let's say a xAK has a troop capacity of 285 and a cargo capacity of 2050. The largest troops only unit it can load in Strat mode will be 968, and in combat mode 774 (assuming absolutely no equipment OR supply is loaded).

[Banzan]

One ship can only load one unit. If it doesn't fit into one, it needs more, but the "left over" space isn't usable for the next unit.

As an example, you load 2 units with a troop-size of 2k into APs with a troop-cargo-space of 1900. You would need 4 of these APs with a troop-cargo-space of 7600 to load these 4000 troops alone and can't use the not needed 3600 space for another unit.

[crsutton]

Like they all said. Try to have about a extra third of capacity left over at least. For both troops and supplies.

[Toro12]

Extra space is also good just to bring along extra supplies. Handy in a battle.

[FeurerKrieg]

In the early turns you may find you are stretching your ships to the limits - especially in DBB-C scneario with the reduced ship capacities. . I pre-calculate what I need for all my TFs. Simple rule I use is for AKs I take the load number of the LCU and multiply by three, then divide that by .9. For APs (or tank/art on AKs), just use the straight load capacity and divide that by .9. So far it works well, and I often have the ship very full with little supplies. This is actually a good thing, since I'd rather have dedicated supply only AKs unloading right next to the troops, rather than hoping all the troops get out with their supplies on the first phase.

[msieving1]

I generally create a separate TF for each land unit that I want to load, then merge them as needed after the load is allocated. If you create one large TF and load multiple LCUs, the computer will probably not allocate the load in the most efficient way possible.

[pompack]

ORIGINAL: msieving1

I generally create a separate TF for each land unit that I want to load, then merge them as needed after the load is allocated. If you create one large TF and load multiple LCUs, the computer will probably not allocate the load in the most efficient way possible.

+1