First an overview over the problems with the current model of just using quality which this suggestion would fix:
- Long range Heavy Aircraft and short range Light Aircraft tactical formations mixing together, ruining everyones range.
- Hard attack and soft attack planes mixing together, preventing specialisation of formations.
- Infantry that is supposed to get a HV gun Light tank attached for hard target support getting your howitzer armed tank (or vise versa).
- Having medium tank formations with a mix of Assault Guns and HV-armed tanks.
- Wanting to give some extra powerful trucks to artillery/AT-gun formations, but keep normal infantry with the default ones for fuel and cost reasons.
Some of those problems can currently be worked around by abusing the quality system (for example setting all howitzer armed light tanks as High or Elite quality, while setting HV armed light tanks as Low or Normal quality), but that quickly spirals out of control (because now you need set all your infantry as High or Elite too to operate with howitzer tank support, meaning you also need to confine all your rpg and machineguns to those levels too if you want Grenadiers somewhere instead of just Assaults) limiting the usefulness of the quality system (because you get harshly limited in how many qualities you actually have available).
And things like mixed Assault Gun/anti-tank medium tank formations are straight up impossible.
So, to my suggestion, first up the picture:
- suggestion.png (2.35 MiB) Viewed 134 times
Explanation:
-I would reuse the Unit Administration window, it is already where we manage acceptable quality levels, and this would be a similar task.
-I have used for illustration purposes a Storm Infantry OHQ (I think I got the numbers right, not entirely sure tbh.).
-When setting up a OHQ, the settings displayed applied would be those of all of its sub-formations (so all 5 battalions if you raise a brigade), the ohq units may attempt to match up those settings proportionally, but are not as important if that doesn’t work perfectly.
-You have in sections the individual types of model. Infantry, Light Armor, Artillery for Storm Infantry, while a MG Infantry formation would have only Infantry and Machine Guns, and a Light Infantry formation just Infantry.
- In each section you have listed all models you have developed of that type (sorted by model line for clarity).
- For each model you can on the scrollbar define how many of the oob-desired amount shall at most be filled from this model. So in the example we can see that brigades of this ohq would at most ever contain 400 Line Troops III, and at most 300 Grunts.
- The checkbox is just a qol thing that is a quick way to forbid models as unchecked = 0. It is not required.
- When a new model is designed if it is part of a model line (Line Troops III is part of the Line Troops model line) it copies the setting of the latest of this model line (so here Line Troops IV would be set to 400/600). If it is a new model line it starts out with 100% allowed as default.
- When a shq tries to send reinforcements to a unit it only fills up this unit to the maximum allowed by this definition.
- This does not replace the quality system, it is an addition. A subformation must meet both the allowed quality level and have free numbers in this defined quantity to be sent as reinforcement.
Outstanding questions to be solved, for which I am unable to decide, see benefit in multiple options and would ask for feedback:
- Should the maximum amount defined be by model line instead of model? The example I provided here could receive 400 Line Troops III, and then fill up the remaining Infantry demand with line Troops II. That sounds on first glance like not what the player would intent (having some Grunts interspersed to train up model field testing), but on the other hand this might already be handled by the quality system and would be a problem if you have howitzer/HV gun tanks in the same model line that you want to intermix?
- Instead of the simple qol checkbox, having the full Allowed/Tolerated/Disallowed trifecta from quality settings might be a better solution as it also helps define what should happen if models exceed their maximum allowed number (because the player decreased it) (send excess always back to SHQ or only if there are replacements available). I am unsure how important that would be, or if that would just be muddying the UI.