Captains, Admirals, and the Naval Academy

[jorsonner]

I'm currently working through the Ian W. Toll series on the Pacific War in World War 2 and he devotes a lot of his time to biographing the various commanders and important characters throughout the whole theater. Not only are the big important people such as Nimitz, MacArthur, Halsey, Nagumo and Yamamoto, given biographies, but even less well known captains of various carriers, battleships, and cruisers. It got me thinking that in my fleet, I have no idea who is in charge of any ships or divisions for lore reasons. Therefore I have a few ideas about how to represent the officer corps of your navy in game. Firstly, in addition to the research box where you can put a percentage of your funds into research, you could also have a box where you can devote funds to a naval academy in your home zone. This would increase or decrease the crew quality of your ships overtime based on budget allotted. Every ship would have a captain named in the data screen whose skills affect crew quality. They could even have specializations like gunnery or night fighting based on the focus when they graduated from the naval academy. Divisions could be led by the highest decorated, most battle stars, officer in them and could be affected by a similar bonus. There could be random events associated with your officers, such as them not getting along with each other, retiring, graduating, acquiring new skills, wanting to change ships, being promoted to higher classes of ships, being distrustful of carriers, etc. Maybe when good officers retire, they can have ships named after them in the next ship designs based on their skills. Truly great admirals can have battleships, carriers, and bases named after them over time. Any feedback or addition to this is welcomed.

P.S. If this has been suggested before, good idea and I'm sorry for the double post.

Edit: Officers can also be upset about ships being put in reserve or mothballed

[dia]

I don't think it has been suggested before, but this seems like something best suited for expanded doctrinal choices, like sliders or checkboxes on how your navy handles its officer corps, enlisted training, pilot training, damage control training, etc. Modeling individual officers might be way over the scope of the game and the abilities of the developers. It also adds a huge micromanaging element that most of the playerbase does not want, especially for those who only playing higher level difficulties. The position the player represents in game is not deciding who will command the dozens or hundreds of individual ships in your fleet.
For the player, you're basically doubling the amount of management he/she has to do - one officer for each ship at minimum. For the devs, they would have to model ages, life expectancy, training, skill levels, specialized skills, relationships with other officers, other attributes, random events, etc. And the fact that divisions are currently completely random and only last one scenario adds to the issue. There are no fleets, squadrons, or taskforces in this game currently. Plus, the officer corp of a navy expands far beyond just combat ships. If you added officers, you would have to ignore the entire officer corp for the ships that are involved in fleet support, which is currently handled behind the scenes in game. Then there is shore duty officers. Another thing is how you would tie officers to individual ships while making them dynamic enough to move to different ships and have their own attributes. Remember, each ship class has it's own file, but individual ships are listed as entries in the save game file that call back to the class file. Not to mention, the game would have to keep a record for an officer's combat history and RtW/RtW2 has some of the worst record keeping of a strategy game I've ever seen.

Now I'm not saying it can't be done or can't be streamlined for the player to make it less micromanaging. It could be a great feature, if the dev team had more time and money.
Once we get taskforces though (and depending on how they are implemented), I can see a lot more merit to this if it were to be restricted to flag officers to command them. But we still have that same problem for the devs of modeling individuals and issues with micromanaging (again, this depends on how taskforces are implemented - which can range from the player being able create an OOB for an entire fleet down to the division level to a simple string system where individual ships are assigned a string (a player named "taskforce")that does nothing more than allowing the player to sort ships in an order that makes it easier to move them in bulk).

[jorsonner]

I've been thinking about this a little more thoroughly and I think dia is right about it causing a lot of micromanaging that some players wouldn't want. I think that a way to alleviate that would be best to come after there are persistent divisions. You can have your AI controlled divisions led by a Rear Admiral or other lower rank and they can have stats that affect things like the likelihood of a misunderstood order, spotting accuracy, reload speed etc. Officers can be injured if the conning tower is penetrated and their stats lost for the rest of the battle. The primary thrust of my earlier post was that I wanted to at least be able to put a name to the AI controlled divisions that affect the battle. These officers don't have to be persistent if that would be too much to micromanage and they can just be generated randomly like the divisions are now. I know this isn't really about ship design but I do feel like having names to put to divisions would add to the immersion of the rest of the game. Also, I'm waiting to see what the upcoming DLC is going to be before I update this idea again.

[gornik]

I love suggestion about Naval Academy as abstracted budget spending for overall crew level.

As for Officers, now the game is mostly about ships and techs, so it would be hard to implement here men without adding WITP-level micro, while automating this means incredible coding for invisible feature, but I may dream...  

I think that, if appeared in any way, Men should work different from other games: "Adm. Ironside: +10 gunfire -5 speed, Exp: 56% Award with Grand Cross with Sinking Ships? Y/N". In my dream, game auto-generate Captains to all ships as simple Names or Names with hidden traits. If they have traits, they should mostly be about ship's behavior in battle. Aggressive captain try to engage enemy, sometimes "misunderstanding" signals, cautious one drive to port in every uncertain situation, good navigator faster rejoin division after losing his place, lucky one may sail through minefield with no effect while unlucky lost one ship after another etc. Of course, they usually have little chance to proof themselves - as their main duty is to keep place in battleline. But after successful battle or after time those who have more "battle stars" and less ships lost in biography, are promoted to Rear Admirals, and every one got "reputation" visible - though sometimes incorrect (especially if there was long peacetime before).
To every country there is Staff table with vacancies - 5 BB, 5 CV, 3 BC,6 CL-CA 6 Destroyer, 3 Administrative (help with crew quality, hidden flaws, research etc), and 10 Reserve (another numbers possible). In battle Admirals are automatically assigned to said generated divisions in random order. Now their traits affected whole division, At DD flotilla, for example, cautious Admiral prefer to launch torpedoes from max distance regardless of their effectiveness, while aggressive one prefer to rush into enemy formation regardless of fire. So It would be better to change inappropriate people to more reliable, though it may be tough in states with "poor education". Every battle give chance, that true nature of admiral will be revealed. In small-size battle there is chance that one of Captains would be assigned to division as Commodore (and became candidate to promotion, if succeeded), also commodores fill extra vacations in super-large battles.  Every change in list cost 1 prestige, except 1 in a year, so you can't make "dream-staff" too fast and easy. After certain time Admiral is retired, maybe with some funny events (go politics to gain Navy more money, write apologetic/scandalous book). And of course every Captain should have info list with battles and actions he took place, and would be great to have ability to gain awards to them, maybe type nicknames for your favorites...  

Anyway, in battles I see many unusual things and if I don't look at files, I would swear, that Captains and Admirals are hidden somewhere in code. I just want to know the names of... some of them. (Yes, former captain of CL Pallada, who lost contact with fleet and steam right in the middle of German BB squadron, I mean you! )

[potrero]

A few weeks back I suggested adding a list of traits that a ship could potentially gain (or lose) to set it a cut above/below the rest of the fleet as a means to simulate personnel effects. Different traits could positively or negatively effect crew quality, accuracy, damage control, and mechanical reliability, and possibly trigger some good/bad random events.

I figure that could be a way to achieve the OP’s overall goal without adding excessive micromanagement or revamping too much of the code.

[seawolf]

This also brings in the idea of training ships, which were/are common ways of training a navies crews up