Nothing But The Stabby Stuff: Command And Communication
How army leadership structures work and what their purpose is
Introduction
So I’ve written more lately about the general details of actual combat, but one part that hasn’t received a deeper treatment is leadership, although I mentioned it a little bit in the previous combat design post. Leadership structures impact a lot of things like cohesion and morale as dicussed there, but they also achieve other goals and interact deeply with other parts of the simulation.
Command
So the first thing an army needs is command. Basically you need some way of providing command to each Unit in the Army. Units will require more or less command to operate properly depending on their size and other factors.
You’ll be able to assign “Orders” to units in the army screen. Orders are persistent but you can change them every turn if you want, potentially based on certain factors. So you might set up some units to flank, or in special cases dive the backline. Some might be one half of a hammer and anvil tactic. Mages and ranged units of course can get more orders on who to target.
Higher command allows for more detailed Orders and more effectiveness, layered on top of the “capability” of the unit to do various tasks. Cavalry are more effective flankers, well any unit is more effective based on their speed and such, but mounted units are a good example.
Command can be provided in a variety of ways. You can assign Characters, or specialized Units as leaders of a Unit. Magical options exist as well. Necromancers or construct controllers will have different command options than mundane military units.
As noted in previous posts there are benefits to training for Characters and Units providing Command. And higher command rations, dependent on cultural factors, can be beneficial. Macedonian and Roman armies had considerably fewer direct reports per low level leader.
Communication
Communication is the second key factor in military performance. You’ve got all the various basic and real life forms such as messengers, horns, flags, mirrors, and signals like flares or fires. Higher communication allows more adaptability in battle.
Basically it represents the ability of your core leadership cadre to know how things are going in places they can’t easily see or hear. In many cases because of low Communication commanders can’t provide Command to far away parts of the army. The leader may not know with much warning if a flank is successful or if it has failed.
So when your army is split into many moving parts you’ll often have to rely on the Command of the sub-leader in charge of a specific Unit or Formation if you lack the ability for sub-leaders and the leadership to have Communication.
Again like Command magical options can be quite powerful. Scrying, mind-links, necromantic or construct specific abilities, and innovations like mirrors or horns can provide levels of Communication. You’ll combine the Tool with the Training of the leadership. Experienced commanders and subcommanders will get better results from horn based communication than fresh leaders. This is simulating both experience in actual combat leadership and training like learning to handle more commands and/or interpret commands better.
Depending on the scale of a battle foot or mounted messengers can be more or less useful. Intelligent messengers also make up for in interaction what they lose in speed when calculating their value.
Highly developed societies will have complex or expensive systems such as a commander having multiple divination users who can scry in real time and other tools. High end magic will eventually outpace basic or technical options like runners or mirrors or horns or looking glasses on high positions but they will of course require a large logistics capacity and training capacity. Even horns and flags in advanced usage would have to be backed up by military academies.
Different options available will depend heavily on the structure of the society fielding the army. A magical society can’t just spin up training hornsmen out of the blue if their supply of crystals powering their specific method of scrying runs out or something. Similarly without magical infrastructure a society can’t just pivot to telepathy or magical sound transmission or w/e. As in other aspects of the game societal capacities are built up over long periods.
Connaissance And Reconnaissance
Finally the last crucial stat for armies is the ability to gather and process information. Battles in Axioms happen over several turns, in the sense that there is a system for the often ignored attempts by opposing leaders to force a battle in favorable conditions and to gather relevant information for when combat is joined. Command and Communication both factor into the pre-battle skirmishing and they combine with reconnaissance here to decide outcomes. Smaller battles will happen prior to major field fights and scouts and messeages will measure against each other.
As noted in previous diaries when two hostile forces are in the same province they don’t immediately get to a major field battle. Indeed in some cases where neither side has a large advantage from being on home turf or having high quality recon capabilities and/or when armies are small and maneuverable two forces might not connect with each other at all and that is even presuming one both sides *know* that they are both in the same province.
Generally this won’t come up for medium to large military forces in core territories. So a fast push to a capital to engage in a surprise attack is often not possible without extensive preparation and an appropriate army composition. If a large state has 20 provinces the core 4-5 will usually have lots of infrastructure that will prevent major surprise attacks. But two armies both on the fringes in borderlands can plausibly miss each other if they both have limited recon capability.
Intelligence networks, guard posts, roads, messenger infrastructure and other such things can create very high levels of recon power, and as these are generally greater in core territory and even are part of what define what *is* core territory that explains the situation noted above where sneak attacks are quite difficult if you want a meaningful force.
You can get some more info on these aspects in the raiding/skirmishing design post here:
Conclusion
Axioms is a game that greatly fleshes out non-military and military adjacent gameplay, but it also has a relatively unique take on combat. The goal is not only to have a well detailed simulation of strategic, operational, and tactical combat but to extend that level of detail and verisimilitude to all aspects of the game.
Most so called grand strategy games or other map painters and even many 4Xes really have no concept of intelligence on the military side or intrigue on the political side. Everything is known pretty well by all parties.
Units/armies are almost never hidden on the map in any way. And military conflict is handled by all knowing and all powerful hiveminds with perfect robot soldiers executing detailed player specific commands without fail.
In Axioms Of Dominion you must handle the creation and management of social and political stuctures and also deal with the effects your choices have, with lots of, in my opinion, interesting and meaningful tradeoffs. And your military are not just hive drones or roboslaves. Your troops and leaders have ideologies and personalities and opinions and they, and you, have limited knowledge of the state of the world.
This just makes everything tedious - players have limited energy, and the change from HOI3 to HOI4 reflects the need for abstraction