Here are some very tentative army rules for your commentary.
The only army units considered are regiments, DS/JS, and eventually Castles Brian. A regiment is nominally 144 vehicles or equivalent, though don't take this too literally(there are support elements, under-strength units, etc., etc., etc.). A regiment requires 9 small DropShips(and 3 JS) or 3 medium DropShips(and 1 JS) to carry it between systems. Additional lift capability will be used for logistics - as a rule of thumb, an additional 1/3 of the listed JS/DS strength will supply a force for a typical campaign.
Four regiment types exist:
- Garrison. Cost = $100m, combat power 1
- Vehicle. Cost = $300m, combat power 2
- Aero. Cost = $800m, combat power 2 (but can fight in space)
- Mech(when tech exists). Cost = $800m, combat power 3.
The obvious implication is that you'll want high-tech units for your spearhead, to economize on transit costs, but to replace them with garrison forces when the fighting calms down and you have the lift capacity available. (Lift capacity is the costly part - it's $4.2B to carry a regiment with current tech, or $2B with medium DS - but in principle your lift capacity should not be getting ground up by losses during invasion combat). And yes, combat power is just a simple add-them-all-up value - I want to keep this really simple, to avoid additional bogging down.
I drew up a hypothetical Great Power circa 2410 to get a sense of what their forces might look like. Out of a total 200 planets:
- 40 minor border worlds. 3 garrison, 1 vehicle, 1 aero each. (Power = 7)
- 10 important border worlds. 5 garrison, 2 vehicle, 3 aero each. (Power = 15)
- 40 important economic worlds. 3 garrison, 1 vehicle, 3 aero each. (Power = 11)
- 10 key worlds. 10 garrison, 5 vehicle, 5 aero each. (Power = 30)
- 100 backwater worlds. 1 garrison each. (Power = 1)
- 4 offensive fleets. 5 vehicle, 5 aero, 120 small DS, 40 JS each. (Power = 20)
TOTAL = 490 garrison, 170 vehicle, 260 aero, 480 small DS, 160 JS. Maintenance cost = $53.2B/turn.
Questions
- Is this balanced?
- Is this interesting?
- How freely should forces be able to move back and forth between Army and Navy?
- Should Army research budgets be a thing?
- Should Army budgets simply be equal to Navy budgets, or set separately? (Or should I merge both budgets together and let you split them up as you see fit?)