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Unit Command (UC) is not a governmental "Department" as such, but is a game mode with its own special set of panels, designed to allow you to control your region's military units. It has no "Minister". Although you can select individual units from the Defense Department, you can only issue orders to units through the UC and its complementary map pop-up menu. Selecting the UC mode button from the circle of department buttons will display the UC main panel on the bottom left of the screen and the Advanced Orders and Missile Deployment buttons in the center.
Any time that you double-click on a map hex that contains one or more of your units, or select one of your units from the map, the game will switch from its current Department display mode to the Unit Command panel. In this case an additional "Individual Rules of Engagement" button will appear along-side the other two.
Units that are selected from the map will appear in the Unit Command "Selected" list, highlighted in blue. If more than one unit is selected and displayed in the "Selected" list, then clicking one unit from the list will de-highlight the other units, making that remaining highlighted unit the only one subject to UC commands. Selecting a unit with the Ctrl key depressed will highlight that unit in addition to the others already highlighted. Pressing the "Esc" key or clicking on a different hex de-selects all units and clears the "Selected" list.
This left panel contains a list box and two rows of control buttons. The top row of four buttons allows you to select the class of units that are to be displayed in the lists below - All, Land, Air and Naval.
These buttons have the important side-effect of creating purple highlight circles on the game map that correspond to allied bases of the selected type. For instance if you press the button with the tank icon, then all friendly barracks on the map will be highlighted, but enemy and neutral ones will not.
If you perform a wide "rubber band" selection of units from the map that contain a mixture of unit types, of if your selection list contains units that are listed by not highlighted then pressing these buttons will highlight all units of that type on you list and assure that the order that you give applies to all selected/highlighted units in the list.
The list box contains four list headings - Selected, Deployed and Reserve Units and Battle Groups. These headings are mutually exclusive since only one list can be active at a time. The second row of buttons to the right of the panel changes according to which list is active and in general they do not appear at all unless at least one item from the active list is highlighted.
The "Selected Units" list is populated by selecting units from the map, by pressing the "Add to Selected Units" button from the "Deployed Units" list, or by selecting a Battle Group from the BG list. Once the SU list is populated and activated its six control buttons are displayed to its right (many of the command names are self-explanatory):
The "Deployed Units" list is populated by the four top "Service" buttons and lists all of your military units that are not in Reserve. Once the DU list is activated and one or more of its units are highlighted, its six control buttons are displayed to its right:
The "Reserve Units" list is populated by the four top class buttons and lists all of your military units that are not Deployed. This includes units that have been sent for Repair.
Once the RU list is activated then only the "Deploy All Units" button is displayed and active.
Once one or more of the Reserved units are highlighted, five new control buttons are displayed to the right:
The Battle Groups list contains the player-assigned names of the existing battle-groups. When the BG list is active and a battle-group is highlighted then three control buttons appear:
The Advanced Orders sub-panel allows you to issue any one of a list of standard orders to selected units. The orders list is in the left-hand list.
On the right side of the sub-panel are the Combined Force Details - Total number of units selected, total of personnel in selected units, combined strength of selected units, the average supply state of the units and their current orders. This side also has two control buttons - "Select Map Destination of Order" and "Formation Move". Formation move is when all of the selected units move relative to each other "in formation", rather than all of them moving to a common hex.
Advanced orders apply only to the selected units and generally consist of:
If the selected units are of mixed types, then only the orders that are common to all of the unit types are available.
Special unit type's (like Engineer) advanced order lists may vary. Some units have no attack ability, or cannot be loaded for air/sea transport or cannot be entrenched.
Some units can be split and merged - a transport unit with a strength of 120 may be capable of being split into two units, each with a strength of 60. Then each of the smaller 60-strength units might be merged with a larger 120-strength unit to form a larger 180-strength unit that is capable of transporting 1/2 more weight.
Right-clicking on a selected unit on the map will display a pop-up menu containing a sub-set of the Advanced Orders. A map click when units are selected implies a move order to that map hex.
Contains a new "Bombard" command for use by indirect fire units such as artillery. Whereas the "Attack" command usually causes the attacking unit to pursue and attack the target unit, "Bombard" causes an indirect-fire unit to move into range of the target, stop and then open fire on it.
The Missile Deployment sub-panel is used to display available missiles and their deployed launch platforms. The player can then load one or more missiles onto the launch platform of their choice. The Available Missiles list box on the left contains active list headers for the Land, Air, Sea, Submarine launch missile lists. Five control buttons to the right of the Available Missiles list box allow you to load selected missiles (payload) onto one of the selected platform units.
The right list has its own control buttons that allow you to unload a platform's payload. Again, each payload must be unloaded individually.
Here is an excellent tutorial on
Loading Missiles.
This sub-panel allows you to customize the ROE for selected units, and over-ride the Global ROEs specified at the Defense Minister level. The left half of the sub-panel contains a count of the number of units selected and their current orders. Below this is a row of five "Locks" buttons and at the bottom-left are another seven "Unit Roles" buttons. To the right are five "behavior" buttons for further fine control of unit behavior. For a complete description see: GC ROE
You can "lock-out" or prohibit:
Unit Roles are used to specify which missiles to Auto-Load onto a unit according to which types of targets a unit will be likely to attack. Targets types include land units, air units, sea units, submarine units and structures/fortifications. See Forum article: Loading Missiles.
A fifth button authorizes the unit to pack nuclear weapons. The sixth button authorizes auto-loading of missiles onto the unit according to its specified Role.
The behavior buttons are: