Commands & Command Structure

A Command is the organisational layer between your cabinet and your battlefield. It is where the Secretary of Defense stops being the person who moves every division personally and starts being the person who appoints the people who do.

This is the most administrative page in this category, and the one that decides whether your war is run by one overworked minister or by a functioning general staff.

Why Commands exist#

Without Commands, the defence seat holder does everything: recruits, assigns, posts, declares. That works for one small war and collapses for anything larger.

A Command lets you delegate. You build the structure; you appoint a Commanding General to run it; they post their generals to fronts and name Theater Commanders; those TCs run the actual fighting. Each layer has real authority the layer above genuinely gives up.

The full chain:

Secretary of Defense
  builds Commands, commissions generals, assigns units
        ↓
Commanding General  (one per Command)
  posts the Command's generals to conflicts
  designates a Theater Commander for each front
        ↓
Theater Commander  (one per conflict)
  declares and withdraws offensives at that front

Building a Command#

Defence office → Commands tab → Create command.

A Command has:

The three types#

All twelve postures are currently valid for every type: the type is about what the Command is for, not what it is allowed to do.

The twelve postures#

Defensive · Deterrence · Expeditionary · Counterinsurgency · Invasion Prep · Occupation · Sea Control · Sea Denial · Air Defense · Strategic Strike · Rapid Response · Training / Reserve

Each carries stated trade-offs on the panel: Expeditionary buys deployment speed and overseas sustainment at a higher supply cost; Rapid Response buys reaction speed at the cost of sustainment depth; Training/Reserve recovers readiness but is not deployable.

⚠️ Command posture is not the same thing as unit posture. A unit sits on Garrison / Standard / Forward-Deployed / High Alert (see Units). A Command holds one of the twelve above. They are separate settings on separate objects.

The nineteen strategic regions#

Regions are the world's coverage grid: the map your Commands are responsible for. There are 19, grouped into macro theatres:

Each region carries terrain, infrastructure, port and airbase capacity, strategic value, logistics difficulty, and a live threat reading. Regions are typed land, naval, or mixed: assigning a sea region to a Command with no naval structure is flagged as weak coverage.

A region should be covered by exactly one Command. The builder warns you when a region is already assigned to another Command, and the coverage view flags two problems:

• Uncovered: no Command is responsible for it.
• Overlapping: two Commands of the same type both claim it, which is a genuine role conflict rather than useful redundancy.

Region cap: 3 per Command. The builder also warns past 4 assigned regions and suggests a Logistics command for multi-region overseas responsibility.

Capacity and effectiveness#

Every Command has a force capacity and an effectiveness rating.

Capacity is set when the Command is created and grows with the number of regions it covers. Each unit assigned to the Command consumes capacity in proportion to its weight: a Carrier Strike Group eats far more of a Command's capacity than a Frigate Squadron.

Effectiveness starts from the Command's base rating and is reduced by:

• No commander: a flat 10% penalty. A Command with nobody leading it is materially worse than one with even a weak general.
• Over capacity: a growing penalty the further past capacity you stack units. Overloading a Command is not free.

The panel gives you an itemised breakdown (base rating, then each penalty with its cost) so you can see exactly where a low rating comes from. Effectiveness never falls below a floor, and the interface colours it green above 82 and amber above 70.

The practical reading: more Commands with reasonable loads beat one giant Command holding everything. Capacity is per-Command, so splitting your army across a sensible structure avoids the over-capacity penalty entirely.

Commanding Generals#

Every Command has one Commanding General, chosen from its own commanders. If you do not pick one at creation, the first commander you selected takes the role by default.

The CG gets their own page at /country/<code>/general/commands, reachable by a "Manage your command →" link on their profile's Military tab. The link only appears for actual CGs.

On that page the CG can:

• Post any of their Command's generals to a live conflict. This is what deploys forces: the units assigned to a general follow them to the posting.
• Un-post a general, which pulls their entire force back to reserve.
• Designate one general as Theater Commander of a conflict.

What they cannot do is pick which units a general has. That is derived: a general's force is exactly the set of units the Secretary of Defense assigned to them, and the CG's page shows it read-only.

This is a deliberate split of powers. The Secretary of Defense decides what forces exist and who holds them. The Commanding General decides where those forces go.

Note that a CG edits only their own Command's postings. Every Command in the country writes into one shared assignment list, and the server merges each CG's submission back into it, so two CGs working simultaneously cannot wipe each other's postings.

Theater Commanders#

One general per conflict may be designated Theater Commander. Only one: the server refuses a second.

A TC gets two things:

1. A front-wide command bonus. A Theater Commander's own training carries, at a fraction of its strength, to every friendly unit at that front, not just the ones they personally lead. The fraction is deliberate: a single outstanding TC can never substitute for putting good generals on the units themselves. Being in charge is worth less than being present.

2. Exclusive authority over offensives at that front.

That second point is the one that catches people out.

⚠️ Designating a Theater Commander locks the Secretary of Defense out of that conflict. Until a TC exists, the defence seat holder may declare and withdraw offensives there. The moment one is named, only the TC can: the Secretary has delegated the front and cannot act over their head. Admins retain an override; nobody else does.

If a TC is dismissed, the front is vacated rather than orphaned: nobody is auto-promoted, and authority falls back to the defence seat holder. The Secretary has quietly taken the job back and should appoint a successor.

A TC also earns XP for battles at their front even when they personally led no units in them, at half what a general leading one average formation there would have earned. See Generals.

Live region threat#

Region threat is not a static map. It is computed live, from your own country's point of view, and two players looking at the same region can legitimately see different numbers.

Threat rises from:

• Pending offensives at conflicts in that region.
• Recent battles, decaying over roughly 24 turns. Engagements where nobody made contact count for much less.
• Massed forces at a conflict there, higher still when both blocs have committed.

All of it is weighted by how involved you are. A conflict where you are the target reads far hotter than one between two other countries, which in turn reads hotter than one among your own allies. Proximity matters too: threat is amplified in your home region and its neighbours, and a share of it spills across borders into adjacent regions.

Bands: Low · Medium · Rising · High · Severe.

Any region with a live conflict reads at least Medium, even when the weighted heat would be lower: an active war is never reported as calm.

Regions with no live conflict and no recent fighting read Low. The world genuinely starts quiet; threat appears because something is happening, not because a designer decided that region is dangerous.

Assigning units#

Units are attached to generals, not directly to Commands, and they are attached by the Secretary of Defense from the office → Military → roster. Each unit card carries an "Assign to …" dropdown listing your commissioned generals.

A unit shows either "Assigned · " or "General Staff · unassigned". General Staff means no general, which means reserve, which means it cannot fight.

The rule that follows from this: a unit is at whatever front its general is posted to. Assign it to a general who is posted to the Manchurian Front and it is at the Manchurian Front. Un-post that general and it comes home. There is no separate deploy step, and no way to leave a unit at a front its general has left.

Putting it together#

A working structure looks roughly like this:

1. Commission several generals. They start accruing tenure points immediately.
2. Build two or three Commands with clear region responsibilities and no overlaps: say a Homeland Defense command over your own region, a Regional command over where you expect to fight, and a Logistics command if you intend to fight overseas.
3. Appoint a Commanding General to each, ideally one whose training fits the Command's job.
4. Assign units to generals, spreading the load so no Command sits over capacity.
5. When war comes, the relevant CG posts their generals to the conflict and names a Theater Commander.
6. The Theater Commander runs the fighting from the war room or the conflict page.

At that point the Secretary of Defense is doing what a defence minister should (raising forces and setting doctrine) while officers fight the war.

Practical guidance#

Always give a Command a commander. The flat 10% penalty for an empty Command is the cheapest mistake on this page to avoid.

Do not overload one Command. Over-capacity penalties scale. Two Commands at capacity beat one at double.

Cover your own home region first. An uncovered home region is the gap that will hurt.

Do not name a Theater Commander until you mean it. You are handing away your own ability to declare offensives there. Name one when you have a general who deserves the front and a player who will actually log in and run it.

Pick TCs for training, not rank. The front-wide bonus is drawn from the TC's trained traits. A Field Marshal with an untrained tree carries nothing to the front; a Major General with a deep, doctrine-boosted path carries real weight.

Watch threat before you commit. A region climbing from Low to Rising is telling you a conflict near you is heating up, usually before it becomes your problem.

Next#

• Fighting a Battle: what the Theater Commander actually does.
• Generals & the Officer Corps: who fills these roles.
• National Doctrine: what makes them better at it.