Officers

Officers are an important element of GT:TCW. They fulfil the critical role of commanding units, impacting both unit effectiveness and behaviour. A good commander can be the difference between a solid line and a routing mess.

The game offers a selection of 1815 historical officers, both of major and minor historical importance, and augments this further with randomly generated officers. Many of the historical officers have colourised pictures, though not all.

## Officer Attributes

Attributes indicate the skills and qualities of an officer. In-game they are shown through the use of stars. Fame and experience are two stats in which every officer can have 0-5 stars, but for the other four attributes they are limited to predetermined maximum values. Most officers will have one or two stats they perform better in, making them suitable for different commands and purposes.

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### Fame

Fame is gained and lost independently, unlike the other commander attributes which depend on the officer's experience to rise or lower.

Fame is gained and lost by the following actions:

* Officer promotion
* Appointment below the officer's rank
* Combat performance
* Victor of the first major battle
* Invader of the North winning general
* Lieutenant General position

Fame affects a variety of aspects:

* Morale & fighting spirit
* Happiness of veteran units
* Likelihood of feuds
* State support gain of political appointees

### Experience

Experience is very important for officers to help them realise their full potential. All officers have predetermined limits to their initiative, leadership, administration and cunning, but these limits are only reached at 100 experience. A commander with 0 experience operates at 50% of his maximum stats, making him markedly less efficient. This penalty decreases linearly as his experience increases.

Officers will often start a campaign with some level of experience, based on the nation's military experience, their traits and a predetermined maximum starting experience value for each officer.

Experience is gained by the following actions:

* **+0.015** exp per casualty inflicted by units they command
	+ this is reduced by 75% per hierarchy level between the commander and the unit, e.g. a division commander will only get 25% of the exp from his subordinate units.
* **+10** exp for being appointed below their nominal rank, per rank difference
* A yearly gain of **+20** exp while appointed, limited by military experience

Experience is lost by the following actions:

* **-25 exp** per rank increase, see promotion for more information

## Officer Traits

### Rank Trait

Every officer has a trait showing the symbol of his rank. The exact symbol will depend on the rank of the officer in question and the nation he is serving.

### Veteran Trait

The veteran trait indicates that the officer in question has experience dating from pre civil war conflicts. This increases the potential starting experience for that officer at the beginning of a new campaign, but it does increase his starting experience beyond the specified value in the commanders.txt file.

### Profession Trait

#### West Point Graduate

Officers with this trait can be freely appointed to command any unit, irregardless of home state. This trait is always accompanied by a branch trait indicating the branch of arms they are trained in.

#### Politically Assigned

Officers with this trait are restricted to leading brigades or batteries hailing from their home state, though they can freely be appointed to the higher HQ positions.

#### Volunteer

Volunteer officers will often have lower attributes than their professionally trained colleagues, but are less prone to feuding. Officers with this trait are restricted to leading brigades or batteries hailing from their home state, though they can freely be appointed to the higher HQ positions.

### Branch of Arms Trait

    The branch of arms traits are unique to officers that have the West Point Graduate trait. These traits indicate the branch of the army for which the officer was originally trained. While these officers can be freely appointed to the command of any unit type, they will give some slight bonuses when assigned to a combat unit of their own branch.

    **Branch bonuses:**

* 25% faster morale recovery
* 20% faster rate of fire - *Artillery*
* 10% better accuracy - *Artillery*
* 25% more engineering points - *Units with engineer perk*

## Officer Rank

*For more information see the officer ranks page.*

## Officer History

This is a chronological flavour text that gives some background information on the officer and has career both before and during the campaign.

## Officer Portrait

Many, but not all, historical officers have their own colourised portrait, making them easily recognisable. These portraits have a variety of different frames, but currently these frames do not have any function. They are just decorative.

## Officer Generation

To ensure enough officers remain available to both sides the game will generate new unique officers from time to time. These officers are assigned random attribute values ranging from 10 to 70 and are usually used to fill the commander positions in forts. These so called dummy commanders never have a portrait.

## Notes

* *Officer history is currently not fully functional. It will not correctly update with events that happened during the campaign.*
* *The experience decrease and associated attribute reductions from promotion are not shown until after the military screen has been closed. This is due to the way promotions are handled. This can give the wrongful impression of commanders losing stats for seemingly no reason.*