dis talks

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DIS
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You have a set of [companies] with with fairly simple statlines. [companies] represent pretty much any group of military personnel; you have infantry, armour, support, etc. Where they come from isn't relevant to the combat mechanics.

You assemble an army by dropping companies from your company list into sections on the army page (all this will be done by the player in their spreadsheet). Sections currently are [Scout], [Picket*], [Vanguard], [Main], [Flank], [Reserve], [Support], [CCC]. On the army page the player will also have a few dials to adjust; things like a [Conservative-Aggressive] axis, and a [Reckless-Caution]** axis.

Once they're set up armies are moved about the region based map ala Sysnes2. When two armies encounter each other the following stages occur programmatically.

A Theatre of War
Information Check A: Each army reviews the information it has on the other to give P(victory)
Resolve Check A: Based on the P(victory) and the dial settings the armies will choose to engage or not.
Scouting Engagements: Companies are randomly selected from the Scout and Picket sections and have engagements (see below). Success will update the winners information by a lot and the losers by a little.
Information Check B: updated by scouting
Resolve Check B
Main Engagements: An aggressor is selected for an engagement with P based on the dial settings
A Company is randomly selected from the aggressor side from the Van (high P) and Main (lower P) and from the defender side from the Main (high P), Flank (Medium P), Van (low P), Support (low P), Reserve (v low P) and [CCC] (v low P) and they have an engagement. Various company abilities, dial settings, and terrain conditions can affect these P. Companies will die and be captured as this is going on.
Aggressor and defenders are selected until all units in Van and Main have engaged at least once.
Information Check C: updated by new combat strength
Resolve Check C: Armies can choose to bring in their reserves or disengage
Reserve Engagements: An aggressor is selected for an engagement with P based on the dial settings
A Company is randomly selected from the aggressor side from the Reserve and from the defender side from the Main (high P), Flank (Medium P), Van (low P), Support (low P), Reserve (v low P) and [CCC] (v low P) and they have an engagement. Various company abilities, dial settings, and terrain conditions can affect these P.
Aggressor and defenders are selected until all units in Reserve have engaged at least once.
The loser will disengage leaving the victor in control of the region.

Two or more allied armies on one side will be virtually merged into one army for the purposes of a combat, with a 'co-ordination' negative buff.
Three or more armies all opposed will fight in a randomly determined order, so players choosing to do so is a massive risk to prevent dicking about.

An engagement
Two companies are some number of distance units apart.
They each make an information check based on their sensor and the overall army information.
They each then make a resolve check based on that information and their dial settings. If one retreats go to 16
Support abilities from units in their army and global support (like satellites) activate.
The companies abilities activate (some are terrain specific).
IF they are in range of each other they fire their most effective weapons that are in range.
Physical Damage is calculated
A company that has taken sufficient physical damage is disabled and captured.
Morale Damage is calculated
A company that has taken sufficient morale damage breaks (go to 17).
IF A is not in range of B it will move towards A based on their speed and the terrain
IF B is not in range of A it will move towards A based on their speed and the terrain
IF A didn't move AND B is at less than its range it may move backwards depending on projected damage done/damage received
IF B didn't move AND A is at less than its range it may move backwards damage done/damage received
Go to 1
If one retreats the other gets a number of free shots based on their respective speed and ranges
If one breaks it takes damage automatically and has a chance to be captured based on their respective speed and ranges.

All this is dumped into an event log for those who care about such stuff to obsess over, but the intent is that a complex event can be generated with very little player micromanagement. Dumping strict simulation in favour of operational efficiency that tries to 'feel' like a battle. I hopefully will just have to select two armies to get a result.
Naval battles happen much the same with vessels replacing companies
Air forces are part of armies and fleets - being a company with special abilities on when and how they can be engaged.

*To save on word space 'picket' is defensive scouting.
**Reckless-Caution being how 'unknowns' are treated.

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DUX
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I would figure you'd know I wasn't much good at the systems end of things by now. :p

It looks fine enough to me in theory and seems to be as good an approximation of the player-decision making process as one is likely to get. My one concern in theory is treating air as a subcomponent of armies and navies, but in actual practice (and the setting in question) that would be true and accurate enough until the equivalent of the very late game, and things like strategic units can likely be finagled in by just setting their engagement conditions right. In other words, it looks good to me, but I'm no expert.

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DIS
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Psh there is a difference between breaking down a system to its min-maxs and asking someone how it feels.

I'm perfectly prepared to throw simulationism out the window to
1. Make a system that feels right whilst having a minimum of player micromanagement
2. Operational simplicity on the Mod's side

An alternative way to do Airforces is to have a two-layer combat system.
1. Airforces fight air superiority
2. Ground forces fight, receive bonuses/maluses based on the outcome of Air Superiority.

(Or three layer)
1. Satellite actions
2. Airforces fight, receive bonuses/maluses based on the outcome of 1
3. Ground forces fight, receive bonus/maluses based on the outcome of 1 + 2

The problem with that is it will be confusion if the ground forces can contest more than one region per update round, and players wanting to put all sorts of conditions in their orders (do X if the aircraft win, Y if they lose).

It might also be a bit more difficult to model since an airforce will easily cover more than one region, might have to be abstracted on an entirely different plane (puns!).


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DUX
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I suppose my quibble mostly arises from the modern imbalance in war. Generally speaking, since about the Gulf War on, it has been the trend that ground units fix the enemy in position and air units kill them, as compared to before, when the reverse was more the case. (One could argue the trend started with smart munitions and ATGMs and so began earlier but ammunition expenditure was going to be a problem in any big sustained conventional war, e.g., WWIII.) Obviously depending on the kind of war in question, this may or may not work fully (or achieve the desired political aims) but it has been the trend. The argument could be made that with near-to-far future tech, aircraft will not be so dominant as they are now, depending on the kinds of developments that are made, but I'll set that aside for now.

On the one hand, a SMAC-like setting will have to generate the infrastructure for advanced aerospace vehicles ex nihilo, so air will not be an initial priority sans maybe some token scouting units (akin to but much more highly developed than, say, WWI; unlike SMAC's Unity Chopper, small tactical/theater drones should at least be fairly simple to make and ubiquitous). On the other, the level of technological development means massed formations of dumb weaponry can be skipped, so one would see doctrine evolve more or less directly from recon to all the modern types of aerial mission (air supremacy/superiority, aerial interdiction, strategic bombing, close air support, etc) and modern types of air war logic (AirLand Battle, AirSea Battle, etc).

Without getting too into the nitty-gritty of realism, it seems like the two-layer or three-layer system (depending on how important space assets are) will be would be optimal, with the impacts getting progressively larger as the game develops such that the "upper layers" come to dominate. That way, one would see a transition from the ground to the air layer (and perhaps then space layer) in importance over time, while keeping all of them functional. So, if you intend to transition into space-based weapons platforms, transatmospheric craft, and so on three-layer. If it's going to be much more bounded, two-layer, maybe add the space later.

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DIS
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Also thinking about this: In my opinion the dominance of killing via airpower over the 20th century is in part due to economic size and isolation of the superpowers from their combat theatre.

The US is half a world away from the middle east and has no direct personal involvement in the maintenance of infrastructure vs keeping its own soldiers alive. Minimising destructiveness in iraq was always seen through the lens of reducing later iraqi anger rather than any direct concern.

In an Alpha-Centauri style colonisation set up the polities (certainly at first) are much more likely to be going to war to get physical things they want when diplomacy fails rather than more abstract aims. Plus the world is going to be much less robust due to its infrastructural and terraforming infancy. When you're seizing a peripheral region to get its unobtanium mines you need to be careful not to destroy said mines (they're expensive!) and not blow up the water pipeline that supplies half a continent. Or if you attack the only region that produces widgets(tm) in an indiscriminate fashion, everyone else on the planet that needs widgets(tm) is going to be annoyed with you.

Such precision will create a greater emphasis on ground forces being the final application of force rather than airpower. Airpower then for air superiority and ground support rather than a strategic weapon in its own right.

The Satellite layer I'd plan to be quite important (as will the datasphere) due to a) its cool and b) having multiple avenues of threat will hopefully counter hegemony and steamrollers. If a polity becomes unbeatable in one sphere (i.e. rushing to build aerospace fighters) its rivals can retreat from that sphere and explore other options. Having F-3500's won't be much use if someone is dropping rocks on your airfields, having a mass driver on a moon won't be much help if someone has hacked your communications uplink and so on.

Also taking your advice about SysNES having a slow start the polities will be starting off with a lot of stuff: pre-fab factories and satellites etc. Where players land all their starting junk will define the game (and hopefully create annoyances and rivalries).

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DUX
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That's a reasonable explanation for a reduction in the strategic use of airpower. I was also thinking in the tactical sense though; something on the order of 40% of the munitions deployed in the Gulf War were dumb bombs dropped by B-52s on massed Iraqi Army formations, accounting for a large percentage of the kills inflicted on them. Responses in real life to mitigate this have revolved around force distribution in permissive air environments, or creating non-permissive environments (these in turn driving precision munitions and stealth/speed, respectively). Iraq had a nominally good 1970s-1980s level Warsaw Pact style air defense grid, but even a moderate tech advantage (and a less-than-Soviet obsession with AA) saw it get overrun. On the other hand, it was quantitatively and qualitatively vastly overmatched, so it's not really surprising to say that a technologically superior opponent with superior resources can run roughshod over somebody from the air.

Having multiple spheres as a sort of rock-paper-scissors mechanism also seems like an interesting system.