Commander – Wage War the Fun Way
If you, like me, enjoy playing on death worlds because we apparently hate ourselves… then you probably also hate the usual way of clearing biters: inching forward with turret creep and mountains of ammo. Effective? Sure. Fun? Not really.
Commander is here to fix that.
This mod lets you command your own army. Instead of personally exterminating every nest, you build a factory that fuels a war machine—and let soldiers do the fighting while you focus on logistics, production, and glorious conquest.
How It Works
Commander introduces base-centered army building with a hierarchical command structure.
The long-term vision is to let you field up to a brigade-sized force—roughly 400–700 commandable soldiers—organized around military bases and HQ buildings.
Army Structure
Squad
The squad is the core in this mod, they execute all the orders, form larger units and is the basic commandable unit. The plan is to program behavior into the squad to allow them to make decisions themselves during combat, but right now all they can decide themselves is to retreat. Squads are spawned from the platoon HQ.
Platoon HQ
This is the first building that allows you to set commands, and the only building that spawns/reinforces squads, the other HQ. Right now you set a platoon order and the whole platoon will execute that attack order, but I am evaluating how you can have more granular control of your squads if it makes sense, and isn't too micro heavy.
Spawns 3 squads of soldiers
Company HQ -- NOT IMPLEMENTED
Each company consists of 3 Platoons
And just as with the platoon HQ, I plan on implementing company orders, to set an order for all it's platoons
Battalion HQ -- NOT IMPLEMENTED
Same as the other but with 3 companies
Brigade HQ -- NOT IMPLEMENTED
Same as the oth... yeah you get it, 3 battalions
The highest command tier
Eventually I might add the ability to build several brigades, but it depends on how this scales, performance etc.
Command & Control
Platoons are commanded via the map:
Place a custom map tag containing the formations ID (platoon/company/battalion or brigade id)
There will spawn tags for the HQ buildings and the squads on the map, when you place a tag to create an order, you only use the numbers on the HQ building tag Ex: The platoon HQ tag might have a tag like "P1234", when you create a tag on the map, write only "1234" to set the order for that platoon to attack the position where you place the tag.
The unit will:
Move to the tagged location
Attack enemies in the area
Return to its base once the mission is complete
Simple orders, big results.
Squads, Losses & Reinforcements
Each squad has:
An operational threshold – determines whether it can be sent on a mission, default right now is set to at least 3 soldiers in the squad
A retreat threshold – causes the squad to disengage when losses are too high, default now is retreat at 2 soldiers left
Reinforcements work as follows:
HQ buildings store soldier tokens
Squads reinforce when they return to base after taking losses
If a squad is completely wiped out, a new squad is spawned at the HQ—provided enough soldier tokens are available
My idea with this mod is not to create an RTS where you micro all your soldiers, but rather you focus on strategy and command at scale. As your force grows you will be able to set commands on platoon, company, battalion and maybe even brigade level to reduce micro. I will try to program behavior into the AI as much as I can to allow them to make combat decisions themselves (like retreating), although I do not yet fully know what is possible to achieve and what is not, because of the limitations with the mod API.
Your factory doesn’t just make ammo anymore—it makes manpower.
Work in Progress
This mod is very much work in progress. Expect bugs, odd behavior, and unfinished systems.
If you try it out and:
encounter bugs
have balancing ideas
or just have suggestions to make it cooler
I’d genuinely love to hear from you ❤️
Oh and btw, I have only tested this with the normal Factorio game, I don't know how or if this will work with space age, as I don't have space age myself. But if you try it with space age, report any problems and I will try to make it work as much as possible, but prio is with just vanilla Factorio.