Customizing your Order of Battle
SEOW is very flexible and allows you to design and build your campaigns to high degrees of historical accuracy. One of the most immersive features is the Order of Battle naming system. In SEOW you can name your navies and armies however you like, so if you want to run a Chindit campaign on the Imphal map with all the right units present on the ground, you can. Here's how.
The SEOW database has a table called Navy_Units which contains textual and national descriptions for the Navies to be used. Here is the default listing:
Nation Navy Designation Alignment Country_ID Australia RAN Allied gb Britain RN Allied gb France FNF Allied fr Germany Kriegsmarine Axis null Russia VfSSSR Allied ru Finland FM Axis fi USA USN Allied us Japan IJN Axis ja Netherlands KM Allied du Italy RM Axis it New Zealand RNZN Allied rz Poland PMW Allied pl Romania Kriegsmarine_Ro Axis ro Hungary Kriegsmarine_Hu Axis hu Slovakia Kriegsmarine_Sk Axis sk
You can edit the "Navy Designation" fields to the names you like, keep the names around 30 characters or less in length. You can even add new nations to the list (but you will probably have to add icons to the MP for the new nation so that the map display works properly.
Army Names
The SEOW model for Army orders of battle is more flexible. For the ground war you can specify the organizational names to be used on both sides at what we call the "divisional" level, more accurately the regimental or battalion level. All these names are kept in the Army_Units table - there is a large set of default units, but you can edit this table as you see fit. Here are a few records from the table:
Country Division_Name Division_Type Alignment Country_ID Campaign_Sector Japan 1_Ichiseki_SNLF T Axis ja Midway Japan 23_Ninoseki_Marine V Axis ja Midway Australia 6_Infantry V Allied gb Cyrenaica Australia 1_Armoured T Allied gb Australia Australia 6_Independent T Allied gb New Guinea Australia 7_Infantry T Allied gb New Guinea Australia 8_Infantry V Allied gb Singapore Britain 7_Armoured T Allied gb Normandy Britain 50_Northumberland T Allied gb Normandy Germany 46_Infanterie V Axis null Crimea
The Division_Name field can be long, but try not to make it too long as you will encounter difficulties in on-screen display and maybe even in statistics counting. Less than 30 characters is usually a good rule of thumb. The Division_Type field tells SEOW what kinds of units belong in the division; the allowed types are "A" (artillery+flak), "T" (armour), "V" (infantry/vehicles), "E" (engineers). When initializing a template, SEOW will read the list of army divisions for the sector of interest, and then allocate each object type to the first corresponding division name. For example, if we were using the divisions lsit above to initialize a New Guinea campaign, the first Allied armoured unit would be allocated to a platoon of the Australian "6 Independent" division. Any underscores used in division names will be replaced by blanks in MP display. Note the Country_ID for Germany is "null", i.e. the 4 text characters n, u, l and l.
Each division in the Army_Units table expands to 64 platoons using a standard SEOW 4x4x4 rule. For example, the "1 Ichiseki Special Naval Landing Force" can contain at most 64 armoured platoons. These will look like "m/1 Ichiseki SNLF Co. n, Plt. p", where m,n,p each can take the values 1,2,3,4. You can add as many divisions as you like, but having more than you need is inefficient.
DCS Initialization Error: Insufficient Platoons Sometimes you may see this error when initializing a heavy template. Basically this means that the DCS is trying to allocate more platoons than your list of division names can cope with. For example, If your template includes 430 Axis flak/artillery platoons, you will need at least 430/64 + 1 = 8 different Axis "A" type division names in the Army_Units table for that Sector. It is your responsibility to ensure that there are sufficient names for the template you are using. Often this information is included in ruleset documentation.
