preassign factory output to armies

I your army consists of at least one t2 unit or higher, you can request a reinforcements to that army. Reinforcements are queued randomly at any free of production factory and continue until your requested units are built. For example if you have 4 factories, 3 of them are idle, 1 is producing something, then the idle ones start to produce your reinforcements. The bad part is you cant specificaly "link" a factory to your army, if you have a few factories close to your army, and another few in the other side of the map, they ALL produce units for your request (and units take some time to travel to your army). 

Oh, that's interesting. I haven't seen yet in the game how to request reinforcements. How do you do that specifically? I keep looking at the interface to try to figure these things out, but I haven't seen this one yet.

Just select an army with at least 1 t2 unit in it, press construct button in the bottom of UI and there you will have your ordinary unit building buttons, just press them and you will see +1 or +n in your armies UI. That is how reinforcements work, when a unit is build, the +1 or +n will dissapear and built unit will join your army automaticaly. 

Ok, thanks Orachin, I re-read your post and tried it out in a game and I see how that works now.

I still don't think that's the best way this can be done, and it certainly doesn't address my concerns.

I watched the podcast thing where Brad was gushing over how in this game, you play the army, not the unit or the control group, and about how awesome that was not to have to micromanage stuff.

With the system the way it is, I still have to micromanage the composition of my army. I have to select it, hit the build button, look at what units are still in the army, and then start adding things to get it back up to the order of battle that I want it to be at. This really should be automated.

In the regular US Army, there's a thing called the MTOE, which stands for Modified Table of Organization and Equipment. It's basically the cookie cutter document that defines what personnel, of what rank, what skills, and with what equipment each standard unit is to be equipped. Since every standard unit is based off the same MTOE, it's easy to know what each unit will have, more or less, because the MTOE will be the same for each unit of a given type.

To extend that concept to this game, if you really want this game to be about the army, not the unit, I should be able to go to an Army interface where I define what an army should consist of, and then simply hit a button and say "make me this, and assign it to this control group." Then available factory production goes to filling out that organization as I've defined it. I could have one or more army templates that I create, and "instantiate" whichever one I want in a given situation. I establish a rally point for that army, and as factory production fills it out, the units gather there. 

As it is, I still have to build some units first, manually group them into an army, manually assign then a control group, manually add a T2 unit, only then do I get to go in and tell the game what units I'd like added to this army. I'm still micromanaging things to an extent that I shouldn't have to. Also, what if all my factories are currently working on requests for another army, and I want to make a new one? The units are rolling off the line already pre-assigned to an army, but I sitll have to go manually round some up, group them up into a separate new army, assign the control group, find a T2 unit from somewhere to assign to it, go into the build menu, etc.

And then, as units die, the army gets smaller and smaller until I manually go in and bring up the build menu again, take stock of what's left, and manually request my reinforcements. This is no way to control an army. Once I've established my baseline template for the order of battle of this army, the AI should be smart enough to automatically request reinforcements for any unit type that is now deficient in the army compared to the army template.

Short of a full-blown Army template mechanic as in my previous post, being able to designate the output of a given factory to a given army would be very nice. then at least I could have a constantly-churning build list with my chosen unit makeup reflected in it, and so at least attempt to keep my army full with the unit proportions of my choosing.

As you hit the unit cap and casualties still occur, there'd be no good way to ensure that the next units added would be in the proportion that i want, but I could live with that.

Anyhow, ask yourself this: do I need a unit already present to build a unit? No, of course not. You click on the factory, select a unit type, and build it. 

So, why should I already need units to exist in order to create an army?

If they really want armies to reach their full potential in this game, you've got to be able to operate on armies right from the very start as units in their own right, and do things like create them without having them already in existence. You've got to be able to set up an army composition of your choosing as a template, and then tell the game to build you one, and let it employ the available production capacity to fulfill that request over time. And then, if "Keep Reinforced" is checked, automatically request replacements from the available factory production in order to keep numbers at the specified level. Then armies will really start to stand out from units and be the level of abstraction that players focus on.

It's like they're halfway there, but that means they've still got halfway to go.