SDN World 3 Commentary Thread II

[Steve]

Steve I know you're busy but what is the status of my attack on Suriname and my mining operations?

Rocks fell, everyone died?

[Ryan Thunder]

Wilkens

I feel obligated to warn you that your landing at Sherman is utterly suicidal. I'm not an idiot. I know about the goddamn river and you can expect to encounter both brigades and a fucktonne of machine gun and mortar positions there.

To say nothing of what the monitors are going to do to your landing craft...

[CmdrWilkens]

Wilkens

I feel obligated to warn you that your landing at Sherman is utterly suicidal. I'm not an idiot. I know about the goddamn river and you can expect to encounter both brigades and a fucktonne of machine gun and mortar positions there.

To say nothing of what the monitors are going to do to your landing craft...

A) If your monitors are there then they will get shellacked by naval gunfire
B) Machine gun positions will be easy prey for naval gunfire
C) If you use Ft Sherman to try and drive off the ships then my troops get a free pass from arty (and use their own on your gun positions)
D) Its a 3 Div vs 1 Div attack with my units having a favorable balance of artillery


Anyway its tentative depending on how the rest of my assaults go (note that it isn't planned until D+7 at the earliest)

[Ryan Thunder]

Hardly. Your ships will be busy getting sunk by the big guns and torpedoes while the monitors pick off your landing craft. Whatever makes it to land by some miracle will get cheeseholed by the 50-some-odd armoured machine gun emplacements in the area.

But hey, if you want to waste your troops on a futile attempt to land next to a goddamn doom fortress, be my guest.

EDIT: D+7? Christ, you'll be totally screwed by then, as I'll have multiple armies in the area.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Wilkens

I feel obligated to warn you that your landing at Sherman is utterly suicidal. I'm not an idiot. I know about the goddamn river and you can expect to encounter both brigades and a fucktonne of machine gun and mortar positions there.

To say nothing of what the monitors are going to do to your landing craft...

A) If your monitors are there then they will get shellacked by naval gunfire
B) Machine gun positions will be easy prey for naval gunfire
C) If you use Ft Sherman to try and drive off the ships then my troops get a free pass from arty (and use their own on your gun positions)
D) Its a 3 Div vs 1 Div attack with my units having a favorable balance of artillery


Anyway its tentative depending on how the rest of my assaults go (note that it isn't planned until D+7 at the earliest)

What? At Normandy, most of the naval gun fire was so ineffectual, they beached a number of destroyers just to fire upon the coastal positions.

[Ryan Thunder]

See, Wilkens, this fort is not a trifling thing that you can just suppress and ignore. It takes a truly epic commitment of forces to actually defeat these forts.

I don't know how many times I'm going to have to explain that before you finally wrap your head around it...

[Norseman]

Incidentally there really ought to be a bonus or a penalty to your rolls depending on whether or not your plan is a reasonable one that can go either way, or if its absolutely insane and can only succeed by a miracle.

[Steve]

There is. Thanas' amphib attack in Timor, for instance, was set at 8 for success. And rolled snake eyes. All of Wilkens' amphibious landings rolled 8s and 9s, but of course I didn't know about Fort Sherman.

[Norseman]

I think that 3 dice would tend to create a more agreable bell-curve where the truly outrageous results 3s and 4s or 17s and 18s would be fairly rare, the way perhaps they ought to be. That of course is why GURPS uses 3 dice.

[Norade]

I second 3 dice.

[Steve]

I'm not against it, but AIM Chat apparently is.

[Norseman]

I'm not against it, but AIM Chat apparently is.

Eh? I just tested it writing in:

//roll-dice 3-sides 6

And it worked just fine, what's the problem?

[Steve]

Seems you have to put a hyphen only between "roll" and "dice and then specify "3-sides" instead of just "3 6".

[Vyraeth]

Seems you have to put a hyphen only between "roll" and "dice and then specify "3-sides" instead of just "3 6".

I've been reading a little bit about this STGOD lately as I've considered playing in the future, but one thing I've noticed is how often issues regarding rolls come up.

I'd suggest that you guys check out this online dice roller:
http://dicelog.com/dice

It has several advantages, namely:

1) All dice rolls are logged and stored, so you can view who rolled what, when, and for what reason.
2) With this system, instead of players having to wait for MODs to be in a chat room to roll - they can simply roll on the log when they're able and the moderator can pull the results from there (only the admins of the log can remove prior rolls, so there's no room for tampering unless you have a corrupt admin).
3) The randomness offered by the dice may be better than AOL's chat system. Although presumably this generator is not as good as rand.org's, I wonder just how good AIM's is. And this site actually offers calculations to give you an idea of how random the rolls are.
4) There is a lot of flexibility for the type of rolls that can be made - and you can include modifiers, like positive and negative integer adjustments within the actual dice roll in the log - so that all rolls are completely transparent (though it's clear that the moderators in this game are already highly trusted, which is nice).
5) You can store up to 500 rolls, before losing your initial data - which means there's a long backlog of what rolls took place, when, and why.

Presumably, since the game has survived three iterations, you all are comfortable in the way dice rolls are handled, but I thought I'd propose this as a potential alternative. I just think it would alleviate some of the issues arising at the moment.

Edit Note(s): Adjusted handle to handled in the last sentence.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Actually, this is the first time dice was actually used. Previously, it was "who wrote first" or "who RPed my opponent's fucking units to hell".

[CmdrWilkens]

Hardly. Your ships will be busy getting sunk by the big guns and torpedoes while the monitors pick off your landing craft. Whatever makes it to land by some miracle will get cheeseholed by the 50-some-odd armoured machine gun emplacements in the area.

But hey, if you want to waste your troops on a futile attempt to land next to a goddamn doom fortress, be my guest.

EDIT: D+7? Christ, you'll be totally screwed by then, as I'll have multiple armies in the area.

Lets be clear, 50-some armored machine gun emplacements is ridiculous, flat out ridiculous. I won't get in to the geography dictating that you are building in to the side of a mountain but moreso that if you have entrenched, armored, fighting positions then you SHOULD HAVE FUCKING DECLARED THEM BEFORE NOW. If you want to keep adding new layers of defense every time I find a new attack pattern that's a level of bullshit I won't even have to point out. First you had "a fort" then you had a fort with guns twice the size of any you had produced elsewhere (so I wonder about their quality), then you had a fort with dozens of entrenched fighting positions covering a dozen or so square miles outside the fort. Seriously declare any fixed emplacements that are rated to take more than 1 shell hit from NGFS and stop adding them each time I change attack plan.


As to the monitors...where are they coming from...and when are they sortieing? If you park them in Colon then I can use my longer range guns to torch you as you leave harbor and the protection of the fort, if you park them in the open sea I will use my longer range...you get the point. Your monitors can not mix it up with even a portion of my main battle line.


On your fort, yes its an awesome bit of firepower. If I tried to storm Colon by sea I'd probably be shellacked and lose half my fleet. But your guns are still subject to geography and in that are there are some very severe rises and falls of land that would make shots physically difficult if not impossible. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a bloody storming the wall but I am saying its doable. Shep is right you can pre-register...but there are some shots that are physically impossible due to the nature of the terrain and the guns in use.


As to the assaulting forces I believe you were given 2 Div/18hr roughly as your limit...which by D+7 would mean (after losses) 13 new Divisions, plus the 2 fortress divisions, and maybe 4 divs left over from 180th Army I Corps, II Corps and 120th Army I Corps. So you would have a total of 19 Divisions in the vicinity of Cuidad and I would have (even if I didn't land) 24 divisions minus maybe 10% casualties [the land based attacks still steamroll you] with 12 more divisions in the vicinity of Colorada. In other words your existing forces couldn't come to the help of your fortress division and even a 4-1 loss ratio would still allow me to overwhelm you.

Not to mention.....the fact that Ryan's troops will be sitting on oodles and oodles of ammunition supplied by the trainload, to support their artillery spam; while you have to move each individual shell over the beachhead, and thence to the guns.

Dude he is going to be stretching his ass from here to the moon just to move troops in position by land. Where the fuck is he going to find spare carrying capacity for heavy shells used ONLY by his fortress guns unless he shorts on sending troops in? The Gap is a bottleneck of all bottlenecks and EVERYTHING he is sending needs to go through there. I'm glad you've solved his logistic nightmare that has his quartermasters ready to kill themselves. Perhaps you should share your solution with him.

Oh goody, then that means your fleet/amphibious fleet has to stay in the area pretty damn long, since it's really hard to move heavy artillery off ships without a dedicated pier and steam winches.

I don't know where you missed my overland advance that is bringing the heavy guns with them and "pack" howitzers by their very nature can be broken in to man/mule portable load segments. In other words stop trying to make my equipment something other than what it is. I accept the limitations of range because, frankly my heavy guns are gonna get there eventually.

[Steve]

Wilkens, you're saying there are "blind spots" in the heavy gun coverage where the Colombian fort guns cannot land a shell due to terrain features. Where, precisely, are they? Have you found pictures and images of the area to show that there's a gun shadow caused by a high hill or embankment where the fort guns literally cannot hit?

[Norseman]

Given that the guns can likely elevate and fire a very precise powder charge combined with a precisely timed fuse I find it very hard to believe that there are any spots they can't hit. That's without howitzers, which used to be very common in naval forts in an attempt to pierce the soft deck of the battleships.

[Lonestar]

Ha. I love it. The Congolese offer terms that mean less freedom to the Dutch government in Kenya, and then prattle on about the Dominionite "never letting them go".

Even more awesome as the land border with the Congolese means they will be more able to send troops in and suppress the locals.

[Siege]

You can't really fault a highly stressed governor for choosing the neutral Congolese over the hyper-militarized, hyper-aggressive, known-to-be-belligerent Grand Dominion though... Certainly not when he knows that throwing in with the Dominion almost inevitably means Kenya will get in trouble with the Sheppos who, as we know, have a much bigger fleet than you do; moreover Mr. Van der Löwe right now is very afraid of getting rounded up and taken out behind the chemical shed by his local garrison commander (a fate that has befallen several of his colleagues), and selling out to the GD is vastly more likely to result in his untimely death than doing so to people who can at least be charitably described as 'socialist brothers'.

EDIT: And I think I have answers to all of you vultures now. If I missed any of y'all, let me know .

[Thanas]

Hey how well behaved are the German troops? Are they burning down entire villages or towns after a single shot or three is fired from a house, due to "franc-tireurs"?

Yes, I've been reading too much of "Marne 1914" which details much of the War's first year.

No, they are not doing any of that. Strict orders not to harm the civilian population and to pay for everything they took. Remember, Germany is the benevolent freedom loving nation here trying to free the dutch from an aggressive dictatorial police state.

[Master_Baerne]

French troops have similar orders, just so you know.

[Bluewolf]

I am going to say that I am probably going to hand in my resignation in regards to China. I don't feel like I can keep going on with this Roleplay and my skills at it are subpar, even when I am actually appearing in the game. I know this is not a fantastic thing for the game but I never had much to offer anyway in terms of potential or actual aid. I hope this not does not disrupt anything but as said, better not have a deadweight.

[MKSheppard]

A) If your monitors are there then they will get shellacked by naval gunfire

You mean the Naval Gunfire that will be forced to counter Fort Sherman, or get sunk?

B) Machine gun positions will be easy prey for naval gunfire

You mean the Naval Gunfire that will be forced to counter Fort Sherman, or get sunk?

C) If you use Ft Sherman to try and drive off the ships then my troops get a free pass from arty (and use their own on your gun positions)

So sad that Wilkens has never heard about split director firing, in which a warship splits it's fire between two targets. All Ryan has to do is swing one or two of his smaller 14" turrets away from the ships and have that engage the landing beaches.

D) Its a 3 Div vs 1 Div attack with my units having a favorable balance of artillery

Artillery on ships that can't press the attack too boldly, lest they get you know sunk.

Anyway its tentative depending on how the rest of my assaults go (note that it isn't planned until D+7 at the earliest)

Rest of your assaults?

Do you even know how amphibious landings were done in the days before Amtracs and LCACs?

Here's a hint, the majority of the world's beaches are inaccessible to various methods of landing craft -- it's only with LCACS from the 1980s onwards, that amphibious forces can access about 85% of the world's beaches.

So logically, the prime landing beaches will be fortified, and those beaches which are horribly inadequate for the task of landing large men will be left unfortified -- I mean sure, you could probably land a company on them, or have a bunch of rangers scale a sheer cliff, but once they're there, what can they do?

[Siege]

A question purely out of interest: how come the majority of the world's beaches was inaccessible to landing craft before the advent of the hovercraft? I though an amphibious landing just a case of driving a flat-keeled landing barge up to the shoreline until it beaches itself and disgorge troops, but clearly I am missing something...