STGOD 2k8 Planning thread

[Rogue 9]

Well, there's a problem with using escorts to escort convoys in this game. People will use dreadnoughts in commerce raiding. Seriously. I tried to do traditional convoy escort in STGOD 4; my convoys would get jumped by a battlecruiser squadron if they were going to get jumped at all.

[Darkevilme]

Is speed specialization a percentage or a straight thing.
So if i have cruiser 50 points(45 base, 5 speed) and scout 10 points (9 base, 1 speed) and i send a mixed group of them to attack the imperial outlier world of nowhere do they arrive at the same time or do the cruisers leave the scouts in the dust?

I mean if its percentage i might give my entire fleet a slight speed advantage as heck they've crossed between galaxies so the engines should be a bit beefier.

[Academia Nut]

Well, there's a problem with using escorts to escort convoys in this game. People will use dreadnoughts in commerce raiding. Seriously. I tried to do traditional convoy escort in STGOD 4; my convoys would get jumped by a battlecruiser squadron if they were going to get jumped at all.

I think that's the part where you laugh at your opponent's stupidity and attack, seeing as commerce raiding with dreadnoughts means that you're tying up a huge amount of resources that could be better spent attacking or defending for minimal gain. I think the way Hotfoot proposed it, each attack nets maybe 1 or 2 points, and is probably guarded by a proportional number of escorts. So, sure, you can raid using huge ships, but congratulations, if for the loss of a few economic points and some escorts I could tie up an order of magnitude more resources, I would take it. Obviously if you just sit around while you get raided like that its worth it to send dreadnoughts out raiding, but if you can use your opponent's own bluntness again them, then it would be worth it.

Plus I think we can agree that a dreadnought would be easier to find than a couple of escort sized raiders, and its lower tactical speed means that its just waiting to be caught in an ambush.

[SirNitram]

Rogue may have been referring to the Black Alliance, who specifically existed to rape normal escorts, and almost never deployed dreadnoughts for pirating except when pirating an entire chunk of planet into their hulls.

[Beowulf]

I'm look at Neph's mechanic, and the question occurs: how do mixed fleets work? Is it just do the force number ratio as a bonus to the whole, and each can distribute damage as they see fit? Or is it something else I can't think of?

[Rogue 9]

No, actually; I was talking about much later in the game, when Stormbringer had battlecruiser squadrons stalking the lanes in the Nashtari star cluster. Granted, there was an all-out war going on, but it was a little ridiculous to need an entire carrier battle group to even begin to try and neutralize his anti-shipping measures. And I was in absolutely no position to attack, given that I was trying to fight off massive enemy forces in my own territory.

[Covenant]

Well, there's a problem with using escorts to escort convoys in this game. People will use dreadnoughts in commerce raiding. Seriously. I tried to do traditional convoy escort in STGOD 4; my convoys would get jumped by a battlecruiser squadron if they were going to get jumped at all.

Oddly, real-life dreadnaughts were used for commerce raiding too. What's the issue? You just hope he's not making a 'profit' from raiding with a dread, but like in real life, raiding with a dread does make some sense. Bismark's jobs was so sink convoys. What you're trying to do is FORCE them to use Battleships--if your basic shit escort is decent enough to encourage someone to use a battleship or a dread to raid it then you've taken a 100 point piece or so out of combat. In some ways that's a useful thing right there, as you might get lucky with some q-ships and erase their dread next time.

I fully endorse systems that mirror reality on the basis of intelligence.

[Nephtys]

I'm look at Neph's mechanic, and the question occurs: how do mixed fleets work? Is it just do the force number ratio as a bonus to the whole, and each can distribute damage as they see fit? Or is it something else I can't think of?

I'd figure the force number is the whole thing. It'd be easier to do it that way, really. Hrm.

Maybe we can just do a really simple rule of thumb for withdrawls too, to promote use of smaller ships in raiding commerce and such. A Destroyer squadron can disengage at any time. A cruiser needs two 'combat turns' of being shot at while declaring a withdrawl. A battleship needs three.

Anyway, capital ships raiding commerce isn't a big deal. A Battleship can only be at one place at a time, and they're expensive and rare after all. Any Battleship moving around sinking tramp freighters isn't taking part in the enemy's battle formation.

[Hotfoot]

Another quick note to mention concerning battleships vs. trade lanes is that they're a big target. A group of stealthed cruiser Q-Ships thrown in to a convoy could take down a battleship.

[Beowulf]

Bismark was used as a convoy raider because it had no other job.

[Nephtys]

Another quick note to mention concerning battleships vs. trade lanes is that they're a big target. A group of stealthed cruiser Q-Ships thrown in to a convoy could take down a battleship.

The mechanic for that can be fun too. Just declare secretly to the mods, some percentage of your points used as Q-Ships. They'll figure a ratio of Q-Ship Convoys to unarmed convoys, and there's always a chance that easy raid ends up with a Battleship absorbing a torpedo salvo as a bulk hauler jettisons it's cargo hatch panels...

I like mechanics.

[Academia Nut]

The dynamics of convoy raiding in this system are interesting because unlike say, Britian's convoys, if the ships get hit then there isn't a big risk of starvation or total economic collapse of the worlds along the route. The economic system we have already presumes some level of self-sufficiency amongst the colonies, so at worst you're going to disrupt the economy enough so that the target has to sell off a couple of escorts to make up the shortfall.

Thus really the current system we have is a trap for raiders. Unless we place a lot more resources into the trade lanes, then sending ships to raid is uneconomical and inviting an ambush called down on your pirate ass.

Now, if you have to specify technology along certain routes, or declare internal routes and minimum trade levels for smaller colonies to remain productive, then suddenly the dynamic becomes more complex. Suddenly its not about taking a few measly points, its about denying an opponent access to certain technologies and the possibility of starving a world into submission.

Perhaps something like moon and asteroid colonies do not have self-sufficiency, so they must have a trade route connecting them to a planetary colony. Of course, having to manage such an internal trade network probably increases the complexity by an order of magnitude, so it probably won't fly.

[Sea Skimmer]

Just for reference, Q-ships totally sucked in real life. They are very famous in both world wars, but in reality they sank only bare handfuls of submarines in the first, and virtually nothing at all in the second in exchange for heavy losses. You really can’t expect to build an effective warship if it has to be indistinguishable from freighter traffic. Armed merchant cruisers are a more realistic raider defense, even if they cannot stop the enemy they buy time for a convoy to scatter.

[Rogue 9]

I certainly would have a hard time supporting effective Q-ships in a space combat game like this. The power requirements of a ship of the line's armaments should be so great as to have a sensor signature all their own; you'd be able to tell if a freighter was able to pose a threat to your dreadnoughts.

[Darkevilme]

Perhaps not if it had emmissions masking and isnt running the powerplant at combat level at the time. Though the commerce raider'll notice something's up when a capital ship powersurge comes from one of the freighters.

[rhoenix]

Perhaps not if it had emmissions masking and isnt running the powerplant at combat level at the time. Though the commerce raider'll notice something's up when a capital ship powersurge comes from one of the freighters.

Optimally, they'll notice only when they're fully within combat range, and therefore within striking distance of the wolves in freighter's clothing.

[Darkevilme]

Depends on how long the reactor takes to warm up i suppose. Then again nuclear missiles dont need reactors and i'm sure you could build cargo crate shaped missile canisters for those freighters that store cargo externally like that. Which'd probably make commerce raiders nervous to close distance as with a freighter so easily modifiable that way they'll never know which are packing.

[Nephtys]

Battle Phase Mechanics
Force Ratio = YourShips/EnemyShips
Effective Power = Points Cost * Various Mod Modifiers
Damage Dealt = Sqrt(Your Effective Power) + Sqrt(Force Ratio)

The following examples assume no bonuses to combat from superior tactics or any other circumstances. Just head-on-battle. Also for these tests, I will assume all damage is dealt to one ship at a time in a class. No doubt we'll fine tune that for a real game.

Test Run: With a Battle Modifier of 3x (Decisive engagement), and no other rule mods

The Alliance of Free Stars:
12x (5pt) DD Shofixti Scouts
10x(12pt) CL Syreen Penetrator Light-Cruisers
5x (15pt) CA Earthling Heavy Cruisers
4x (20pt) BC Yehat Terminator Battle-Cruisers
2x (50pt) BB Chenjesu Battleships
Total: 435 Pts, 33 Ships.

vs

The Ur-Quan Hierarchy
42x (1pt) FF Umgah ComedyFrigates
4x (14pt) CL Vux Intruder Cruisers
8x (15pt) CA Spathi Eluder-Cruisers
4x (50pt) BB Ur-Quan Dreadnaught
Total: 418 Pts, 58 ships.

Turn 1: (Damages Rounded Down) (Force Ratio Bonus: Ur-Quan, 1.75 pts)
Alliance: 20.8 *3 = 62 Damage (Order: Attack Frigates!)
Ur-Quan: 20.4 + 1.75 *3 = 66 Damage (Order: Attack Battleships!)
Damages:
Alliance: 1x BB Dead, 1x BB at 16 damage
Ur-Quan: 42x FF Dead, 1x CL dead, 1x CL at 6 damage

Turn 2: Force Ratio Bonus: Alliance, 1.46
Alliance: (32 ships)(385 Pts): 63 damage (attack Cruisers!)
Ur-Quan: (15 ships)(362 pts): 57 damage (Attack Battlecruisers!)
Damages:
Alliance: 1x BB Dead, 2x BC Dead, 1 BC at 1 damage
Ur-Quan: 4x CL Dead, 1x CA (7 damage)

Turn 3: Force Ratio: Alliance, 1.62
Alliance: (29 ships)(315 pts): 58 Damage (attack Cruisers!)
Ur-Quan: (11 ships)(306 pts): 52 Damage (Attack Battlecruisers!)
Damages:
Alliance: 2x BC Dead, 1x CA (13 damage)
Ur-Quan: 4x CA Dead, 1x CA (5 damage)

Turn 4: Firce Ratio: Alliance, 1.96
Alliance: (27 Ships)(275 pts): 55 Damage (Attack Cruisers!)
Ur-Quan: (7 ships) (260 pts): 47 Damage (Attack Cruisers!)
Damages:
Alliance: 4x CA Dead (One Left)
Ur-Quan: 4x CA Dead (none lefT)

End of Battle
Results: Alliance: 215 Pts (10x CLs, 12x DD)
Results: Ur-Quan: 200 Pts (4x Dreadnaughts)

As you can see, a fleet battle is cripplingly fatal for escorts, as it should be. It should be the realm of battleships. But this method has a few issues. We'll try another set of rules...


Test Run 2: With a Battle Modifier of 3x (Decisive engagement), and you can only shoot as many ships as you have (AKA, one 50 point ship can't kill a dozen Frigs). Also, no more 'force imbalance' modifier.

Turn 1: (Damages Rounded Down)
Alliance: (33 Ships) 20.8 *3 = 62 Damage (Order: Attack Frigates!)
Ur-Quan: (58 Ships) 20.4 *3 = 61 Damage (Order: Attack Battleships!)
Damages:
Alliance: 1x BB Dead, 1x BB at 11 damage
Ur-Quan: 33 FF Dead.

Turn 2:
Alliance: (32 Ships)(385 pts) = 58 Damage (Order: Attack Small Stuff)
Ur-Quan: (25 Ships)(385 Pts) = 58 Damage (Order: Attack big stuff)
Damages:
Aliance: 1x BB Dead, 1x BC Dead
Ur-Quan: 9 FF Dead, 3 CL dead, 1 CL at 8 damage

Turn 3:
Alliance: (30 Ships)(315 pts)
Ur-Quan: (13 Ships)(334 pts)

Note that despite being outpointed, the Ur-Quan now are in the lead for points... and will win the engagement if they kill the Alliance escorts next.

In this 'pitched fleet' battle, we can see that Frigates and lighter ship will be the logical targets to kill first. They'll take bad casualties, but a side that does not bring enough screeners will suffer from targetting issues. In this case, the battle damage modifier of 3 made this less apparent. If we use a modifier of 1, small ships will struggle to kill big ships, while they're getting swatted down hard. The perfect vessel for screening therefore will be a Light Cruiser, or fighter (1 pt) squadrons, though fighters will take more casualties. But contrary, in a raid, 50 fighters will utterly destroy two or three unecorted Battleships. However, if the Battleships bring along a few cruisers or Destroyers, the fighters will be more closely defeated. I propose that in such a situation of fighters vs an escorted squadrion, the escort squadron gets a mod multiplier of 1.5x versus the enemy fighters or light ships.

Just stuff for thought. There's a lot of kinks to work out, admittedly, but I think it can help a lot in how we decide lethality of battles besides gut feelings.

[Academia Nut]

Glad to see I'm not the only one abusing Excel for the planning of the game .

But yeah, the system is... interesting to say the least, although the mechanics could bog down really quick. I suppose if each post represented a turn and there was OOC coordination where everyone could see the math being done there would be less room for error.

[Covenant]

I think some sort of 'ballparking' system for giving people a rough idea of how many ships they can expect to lose in a given confrontation is not a bad way to let people do a threat assessment before they fly into combat (as well as to evaluate how to target their vessels), but I think this method is overly complicated. I'm also talking with Neph privately since now it still favors big ships, which is fine by me, but apparently not what people want to do.

What I think people should do is view this differently. Instead of multiplying your damage by your Force Ratio, essentially, decrease it. Big ships should be hit by every shot lobbed at them, while an inverse relationship between fleet numbers and damage taken would encourage smaller ships being dodgy. Seems intuitive to me.

But I dunno. These things get wonky when fleet sizes get into the thousands.

[Adrian Laguna]

The problem with doing systems like that is that they fail to account for numerous things that affect combat. There's positioning, range, weapon ranges, weapon types, etc. If one side has reflex cannons and the other missiles as their primary weapons, a roughly even engagement will be a slaughter for one side at short range, and a slaughter for the other at long range. Similarly an outnumbered fleet could pull off an upset if it manages to isolate elements of a larger fleet and destroy them in detail.

[consequences]

To throw in my two lira on things:

It would be kind of nice to have a graduated system of punishment for non-involvement, rather than jumping straight to 'relativistic rocks fall, everybody dies'. Say for ignoring routine visits and attempted diplomatic relations you start taking hits to that turn's production(based on corruption, societal apathy, opportunistic pirates, or whatever). If you crap out in the middle of a battle, your opponent gets to Honor Harrington his way through your deployed forces for minimal losses. If you consistently fail to participate at significant moments, a giant star goat eats your civilization.

[Hotfoot]

I certainly would have a hard time supporting effective Q-ships in a space combat game like this. The power requirements of a ship of the line's armaments should be so great as to have a sensor signature all their own; you'd be able to tell if a freighter was able to pose a threat to your dreadnoughts.

That's where "Stealth" comes in. You'll note I specifically worded the original version to disguise warships as civilian shipping.

Adrian Laguna
There is no range mechanic for a reason. The point of these rules is not to favor a specific tactical combat style in space, because it gets needlessly detailed and, frankly, too much of a headache. Want to play a super crunchy game? Play SE5.

Academia Nut
Remember, these hard values are meant to allow for ballparks and easy moderation tools in the event of players who cannot reconcile combat on their own for various reasons, not as a hard guide of what MUST happen in every case. Things like good tactics, creative traps, and so forth are always more important, and frankly, we just need an idea of how long people should expect battles to last in the event of reinforcements and so forth, something that's been desperately needed for YEARS but nobody has been willing to do because we constantly get sidetracked into other stuff. As a result, every time we get to a major combat, EVERYONE bitches over how long the fight should last, what losses should be taken, how effective cruisers should be, how effective escorts should be, how effective battleships should be, how effective stupidly overcosted dreadnoughts are, etc.

Nephtys
Thanks, this should be very helpful in deciding a general combat mechanic

[Academia Nut]

I was more objecting to the perceived complexity, but yeah, I definitely support something along the line of every tactical "turn" taking something like half an hour to an hour's worth of time. Of course, there is always ways of screwing around with the formula using tactics, such as what if one side decides to stall? How will that be worked out? Obviously if you decide to turn and run, diverting weapons energy to engines and shields, you're still going to take losses, but how much?

Of course, no formula will replace clever tactics, and I can already think up a few methods of a significantly smaller fleet forcing a win via clever tactics, even if there is probably no way that they could ever destroy the enemy forces.

Also, I think I should point out how we will incorporate points that don't work straightly. Like if you have ships with point defences, fighters, and EW, how will those interact? Especially if both forces are mixed. If you can spoof enemy guns into thinking you're elsewhere, does that mean that you get virtual points to allocate damage to?

On a wider scale, how good are a ship's sensors? How far can they see? Because with time to call for reinforcements, this suddenly becomes huge. If the enemy can't see that far, then there are many effective bluffs that could be made with regards to reinforcements, but if they can see too far then they will be able to know if there are no reinforcements, not enough, or if they're about to get assraped and should probably call off the fight even though they could win.

At least we seem to have worked out industry. Do you all think we could update the first post to show that we've agreed upon the rules: 1500 points to start for purchase of ships, 60 points to purchase planets with the following classifications:
Class 1 (Earth-like): 10 points - 100 points/turn
Class 2 (Mars-like): 5 points - 50 points/turn
Class 3 (Moon-like): 3 points - 30 points/turn
Class 4 (Asteroid): 1 point - 10 points/turn
And that maintenance costs for standard ships is 20% of base cost a turn?

That all seems pretty well set-up, so we can leave that to the side for the moment and everyone can come into the thread knowing where the rules currently stand.

[Adrian Laguna]

Adrian Laguna
There is no range mechanic for a reason. The point of these rules is not to favor a specific tactical combat style in space, because it gets needlessly detailed and, frankly, too much of a headache. Want to play a super crunchy game? Play SE5.

You have it backward. My point is that since the mechanics fail to account for these important factors, we shouldn't use them to decide battles, not that we need even more complicated mechanics.