STGOD: A Dead Art?

[Thirdfain]

UCB specified the EW ship in front. I adding letting the supply ships trail, but that makes sense if patrols are going to be engaged on the way in, because they're small, fragile and the only thing at serious risk from patrol forces.

Supply forces tailing by even a couple hours or days make a lot of sense, and are to be expected.

An hour's extra warning isn't significant when the ships take a couple of days to get to the target and multiple days to get between even adjacent planets. UCBooties is paranoid and I don't blame him.

Multiple days to get between adjacent planets? It's what, a week to cross the entirety of Known Space? Poland reaches about 1/4th of that from the outermost colony to Earth, and Nowa Masovie is towards the Core, being a major indsutrial world. Response times from the major fleet bases will be in hours.

What makes you say that? All the forward ships have to do is slow down a bit in the final run to the target and they'll be back together again. But the forward intel will allow the approach vector(s) for the main force to be optimised depending on where the defenders are.

So, the League ships are going to sail within an hour of Nowa Masovie, well within the reach of the EW systems on-planet, and then chill out for a bit wiating for the big Pirate formation to all arrive in dribs and drabs for attacking?

Specifically, they're not detecting any patrols at all on the way in?

Of course they are! I've got 2 major fleet battle groups, the 1st and 2nd corps, which are all concentrated as reaction forces. The 3rd and 4th Corps consist of cruiser/light carrier patrol groups, and as such will (in times of peace, such as the Pirates are expecting) be spread out over Polish space on, well, patrol. However, a Polish patrol group as standard would be at the largest something like this:

----1st Light Carrier Division
3 Stanisław Skalski-class Light Carriers
1 Husaria-class Heavy Cruiser
-3 "Zbik"-class Frigates
-1 "Orzel"-class EW Destroyer
-1 "Wilk"-class Destroyer

or, at the very LEAST, a light cruiser group:

----9th Cruiser Division
2 Blyskawica- class Light Cruisers
-2 "Zbik"-class Frigates

In other words, a tiny 5-ship vanguard of about 55 points would be slightly overmatched and heavily outgunned by a combat-oriented 60+ point Polish CVL patrol group, and would have to stop and fight it out with a 20 point light cruiser group, having only 2-1 parity in terms of shooting effectiveness, likely leading to the attack's detection and the loss of surprise when a patrol unit either sacrificed a frigate to force through a short-range signal to one of the many relays in industrial Polish space or simply failed to report in on time.

So, your vanguard will detect Polish patrols, but probably won't want to stop to engage them- and frankly, don't have the means to do so.

If you are within range to detect a patrol group with shipboard sensors, it's in range to detect you with the same, and report before you land. If your intel is so good, wouldn't the logical path be to plot your course so as to avoid those patrol groups and land on your target with both feet?

You're keeping them over Nova Masovie?

Specifically, they were deployed just so they happened to be within transit range of Nowa Masovie within the expected reaction time of the Polish shorter-range EW network on Masovie itself- so they'll be a fairly moderate force, stronger than expected by a small degree (at least one Polish battlegroup would have been able to make it on-station regardless, hence the need for your 4-nation assault, mmm?)

The forces I have would be no contest against a co-ordinated, pre-planned, unexpected attack by the forces the League and Pirate leaders expect to have arriving on-target. However, half of your force is not going to make the party, and there are large international contingents hiding in the region, far from the planned attack vector, within a few minute's jump of the system- none of which you know anything about at this stage.

[Thirdfain]

Whatever. Let's just play, no need to bicker.

Polish patrol groups are on a different movement schedual since the attack on the EW networks, so your intel is out-off date. However, your vanguard will detect at least 1 patrol group on the way in. A mod decision can figure if it's a light carrier or cruiser group, and you can decide to move to intercept or not.

[Adrian Laguna]

A violent tremor ripped through the Causeway. The jolt was so jarring that Princep Ghenai nearly lost her balance, despite the shock-absorbing magnetic panels that encased the ship’s command center.

“The Habsburg line?” she demanded, steadying herself.

“Yes, Elevated,” came the reply. “Our aft screens just took four direct hits from high-velocity projectile weapons.”

Four hits? Causeway better not be one of the carriers I'm aiming at, because looking at my posts those had 156 railguns fire at them simultaneously.

I'm finding the combat here to be lacking in lethality. I mean I just hit two of your 22 point ships with over 300 points of warship, 30 of said points being dedicated anti-shipping. They should be dying, not trying to play Greek Navy. I'm willing to play with lesser lethality than what I had in mind. It's just that I'm uncomfortable not having a guideline to know roughly how things should be.

[Starglider]

[Multiple days to get between adjacent planets? It's what, a week to cross the entirety of Known Space?

No, it is not. It took three weeks for Noble Ire's forces to get to the staging area at full speed, less than half the diameter of the map. Even assuming he took a circuitous route, that's a month to cross all of known space. Messages seem to take about a day to cross the same distance, unless you have points in comms.

If your proposition was actually correct the spacing would be more like 10 minutes of FTL, but it is inconsistent with basically all travel to date.

Response times from the major fleet bases will be in hours.

It will take several days for forces to arrive from earth. Ships from adjacent planets will arrive in hours.

So, the League ships are going to sail within an hour of Nowa Masovie, well within the reach of the EW systems on-planet, and then chill out for a bit wiating for the big Pirate formation to all arrive in dribs and drabs for attacking?

You'll find out soon enough.

Of course they are! I've got 2 major fleet battle groups, the 1st and 2nd corps, which are all concentrated as reaction forces.

Ok, the two invading forces are approaching the target from nearly opposite directions (something like 160 degrees apart). Where are your task forces in relation to the target? If there's one on each side, is the northern one going to go straight for the three (visible) pirate ships?

In other words, a tiny 5-ship vanguard

A three ship vanguard even! Visibly anyway.

of about 55 points would be slightly overmatched and heavily outgunned by a combat-oriented 60+ point Polish CVL patrol group,

Oh absolutely, so you'll be coming in to smash it then?

If your intel is so good, wouldn't the logical path be to plot your course so as to avoid those patrol groups and land on your target with both feet?

Sadly this is not possible, as you confirmed earlier that destroying the outer tracking stations only knocks out coverage on the first 1/3 or so of the trip to the target, so even best case you'll have a day or so of warning.

The forces I have would be no contest against a co-ordinated, pre-planned, unexpected attack by the forces the League and Pirate leaders expect to have arriving on-target.

The incoming forces are a bit more than 1000pts of ships, and half your fleet is established as being at earth, so clearly you'll need allies to win the fleet engagement (and you would be foolish not to have them on hand).

However, half of your force is not going to make the party,

I am not sure how you have this delusion. Why would you expect White Haven's fleet to be arriving at any other time than the Pirate fleet? Even if the original plan is disrupted, they'll be breaking comms silence about half way in anyway.

and there are large international contingents hiding in the region, far from the planned attack vector, within a few minute's jump of the system- none of which you know anything about at this stage.

Now this is relevant. Going with Hotfoot's statement of the map being somewhere between 5000ly and 10000ly across, hexes are 250-500ly, FTL speeds are about 7 to 14 lightyears/hour. 'A few minutes' is about a light year (on this scale your territory is about 500-1000 light years across - for a smaller scale, it's obviously a shorter distance).

The important question is 'when will the incoming fleets detect the additional ships'. They're detecting the patrol fleets at 10s to 100s of light years range, but those are moving. What's the active scanning range at which waiting fleets are detected (not so much in absolute terms, as relative to the speed of the ships)? This is relevant to the other battle, in so much as whether Noble Ire can successfully running away depends on the sensor capabilities of his opponents.

The next post will /either/ be White Haven and/or UCBooties taking out a patrol force on the way in, or if they run away it will be a post breaking comms silence, comparing sensor readings and noticing that half of the attackers seem to be missing.

[Hotfoot]

I do believe the ruling was 2-4 weeks to cross known space, but I think days between systems in one's own territory is far beyond the expectations previously stated. From one end to another, perhaps, but organizing the bulk of your forces against impending doom shouldn't take too long.

Well, except in the case of Poland's territory, because it's a long, thin strand of space which is inherantly harder to defend. Ships scrambling from Earth, obviously, wouldn't be able to make it in an hour. In fact, just one hour would be not be a huge amount of time, but it would certainly be enough to scramble whatever forces are in the immediate area.

That said, I've already come down pretty hard on a couple cases of metagaming when the stakes were much smaller on this. This move, however, was declared prior to the backstab according to mod records, so it stands, without me looming over people. This is disappointing, because I do so love to loom menacingly.

Naturally, if I do detect any prescient "It's a trap!" wankery, the guilty parties will kill reporters. This is a general notification. Yes, I know it sucks that you're walking in to a trap, but look on the bright side, you can now work with your traitors out of game to come up with some really cool posts of shock, horror, and terrible, agonizing deaths as your commanders feel the last ounces of strength fail, a chuck of twisted bulkhead impaling them, having torn their vacsuit, blah blah and so on. Enjoy!

[Noble Ire]

Four hits? Causeway better not be one of the carriers I'm aiming at, because looking at my posts those had 156 railguns fire at them simultaneously.

I'm finding the combat here to be lacking in lethality. I mean I just hit two of your 22 point ships with over 300 points of warship, 30 of said points being dedicated anti-shipping. They should be dying, not trying to play Greek Navy.

I thought that combat in this game was supposed to be more than merely shoving imaginary cut-outs with point values attached to them at one another and seeing who has more. If tactics and dramatic fluff are to count for nothing, in opposition to what was decided before the game started, then fine, but that should be stated outright by the mods.

Look, I've kept the point situation in mind. As far as I can tell, not a single ship opposed to my fleet has been destroyed yet (I hope that isn't entirely the case, and I had expected at least a few lighter vessels to fall to my heavy cruiser's death throes, but I will accept that if it comes down to it); I fully expect to lose most, if not all of my ships. Isn't it better to let me try to maneuver and evade a bit before dying, rather than having all of my ships just blow up on the first turn?


On an unrelated note, I think that it might be wise for those players with more than one major world to either describe where their major planets are in relation to one another, or draw a simple map of their space. Nothing too complicated, but it might be useful in avoiding problems related to planning attacks and invasions. For example, I had no idea where Nowa Masovie was in relationship to Earth before Thirdfain clarified its location a few posts ago.

[Starglider]

I'm finding the combat here to be lacking in lethality. I mean I just hit two of your 22 point ships with over 300 points of warship, 30 of said points being dedicated anti-shipping. They should be dying, not trying to play Greek Navy.

I thought that combat in this game was supposed to be more than merely shoving imaginary cut-outs with point values attached to them and seeing who has more. If tactics and dramatic fluff are to count for nothing, in opposition to what was decided before the game started, then fine, but that should be stated outright by the mods.

Well it's partly that, certain players do seem to be vacillitating between 'oh no, don't even talk about anything vaguely empirical, that would be rules lawyering' and '300 points will clearly completely destroy 100 points with minimal losses, no exceptions' depending on whether it suits them.

But really I think it's more a question of timescales. Laguna seems to be thinking of the kind of timescales a modern air battle happens on - it's over in a few minutes and waves of missiles. Maybe WWI BB slugfests, which took under an hour. Which is ironic, considering he seems to be going for the 'sailing ship' idiom where major fleet engagements lasted for hours. You seem to be going for either that or the 'WWII carrier combat' timescale, where battles also last for up to a day. The later is more compatible with drama and cunning maneuvers and desperate sacrifices, simple because you have more time to think. Engagements being over in minutes and a few hits means it's all down to how good your planing was and yes, points values.

[Adrian Laguna]

I thought that combat in this game was supposed to be more than merely shoving imaginary cut-outs with point values attached to them at one another and seeing who has more. If tactics and dramatic fluff are to count for nothing, in opposition to what was decided before the game started, then fine, but that should be stated outright by the mods.

Dammit, my edit didn't make it in time. I went on to say, "I'm willing to play with lesser lethality than what I had in mind. It's just that I'm uncomfortable not having a guideline to know roughly how things should be."

Look, I've kept the point situation in mind. As far as I can tell, not a single ship opposed to my fleet has been destroyed yet (I hope that isn't entirely the case, and I had expected at least a few lighter vessels to fall to my heavy cruiser's death throes, but I will accept that if it comes down to it); I fully expect to lose most, if not all of my ships. Isn't it better to let me try to maneuver and evade a bit before dying, rather than having all of my ships just blow up on the first turn?

The issue here is that I have a grand strategy mindset, where things are decided more by how, when, and where you deploy your fleets and less by how said fleets fight. So fleet battles would be over quickly and without much manoeuvring. You have your plan and so does the enemy, both execute, battle over. I have no problem in adopting mindset for more intricate batles, I would just like to know which one is the one the game is working with.

Laguna seems to be thinking of the kind of timescales a modern air battle happens on - it's over in a few minutes and waves of missiles. Maybe WWI BB slugfests, which took under an hour. Which is ironic, considering he seems to be going for the 'sailing ship' idiom where major fleet engagements lasted for hours.

Yes, I like irony. There is also the fact that nuclear weapons tend to conjure images of very quick battles. Though there would be no harm in having the combat match the idiom better.

[Starglider]

It's just that I'm uncomfortable not having a guideline to know roughly how things should be."

Join the club. Hotfoot warned about the dangers of ambiguity at the very start of this thread. I made several attempts to pin things down to cries of 'oh no it has to be flexible'. By the time players have made deeply laid plans and strategic comittments based on incompatible assumptions, arguments are fairly inevitable.

The solution is to describe the basic properties of world at least as well as one of those obsessively detailed OOBs, rather than just saying 'oh we'll work it all out later'. And for all the stuff that misses, keep track of precedent and stick to it.

I have no problem in adopting mindset for more intricate batles, I would just like to know which one is the one the game is working with.

Amen. Battle lethality rates are up there with FTL speed and sensor range as a critical factor that needs to be defined. And the people who say 'oh but every situation is a special case, don't constrain our creativity' can STFU. Determining what happens in special cases needs 'typical cases' as jumping off points, otherwise you have no alternative to pulling stuff out of your ass - and guess what, when that happens we're all producing different kinds of crap.

[Dahak]

Amen. Battle lethality rates are up there with FTL speed and sensor range as a critical factor that needs to be defined. And the people who say 'oh but every situation is a special case, don't constrain our creativity' can STFU. Determining what happens in special cases needs 'typical cases' as jumping off points, otherwise you have no alternative to pulling stuff out of your ass - and guess what, when that happens we're all producing different kinds of crap.

You can STFU, politely.
These kind of games have been, successfully, going on a long time before you ever thought about it, So It. Actually. Works.
It's about story, writing and talking to each other, not about rigid rules, formulas, and the like.

And for Laguna: It's a quite realistic assumption to make that one should be concerned about battle tactics as well as Big Ass Strategy. Because if you don't win the battles you need for your Big Ass Strategy, then it will not work.
These games have, among other things, always relished in the description and playing-out of long and complicated space battles. This should give you a rough idea.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Since it seems that fluff is beggining to make a differance in battles, now that such things have come it, Im beggining to feel an itch to describe more my systems, les sI be caught with my pants down ships finally open fire.

Im reading over the OOB of ships and finding something disconcerting... Some ships have littarly HUNDREDS Of guns. Exp:
Academia Nut
Halcornath-class dreadnought:
2x axial mounted heavy starfire cannons
10x turret mounted turbo-ripper cannons
40x turret mounted quad heavy ripper cannons
90x turret mounted medium ripper cannons
120x turret mounted quad FV guns
6x forward mounted hellfire torpedo tubes
12x side mounted hellfire torpedo tubes
15x feeder tendrils
5x sensor upgraded feeder tendrils
(45 points + 1 point EW = 46 points)
That is a 46pt "Dreadnaught" with well over 250 Guns!

Now Compare that with my own 40pt Battleship
1 x Spinal mounted “Reflex Particle Cannon”
2 x Spinal mounted “Eye Cannons”
12 x Heavy Phaser Batteries
20 x Light PD Phaser Batteries
10 x Heavy Missile Launchers
Thats ONLY 32 'Guns' and a smattering of missile launchers.

Now, Will such a Vast differance in arms mean much if (and god I hope not) our ships should meet in battle? I'm reading other OOB where people havn't even Listed gun amounts, and have "X-pt" ships wiht a short description.

Will such things heavily affect the outcome of a match? Would perhaps, Many guns = weak, vs few = stronger?

[Starglider]

Would perhaps, Many guns = weak, vs few = stronger?

Yes. You can have a few powerful guns or lots of small ones. The battle with Nephtys illustrated the way this works quite well. It's fluff unless you come up with an incredibly cunning tactic to exploit the difference.

It's about story, writing and talking to each other, not about rigid rules, formulas, and the like.

Thank you for illustrating my point. Some kind of brain damage has left you unable to distinguish between 'basic consistency and setting details' and 'Star Fleet Battles'.

[Dahak]

Thank you for illustrating my point. Some kind of brain damage has left you unable to distinguish between 'basic consistency and setting details' and 'Star Fleet Battles'.

No, it hasn't. But almost every time this point has been brought up by you or others, you had a small fleet of formulas or structures trailing behind you.
What is so hard for you to just go with the flow of things, when almost everyone else can...?

[InnocentBystander]

Beowulf appears to be interdicting a ~360pt fleet with 12 points of interdiction (at the start of the battle), for a ratio of 30:1. Is that comfortably within normal interdiction performance? It's nice to know my ships can interdict ~1000pts worth of enemy, if necessary

The ruling, as I hear it from hotfoot, is that each ship needs to have points into its engines in order to break the interdiction faster. The 'amount' of interdiction is given by the ship with the most points into interdiction, and further interdictors only increase the range.
Interdiction doesn't target engines or anything, it uses handwavium to wreak havoc with faster than light travel of all types.

[Starglider]

No, it hasn't. But almost every time this point has been brought up by you or others, you had a small fleet of formulas or structures trailing behind you.

As far as I am aware there has been precisely one 'formula' mentioned; me suggesting that (force ratio^2) is the rough relationship between losses in a capship battle. That's it. Your brain appears unable to process the notion of this being a 'guidline' or a 'baseline', and it seems to consider things like ships having a particular speed to be 'a fleet of structures'.

I've PMed what I think UCBooties strategy would be to the mods to check that it's realistic and not-metagamey. It's my best guess on what would actually have happened, but I though I'd better get someone impartial to look it over. I'll execute that if it gets approved.

The current Pirate formation is this;

Code: Select all

                                           CA  (CA) ID
 <- to target                                BB
                                           CA  (CA) ID
      (CA)                                                                      MT MT AT

    CA                                     CA  (CA)                             MT MT AT
      EW     < ~5% distance to target >      BB     < ~5% distance to target >
    CA                                     CA  (CA)                             MT MT AT

      (CA)                                                                      MT MT AT
                                           CA  (CA) ID
                                             BB
                                           CA  (CA) ID

----
EW   = EW Cruiser       BB = Battleship
CA   = Cruiser          ID = Interdictor
(CA) = Cloaked Cruiser  MT = Marine Transport
                        AT = Armed Transport

It's cruiser-heavy, but that's pirates for you. Eight ships are cloaked to try and hide the size of the force; the cloaks don't stand up at short range, but at long range they'll make the formation look about 20% weaker than it actually is. Beowulf has established that cloaked ships can pick up 'EW pulses', but I'm assuming that only works at short range and can't be modulated very well (i.e. prearranged simple signals only).

[Thirdfain]

I accept your force structure as the other player in this fight. I've posted what they detect incoming. Let's play.

[Noble Ire]

So as to make sure that my point about faction maps isn't lost, I've drawn up one for my own territory:



I believe that having similar maps for the larger and more active players in the game might help avoid confusion later on, especially in regards to invasions and the like. Nothing complicated is needed, but we should at least have the positions of the major worlds firmly set.

If anyone else wants a similar map, but can't or doesn't feel like making one, just PM with some general instructions, and I'll draw one up.

[Starglider]

I accept your force structure as the other player in this fight. I've posted what they detect incoming. Let's play.

I'm currently waiting for:
a) Hotfoot (and other mods if required) to check that my suggested strategy for UCB's fleet is sane.
b) For the other battle, SirNitram to confirm whether my minelayer can do that comm burst trick he described.

And before we can go much further;
c) White Haven to confirm what ships he's got on the way; presumably they'll be scanning for patrols in a similar fashion to the pirate fleet, and how they react on the way in will make a difference in the near future.

EDIT: I'm getting the impression that effective sensor range with active scanning is something like '10s of lightyears for moving/radiating ships, a small fraction of a light year for stationary non-radiating ships, an AU at best for ships at cold power-down - multiply by a factor of 10 or so for large stationary strategic scanner networks as compared to mobile shipboard scanners'.

Which is fine, but all the military experts in the setting will be intimately familiar with this and basing their operations planning around this (players with exceptional tech excepted). It confirms that pre-positioning fleets is critically important, because unlike say contemporary aircraft or ships, movement is mostly what the scanners detect (more like contemporary submarines using passive sonar).

[Starglider]

Just to confirm, normal Kiro are nowhere near this insanely dedicated (and paranoid). Usually Kiro ships do surrender and you would get prisoners, but these special operations types are of the 'better dead than being tortured by xenos' mentality. Of course, roughly half of them are now vapor, so look where that mindset got them.

That said disabling Kiro ships without destroying them is a dicey proposition because of those horribly unstable reactors. Sometimes this is good and sometimes it is very bad, like when one lucky Larkenseal shot blows up the whole ship (though under normal circumstances the safety mechanisms are good enough to just blow out the reactor module).

[rhoenix]

Due to time issues and such, I'll have to withdraw from this game. I simply cannot devote enough time for plotting in dark corners to enjoy this game fully.

I'll also delete my last post, saying that the Gliesans were coming out of isolation, for continuity's sake.

I thank all of you for the fun and experiences thus far, and with that said, I wish all of you a good game - I'll be watching from time to time.

[Starglider]

I've updated the map with Stormbringer's position, my best guess at Laguna's position, and an indication of which players have dropped out so far (I've also updated the summary in that respect):

[Stormbringer]

As I said in my PM to you, I'm not terribly happy about my position and would much rather be in the place I actually picked.

It doesn't make any sense at all for a star-nation to be located next another power at a fraction of the distance of it's internal volume and yet retains an isolationist position and limited contact with the outside. That just doesn't work well for and I submit you that it doesn't make much sense either.

Besides, exactly what is it going to hurt to let me be a bit further away?

[Starglider]

Besides, exactly what is it going to hurt to let me be a bit further away?

It looked half off the map to me so I moved you down a hex. Apologies, I've reverted it now.

EDIT: Oh wait, if you didn't do shift-refresh when you loaded this thread you'd have my first guess, which was completely wrong. Ah well, never mind.

[Stormbringer]

Besides, exactly what is it going to hurt to let me be a bit further away?

It looked half off the map to me so I moved you down a hex. Apologies, I've reverted it now.

If that's a problem for you or any one else, you could always drop me down a bit and scoot me over a hex or two instead.

Like this would work fine for me too, I mostly just want to have at least some distance between me and my neigbors:

[Starglider]

Like this would work fine for me too, I mostly just want to have at least some distance between me and my neigbors:

Looks good to me.

Do you have a huge population or are your planets just unusually spread out? I got the impression the GSC was more the later, the Polish more the former.