Transwarp, strategies and tactics

[ShadowKitsune]

Hehe

 

All kidding aside

 

What prevents this game from turning into:

 

One Massive Mega-Ship v. another Massive Mega-Ship?

 

Riddle me that :lol:

 

I have me own answer - and it involves the inconvenience of protecting more than one front....

 

Translation: Stay away from 2 front wars and your ship design issues beome a whole lot easier.

There is nothing to prevent this game from becoming 'Battle of the MegaUberBeserker Dreadnaughts' given enough time.

[Paradigm]

That's something that has ruined many a game design. My big stack vs your big stack, roll one die, one side is utterly crushed and the other is unharmed and thereafter unstoppable. That's why I'm kind of skeptical about the one massive ship strategy the game seems to be pushing us towards. I would prefer to see more balanced fleets where other things being even vaguely equal, the winner of a battle suffers some losses and a game that takes several years to play doesn't come down to luck or unluck in one big battle. Two vaguely equal player empires hammering away at each other should entail a series of battles where both sides take losses and the battle field ebbs and floes until one is left standing battered but victorious. It shouldn't come down to two massive ships fighting with the winner taking all and only suffering the inconvenience of repairing his ship afterwards while the other has no hope of building another massive ship in time to avoid assured destruction. Or at least that's my opinion on it all.

[octagon999]

That's something that has ruined many a game design.  My big stack vs your big stack, roll one die, one side is utterly crushed and the other is unharmed and thereafter unstoppable.  That's why I'm kind of skeptical about the one massive ship strategy the game seems to be pushing us towards.  I would prefer to see more balanced fleets where other things being even vaguely equal, the winner of a battle suffers some losses and a game that takes several years to play doesn't come down to luck or unluck in one big battle.  Two vaguely equal player empires hammering away at each other should entail a series of battles where both sides take losses and the battle field ebbs and floes until one is left standing battered but victorious.  It shouldn't come down to two massive ships fighting with the winner taking all and only suffering the inconvenience of repairing his ship afterwards while the other has no hope of building another massive ship in time to avoid assured destruction.  Or at least that's my opinion on it all.

You know, I can't think of a single fact to dispute your analysis.

 

The downside is exactly your analysis. When it loses, you are completely screwed. One of the factors pushing towards the single ship solution is the fact that regardless of how big the ship is, or how small the warp point is, a single ship comes through all at once. Period. Thus my decision to concentrate on a single, huge, Battlestar Galactic solution. Precisely as you have pointed out.

 

This whole issue gives me a lot to think about. Thanks.

[Ixitixl]

There is still hope...

 

If you build an extremely large ship and it is destroyed in an attack against your enemies, you may still rely on your orbitals guarding your warp points. In my case, the orbitals are equal to the tonnage of my warships. Your enemy then must either repair his damaged ship or continue with the attack. if he sits back to repair, you still have time to build a replacement ship(s), and if he attacks, hopefully your original ship has done a lot of damage and the orbitals will make short work of his ship(s).

[hobknob]

One of the issues that will contribute to the winner take all outcome is the lack of any real ability to break off if the going gets tough. Evidently all/most of our naval commanders are suicidal at heart as they will stick around untile destroyed or captured. There really needs to be a way to set a damage limit or fleet size disparity that will trigger a fleet to attempt to disengage when overwhelmed.

 

On the discussion about the single megaship. If you have lost your ship to your enemy you may have enough time to build another one, but so has yor enemy so the next battle could very well be 2 Megaships vs your single ship.

 

However, even though Pete has always said bigger is better there is still the issue of tactics of a fleet as compared to a single ship. Since it is turning out that you must be very divers in ground combat I am willing to bet that you are also going to have to be fairly diverse in space combat. For that reason I will welcome any agressor with a single mega ship to combat any day. His 24 slots for items will have to go up against my unlimited slots for items since I will/do have many designs that incorporate many different strategies and weapon systems.

 

Good Hunting

[EternusIV]

Ah.....

 

but how does your UberGiganticBattleship stack up against mine?

 

Do you have EVERY type of defense on board? How superior is your technology?

 

It will all come down to matchups......which given the design and the amount of knoweldge we know about each other's technology, is very much akin to a roll of the dice

 

 

 

 

A good strategy would be see what tech they throw at you with their little cruisers at turns 40-50 in the game. From there, you can guess which tech path they are and load up on defenses for that ype of attack....and simultaneoulsy design offensive systems that they have no apparent counter for....

 

But in the end - it still comes down to guesswork doesnt it?

 

SPIES dang it! We need SPIES!

[hobknob]

That will work until you get that influx of traded tech from your neighbor.

[Laserwolf]

uuuhhhh yeah, like they are gonna trade you the GOOD stuff...

 

sure they will...

[EternusIV]

One agreement I'm in the middle of proposing is a situation where I'll ship a ton of raw resources in exchange for a defensive pact and advanced items.....granting a surplus (errr 'profit') to the other player.

 

[Laserwolf]

A whole ton of raw resources? Wow... talk about microeconomics... I bet you only have to keep half a ton at your house eh?

 

What sort of ship would you build to deliver a whole ton of raw resources?

 

Of course I suppose he might want to sell you that defensive pact each turn, so a one ton RM convoy route would probably be in order...

 

[EternusIV]

LOL

 

You got me

 

Ok....so like 1,000,000 tons per turn of Improved or Advanced Goods or something to that order. :lol:

[Paradigm]

The downside is exactly your analysis. When it loses, you are completely screwed. One of the factors pushing towards the single ship solution is the fact that regardless of how big the ship is, or how small the warp point is, a single ship comes through all at once. Period. Thus my decision to concentrate on a single, huge, Battlestar Galactic solution. Precisely as you have pointed out.

 

This whole issue gives me a lot to think about. Thanks.

I wasn't even focusing on the warp bubble issue but that's certainly one of the factors pushing for mega ships. I was looking more at the all or nothing aspect of mega ships and war. If you win with your mega ship, you suffer no net loss at all. Just the inconvenience of repairing it. It's all or nothing. Either you win big or your empire is doomed. Whereas if you had a balanced fleet, some portion of it would be destroyed in a battle that was at all equal.

 

As someone else pointed out, another big problem I see with the combat system is no way to break off a battle that's going badly. There should be some point where the loosing side at least tries to run for it and save some of the fleet to regroup. Or for a fleet coming through a warp point to stop if the enemy is destroying the ships as fast as they can funnel through the warp point.

 

I don't want to start a side thread about an old tired TV show, but wasn't the premise of BSG that they was actually a whole fleet of carriers and all but one was destroyed in a perl harbor sort of event?

[Ur Lord Tedric]

One very interesting thing to find out is how the tactics work with the 'single ubermegaship concept'???

 

What I mean is this....

 

You design a single 5M ton monster (well, pretty monsterous for right now...), I design 2 x 2.5 ton smaller monsters. We have identical total weapon and defence fits.

 

However, I concentrate most of my defences in one ship and put that in the Heavy Defence slot, most of the weapons are in a Battle Line ship. My FBP has the H in front of the B - your's doesn't really matter as there's only one ship....

 

In the battle, as we're kind of expecting it to go, you shoot lots and I shoot lots, but my shots are hitting and degrading your ship, whilst your shots are only hitting the H vessel, whilst the B vessel isn't degraded at all. Consequently my hit points keep whittling away at your ship, which gets weaker and weaker. Ton for ton, and point for point, I should 'win' with your ship destroyed and my H vessel pretty knackered, but my B ship fairly unscathed......

 

Now, until we have some 'decent' and not 'trivial' battles we won't know, but it's a plausible reading of the rules......

 

Another interpretation of the bigger is better quote, could be as simple as either:

 

1) For strategic movement you need TWDs and therefore you need less with bigger ships; (perhaps it's silly to even consider one on anything less than a Light Cruiser)

 

or

 

2) Lots of little ships will need a disproportionate amount of fire-control to co-ordinate them?

 

A quietly musing until turns appear Chief Warmaster to Ur-Lord Tedric (who's wanting good fleet battles with reams of options to play with, so no one single strategy works all the time.... )

[ShadowKitsune]

Ur-Lord,

 

If the ships are all Transwarp capable, you can't have equivalent equipment. Given your 5MM ton conflict, the side with the two 2.5MM-ton vessels will need two Transwarp drives, while the other side only needs one Transwarp drive. Given the tonnage of Transwarp drives, the single 5MM-ton vessel can slather on more armor or increase its Fire Control capability or whatever.

 

The one-ship concept doesn't care about the size of the ship's Warp Bubble, so all you need is one Jump Drive, and since one Transwarp Drive gives you the multiple WARPs in a single turn advantage, all you need is one Transwarp Drive on your Leviathan. Plus, you can assume that all of these monstrosities will have at least 4APs worth of manueverability, otherwise the strategic advantage of the Transwarp Drive is nullified.

 

Admittedly, I think that your Hammer & Anvil concept is brilliant for defense. If your two 2.5MM-ton 'ships' are actually Orbital Defense Platforms. You can't use a Transwarp Drive or Engines, which gives you a lot more space for other things. Plus your structural integrity is three times that of a starship.

 

M2CW,

-SK

[RTGPete]

The forward soak-off strategy can be very effective. Another way to try it would be to build 100 small target ships - say, 1 jump drive, 1 engine, 800 fuel tankage - and put them all in front. Your warship(s) sit in back. If the enemy doesn't have any fire control, he'll only be able to kill one of your junkers each round while you get to pour 100% of your firepower into his fleet (hopefully, he doesn't have a screen of his own). If he has good fire control, you'll lose your forward screen and you're back to square one (wasting 100,000 tons of shipping, to be sure). Fire control, by the way, will be showing up along with a host of offensive weapon and defensive system values on battle reports.