Baffled by Infantry Construction & C-Bill Cost

[CapricornNoble]

Greetings all, first post. Just decided to get back into BT after a ~17 year hiatus. I started with the 2nd Edition boxed set, but eventually big stompy robots + FASAnomics turned me off. Now for whatever reason I'm looking back into the game/universe and I'm seeing much more realism, combined arms, and a more mature setting compared to WH40k (also quit 40k about 7 years back) or really anywhere for a TTG.

I was trying to design some foot infantry and the C-Bill cost formula which looks so simple is driving me nuts.

Base Trooper = 2000 * sqrt(weapons)

So I fired up the Infantry Platoon Creation Sheet (  ) which is kinda wonky because I'm on Linux using LibreOffice. I tried to read the macro formula there but still got results I didn't believe So then I fired up MegaMekLab....


Add 1 Foot Infantryman with autorifle. ~16,000 C-Bills
Add a 2nd grunt with autorifle...... + ~16,0000 C-Bills
And a 3rd grunt with automatic grenade launcher support weapon...... +~60,000 C-Bills  :o The weapon costs ~1000 C-Bills but adds 34x that to the unit price? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

So I think I KINDA understand the actual formula is correct but the cost of your grunts explodes with even modest equipment.

My platoon of 4x10-man squads with autorifle + 1 AGL per squad comes out to ~900,000 C-Bills. (MegaMek won't let me design platoons >30 so here is a 2x10 sub-platoon:

Code: [Select]

New Infantry
IS experimental
BV: 50 Cost: 444,000 C-bills 
Movement: 1/1  Men: 20 (10/2) Armor: 1.0 
Primary Weapon: Infantry Auto Rifle
Secondary Weapon: Infantry Auto Grenade Launcher (1)
Damage per trooper: 0.617

If I add ablative flak armor, which doesn't even provide damage reduction in BT if I'm reading the rules correctly, the cost of the 40-man platoon shoots up to ~2.5MCB.

These are just dudes with rifles, flak vests that don't stop flak, and the 32nd-century equivalent of an AGS-30. No infrared laser sights. No night vision goggles. No thermite grenades or other demo. Definitely no "anti-Mech training".

But they cost more than a Locust, which has a fusion engine inside. Hell, they cost almost as much as a 65-ton Rommel tank.


I thought I was gonna sit down and, with Interstellar Operations and Strategic Operations as a focus, design a military from the ground up for my Deep Periphery state. I was trying to be as "realistic" as possible and focusing on making a combined-arms force light on mechs that can defend ~30 worlds with a budget of about 1 Billion C-Bills/planet, and still have high-quality forces available to conduct expeditionary operations. Instead I'm just sitting here foaming at the mouth again.

Here's the wheeled IFV I designed to carry them, meant to mimic a real-world Chinese ZBL-08 IFV:

Code: [Select]

ZBL -08 IFV
IS experimental
25 tons 
BV: 257
Cost: 305,813 C-bills

Movement: 4/6 (Wheeled)
Engine: 80 ICE

Internal: 15
Armor: 59 (Heavy Ferro-Fibrous)
                     Internal    Armor
--------------------------------------
Front                       3       14
Right                       3       11
Left                        3       11
Rear                        3        9
Turret                      3       14

Weapon                         Loc  Heat
----------------------------------------
AC/2                            TU     1
Machine Gun                     TU     0
SRM 2                           TU     2

Ammo                           Loc Shots
----------------------------------------
AC/2 Ammo                       BD    45
SRM 2 Ammo                      BD    50
Half Machine Gun Ammo           BD   100

Carrying Capacity:
Troops - 2.0 tons
My wheeled APC costs 25% of the 20-man squishies it carries (if I add infantry armor, not the unarmored cost shown). How is it cheaper to manufacture/procure a fusion-powered myomer-muscled battlemech than it is to give a group of kids 3-months of boot camp and a few small arms? Someone please tell me I'm looking at the numbers wrong.

[Daryk]

I've never gotten confirmation that body armor enters into the cost formula as part of "weapons", so I just add the cost per trooper.

You may find this thread of use in your effort.  And yes, I came out with about 1,000,000 C-Bills per platoon too.

[Retry]

Just old Fasanomics things that's never really seen any updates.  Seriously, make a high-end 5-man squad of clan Jump infantry with Mauser IICs & an ultra-heavy laser support weapon, your price jumps to over 4-million C-Bills, which is more per trooper than a point of elemental powered armor.

Why in the world would the base cost per trooper be proportional to the square root of weapon cost?  There's no physical reasoning for that, certainly.  It would also imply that the c-bill cost for infantry with only good 'old fisticuffs would be zero: Apparently your kung-fu fighters don't mind brawling for free.

My advice if you want to keep trying to design a realistic garrison army for 30 worlds: throw away the canon C-Bill formula for Conventional Infantry entirely, which IMVHO is probably the most unrealistic bit of the entire Battletech Universe.  It's very much an arbitrary black box with no physical meaning.  Make your own formula that makes sense.

Ex:

C-Bill Cost = #Troopers*(BaseCost+ArmorCost+SpecializedTrainingCost+AugmentationCosts)
+#Squads(PrimaryCost(SquadSize-#Secondary)+SecondaryCost*#Secondary)
+FieldGunCost*#FieldGuns

Okay so that's quite a bit that you'd have to work through, but if you're not planning on using a lot of the options very often you can simplify the formula quite a bit.  Ex: If you're standardizing the armor type to one version, the ArmorCost section just becomes a constant value.  If you're not using Manei Domini cyborg mods, you can ignore the AugmentationCosts entirely.  If you're not using field guns, the field gun term goes away, and so on and so forth.

You might have to "make up" certain values like the base training cost (I used 2,000 C-Bills for that) and specialized training costs (like engineering training, paratroopers or XTC training, etc) but I'll assure you that you'll reach more reasonable, and more importantly more satisfying conclusions with such a formula.

[Daryk]

Infantry costs aren't even in the top ten most unrealistic things in the universe, but it's still my favorite science fiction game system.

[Retry]

Infantry costs aren't even in the top ten most unrealistic things in the universe, but it's still my favorite science fiction game system.

I can make general-purpose conventional infantry whose cost exceeds that of a Savannah Master which is a light-weight hovercraft which includes 1.5 tons of armor and a fusion engine.  And I'm not talking about the entire squad: Every individual infantryman ends up costing more than a SM.

It's definitely in the top ten.

[Daryk]

The cost formula is certainly broken, but various aspects of the aerospace rules sweep my top ten easily.

[CapricornNoble]

Guys, thanks for the assistance and links, especially that Glenmora Militia. I'm just returning from a business trip and getting back into building my AU. Unfortunately I'm heavily using MekHQ so adjusting the C-Bill formulas might be out of the scope for the time being (maybe if I compile the application from the source code I can change the cost formulas, but I'm more of a C++ guy than Java...).

I did some changes to my AU, dropping the faction from 30 worlds down to ~15, and the population from ~33Billion to about 2.2Billion......but I had also made a mistake in my original budget calculation, so now despite a theoretically smaller economy I actually have a budget closer to 48B C-Bills per planet  :D Suddenly spending a "fortune" on the garrisons isn't quite as annoying.

[Daryk]

You're very welcome!  I'll be curious to see how your militias turn out...  :thumbsup:

[boilerman]

Infantry are very abstract in BT, so is the cost formula. The formula certainly isn't just the outfitting cost, like the sticker price of a new car or slightly used BattleMech.

I chalk it up to training costs. The cost formula for battle armor throws on a 150,000 C-bill line item specifically labeled training to pad the bill. I think it's easy to say the same thing for conventional infantry.

Just my 2 cents worth.

[idea weenie]

I've figured that price was for the weapons per trooper, to reflect the training.

So for example, if you had a weapons/armor/equipment package that cost a total of 10,000 C-Bills

So you'd have:
Basic infantry training (don't know the numbers for various skill levels)
Cost of training for the weapons and armor being used: 100 C-Bills
Cost of the equipment itself: 10,000 C-Bills

So a single trooper, not counting skill level training (green -> regular -> veteran -> elite) would cost 10,100 C-Bills to be equipped and fully trained with their gear.  A full platoon would cost 282,800 C-Bills for gear and training.

If that 2000 multiplier was used, then the training would cost 200,000 C-Bills per trooper, making a platoon of 28 cost 5.6 million C-Bills just for training.  For a universe where 'life is cheap, Battlemechs are expensive', that does not fit.

[Daemion]

Well, it might actually make sense if you consider that the infantry you're making are not 'average' conventional forces.  The kind you're making have the stats to be deployed on a game map among BattleMechs and other armored units and expect to hurt said units.

That's extreme front-line, cream-of-the-crop, right there, even if they're inadequately equipped in the way of ancillary support gear like Night Vision and what-not.  Although, again, that extra gear might not 'appear on paper' simply because it's 'built-in'.  I point out that conventional infantry in Total Warfare are not subject to night-time and adverse weather modifiers in the same way that other combat units are not subject to those modifiers until you choose to opt those rules in.  Which suggests that they actually have the gear to handle adverse weather and night-time conditions built in.

So, if you wished, you could come up with a cost modifier for grunts who don't actually have that gear built-in.  They would be subject to adverse weather and night-time modifiers per the TacOps rules for such things, but would be proportionately cheaper, and far more prevalent, for it.

It is this notion, in general, that has me wanting a revised BattleTroops that deals with grunt level fights away from the front lines with the average joe trooper.

[Daryk]

Most of the AToW faction armor kits have night vision, IR or both built in.  They all have flash protection.

[Dark Jackal]

C-Bill cost for infantry makes sense if you're taking them with you off planet as a body guard. Once you sail the stars C-bills is the go-to currency and 'Mechs the go-to fighting force. If it's a regular planetary militia, just pay them the local going rate and save the C-bills for your adventures.