Sorry for the lengthy absence. I was in New York for most of the last week, and was too busy eating tasty food and dodging insane drivers to reply here. Brace yourselves for a very long reply post...
Every freak accident in the past centuries could be explained with a GM having an off day. ;D
Forgive me if I'm just blind, for I couldn't find it, but: How are battles actually resolved?
And, assuming there's counting and virtual dice rolling involved: Would it make sense to send the preliminary numbers to a neutral party to check?
Now there's an interesting choice upon marcus:
Are the problems, in-universe, recognized as problems with the tactics, the technology, or bad execution at that moment? :)
Battles are resolved by me rolling a few dice to see how everyone does that day(crew skill, command skill, and luck for each side) and then me crafting a battle that seems to fit with the fleets, stated doctrines, and dice rolls for both sides. There's no explicit mechanical rules available, largely because if there was you'd all max-min like crazy.
More Detail:
Perception of need for doctrine/design change is based on the following.
1.) 6CVA + 6 CVE (6MT) conduct a fighter strike of ~5000 Fighters, defeat 3 CA (2.25MT). Of those 3, 2 are hard killed, 1 is mission killed. The 6MT of carriers contributes nothing further to the fight. Mission killing 6MT of ship to eliminate 2.25MT of ship is just not sustainable. Now, better armed carriers that could stand in the line (contributing firepower and armor to the 'gunline battle' might address this.
"Sustainable" is an interesting question in this context. If battles were more frequent, that would be an absolutely fantastic outcome. Even if 30% of those battles end with your fleet getting mousetrapped and killed, that's still a good loss ratio.
2.) 6 CA (Tyr) badly outperformed by 3 CA (Atago, already damaged) 6 DD (Minekaze) and (presumable?) 4-6 FF (Tate). Now, some of the problem in this phase of the battle grows out of 1, above - the CVAs and CVEs play zero role in this phase, contributing neither fire nor armor. Again, CVAs and CVEs that stand in the line, contributing armor and fire would help, but given the light missile load on Walkurie and Heimdaller, I cannot say that the Admiral made a clearly wrong call in keeping them out of harms way. (though I anticipate that the box score would have been better had the carriers stayed in the gunfight launching missiles and absorbing fire - the losses for BOTH sides would have been heavier).
The CV wing *did* use their missiles, but they fired at extreme range and fell back once their tubes were dry. They need to stay close enough to recover fighters, and to provide some mutual support - it's not like scattering to avoid being run down would work in this case, after all, so they mostly just wanted to hang back a bit. (And even if they *had* been up close, they'd be low-priority targets in a gun battle. Unlike WW2, they have armor comparable to the gunships, so it's not like you can just rack up carrier kills. Better to silence the guns and run down the carriers later.)
3.) Because of 1 and 2 above, the underlying doctrine (Carrier strike, Cruiser Gunline defeats/defends against survivors of carrier strike) failed. Now, we know out of character that it failed because of poor rolls on the part of the LC force, and because of the presence of a swarm of Civilian Dropships that both served as AAA/PDS, and to absorb incoming missiles. But the characters in game dont know they rolled poorly, and must assume that the enemy will in the future also have the 'Free Milita Dropship Swarm' (even if not free because it has to be paid for post hoc, still free in that it didnt have to be paid for before!)
Looking at responses to this battle, I think the "militia dropships" need some further consideration. We can argue that they're actually Army units, not militia, which answers the "why are they fighting in pitched battles?" question, but the budget is still wacky. (Hell, maybe I need to give you an army budget. No designs, but a price on regiments, combined with the ability to buy DS out of that budget, would perhaps fix this? IDK.)
5.) You really cant build a ship with more fighters per ton than Walkurie. You CAN build a navy with more fighters than the LC, at the cost of all other capabilities... but I dont see another 6 CVs deckloads killing enough to keep the survivors from running down and eliminating the carriers. Faster carriers and missiles fired from longer ranges might allow more reload/reattack - but at 4/6, youve lost about half your fighter carriage. Firing at long or extreme range, youve lost half or more of your hits. In such a scenario, your emptiying the decks of 6 Megatonnes of carrier to kill on a good day ONE Cruiser. Thats just doesnt work. On the reverse, you can with casual ease build a ship, or a navy, with far, far more AAA/PDS than the DC brought.
Fair.
For the above reasons, current LC design and doctrine is a failure, and a dead end, from an OOC perspective. Now, its possible that in-universe the Navy will pitch this loss as a win - after all, the German Navy called Jutland a win, despite fleeing the field, based on total losses inflicted. However, it seems that the Naval Prognosticators of the universe should be looking at this and seeing IC what I'm seeing OOC.
Whether or not they *will*, ~tips hat to Unlimited~, is another story. The Lyran Military History primarily consists of being assigned a dominant economic position and then carrying the idiot ball sufficiently far to ensure that that dominant economic position is rendered meaningless. Im thinking having the navy stick its fingers in its ears and singing 'lalalalalalala', while yelling at its pilots to get closer, yelling at their missile designers to invent missiles that kill ships, and building to replace losses while conducting RnD and ignoring the elephant in the living room would certainly be the sort of thing that has happened before.
One doctrine change that IS possible... a high speed engagement profile might allow missiles to hit hard enough to meet their promise, but a 2/3 fleet only does high speed engagement where the enemy allows or it has serious recon superiority.
TBH, with your fleet the way it is, I'd probably aim for high-speed passing engagements as often as possible. Your fighter force is ridiculously large, and that has the best performance per unit mass in single-shot engagements by far. It's not even a mission kill for the carriers if they can stay out of combat for a day or so to recover, sleep, re-arm, and re-launch. And aside from the Charon, nobody has the fuel to move faster than 1g for any sort of strategic length of time, so you don't even have a mobility disadvantage there.
Proper warship ECM hasn't been invented yet. We also haven't delved into what 5K-15K AC/5s from the Lyran ASFs should have done.
Some ECM exists (it's my fluff explanation for why it's harder to hit at long range, even with light-speed weapons), but it'll get better with the ECM tech. (I don't have numbers for this yet.) As for the AC/5s, they don't stick around for long in the first engagement, and they don't have time to adjust targets to aim for holes. They'll do some damage, but not very much, and it's incorporated into the damage done by the missiles.
I can see where Marcus is coming from here. If the plan for a fighter-heavy strategy is:
- NLs don't have a +3 to hit penalty.
- NLs have a 360 arc.
- NLs are an automatic kill vs. fighters
- 5 AC/5 shots kill Lyran fighters.
- 70+ Civilian dropships are up-armed and armored to military standards for free when facing fighter strikes.
- Lyran ASF don't have (or refuse to use) MGs for defense against Barracudas.
- Lyran ASF don't have (or refuse to use) AC/5s or other mech-scale weapons in their attack pass.
it makes the fighter heavy strategy look like a cartoon. Maybe the rolls are so overwhelmingly important that they wash out most/all of the value of design and even the battletech rules and commonsense. Or maybe the plan is that every design is roughly equivalent with rules adjusting as necessary to make that so. Either way, it means that investing fighter-heavy designs doesn't make much sense. In the first case nothing matters while in the second case, you'd rather have 50% more battleships.
I'll note here that massed fighter strikes are easily countered with massed MGs---it just requires appropriate designs to do so (... see TC). Hence, it's not like we are talking about something unbalanced.
Some clarification about fighter armor vs. mech scale weapons seems like a good idea. If ASF armor is going to be treated as 1/10th normal thickness vs. mech scale weapons (as happened here) and the Combine upgrades AAA (entirely sensible after this battle), this may not be viable.
Related, I glanced through all the 50+ ton designs in TR3039 just now. Every one of them (even the infamous Chippewa) would typically survive a single NL35 hit in the default rules. I'm personally fine with treating capital scale damage as x100 standard scale damage as that makes more sense than the standard x10 anyways, but maybe we should be explicit about this.
I think it's clear that I need to analyze my numbers a bit more closely here.
A bug report: It appears that fire control tonnage is a factor of 10 to low for every arc except the nose. As an example, J9 compute the total weapon tonnage in FR, then multiplies by 0.1. J6 then multiplies by 0.1 again when computing fire control tonnage from the FR arc.
Is this something to fix or part of the rules of this game?
That's a bug - previously mentioned in this thread, but I haven't had a chance to fix it. I'll fix it by this weekend.
Well the Lyran Commonwealth has been updated on the Master Sheet so you can do your turn Marcus, is that DC vs FS fight still on, or put off for next turn?
Still on. I'll do it up this weekend.
Thought that was writers fiat....
But then how does one expand? I either take what I want ( or can keep, looking at you FWL, don't eat me purple byrd! ), or is there another way?
Would this be feasible? I specifically " attack " a planet, say Trondheimal in the Illyrian Palatinate, even though their not really colonized yet, and " take " control of it as in defending territory and rebuilding the system to my realm's patronage?
It's like calling " Dibs " on something and then defending said Dibs from all others. While this would let me to honor my expansionist behavior, it would also allow others to seek out my claims for themselves. ( Don't try it I says! Stupid purple byrd! )
Thoughts or is this too much? Cause the only action I got is becoming a long term bank sink... or expand. So much one can do...
The RWR has spent a lot of their budget encouraging colonial efforts and economic development thus far - between the faster communications of a command circuit, government-funded JS/DS to help establish colonies, and so on, it's probably been half their budget. They've seen their economy grow faster than other nations as a result. The outer limits of the Inner Sphere are not fixed, and this is not a SW-era game where exploration is considered passe. All nations are engaged in colonial activities right now(including the Marians), and that's part of the economic growth we see every turn.
This includes both the opening of new planets and the development of thinly-settled worlds, FYI - a planet outside the TH is considered large and important if it has a couple hundred million people in this era, but many settled planets can be developed to nearly the same scale as Terra if the economy and population exists to develop it that far.
I found myself flipping through turns trying to find individual designs, so I made a master set of design links. This provides easy access to detail beyond the turn-tracking spreadsheet.
You are my hero.
Might be illegal. I say might because I think the issue has been brought up and the official construction rules regarding it thrown out (I just couldn't find where it was spoken about), and a similarly potentially illegal design was already submitted in Alsadius' Charon. In both cases the SI is more than the maximum thrust allows according to the official construction rules - 30 times the max thrust (they both should max out at 90).
It's definitely a potent min-max ship that is using learned information from past battles though.
Those are intentional rules changes. Speeds round to the nearest 0.1 now, and SI is un-capped.
