FGC module combat discussion

[guardiandashi]

so since combat is an integral part of the FGC I was thinking that the first step would be to determine what a "unit is" and then some way to rate its relative strength.

I am thinking that as a leader/ruler that you wouldn't deal with individual units or even lances companies etc, a regiment/galaxy would likely be the smallest unit you would normally deal with.

with that in mind I suggest that the standard unit be a regiment or the equivalent.

the exception might be "hero units" you have the wolfs dragoons working for you, and you also have the black widow company, you can't deploy the black widow company by themselves, but you can attach them to a regiment, to "enhance it"

now we all know regiments are not created equal just ask a laio player with his regiment of urban mechs, how that holds up against a steiner assault regiment how well that works....

so my thought is to sum up the bv of the unit, reduce it to a 4 digit equivalent and add adjustments for loyalty and experience.

example
bob has the 1st davion heavy guards they currently have a bv of 250365 are considered fanatical loyalty, and are an elite unit

the bv is changed to 25.04, because they are elite they add a +1 and fanatical another +1 meaning the unit rates as an effective 27.04 when they go into battle

this would be compared to an enemies value to get either bonuses or penalties (relative strength) a mission/track is determined and a check is made, and results applied.

I am thinking that units should have a "condition scale" and most missions should not be able to spontaneously destroy a unit.  degrade yes but to actually destroy a unit takes a fair amount of work.


thoughts?

[Terminax]

A very convoluted way to go about things when you could just assign a target number to a die roll for similar results and nowhere near as much work. Also, reducing the game to regiments/clusters (the regimental equivalent in the Clans) pretty much makes this a form of over complicated Risk in space.

[guardiandashi]

part of my reasoning is that by incorporating a bv for units (or typical bv ranges) it accomplishes a couple things.

1 it gives you a reason to build units (which many of us like)
2 it differentiates between a "light regiment" and a heavy or assault one a cav (Calvary) unit etc
3 it sets up conditions to allow "zooming in on a particular fight" if desired
4 it allows for "upgrading" a unit IE replacing said units phoenix hawks with whatever's changes the units relative strength by ...

at a certain level the FGC is a giant game of risk

[Terminax]

Again, a convoluted process for results that could be had another way without anywhere near the work. How is one to figure out the BV of  every single regiment or cluster? Are you proposing to do from adding up every single component unit? If so, it's a ludicrous amount of work and that's just counting the mech units and nothing else. Then multiply it by two dozen factions. It's not feasible. In my Shattered Sphere game rules we setup a cost per individual units, divided by tech level and weight class and giving a multiplier based on experience level and people would buy what they wanted and assemble units from that and it was only moderately less work than your idea. And budgets were done by hand, no software support and guess what? It was a huge amount of work and running the game was essentially a full time job.

I think a more feasible route, is to build commands using the company/squadron (Battlemechs/Aerospace) and battalion (everything else) for the Inner Sphere base size and Binary or Trinary for the Clans base size like the Inner Sphere in Flames rules but design a different combat mechanic than adding up poorly balanced points. As I've indicated in my thread, you could setup a simple record sheet half a page long for small to medium commands (so you could double up) like the typical Inner Sphere regiment with light support forces and a full page long record sheet for bigger commands like RCTs.

No matter what is going to be chosen, units are going to involve the most paperwork in this style of game but by no means does that mean it has to be complicated paperwork. Sure it'll take up time (but it's going to take up time anyways) but it's not hard to engineer PDFs that you can edit or print out and keep everything organized and in the end, that is the key.

[monbvol]

The Regiment(or it's rough equal) is probably the smallest unit that a Fan Council should work with.  That said Just so you don't get bogged down in details and since by the time you reach a Regiment you should have examples of every weight class anyway it really should be boiled down to as few things to track as possible.

I'm of a mind there there should only be two types of forces.  Ground and Aerospace.  It is possible to convince me to go to three: Conventional, Mech, and Aerospace.  Warships would just be rolled into Aerospace "Regiments".

Each unit would have a three(technically four but the last is a bit redundant to track IMO) state damage progression(undamaged, light damage, heavy damage, and destroyed), a transport cost(I'm thinking a flat 1 for Aerospace per 30ly move, 2 for Ground per 30ly move), a support cost(2 aero, 1 ground), a loyalty rating(need something for civil wars and wars of independence), and two numbers derived from Green, Regular, Veteran, and Elite: A 2d6 modifier to progress the damage state of an enemy unit and a target number to meet or beat via aforementioned 2d6 check to progress damage state.

I still need to work out withdraw actions so that Regiments can be outnumbered but still have a chance to survive combat intact enough to either become a nuisance or get off planet.

[Ruud]

just a newbie to the FGC the last time, but 1 regiment of mechs is a lot.  Maybe battalions for mechs and regiments for other ground forces?

It would be awesome if some "orders" could be given prior to resolving combat, but that would be pretty complex (i think).  Almost impossible to keep it simple enough to work and then add more and more variables (climate, terrain, defensive tactics vs. aggressive attacks, etc. etc.).

I guess it would be nice to have a "chivalry" rating for a mech on mech unit fight.  A mech is a very valuable piece of equipment and mech pilots must be quite the investment.  Sure "Waco" & Co would go all out vs. the WDs, but i would think that such instances would not always be the case.

(just excited to see FGC is being talked about and resurrected)

[monbvol]

A regiment isn't actually that much.  I know people like to complain about Companies taking planets but from what I can tell that never really happened.  Every time a planet changed ownership as far as I can tell it involved multiple regiments all the way back to the dark days of the late Third Succession War.

When you already have over a hundred regiments to keep track of(each faction has this many in the late Third Succession War all the way up to about the Civil War except for the CapCon) I'm hesitant to go to the fine detail of tracking individual battalions.

[Ruud]

True that.

[The Eagle]

And besides, if you want to track a unit at under regimental strength, you simply adjust their Force Point or BV or whatever by the amount they're short.  So if a 'Mech regiment is worth 10 force point (as an example), and the 1st Mystuffrocks Guards are only two battalions strong, then instead of being 10 FP, you record them at 6.6 FP (or 6 or 7, depending on how rounding works out).

[Arkansas Warrior]

In the Good Old Days^TM a regiment might well be broken up into component battalions for garrison work and raiding, but even in the latter 3rd War days you'd be sending a regiment+ if you wanted to take and hold territory.  That how it's always seemed to me, at any rate.