Thinking of navies as units rather than hulls - a way forward found

[Alan Grant]

I've been catching up on some of the more recent BattleTech books like FM: SLDF and the Great House 2765 Field Reports and these more recent books have provided a roadmap to a part of Battletech that I've always found frustrating.

The "space navy" side of Battletech has seldom had the same level of sophistication, detail or sustainability as the ground forces. Over the years we've had Field Manuals that have provided incredible levels of details for ground forces, yet left fleets and navies vague. Often we've had no details at all. Where detail was provided it jumped to a far extreme identifying every warship by name. Which I think made it extremely difficult to keep track of all of those warships later.

In my opinion it wasn't until Field Manual SLDF and the Great House 2765 Field Reports that we finally started to find the sweet spot between super vague "they have navies, no idea how big" and "naming every warship hull in existence."

The sweet spot is units rather than individual hulls. By whatever name, naval squadron, fleet etc.

Where Battletech went wrong in trying to bring the warship fleets back was trying to label each and every one instead of giving us units.

We don't know the nickname and serial number of every Atlas BattleMech in existence. But we know about regiments of BattleMechs and RCTs and we know you can find Atlases in them. Keeping track of every individual Atlas is too much record-keeping. Keeping track of of units is not.

Apply this logic to navies and it allows enough vague area that it becomes practical to send a naval unit, say the Fed Suns 3rd Cruiser Assault Squadron, into combat, and record in some future Field Manual that it suffered 50 percent casualties in that one notable battle and expects to be back at full strength within 2 years and is currently patrolling between system X and system Y. Somewhere else you also get a general description of the average composition of a Cruiser Assault Squadron somewhere in the book.

Come up a slew of units like that, right alongside listing BattleTech 'mech regiments and LCTs/RTCs, and you got a formula for a viable space navy.

Taking this kind of approach has some notable benefits:
- Tracking of most individual named hulls goes away, you get a few notable named ships here and there but they are the exception, this makes record-keeping much easier
- A lot of navy assets can be covered in fewer words/pages in a book
- The fleet becomes sustainable, meaning hulls can be lost, and then replaced in due time, with much simpler explanation required.

We may never see full warship fleets again, but the same concept can be applied to the Assault Dropship/Pocket Warship fleets by whatever name and organizational structure. We've got a lot more assault dropship classes now, I think its entirely viable.

I really do hope we get more detailed combat navies in the future. I love the kind of breakdowns of ground forces we get in the Field Manuals. The Great House and Clan Field Manuals set in the 3050s and 3060s were some of my favorite Battletech sourcebooks. But I'm also very much into the space navy side of things and that area just hasn't received the same consistent level of attention. FM: SLDF gave us naval fleets and squadrons with actual fluff, CO names, personalities, homeports, unit nicknames and other details.

I think the writers did a fantastic job with the SLDF Navy in FM: SLDF precisely because the writers stopped trying to name every ship. Letting go of that allowed them to find the perfect sweet spot.

I know I'm way behind on these books and odds are others have already had this conversation (I genuinely hope I wasn't the only one to feel this way about this). But I just wanted to share my thoughts.

[Dragon Cat]

I agree FM SLDF was a great product

I actually hope ilClan is the turning point

In an almost nBSG sense "all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again" I hope that ilClan is the start of a reunification war two which sees the Clans conquer the Inner Sphere with the succession states swept away or reduced to a fraction of their size and used as target practice by the Clans

whats the best way to dominate the new factions? Have better ground forces and WarShips too

Also may be best time to redo the WarShip rules might reinvigorate the system

[Red Pins]

...mmmay-bee...?

I've been watching Cannonshop's new Ngo series fiction, where the Cutters and WSs follow that suggested notion, with hundreds of ships but not many individually named ships.

But it seems unlikely to say the least.  Not only the situation in canon, but the way the rules are jumbled around and poorly organized for players makes me think they'll simply continue to face away.

Still, I keep hoping for a 'Clan' Amaris (maybe a "Katherine"), some Khan maybe, who is willing to burn it down if he can't rule it, maybe reintroducing a resurgent Group of Homeworld Clans.

[Onion2112]

“Burning it down” is possibly Khan Malvina  :)

Listed Warship squadrons for each house  in the 1SW book would have been nice - although I suspect most houses had fleets filled out with Destroyers & Corvettes with several  dozen larger ships except maybe the Lyrans who comparably probably had quite a few domestic built battle cruisers/Light cruisers. So these squadrons would’ve been mostly patrol/Escort types anyway.

In the Dark Age a listing of the Pocket Warship Squadrons (and Assault) would be nice also - even a number of such squadrons. This would also  help get an idea of the number of Naval Aerospace Wings.

I previously put together an Inner sphere at War scenario set in the dark ages one of big questions I had to consider was trying to work out the size of Assault Dropship fleets - I found very minimal information to help me - I ended up with 1 Dropship Sqn per Mech Regt

Even a mention of the size of the Naval Forces involved at Palmyra and New Avalon would be informative

A comment about the Raven Alliance Naval ASF strength being around the same  size as the Touman and AMC combined is one of the few references I’ve seen of such a thing.

[Cannonshop]

“Burning it down” is possibly Khan Malvina  :)

Listed Warship squadrons for each house  in the 1SW book would have been nice - although I suspect most houses had fleets filled out with Destroyers & Corvettes with several  dozen larger ships except maybe the Lyrans who comparably probably had quite a few domestic built battle cruisers/Light cruisers. So these squadrons would’ve been mostly patrol/Escort types anyway.

In the Dark Age a listing of the Pocket Warship Squadrons (and Assault) would be nice also - even a number of such squadrons. This would also  help get an idea of the number of Naval Aerospace Wings.

I previously put together an Inner sphere at War scenario set in the dark ages one of big questions I had to consider was trying to work out the size of Assault Dropship fleets - I found very minimal information to help me - I ended up with 1 Dropship Sqn per Mech Regt

Even a mention of the size of the Naval Forces involved at Palmyra and New Avalon would be informative

A comment about the Raven Alliance Naval ASF strength being around the same  size as the Touman and AMC combined is one of the few references I’ve seen of such a thing.

Considering someone thought it was a GOOD idea to park an Avalon class in orbit without support, I'd say navies were and are microscopically tiny and mostly made of transports.

[Renard]

I was interested in a similar idea for standard Battletech rather than Aerotech, but I worked out a bunch of rules and am working on comparing the empirical distributions of outcomes the standard rules to the alternative ones. I had to type up the 3025 and 3050 TROs in JSON format since I couldn't easily find a good downloadable database, which was a pain. My idea was based on trying to maintain the balance of existing weapons and units but speeding up play without getting rid of record sheets, like Alpha Strike. You sound like you want to go another step further and eliminate record sheets for individual units?

[glitterboy2098]

the big drawback to this problem is the one that made them stick to small post-star league navies in the first place. once the navies are big enough you are throwing around squadrons of warships, the setting very quickly becomes "and the mechs were blown up before they hit atmosphere"

that is, unless you expand the size of the ground forces to match.. at which point you are back to star league level fighting with multiple divisions of mechs being thrown at every world and even more divisions being stationed on every world, and conflicts become things best played out by statistical analysis with spreadsheets rather than dice and miniatures on a map. at which point the gameplay experience has no connection to how the fiction depicts the battles.

and frankly if i wanted that i'd go play warhammer 40K.

[Renard]

the big drawback to this problem is the one that made them stick to small post-star league navies in the first place. once the navies are big enough you are throwing around squadrons of warships, the setting very quickly becomes "and the mechs were blown up before they hit atmosphere"

that is, unless you expand the size of the ground forces to match.. at which point you are back to star league level fighting with multiple divisions of mechs being thrown at every world and even more divisions being stationed on every world, and conflicts become things best played out by statistical analysis with spreadsheets rather than dice and miniatures on a map. at which point the gameplay experience has no connection to how the fiction depicts the battles.

and frankly if i wanted that i'd go play warhammer 40K.

From my perspective, the record sheet is the core of the *tech experience. As long as I am tracking unit damage in a sufficiently meaningful way that reflects the choices made on the battlefield and shapes strategy, I am happy. I don't need to roll 27 times a round to get that though.

I am less familiar with aerotech, having only read the 3057 TRO obsessively for a year sometime in the 90s. The scale between a fighter and a warship is orders of magnitude different than a tank and a mech, so I would need to think and read up on the rules much more.

The problem is scale and the curse of dimensionality. Battletech damage resolution systems typically grow exponentially with the number of units. There are reasonable ways to reduce that problem without losing what I think are the best parts of the game, but I have no idea if you would agree.

[Red Pins]

I'm not sure.

Like most I experimented with my own sheets, cutting out complexity and reducing sizes of different things like the heat scale.  I had a  pair of Mechs on each side, made it easier for larger battles.  I was working on a set of four per legal sheet, but lost interest, but even so they still tracked armor/IS/Crits.  I don't know how much you can take away from that without playing Alpha Strike.  (Alpha Strike? Is that right?  Never played it.)

[Renard]

I'm not sure.

Like most I experimented with my own sheets, cutting out complexity and reducing sizes of different things like the heat scale.  I had a  pair of Mechs on each side, made it easier for larger battles.  I was working on a set of four per legal sheet, but lost interest, but even so they still tracked armor/IS/Crits.  I don't know how much you can take away from that without playing Alpha Strike.  (Alpha Strike? Is that right?  Never played it.)

Yeah I read the Alpha Strike rules, but they are such a compression of classic Battletech. It feels like the mechs really lose their personalities and strengths and weaknesses, to me.  They're just the Armor/IS, movement, and damage profiles.

The system I have been playing with keeps the attack roll the same but consolidates damage rolls in a mean preserving way. So instead of rolling for a bunch of weapons, you find the total damage for your attack, and the damage is then randomized in a computationally efficient way that preserves the expected damage. I am working on how to do the critical hits now; the most promising version I have worked out so far is to index the critical hits to the amount of internal structure destroyed with a random chance of scoring extra critical hits when the thresholds are exceeded. Then the defender decides how to allocate damage to units (in areas exposed to the arc from which the attack came), but the attack decides what the critical hits destroy.  This speeds the game up a ton, especially early on, when we're just checking off armor bubbles, and then it slows down as shots go internal and things get tense. Attack rolls are penalized judiciously.  Heat stays the same.

This scales pretty easily, since lances do massive amounts of damage to one another, but the damage assignment and critical hits determination doesn't scale in the number of weapons fired. So you can plunk down one mini to represent a lance, which is really four record sheets, and or a company, which is 12 record sheets, and everything scales at the "lance" or "company" level. I have played with adjusting ranges and melee rules a bit but have been investigating how things work statistically at the unit level first compared to CBT rules.

[glitterboy2098]

i'm just saying. when your "standard planetary battle" involves a thousand mechs per side with thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of infantry, and you are fighting with similar sized forces across dozens of worlds at any given time, the actions of my four mech lance basically mean nothing. actually playing out games becomes a formality, since elements that small have absolutely no effect on the setting, making it hard to even pretend the games you play mean anything in setting.

the current set up, where most planetary battles occur between at best a couple score mechs per side for all but the most important battles, give a lot more grounding to play and make it a lot easier to connect gameplay to setting importance.

but the side effect of being able to use small ground forces is that you can't have big navies. because if a planet can be invaded and conquered by the forces in a dozen dropships, it makes it hard for them to survive even one warship much less a squadron of 6-12..

[Alan Grant]

I don't think "organized navies" has to equal "big warship navies dominating everywhere, involved in every planetary invasion." It's not about growth its about sustainability and organizing what's already there but only vaguely described.

Let's just say for sake of discussion that the standard independent unit becomes the naval squadron, commonly made up of about 6 hulls (there is precedence for this, the Medusans followed this pattern, the LAAF (FM: LA) described a squadron as 2-6 vessels, and FM: 3085 page 55 describes a Fed Suns Pocket Warship Squadron as 4 Pocket Warships, 1 ASF carrier and 1 support ship for 5 hulls, a 6-collar jumpship would make 6).

Over on the Clan side of things you have the Star, 5-6 hulls. The Dominion deploys escort stars containing Aesir and Vanir dropships, along with Isegrims or Nagasawas and an Odyssey jumpship.

Given all of these canon references, I think 5-6 hulls (with some variations) is more likely the pattern for independently operating naval units. Bigger forces might be more administrative.

Also I'm not suggesting you'd find these units everywhere. Yes in the 3145 time period you would see more naval battles than you did in 3050 or the 4th SW, but even in 3145, with all that has been described above, how game breaking is the problem at this point? We've got Clan naval escort stars and Inner Sphere Pocket Warship squadrons flying around in the universe today, are we impaired as you've described?

I think that's where this would start, organizing things in the universe as it stands today, see how that goes, then add or delete as needed to keep the game/universe fun and engaging. Maybe that means reintroducing warships back to the universe later or maybe it doesn't. I absolutely agree that upscaling to the point where a single mech lance is almost meaningless because its fighting in a Corps v Corps size battle doesn't sound very fun. Nor does a universe where the 'mechs just can't move between worlds without having to fight through a naval blockade every time. Which is why that's not what I'm suggesting at all.

We know naval assets exist in the universe, I'm not arguing for more of them. Its how vague they are relative to the ground forces that has always been the problem.

Yes, in terms of actual gameplay, the military colossus presented in FM: SLDF is a spreadsheet battle. I'm admiring its on-paper organization and fluff, not its scale.

[Cannonshop]

i'm just saying. when your "standard planetary battle" involves a thousand mechs per side with thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of infantry, and you are fighting with similar sized forces across dozens of worlds at any given time, the actions of my four mech lance basically mean nothing. actually playing out games becomes a formality, since elements that small have absolutely no effect on the setting, making it hard to even pretend the games you play mean anything in setting.

the current set up, where most planetary battles occur between at best a couple score mechs per side for all but the most important battles, give a lot more grounding to play and make it a lot easier to connect gameplay to setting importance.

but the side effect of being able to use small ground forces is that you can't have big navies. because if a planet can be invaded and conquered by the forces in a dozen dropships, it makes it hard for them to survive even one warship much less a squadron of 6-12..

the correct answer, is to give those players' four 'mech lance meaningful missions, crucial missions.  Missions that aren't for the run-of-the-mill spearcarrier troops to carry out.

A planet might have millions of troops on it, but they're not all going to be just hanging around in full gear at the HPG call center, even during an assault.  Concentric rings of Somme-like waves of defenders will point out exactly where an enemy's hiding his critical command center-this is stupid if there are Navies in play, a mobile enemy commander is absolutely going to be trying to balance defensive power with avoiding being caught-that's a TERRIFIC mission for a lance or company of Heroes, whether as the protectors or the attackers.

(for an example of why concentric rings of conspicuous defenders and a fixed installation are a bad combo, I refer you to the death of Sharon Bryan...and the Falcons didn't even bother with orbital bombardment for that one.)

it's like the "all cargo is liquid until unloaded" fallacy-there can be massive hordes, and you can't conquer a world with a lance of Locusts anymore, but that doesn't mean that lance of bug 'mechs can't be the critical 'tipping point' unit that enabled the world to be taken...or lost.

[DOC_Agren]

I have won battles by capturing/destroying HQ unit and sites with fast units like Locust, Bugs, Assassins and Jenners

[Hellraiser]

I like the idea.

Many people complain that if warships are around in #s then mechs die before they hit the ground.

I find that a false for 2 reasons.

In the fluff, Space is Big, there are plenty of ways to come at a planet w/o having to cross paths with a warship even if there is one.

2.  Who says we have to have mechs/warships in the same battle.

Maybe we just want to have a large fleet action w/o it having to involve popping cargo ships.

But you can't toss in your home battle w/o completely defying the way they have written canon.

I think the Fed Suns has more "March Princes" right now than they do Warships which is just sad, IMO.



I like this idea of increasing the #s of ships w/o it requiring naming them all or having it turn into a situation of a dozen warships above every planet.

All you really need is navies of say 50-100 ships instead of 10-40

Enough to say you have a enough 6 warship squadrons running around on your borders to make the chance of them appearing as a possibility instead of "Nope, they don't exist enough to travel in packs of 6"

[Kasaga]

I like the idea.

Many people complain that if warships are around in #s then mechs die before they hit the ground.

I find that a false for 2 reasons.

In the fluff, Space is Big, there are plenty of ways to come at a planet w/o having to cross paths with a warship even if there is one.

2.  Who says we have to have mechs/warships in the same battle.

Maybe we just want to have a large fleet action w/o it having to involve popping cargo ships.

But you can't toss in your home battle w/o completely defying the way they have written canon.

I think the Fed Suns has more "March Princes" right now than they do Warships which is just sad, IMO.



I like this idea of increasing the #s of ships w/o it requiring naming them all or having it turn into a situation of a dozen warships above every planet.

All you really need is navies of say 50-100 ships instead of 10-40

Enough to say you have a enough 6 warship squadrons running around on your borders to make the chance of them appearing as a possibility instead of "Nope, they don't exist enough to travel in packs of 6"

Agreed that's how I work it in my AU its so hard to track ships.  I have to do it simply because if I don't I happen to bring a dead ship back for a fight and don't realize it until after its written.  But I don't name every ship that shows up in the fight.  I have a set organizational principle and then only identify the ships if it makes sense in the story.

I would play more if Warships were a thing instead of a plot sub-point.  If you run 100+ warships you will still have times when they are not around even at strategically important worlds because not all of those worlds will be worth stationing a squadron at.  They will be patrolling and you could even roll dice on the chances of encountering a warship if you invaded a system make it a low chance.  Warships if smartly used will be grouped together for counter attack or defense of staging areas.

The 3050-3070's use of Capital defense and hiding in the void as the boogeyman sucks.  Then we have the Warship Purge of the Jihad...

[Charistoph]

In the fluff, Space is Big, there are plenty of ways to come at a planet w/o having to cross paths with a warship even if there is one.

Space is Big, but the entry points in to a system are largely predictable.  Jump signatures are easily recognized, provided one has the basic sensors in place, which I think most warships carry.  Tracking least-time transits are also easily predictable since you would have navigators doing the same thing for your ships.  There are ways around them, but they usually involve vastly increasing the time for entry of an operation.  Good for stealth missions and the occasional raid, but lousy for whole-sale invasions.

Furthermore, there are two places where warship action is going to take place, Jump Points and orbit.  One isn't going to be have more than a few seconds time of interaction while in transit, unless escape is part of the plan.

While predicting where a dropship will land is rather unpredictable without knowing its mission and resources, it is rather easy to determine where in orbit it will have its first chance at interface, so intercepts there are quite feasible.

2.  Who says we have to have mechs/warships in the same battle.

The only reason why mechs would be involved in a warship battle is they are in the open on the ground and a warship is used as a strategic asset or someone put battlemechs on a hull.  This latter usually happens when ASFs are at a minimum on a side and/or your command structure is rife with glory-hogging 'Mech jocks.

Still, this would be like putting your tanks on a transport's deck to fight a Battleship in WW2.  The transports should be trying to avoid the warships and your escorts should be making it painful to try intercepting the transports.

Maybe we just want to have a large fleet action w/o it having to involve popping cargo ships.

Part of the point of warships is to make sure said cargo ships full of something do not get to a destination, the other part is to make sure said cargo ships full of something DO get to a destination.  This could be contraband or troops.  Fleet actions usually happen when one uses warships to counter other people's blocking warships.  This could be pre-emptive or as part of a landing campaign, but that is the general idea.