does this not make it more realistic then?

i would have thought half of the enjoyment is the risk, not sitting in the orbit of your fortress and only going to battles with overwhelming forces because you know for sure you will win????

wheres the skill in that...................


obviously theres a problem, when i joined i can remember Mica saying, oh yes. HH ships are designed to be in battle for days and the program has shown that 1 HH ship outnumbered 2-1 would take 5 days to blow up etc etc, but this will never happen due to the uber fleet system. ( i wonder why everything that means total destruction ends up with a germanic sound)

anyway, what ever decision is made its not going to an easy one.

one possible theory is to make jumping more expensive if carried out on the same turn, someone bought this up a while back. Basically a hyperdrive or QJJ can jump every day for 50 tus. but if they attempt more than 1 jump today then the second jump is 100 tus and the 3rd is 100tus. this means that if you have 300 tus and are sat with your pipe and slippers at your HQ, you cant be expected to be in the farthest reaches of enemy territory the next day. but you can move everyday for 50tus, this in effect allows skirmishing to a degree.

im not sure if this would solve the problem it would have to be thought about a bit more

Alternatively only allow ships to save 60TU - 1 day- unless there are stacked orders with the "Wait for TU" order. This will make it a real time realisitc game. This will make it very difficult to respond to threats and will create skirmishes as no-one will commit a fleet deep into enemy territory.

Platforms for defence will need to be built to defend home systems against an uber fleet attack while the skirmish squads are away looking for targets.

Cargo ships are constantly run all the time so should have stacked orders set for them.

Bad idea, sack it

Another idea was to make jump engines explosive - we've all seen Star Trek warp core shennanigans.
The original description (BSE) of the hyper drive stated that it was unstable so giving it a hefty explosive damage is perfectly in line with its design.
We could even have explosive damage for all JD's just base it on an exponential value of its size - making the big ones very scary.
Fast response fleets may even jettison them prior to entering combat!

Another idea was to have ships flagged as combat ready or not. No idea what sort of mechanism to use, but if bringing weapon systems other than point defence on line took all available TU's, or X TU's per day to keep weapon systems on line we effectively slow fleets down, e.g. a warship running while combat ready has 50TU's per day with a max of 150 per week while a surprised fleet would suddenly have zero TU's as it upgraded to battle stations.

Combining layered defence, explosive jump drives and battle ready we have cumbersome warfleets with limited range.

Feel free to shoot these suggestions down in flames.

This would increase the time required to generate turns, the number of turn reports sent/recieved and the amount of 'babysitting' required to ensure a position's orders are running as intended. Currently if I am low on time I can save 300TUs and do a whole bunch of things at once, and just have one turn to check that everything worked okay. With 60TUs whilst doing something signifigant I would have to check my turns everyday to ensure everything is okay.

These are all bad things for those who do not wish to invest more time and effort in the game and I feel would discourage new players.

Is the exploding JD the same idea as the bomb one? The other ideas will affect all ships the same - so wont penalise uber fleets any more than it does smaller fleets. Anti-combat, rather than anti-fleet.

Could not a simple solution be to modify the damage, accuracy, etc done, based on the number of ships in the battle? Say, because so many ISR engines destabilise space.

it also keeps the results fluid, as its based on the total ships present from both sides - do you bring 50 ships to a battle and cause spacial flux and get thrashed, or bring less ships and be able to do more damage, etc.

Mark

Since all movement is based on ISR (whether jump drives, thrust engines, or ISR engines) then they could all have a different modifier on how space is de-stabilised; so even a small fleet all with Hyper drives (or all high speed, etc) would cause the same damage as a larger, far slower fleet would.

So it still allows some flexibility in approach - big, slow fleets, small fast response fleets, etc.

Mark

All you would have to do for a cargo ship is enter "Wait for TU - 250" just as you do now, or at least I do. I save the cargo runs I do most frequently and then load them up with the correct Wait for TU orders in. Saves loads of time. Some ships I don't look at for weeks. This would not change.

Warships I agree need to be reviewed daily if a battle is taking place. But then you would be doing that anyway so I don't see the difference

Andy

will that not mean that the rce for larger faster ships will escalate out of control to get a fleet of 100 300 hull warships. Still uber fleet - you will just have more than one uber fleet attacking different locations

I like the idea of explosive jump drives but i think they need to relate to the amount of pulac in the drive itself as that is the explosive element. All other items with pulac in must be made explosive as well though.

Jump drives have 5mu pulac. Pulac does 5MU damage so 25MU damage. Hypers have 39Mu damage so 195MU damage if they blow. Not scary but painful none the less.

Either the suggestion to make jump drives explosive or increasing their surface area is fine by me, but not both. The surface area one makes the most sense to me.

Battle ready suggestion : Are you saying that warships will be capped at 150Tu per week? If yes then this is a good idea to limit the warships range. I also like the battle readyness option but I think it places the defending fleet at too big a disadvantage. All warships should be able to keep Battle readiness to on whether defendng or attacking but the time to Recreation should be reduced to 25 weeks from 30. This will also limit battle ready fleets as recreation will come round sooner.

Summary :

1. Hyper / quantum drive issue - explosive damage or increased surface area - not both - increased surface area in preference.
2. 150TU cap for warships with battle readiness option and quicker time to recreation,

Andy

Like it much better on hulls

Perhaps the combat efficiency can be adjusted up or down by an admiral type position. You would need 1 admiral per 20 ships?

Andy

Much of the issues with this approach can be countered by making the function related to the target silhouette or surface area of the position in some way. Large platforms, bases etc. can be hit by more attackers, as there is more to hit.

It would mean that larger ships can be hit by more - but equally larger ships only take up one "slot" when attacking too. If the balance was right (ie. the formula) then I don't see it affecting the "small ships Vs Large ships" issue. Space fighters fit in with missiles, torps etc. - you could treat them in exactly the same way, one launch pad.

I don't think it should be a hard limit though - it should be a deterioration in offensive efficiency (not defensive) a bit like the 10% drop for mines etc., although I don't think a linear reationship like the 10% drop would work quite so well

One other point though - You should still be allowed to hit as many targets as you want, otherwise a starbase would only be able to hit one opponent at a time...

Dan

It also makes boarding too powerfull and it will kill the trader.

At this moment, I move most of my ships from base to base, but thats only because I can save up TU's. If I won't be allow to save up tu's I will have to kill my smaller ships, deploy loads of marines on my surviving ships just to fend off those pirate atttacks.

And how is an 200 tus jump ship with low effeciency supposed to move??

Anyway, this idea was shot down an couple of weeks ago..

Will this formula not simply mean that 100 ships (or 10,000 hulls) becomes the standard fleet size, giving the maximum potential you can achieve. It will make combat very boring if all fleets have the same number of ships/hulls.

Mark

This actually sounds like a good idea to me, although repurcussions of course in terms of ship configurations, a lot of people having designed their ships around 4 round/day combat.

Wouldn't affect the trader, and even adds more possibilities for skirmishing to the game - some people may only choose to hang around for 5 rounds of a 10-round/day combat, for eg.

Presumably the efficiency drop should be a function of the size of the opposing fleet as well. If you are facing 100 ships, you will have a lot more room for targeting than if you are facing 10 ships. So while 100 ships, say, may be the optimum size for taking on an opposing fleet of 50 vessels of the same size, it would not necessarily be the optimum size for taking on a fleet of 80 vessels. Thus there would still be reasons for operating fleets of a variety of sizes.

Richard
AFT

but in turn by doing what your saying here and allowing unlimited,unrestricted and easy transport, for all ship types, merchant or otherwise, this area of the game is totally removed???

what your saying is, you want all your ships to move from the equivelent of Liverpool to Canada in a day so you dont have to worry about the wolfpacks.......... ( i know im using another world war analogy but some one has to )

there are differing views on how this should go, as you can see, i think micas original idea of layered damage and potential loss of drives is probably the only way, it means those that have the drives at the minute still keep their advantage, but in the long term after continuing battles they may start to lose drives and consequently come down to the rest of us/you.

We have already seen the massive losses Pirate Large can deliver.. losses, which if you look at the base value of the ships are so big that in normal situations the player would go bankrupt. I don't know about you, but replacing an 100 huller is an expensive thing. And due to the low profit margins, it will take months or even years before I can earn this amount back. Especially if you are concentrating on trade by buying and selling stuff.

If you can't move from base to base, because you can't save up enough TU"s then trade is going to change drastically. I will probably motball most (or maybe all) of my smaller ships and concentrade on my bigger vessels, vessels which are big enough to load enough marines to fend off boarding parties. This means smaller bases who don't produce enough uniques to make an big ship profitable will loose out...

I do think that Phoenix will change so much, that I will have to reconsider my entire strategy in running ships and bases and it will probably mean that most of my smaller bases will not be sustainable anymore.... I already see an tendencie to make bigger groups stronger and stronger at the expense of the smaller groups.. which is maybe good in the eyes of the strong military forces, but will turn phoenix in an 100% wargame.

People are now complaining that "Uber Fleets" are an problem, but "Uber Fleets" are helped out much by the new squadrons.. So, I suggest that deleting those squadrons might be an good idea.

That's just silly. Somebody will write a bulk order tool to replace them if it becomes a problem.

Okay..

An better idea to reduce the number of fleets in an "Uber Fleet'. Just limit the number of active warships an player can run to 10 per player.

This way you are sure you dont' have massive fleet roaming around and it also means that every player in your affliation will count as an truly resource of power. Ofcourse all affliation should be able to run at least an number of ships independently of the number of players.. so that smaller affls (with less players) still have an decent fighting chance.

So what happens to the affs that have more than that already? or the affs that have one or two players running the fleet on behalf of others who want that fleet working for them but not run by themselves - I know several players who only like running warships, and others who only like running tradeships

And what happens if an aff is up to their limit, and a player drops from the game? The way to deal with uberfleets is to make it more sense to run things a different way, not a delete button...

sorry, but this idea (as it stands) is just unworkable

Dan

While it can often seem that way, I think the things Mica and David are looking for/concerned about with this kind of thread are the parts of the game where there is only one succesful strategy - like the photon gun was in BSE, the "uber-weapon" as far as the majority of us were concerned. It is rapidly becoming the case that the uber-fleet is "the" tactic to use... it's being used extensively in the "Human" wars - and the Consortium did it in Crusade too (to an extent). That in itself can't be good for the long-term survivability of the game.

Even in the vastness of space, there would be a physical limit to the ability to control a huge number of different combat units. yes, you could argue that 100 ships is not enough to put a limit on, but could you say that for 1000? 10,000? sooner or later we WILL get to that point, even with the changes to shipbuilding a while back.

The idea of reducing efficiency based on size of fleet, relative size of fleet or relative number of attackers against a ship are measures that try to deal with this to a degree...there are many, many more - for example giving a heavily outnumbered ship a better chance to hit enemies (ie. so many of them you'relikely to hit something, even if you miss your intended target) - but it's better to find a relatively simple, but workable and balanced, change if we can

People wouldn't be forced to split their fleets - if they were, any change would be too severe and be pushing for a single winning strategy the other way. But it should mean that there would be reasons to split the fleet in some circumstances (which currently there isn't)

Dan

Mm, you know, I quite like that idea. The first problem that springs to mind, though, is that it would make just about all warship designs instantly obsolete, since they don't have room to store any fuel!

Personally I was thinking it wasn't unrealistic even if you assumed all ships fired at the same time, space is *big*, ships aren't.

You have to assume your average combat spread is around the lightsecond range, i mean it takes the first round for fighters just to cross the space. On this kind of scale I don't see why having 1000 ships targeting a single ship is a problem.

You can't really relate space combat to aircraft combat, a closer annology is naval conflicts but you have to think in 3d, more like subs i guess, and even then gravity is an issue.

Although this would ruin almost all my cargo ship setups, and force me to protect my trading vessels a lot more, it makes sense, and would probably add more angles to the game (although make piracy easier). It also goes some way to solving the uber fleet problem as you can effectly pin sections of the fleet by enageing it in combat on route.

you'd get the same effect by making ship's crews that have been in combat, (or maybe all combat vessels) get worn out faster so need R&R more often, of course you'd need to alter to rules to R&R was actually a problem first and not just a 20% reduction, (maybe 5% per week over), the advantage of this is you don't need to keep track of two things all the time and existing blueprints still work.

Don't forget r&r is actually linked to the ship and not the crew so it's reasonable to assume it includes things like replacing air/food/fuel etc

To be perfectly fair there are very few cases in history where spliting forces in combat have been benifical, normally these cases have been to do with terrian advantages, flanking/morale issues or special forces conflicts.

Because we really don't have many terrian concerns above which systems link to which, the reasons to split are reduced massivly. We also have no concept of 'surprise attacks' at a ship level, sure the player might not expect it but that combat vessels will still perform as well, something that wasn't always true in history. (although forces are much better trained to avoid that these days).

The only real reasons left are for decoy and strike missions, and as it appears to be more than a little bit difficult to withdraw without losing half your forces you effectivly lose the decoy squad. Defeat in detail is a bad thing

Hmm fair point, why didn't i think of that.

However you still have the problem of penalising large forces, because if you have just a drop in effeiceny then either it won't be enough one way so more ships is still a benifit (which to be fair it should be, but that doesn't stop the uber fleet problem), or you go to much the other way and there will be some value of ships/hulls that is the optimium to combat with, which is what everyone will use.

Sure you can say that in the first case it's more effeicent to split your forces, however the fact remains that the uber fleet will destroy either of the "more efficent per ship" smaller fleets (which is how it should be but doesn't stop the problem).

Most important point here however is that how do you count the fleet size? I know we've all be talking about this based on the IMP block vs the CNF block so you have two sides in ever conflict, but that isn't really the case for how battles in phoenix work.

So do you count the fleet size;
allied affilation blocks? seems a bit abstract, especially when theres no rule against and affialtions being allied with both of two hostile ones, and even then do you only count publicly delcard allies?
per affliation? what if i wanted to attack another RIP player?
per player? seems like affilations with more players get an ever bigger advantage there.
based on the target lists of each ship? how many sides in each combat would that give you?

This sounds like equating space battles with grunts on the ground in straight lines (circa 1814)

A large force in space can englobe a smaller one, stand off a goodly distance but within range and you have a massive area (inside of a spere) in which to deploy your ships, so why would they get in each others way?

At present I believe each engagement is run as a mini ship v ship battle, even if more than on ship engages a target.

Making multiship battles would increase the density of incomming missiles and cause much higher proximity damage to the incoming when point defence kicks in.

Also, as the situation is at present, in a major battle it tends to be unusual for more than ten ships to engage a single target. This only happens when there are a few stranded ships left behind on subsequent days when one side decides to break off. unless one side has managed to arrange massive local superiority in the first place, in which case it is reasonable that the opposition gets trashed.

Geoff

It would certainly put the brakes on combat for a few weeks whilst everyone re-configured their 4 or 8 round missile ships.

Then add a few more weeks whilst they build the patches needed to bring their converted ships back to high efficiency

Geoff

I think Pedro mentioned this earlier - the smaller fleet would not stay at the centre where everyone can attack them; instead, they would try to move closer to part of the enemy fleet to engage at closer range and (as far as possible) outside the sphere.

its the Star Wars scenario - either the Death Star blasts you apart, or you engage the Star Destroyers at point blank range. Might be a choice between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, but Id prefer to fight back than be a sitting duck.

How many cliches can I include in this message

Mark

I like this idea too - but its pretty much the same as the patch requirement for ships ie. a control mechanism to make fleets more expensive and control their time away from port.

Which makes me think, wasnt the (fairly) recent changes to ship production/patch requirements supposed to control ship production? Without ship production, where are the massive Uber Fleets? I know existing ships werent affected, but if the big affiliations are fighting en masse in Uber Fleets, surely this means those fleets would be getting smaller and smaller?

Either the recent ship changes are not doing the job, or is this entire proposal not a bit premature? Dont know, just thought the questions should be put forward

Mark

I havent been involved in space battles (yet<g>) but thought they only have two sides?

Mark

that one's simple - if this is an option decided upon, have jump engines give a new cargo type ("fuel") capacity

Dan

Only if your only looking at the IMP block/CNF block war. no reason why you can't have more parties.

Besides the combat is at a ship level not a fleet level, so ship x might have a whole affilation on its enemy list and ship y might onyl have a few positions. Do they still count as one fleet?

What about all the concerns such as how disabling a ship is effected by this, which if i remember correctly included taking out thrusters (+combat and landing) and irs/jump drives. Now some of these are easier to damage than others, were as before we had a flat bonus to hit them due to location.

Why not just alter the targeting bonus, rather than including a complex layering system? or reduce the items armour value so it gets destroyed faster? Seems to me that the layers just add duplicates of values which we already have.

I understand the layers fit the way someone might visualise a ship layout, but I'm far from conviced of how useful the concept is, and if this is geared towards limiting the resposivness of a fleet the best way, in my opinon, would be to look at the limiting factors of military forces in history.

Two such factors which spring to mind are integrity and r&r:
Aircraft in doing combat manvoures put a far higher stress on parts that when they are mearly patroling airspace, and I imagine the same would be true of combat between space vessels, although those high-g twists and turns can't be good for the ship's structure, the faster the worse it gets too.
All members of military forces, throughout history, have had problems with long drawnout battles, morale, fatigue etc. A good use of the r&r statistic we have would be to make ships that have been in combat require r&r sooner than those that have just been patroling or trading. Of course you'd have to make r&r an actual problem first, but thats another issue.

I feel fairly confident that these two have been touched on before.

The primary drawback is that they favour doing nothing for very long periods of time and more importantly going in with absolutely everything for as short a period as possible so as to reduce the overall setback.

We definitely do not want to make combat impossible or even overly expensive. We want skirmishes where it is tactical range that determines ability rather than a massive war-bill for any that want to engage in the practise.

If you attack a location we would prefer it if the defenders send in 20 ships on the next day because only 20 are in range. Any attempts at RnR/Integrity without altering range will mean that 100+ ships still turn up the next day but the players will then quite rightly have a bitch and moan that moving a fleet is a bloody nightmare and penalises affiliations for having large fleets.

Just to reiterate the point again, players send everything they have because they can. No amount of penalties to moving a large fleet will alter this. The only way to prevent this is to give the choice whereby they can sacrifice range for stopping power. If they choose to have long range fleets that are vulnerable then it does not matter if they can get everywhere as long as they can be defeated by a smaller fleet comprising of heavy hitting but short range fortress style ships.

The whole concept of making a 'fleet' less effective with more numbers is flawed because it's going to be next to impossible to calulcate which ship is in which feel.

Okay so the IMP/CNF conflict has two very distict sides, but we are not just looking at these combats (at least i hope we are not).

The rules on combat clearly allow more than one 'side' in combat, and in fact a single should could probably be setup to defend two other ships, both of whom are fighting each other. Although i have no idea what it would end up doing (i assume nothing), i can't imagine how you'd try to get 'fleet' numbers out of that.

Which is effecitvly the same thing your doing by making hyperdrives easy to kill, the difference is it's much easier to move ships with low efficency back to base than ones with no jump drives left.

Either your limiting them by making the fleet weaker, due to layer with the hyperdrive or just to limiting the number of ships that can be there, or your limiting them by making combat expensive so they have a choice of commiting fewer ships or having large sections of fleet out of action for a while.

This I agree with whole-heartedly.

I was thinking of simply number of ships from your aff in the same quad. If you want to include allies can't you simply add up the number of ships that are supporting or defending each other?

If it is on your support/defend list or you are on its support/defend list then you are in the same "fleet".

Not sure what the answer to this is to be honest, but if we embrace the idea that we play to eliminate our enemies totally then this won't be an open-ended game. Will it?

Aff A destroy Aff B's entire war fleet. Aff A can then pick off Aff B's economic fleet and all it's outposts. Aff B dies a slow painfuly death (before or after all it's players leave the game).

Aff A now reigns supreme over Aff B but Aff C, seeing Aff A's weakened position then attacks Aff A. Aff C wins. Until there is one aff left, or a dozen players with their own aff, a starbase and a couple of scouts each.

(Maybe)

I do tend to think that there will always be players/affs who try for this. There may not be an answer except to watch the game degenerate into a war game. But there are not many open-ended war games (it seems to be the opposite of the concept).

I was just referring to a space combat. All evidence I have seen since the start of Phoenix indicates that players will use every available resource in order to ensure that a battle will be decisive on a single day.

Nothing we have added to the game has made a lasting difference to this. David is already fully convinced that anything we add will be seen as an obstacle to achieving this one-day massacre, an obstacle to be overcome, never, accepted.

For me personally, i can't speak for anyone else, i'd like fast running battles, i have no problems with other people having large fleets provided they can't just walk over and crush me (which they can't, good old sargasso) or provided i would have a reasonable chance of getting out of a battle at the end of a single day.

From what i've see so far withdrawing from a battle is very dangerous, as it should be if your pinned but it does limit surprise attacks somewhat, as well as give major problems to smaller affilations.

I could live with battles being played out in a day, although that would massivly alter the way the game plays, and i know some people like the big set piece battles, and to be fair they make epic history between two evenly match sides, but its no fun, for me, to run a large unbeatable fleet, challenge is fun.

With the current rules as they are i can see dozens, if not hundreds, of setups and tatics that might work against large fleets. Won't know until i try them, and i'm not, yet, in a position to do so

Of course saying all this the IRS seems happy to provoke the consortium and if there was ever an uber-fleet problem its there

isn't that just part of the reaction to the fact if the battle goes on longer than a single day then it becomes a focal point for every ship your affilation can move into the system.

Some players want large set piece battles,some want to see a more skirmish type of combat system.Both have their place in the game.
Personally I prefer the skirmish style.Over the last couple of years I've had to concentrate on the war aspect of the game and it's not my favorite!!!
Doesn't mean there shouldn't be all out wars though.
I think it may be a mistake giving us players our every whim to keep us happy because in the long run the game would become unplayable as none of us can see the whole picture!
I've put a few suggestions forward on this thread,but after thinking about it nothing in the combat/ship movement areas of the game needs changing.We have 4 rounds of combat each day,so in a standard 24 hour day that's 6 hours a round,giving enough time for any number of ships to manuover into position to target enemies.
I think the uber fleet problem will sort it's self out once the infrastructure rules come into play.And back to my old chesnut of political bankrupcy!!
You need stellars to run and maintain a large military machine plus all the suport bases that go with it.
If you haven't got the income you can't do it.
If this aspect of the game is sorted out the uber fleets will soon be whittled down in size.

In fact I believe this is a new and promising approach.

In the past, space combat rules were amended so that warships could withstand prolonged battles, especially by downgrading missiles. At the same time, as has been pointed out, extended battles become a "focal point" for affiliations where you throw in what you can, or lose whatever you already have in there. Withdrawal is not an option (emergency jumps are unsuitable for a coordinated retreat). This seems to be the real problem, not so much possible response times for the fleets.

My suggestion would be to increase the number of combat rounds per battle significantly (anything up to 100 rounds), but keep a limit. At the same time, pinning/withdrawal rules must be re-written to allow ships to leave combat much easier. Pinning should never be absolute, but rather determined as a chance based on the combat speed of both opponents. Circumstances may help (like a freighter jettisoning its cargo), also we could introduce some new withdrawal (flee) options.
Heavily damaging ammo based weapons will wear out after a few rounds, while energy based weapons continue to do damage (finally giving them some value). Space fighters may suffer extra limitations (like, have to refuel after two rounds but to recover the fighters, the carrier must reduce to 1g combat speed which in turn may allow most enemies to escape).
This should work nicely for fleet battles, including skirmishes with few combattants on either side.
Starbase assaults will slug it out until the attackers withdraw (likely because they have spent their ammo); it will be suicide to enter line-of-sight combat with a starbase.
Pirate raids will have an added element of uncertainity. The freighter's chance to escape will actually be higher in the beginning, but as engines are likely to suffer damage anyone who cannot flee in the first two rounds is likely to become prey.

You seem to be suggesting that the uber fleets are being run in the red? Is that really the case?

it does nto really matter if a fleet is curretly causing a loss or not. The thing is that production (once up and running) does not 'wear out' unless you run out of ore. So we are in the situation that if you do not grow your income base and keep producing ships you will not be able to afford more ships at some point.

This point is still to come for most affs but it will be there. Warships have already been made significantly more expensive to maintain recently and I stongly believe that this change has not really made it into everyboedies minds yet (including me here). Once you have hit the point where you need to maintain and repair after a battle but you only got patches for one or the other you will think twice next time to send your whole fleet into combat, and you will untool 'a few' factories from producing hulls and change to patches.
This will always be like this, sometimes you can afford few more ships, sometimes you can't. Or you don't want to afford them.

In the end a large fleet is costing a lot of stellars and production. These resources cannot be spend elsewhere. Production is not the limiting factor to fleet size, stellars are. Production is 'only' the limiting factor to fleet buildup, and once you hit your max fleet size (determined by stellars) it is the limiting factor to how much you can afford to loose (because you can replace it quick enough).

Right now everybody is still building up and hates to loose positions. Once people start realizing they have to get rid of older warship designs because they are too expensive to maitain this will all be perceived completely different.

I doubt uber fleets are being run in the red right now as at the conversion every aff was sorted out economically so that they could run existing assets.But if players/affs wanted to expand their military machines they have to generate income as well.
Maybe the "Empire Building"affs are near their limit financially now and we won't see a large increase in fleet sizes,but only replacements due to combat loses??
Of course if an aff manages to expand and gain more sources of income they could add to their already large military assets.
To be able to survive in this environment an aff has to work on many different areas.To concentrate on just one area alone,in this case combat will cause problems in other areas.
Like I said if players/affs that run out of stellars start to lose assets as crews/troops/employees leave uber fleets would be whittled down.

This doesn't make any sense. If you have 250 friendly ships in front of you then of course you'll have problems. But in a volume roughly 1/60th of a solar system, thousands and thousands of phoenix-sized ships could easily find a suitable firing position for at least one of the enemy.

(And if the enemy is so vastly outnumbered that this assumption breaks down, they'd inevitably get squashed like a bug even with rule changes)

I think we are about at 40 weeks after the integrity reset. For heavy hulls -> 80%, the bite point. Negative feedback is about to start taking effect. It will only hit most ppl when they have to send warships in with low integrity, because the fleet would be out of action for 6 weeks.

This suggestion would force the use of uberfleets in order to minimize the incoming damage to your own position, hence more rounds of battle per day will only make things worse.

Brian, DTR

I am positive to this idea. One of the problems we who don't have uber fleets face is that whenever we engage the enemy we face the very real danger of being totally destroyed. If we don't destroy the enemy day 1 we suddenly have hundreds of enemy ships pouring fire into our ships effectively destroying all we have as we can't escape.

Allowing pinned ships to move away day 2 after 1 round of combat would be a good way of making hit and run and skirmishes more effective. Yes, the fleeing fleet take some damage but it can at least withdraw and be used again.

This is also something I am postive towards as it will also increase the chances of a small skirmish or a hit and run attack to be effective. But as someone stated we can't have to many rounds because I don't believe the 'fight to the death' idea is good. 6 or 8 rounds sound like a good number.

Neither of the above ideas remove the effectiveness of the uber fleet, instead they make other tactics more viable.

Still doesn't solve the problem of uber fleets(though still not convinced there is a problem).Sometimes ships pinned or otherwise cannot move out of the combat zone because their engines are all gone.The DTR are especially good at taking out the enemies engines(yes,it is meant as a compliment ).
So on day two of a battle you'd still get masses of ships turning up to either finish off the disabled or friends arriving to cover them and hoping to deliver replacement engines.
Back to uber fleets having a knock down and drag them out fight!!!

The difference is, in my opinon at least, that there is the option of withdrawing. As it stands pinning makes any low level movement based stratgeries far too difficult, yes uber fleets will still be around but i think they will be more as tehy are in life, a threat of the possiblity rather than the only form of combat.

Without pinning you would need to use more tractor beams to keep the enemy ships in position. It gives much the same effect but with more of a strategic/tactical slant to it.

from another angle.

Or so it seems to me.

I believe the answer to that is the ISR field can't be engaged close to another mass, so a ship has to be able to outpace an enemy to get away, even if the enemy cannot cause damage.


But, I do think making pinning harder would be an excellent plan.

Battles are usually won by attaining local superiority with effective ships, if you can do that big time you win.

Whatever retraints are put on, this will still be the case and someone wanting to initate a big battle will manoever forces in advance to hit with the max, the restraints will stop the attacked side from re-inforcing fast enough to counter this.

I don't like the idea of massive amounts of rounds of battle on the same day as it will effectively eliminate the use of weapons that need ammunition. Limiting effectiveness to beam weaponry, most of which is currently of dubious effectiveness in itself, and space fighters/bombers.

Geoff

Why do I get the picture of everyone stopping at the end of each day's battle, mingling and socialising with each other for a bit, nice early night then clocking on to continue killing each other at 8.30 the next morning...?

(Do we get tea breaks between each round? )

Why should space combat follow historical orthodoxy? It's like expecting air combat to behave like naval combat, or the battle of Hastings to look like the battle of Goose Green.

I agree that changing pinning somehow may be a good move, but let's not have spurious reasoning for it.

I for one wouldn't be happy with a complete removal of pinning, however I think the rules are currently far to strict about it.

Historically we do have pinning, time and time again good taticians have cornered a slippery enemy and forced them to fight, maybe not with so often with air combat, but certainly naval combat. Don't forget that ships could be trapped between land masses, and aircraft had to land sometime, in both those situations you have hostile craft that can't escape (okay so maybe the aircraft landed is an extreme example)

Anyway it's really irrelevent, the fact remains if you remove pinning totally then in order to damage your enemy you have to go after his means of repair and production as the ships slip away, and I for one don't wish to push the combat in the direction that forces destruction of starbases.

I still think that we need to make it easier to escape without totalling your fleet, but removal of pinning isn't, as i currently see it, an option that works.

Playing devil's advocate here:

If you can guarantee a fleet death with ship ratios 10:1, you will send as many ships as you can.

If tactics such as ordered withdrawal mean that you have less rounds to destroy them in so that to guarantee a fleet death you will now need ship ratios 25:1, you will still send as many as you can.

If attacking doesn't give a penatly then you will always send enough to guarantee fleet death. That just sensible tatics in the current system, as if you don't send all your ships then you stand a chance of taking more damage and good tatics mean maximising your damage/lost ratio.

If, as i mentioned before, ships engaged in combat lost all tus then there would be risk of sending all the ships to a battle in that you couldn't react to an attack elsewhere.

Just a thought, probably lots of issues with it but if you made it so only ships that actively attacked (ie fired a weapon at someone) lost tus, and removed or drastically limited pinning, then you'd have an intressting situation where if you wanted to withdraw you could do so but you would have to spend a day in combat without shooting.

Mica, read my original post please since what you wrote is plane wrong. If you think this is so stupid then why are there tactics in ground combat? Isn't this just as stupid?

If some DTR fleet goes at hits Jax then they are on the offensive. This fleet wants to withdraw the next day as it's done it's job, so can issue a withdraw order. They still are in 4 rounds of combat but fewer ships are pinned the day after when they leave the area. Withdrawing means they deliver less damage to the enemy, but will still take damage by the incoming cavelry, unless you are suggesting that the IMP will just sit idly by and let Jax be nuked rather than responding with what ships they can.

The withdraw tactic also has disadvantages as the attacking fleet is tied up for one more day meaning that home is more vulnerable unless mroe ships are kept at home, thus meaning smaller attacking fleet. It's then a compromise of EJing pinned ships out (to gain a day but take more damage) to withdrawing (take less damage, but lose a day).

You can then also have assault tactics, where the ships deliver more damage but receive more as well (e.g. ship accepts getting blasted since it is willing to get in the perfect position/dodge less to do even more damage).

Please explain why this idea supports uber ships.

Nik

As have been suggested earlier we could add tactics to space battles.

For example we could have a system where we could add tactics to a squadron (not individual ships) and each tactic works either good or bad against the tactics used by the enemy squadron. By chosing the right tactics against the enemy you could perhaps get bonuses to combat speed, dodge, damage and chance to hit the enemy.

This changes the game from just throwing everything you got at the enemy to actually consider to what tactic you enemy usually use, what does his fleet use now and so on. It add a new element to the game that can change the outcome of an even battle and even make a smaller fleet able to fight a larger fleet (to some extent at least). Of course, it can also be the other way. The large fleet, by using the right tactic can get even better...

Squadrons would have to change tactics between battles as otherwise your enemy would set his own tactics to overcome yours.

yes, this is a logical consequence of this. It has been mentioned a couple of times that if players can achieve a sure kill in one day then they will go for it. You will not be able to change this in my opinion.
But what is the problem with this. If you want to kill one ship and you send 25 for it then fine, the enemy only looses one ship. Not much given there is mass production.
The one ship could also be a trap by the enemy who wants to lure your 25 ships into combat, or who simply want to see your 25 ships move to one end of the galaxy to ensure they don't turn up at the other end of the galaxy where his 100 ships pound a platform of yours into oblivion.
That's all tactics.

Now I think Nik has a very valid point in saying that an ordered withdrawl is missing in the current tactics options. Lets just assume that for one reason or another there is a big battle going on. Side A has 100 pinners and 100 capitals with photon weaponry and side B does 'only' have 100 capitals with photon weaponry in the battle. Side B can't move out at all and fears that side A will send torp ships to do real damage but they recon this will take at least 3 days to get there. Currently their only options are ejumping out or heavily reinforcing to force side A to retreat. Would it not make sense to have an ordered withdrawl tactical option that (for example) means a position would not be able to fire any weapons the whole day but gets a chance to break the pinning and leave combat after each round of combat? This chance should increase every round of combat and should be in relation to the combat speed difference of the pinned position and the pinner. At the end of the battle the chance is boosted considerably again, but still not to 100% if there is a huge speed difference.
Side B could have their 100 capitals all to perform an ordered withdrawl and thus the chances that they will be able move out will be quite good, provided they really have 2 days to try. They will suffer the photon weaponry fire from Side A's 100 capitals during the time they try to withdraw, but this should not be as bad as ejumping.
OK, before somebody say 'but pinners are cheap since they can be small and do not need any weaponry', the smaller and cheaper the pinners are the easier they can be shot down. If side A's 100 pinners are all 10 normal hulled then Side B can quite easily take them down and leave. The more an AFF invests into thier pinners the harder it gets to break the pinning since the pinner cannot be shot down easily and/or the difference in combat speed is huge.

Think about this in all possible scenarios. This will not take away the option to be tactically superior (or plain lucky) and do real damage to the enemy, but it does not force the enemy to send refinforcements or ejump out if they are afraid of loosing otherwise.


And please, can we stop saying 'but what happens if one side has the ueberfleet and can achieve 10:1 or 25:1 or 100:1 ... ... odds'?
Between powerblocks this will not happen due to game limits (stellars). One Aff might be able to vastly outnumber another AFF but there are politics and alliances in the game. If an AFF fails to realise and use these options and instead get the game mechanics to save their butt anyways, please, why do we play this game at all? In this case just scrap the game and shout at each other for free on a yahoo forum, same thing to me. <sorry for beeing sarcastic here>
And if you are small and want to be on your own (for whatever reason) then you simply don't have to annoy somebody bigger than you or you don't let yourself be caught get caught.
I am very fed up with people 'demanding' from the game mechanics to allow them to be able to fight another fraction without loosing badly, but completely neglecting the fact that they need to properly buildup their assets before fighting. This takes a few years I can tell you but that's the way the game is designed.


Thomas

If damage done increased depending on the number of ships (or hulls) in a battle, then it means the more outnumbered yo uare, the more likely you are to inflict far heavier losses on your enemy. Outnumbered 10:1, you still die - but you take 1 or 2 with you. outnumbered 25:1, you take 3 or 4 (for example). Whatever the actual damage increases, the end result is that it will always be more dangerous to send in a large fleet over a smaller one.

Ground Combat follows a similar path, with the the control factors (bigger GPs can get more more control factors per round, yet will suffer increased casaulties for it).

Mark

Yes - may have to drop the dodge to zero if you try to pin.... set it as an option to not try to pin. There may also need to be something relating to ship size on the pinning % chance to work....

setting dodge to 0 if pinning and giving the option not to pin is the same as remove pinning from the game since dropping dodge to 0 is suicide for a pinnig ship.

David/Mica, is there anything wrong with the tactical withdrawl suggestion? For some reason I am getting the impression everybody seems to be avoiding this. Why?


Thomas

Getting ground ordnance to the desired destination has much harsher logistic limits on it than moving a fleet.

Also it is impossible to completely capture a ground base in a single day.

With ground assaults there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing bringing ordnance from distant locations.

Is it therefore a fair comparison?

There are some good ideas coming out of this discussion, it is just a case of working out what people really want and working from there. Tactics offers something, I am not sure what though. Basically, if I can find ways of subverting ideas before they are even in the game, you lot will certainly will as well!

Change for the sake of change is bad, change for the worse is terrible...

These changes, should they come to pass, have to be playable, enjoyable and improve the game.

This is a pandora's box. "Could a 75 hull Normal be pinned by a 50 Hull Hvy? No, what if the Normal had ablative armour but the Hvy has Mk III Plate". A thread all of its own I think

I think that's a good summary. At the moment, if I have a small handful of warships I can't do anything really useful with them without it being almost inevitable I'll lose them all. Alter the pinning rules, and the risk of a hit-and-run suddenly becomes reasonable.

Okay i promise not to keep mentining this but you can solve both this problems by

• Killing the tus of any ship that fires a weapon in combat
• Making pinning a factor of size/irs drive type
• Make IRS 1 more 'slippery' but less 'disruptive'
• make IRS 4 massivly less 'slippery' but more 'disriputive'

The IRS thing was mostly thrown in becuase as far as i knew the pinning was that engines caused an interferance in the jump generation, and irs 1 makes a tight feild and irs 4 makes a wide field, if i'm wrong feel free to drop those two.

The others will effectivly stop people reacting with ever ship as they then couldn't counter another attack, and make hit and runs possible as it would be harder for pinning ships to pin you.

And yes i'm aware i've mentiond most of these points before but while people keep trying to bring up 'fleet size' without saying how they'd calculate it then i feel justified in repeating

So in order to be able to withdraw you have to stop shooting at those shooting at you for a whole day's combat?

Personally I don't like "artificial" fixes like this. Why should TUs be dropped for combat?

Perhaps we could say that combat should actually use (cost) TUs?!

Different weapons/manuevers could take different TUs? (i.e. 10 TUs per round for full dodge/combat speed, 1 TU for every shot including point defence...) That might be very interesting

Edit: Well okay, not PD as its automatic but each type of weapon could have a TU cost (beams being cheaper than torps as they fire faster and take less "preparation", etc.)

What's wrong with just counting the number of ships?

As I said earlier in the thread you count every ship that is in the same aff for a start then if you want to include "allies" you add in every ship that's supporting or defending each other.

because it restricts the possiblity of inter-affilation conflict (which a couple of affilation profiles mention), it also doesn't work well on anything more complicate with support/defend lists.

Also support/defend is per ship not per affilation, for example if i have a small squad on defend RIP and SMS, and another small squad on support/defend just RIP, and both are in a combat with SMS against some third party(ies) which group of ships do you count? you can't just add up RIP and SMS as a total, because one squad wouldn't be aid the SMS like that, but again you wouldn't want to ignore it.

I think any calcuation you try and do would get overly complex, and i'm not conviced reduction in fighting ability is a good system to use regardless.

Well if we are talking about reducing effectiveness based on the number of ships (because of added communication/targetting/maneuver burdens) could we not just add in every ship within the same quad, regardless of "side"? They all contribute to the "fog of war". Slightly arbitrary perhaps but saves your complicated formulae and not totally unreasonable.

You may not be supporting or defending a ship but you will trying not to hit it (with your ship or your weapons) while searching for the target among all the other ships of your own aff, friendly affs, neutral affs and enemy affs.

This stops pirates from being able to operate. They have 60 TUs to get their own ship and the captured ship out of the battle location which isn't enough.

Nik

I think it's fair that enemy ships take some damage if the cavelry arrives the next day. If not, affiliations can go around nuking planets for no loss so the game will degenerate into nuke a planet and run.

Nik

Fair point, didn't think of that would damage hit and run the same way too.

Okay scrap that idea.

You know i'm starting to get the feeling we should leave things as they are

I disagree. It's down to planning, and planning during naval battles is just as complicated (if not more so) than ground assault.

You can do it, as it has been done. Yes, it is impossible to capture a large Starbase in one day, but it is also impossible to take out an uber fleet in one day. Indeed, as the Pollux platform battle showed, this took a couple of weeks to achieve which is a similar length of time it would take to capture a large Starbase (yes, there were also other reasons that this happened, but the premise still holds).

And according to your original battle ideas, this should happen in space battles as well. Squadron should come in, hit something, leave to re-arm/repair etc. Isn't one of the problems regarding the DTR/IMP battles that the IMP want to hit and run the next day whereas we are prepared to fight it out over a longer period of time.

Yes, I think it is.

Nik

These ideas are great and should be in anyway, regardless of whether it will help the uber fleet problems. Although it sounds like it might work.

Because of the Uber fleet situation affs at war are not using hit and run against smaller targets within enemy space. These tactics would force the enemy to split their fleet more but affs feel they cannot split *their* fleet for such tactics in case the enemy uber fleet turns up and they need their uber fleet to respond.

Forcing affs to better patrol their space, escort their ships etc through GM/game controlled threats sounds like a great idea to liven the game up and keep the larger affs busy. More system/bases means more resources means bigger fleets but it should also mean more threats and more demands.

Absinthe all round I say!

Could something like this be added to the infrastructure rules coming in..soon I hope...no pressure David!

Maybe affs could get a bonus on influencing a population if they fly the flag(morale boost for owned planets,intimidation for planets controlled by others).

Also Steve's suggestion of combat costing Tus has merits.After all it costs Tus to scan a location as the ship has to move in the quad.The same should apply to combat as ships move about dodging and trying to target.

I'm not keen on this part. To me one of the great attractions of Phoenix is that pretty much everything is player run and the majority of things happening are due to players. The fewer 'artificial' elements trying to enforce a certain behaviour the better in my opinion.

But once the infrastructure changes come in there will be a lot of things that are managed, but not controlled by players.

I think it's good that there are some things out of the players control. Even in a totalitarian police state there will be rebels or freedom fighters or criminals or any number of things happening out of the government's or police's control.

again, there are limited amount of people that can have the cavalry arrive in full the next day anywhere on the map, thats the whole point of how this topic started

i agree with you Mica Patrolling was initially a good idea, something it hought we would do, but basically everytime you go patrolling with 10 ships as you point out above as soon as they are spotted, the entire enemy fleet (ours being DTR etc) can make it and extinguish the lot in one battle. Hence this has removed this from our equiation.

we have carried out raids in CNF space against patrolling fleets, but it took a couple of weeks to organise diue to travelling times, this element is removed when Hyper drives are involved.

I would like to see the patrolling aspect, but feel it is unlikely without some more of your out of the box thinking. although i wish i could get inside the box, but im not that lucky.

Unfortunately, due to the presence of pop-up response, the 'majority of things happening' of a combative nature is becoming increasingly difficult to instigate effectively.

Currently we have a tiering system to the player base.
There are the veteran players that instigate the major events of the game. These guys are very busy.
There are the experienced players. These guys have found a niche and are generally happy, but sometimes, if controlling starbases in secret systems miss out on the game unless there is a conflict.
Then you have the novice players that want to get involved, but the only place to sharpen their teeth is on other affiliations and as they can be countered by veteran players as easily as other novice/experienced players....

Many of these features can be dealt with through brute force. Not a problem for veteran players with little time to spare. But could also be dealt with much more subtley by novice players, giving them a learning curve. This even means that some players within the affiliation can simply ignore the whole thing, leaving it to other members of the affiliation to sort out.
In truth it also adds a depth to areas of the game that do not live up to their description. The Inner Confederacy for one was described as a hotbed of piracy in the wake of the fall of Samuel, as minor factions sought to get their piece of the action.

These sort of events should lead to diplomatic issues that in turn cause players to interact with each other on a more frequent basis. The type of behaviour we are trying to enforce is active. Personally I do not see this as a bad thing.

Regarding piracy, whilst the IMP did have some success seizing Confederate freighters, it didn't take them too long to wise up and switch crew for troops. A marine complement of around 20 can fend off much larger boarding parties. I'll have to root through my turns this weekend, but I'm sure I've failed when I've had a 10:1 odds or better in troops numbers (usually with larg(ish) number of Vets marines)

Furthermore, I noticed that it became much harder to spot and attempt to board targets in the first place, because - presumably - players have wised up and keep their freighters moving.

With the success of Pirate Large, I suspect that these tactics would have transferred to affiliations not involved in the IMP/CNF-DTR conflict, and as such makes piracy much more unlikely

My question therefore is: would game patrolled pirates really cause that much of a problem?.....assuming that the Pirate will attempt to capture ships and not just go round shooting things up (which in reality isn't piracy, its just terrorism).

Would it be feasible to have a boarding party options for example, which would allow a boarding attempt to be made if the boarding ship scans a target and certain criteria are met (ie; number/type of ships scanned, TU's available, troops available).

Although i like the concept of patroling and think it would go a long way to limiting the 'instant travel' problems, it does have sideeffects as Gandolph mentioned, furthermore I don't see any actually benfit to patrolling.

Your average patrol gives you more information about the ships passing through, and could stop minor things like pirates, but although information is important this partiuclar kind doesn't give you much. Maybe you'd learn the CIA is spying on you, or that the SMS is moving a hundred large cargo ships pass where you are patroling, minor stuff really considering there is a war going on.

In real life patrols are there to give you advanaced warning of something, either the attacker avoids or neutrialised the patrol before moving on. With 'instant travel' there is no much chance of advanced warning so why patrol at all?

Although i guess you could patrol all the upper rings of a system and enaged any fleet, okay so you'd lose the patrol but you'd stop the fleet jumping to whereever it was heading i think (not sure on how ships react like that)

Add to that an option to issue a single order to the newly captured ship and you change the whole freedom of movement completely. It wouldn't any good for the anti-priate ships to show up the next day so you'd need to take preventive measures

There is a lot of scope for piracy, which to date we have not really considered that do not require open conflict and boarding actions.

Cutting and running - rather than going for capture, getting the cargo and leaving.

Stealing from Shuttle ports - raiding the automated systems.

Sabotage - accidents happen in space such as jettisoning the cargo but bypassing the alarms so that it is noticed till much later (end of turn) forcing the ship to either return for it (and possibly pirates) or write it off.

Smuggling - ships moving to and from the planet with goods thereby reducing the trade goods demand.

I'm sure that players can think of many more things.

Which is all well and good, but it also means that even if you could turn up in time (smaller fleets split across multiple locations) it's irrelavent as the fleet has fled. So we could nuke Jax and leave and even if your fleet was over Asgon you cannot do anything about it. Basically you want to have hit and run tactics as the sole tactics to use in battle.

Nik

i dont understand what your driving at, i am not now suggesting that the whole pin is removed, so either way that fleet would get damaged? also once ytou left orbit you would be vulnerable?

what your saying is i want the only tactic to be hit and run, what im saying is that the only viable tactic at the moment is mass hits. See Mica's quote above regarding this and the lack of other actions carried out by warfleets.............

Generally spoken, if all ships can always leave a battle without consequences then this totally defeats the idea of having battles every day with limited damage and ships beeing able to last a couple of days (on 1:1 odds).

.. which then reduces a battle to deliver the maximum amount of damage and leave so you can't take any further damage. It will only be a matter of time until uberfleet A finds ueberfleet B and completely destroys it in one day because ueberfleet B had just run out of uberammo X for uberlauncher Y completely nuking headquarter XYZ a day ago. Of course uberfleet A only located uberfleet B by scheer luck after they had moved away since you cannot stop a moving fleet, you need fo locate it somewhere 'parked'.

I'd also like to have the question of why you would not send everything you can into combat if you are sure you can leave again the next day answered?


Thomas

If orders were stacked instead of TUs wouldn't freighters be left in space waiting for their next order to run? And thus be prey to pirates (more so than now where you can save up TUs then do your trade run in one go). Plus trade will slow down generally so that by the time you arrive the goods have gone (although that could maybe argued as a good thing, give more spice to trade perhaps?).

I actually quite like the sound of that idea but it seems that while it may help the uber fleet problem it would put freighters at more risk. Hmm. But then that would mean more need to escort your freighters wouldn't it, which would give warships more to do as per Mica's suggestion... You would need actual fast ships (faster and more engines, thrust, ISR and jump) for fast deliveries or fast response rather than ships that just hang around with the full 300 TUs waiting until they are needed. To be honest I always though saving TUs was a strange idea...

Actually this sounds another interesting idea.

So we collect turns on a day, but process the turns on the following week....

You send in orders for your freighter to go to Starbase Doomed, only to be told by the owner three days later that he is being attacked. Two days after this your ship arrives and gets creamed. Three days after your ship gets creamed, the cavalry arrive.

Or are you meaning the one where you will only process the orders once you have sufficient TU's to do them? i.e. everyone has zero TU's and only start to accumulate TU's in order to fullfill pending orders.
How does this deal with variable TU's where the cost is determined by the event and not predetermined, e.g. pick up item type etc.

sigh.

The biggest problem is that it is far easier to moan to the GM than than think of a solution yourself to a problem.

This topic started since the HJE is meant to be a game winner and unfortunately even Mica has been sucked into this belief.

It is not. I have not wanted to write this since it is tactics which I do not believe that I should give to the IMP block, but I am totally fed up with all of this.

The problem is IMP block tactics and the fear of receiving damage. You want to hit and run tactics. Fine, I don't care. The trouble is your tactics are wrong. The hit works well and you deliver significant amounts of damage. In many cases you have had significant odds on your side, even when the cavelry has turned up. However, you have fled without pressing your advantage meaning that we can get away slowly and clear up the debris, whilst you take more damage EJing out.

If you had stayed more days then you would have delivered more damage. This would have then destroyed more internal items meaning that more HJE would have been destroyed. There are not unlimited amounts of zionite in the game and thus only a finate number of HJEs in the game. Yes, your current ship configurations are not designed for long term battles, but that is due to your current tactics.

If you'd done this from the beginning of Phoenix I can guarantee you that the majority of DTR warships would not have HJEs in them now since we would not have enough HJEs left to do this.

And yes, you would have received a pounding in return, you perhaps would have lost more ships and yes it's even possible that we'd have flattened a 1000k Starbase in revenge. But you would have won the long term tactical battle via in game actions rather than moaning to the ref that it's not fair.

Even having said this, only having 100TU JEs and all the changes mentioned about will not stop mass hits. This is for a number of reasons, the main ones tactics and peoples desire not to loose ships (and the DTR are as guilty as everyone else to this charge). From what I have seen, tactics do not come into play in this game.

If there is a small battle, ships from everywhere (even if they cannot make it) are called to the scene to take part so that your side has better odds meaning giving more tamage and taking less. One day someone will have the bright idea of ignoring those 20 ships which are being pounded to death and instead launch a small attack on Starbase X (loosing more ships as more enemy ships head there to deal with the situation) before launching a major attack on Starbase Y.

Once this has happened a couple of times, suddenly not all ships will be dispatched to the initial battle location. Tactics across a periphery scale will start to take place as both sides realise that the little squabble in Alpha 11 of Audrey is just that, a little squabble.

Regardless of what changes are made, the game will remain broken whilst it's easier to moan to the GM than to find your own solution to the problem.

Richard and co, this is not personal but I will not apologise for the bluntness and harshness of this post. If you want, you can kick me off this message board now.

Nik

When i think about stacked orders i would assume you store how many tus have been "invested" into the current order.

For example you want to jump (100 tu cost) and your daily turn gives you 60tus, this means your ship notes down that it has 60tus invested. Next day you get another 60tus, 40 goes into the jump, which occurs today, and the next 20 towards whatever the next action is.

Although i like the concept i also like the fact i don't need to micromange everthing and can forget to do a ships turns knowing it doesn't really matter.

I'm not sure which system i'd prefer in the end.

I know thats not directed at me, not being part of the IMP block, but i want to comment anyway that the is nothing wrong with being blunt as long as your not insulting, i know i go to far a lot as well.

Secondly I for one don't see the HJE as the problem with 'instant movement' because normal jump engines give you a massive range anyway, HJE just extends the problem.

Stacking orders would solve that, but i'm unsure of all the side effects. Especially as you can't modify order queues, other than deleting. Add the ability to insert an order into the queue (like the opposite of delete pending order) and it would solve a lot of issue i'd have with stacking.

Now I really like this idea. Obviously players would have to be able to change their maintenance day. So you have your thursday squadron, this being one that reaches 300TU's on Thursday and maintains on Friday.

Wouldn't this just divide the uber fleets in five (best case) and give the the same problems?

Ahh nope cause the advantage would be on the attacker, who would have all their ships on the same day and only be facing a fifth of the hostile forces.

Hmm doesn't that accelerate the problem?

yes it does becasue the attacker can plan ahead and the defender has less chances to respond.

Build up a fleet that is large enough to destroy a starbase and move it in fort he kill. You can be pretty certain that the enemy can only repsond with 1/5th of its fleet the next day or not at all since he was just shoveling his maintennce day around.
Makes the game a gamble.


Thomas

Maybe not.Would an attacker use all their ships on the same day leaving other areas open to attack as your target will know where you are with most of your fleet?
I think that it would break up the uber fleets into smaller forces,for the most part.Of course with careful planning an aff could get all their ships into the same area on the same day for a massive assault.

Nik.
I'm in total agreement!!

I think that war is a gamble.
Do you go for an all out attack and leave areas undefended?Or do you use some of your forces to defend your assets??

This is where good intelligence work comes into play.

I totally agree here, but why not simply use intelligence and tactics in the current system (with minor changes applied)? It's not as if tactics do not work at the moment!


Thomas

And are both good changes taken on their own merits, not just fixes for the perceived problem.

Is anyone actually against them?

I agree tactics do work in the game now!
But isn't this thread about the so called uber fleet problem?
I've got no problem with players/affs running large fleets(getting sick of the uber word! )so long as they can afford to run them.
I think as has be mentioned here we'll see the limit in size pretty soon due to in game economics.
IMHO the problem is the accumulation of TUs and ships sitting with 300 Tus and being able to react to whatever gets thrown at them wherever it may be.
I haven't got a problem with HJEs either.Players have taken the time and trouble to research them so they're here to stay.
That's why I suggested the reseting of Tus on maintenance days.
Once a period of time has passed you can't get it back(not until someone researchs time travel in game!).
So if a ship/fleets whatever are sitting around doing nothing they've wasted their time.

Yes, I know what you mean, if I was convinced we'd really need a drastic change I would say this is a good suggestion.
But what I am trying to say is, will the current system with minor modifications not achieve the same?


Weakened pinning rules will allow disengaging from a battle without automatically getting 25% damage from ejumping when pinned.

Layers will make hypers go faster => immediate effect is that heavy duty warships (75% of our warfleet) will not use hypers any more and swap for normal JEs.
300TUs for your heavy duty warships will allow them to jump 2 systems and a little ISR movement. Too much for the current gameboard? I don't think so!

civillian/anarchic stuff will allow skirmisches and without escalation and will allow learning without burning a years worth of production in ships.



This all sounds so good, is it me only who thinks this will cure the problems?


Thomas

Full agreement. There is no uber fleet problem as such. It's not the number of ships or their firepower, but the possibility to move them to where you need them with carryover TUs. Effectively zero response time to attacks makes the defender too strong and promotes passive and defensive gameplay.

How about scrapping maintenance days, and having maintenance done for every position, every day? That would effectively cut carrover TUs to 60 (a day's worth) except for cases where a single order costs more than 60 TUs, in which case the orders and accumulated TUs are carried over just like we do now.

When cancelling pending orders, TUs would have to be reset and turns have to be generated daily. We'd also have to divide all figures referring to starbases and planetary economy by 5. But aside from that I cannot see any effects on the game as it stands.
I believe David will moan at the amount of extra computing power that this will eat, but isn't that a more elegant solution than creating odd rules around the 300TU carryover rule and its ramnifications?

And (quote Mica):

You issue 600 TUs worth of orders which will move the freighter to EEM Doomed in 10 days. Provided that everything goes as planned, you can forget about this position for two weeks.
If you are notified on an attack on the starbase while still enroute, you have a number of options:
1) Cancel pending orders and move the freighter elsewhere. Of course this will mean you alter your course and have lost TUs on the useless journey so far.
2) Cancel pending orders and leave the ship in mid-space until the destination is declared safe again, hoping that it is not found by pirates in the meantime.
3) Press ahead, assuming that by the estimated time of arrival, the attack will be over.
4) See if any friendly warships are in range to respond to the attack before the freighter gets there, who can either defend the destination starbase or escort the freighter.

me but only the layered ship target areas, as i'm of the opinon we already have stats that cover this for items, and i'm not conviced it will make a large difference.

Or up to 8 systems and ISR insystem, which i think is too much for one day of movement. If everyone else feels otherwise however then the layered option has merits (although i'd prefer if you just reduced it's armour value, thats what it's there for surly?)

Don't fix something that is not REALLY broken.....

Goth

Fine, but what that means is a very dull game. Throwing a few ships into enemy territory to harass is, as you say, insane. The only sane thing is large fleet actions, which gets dull - especially for new players.

No, someone (not in DTR) pointed out that he had his ship gutted and had zero chance of exploding (That was about 2 weeks ago.) I then remembered that i had not implented the empty space stuff for damage on ships..... However this tied back to the problem with jump drives and uniques never leaving the game (espeically if there was an empy space routine).... hence layers came about. Ships will still get gutted and not explode - but they will not be 100% empty at that stage. Do you have a real problem with this or is it the lack of details that makes it an issue ?

BTW: I purposing keep out of these discussion now cos ppl get upset when i talk in very final language. However everything still has to come through me to get implemented. Even if mica has been ear bashed by someone on the phone - he has to cold convince me its a good idea. And some enthusiastic suggestions can often be reduced to - its crap and its not happening - very quickly.

more details are (almost) always useful... some things sound very scary until they're explained... a few only get scary AFTER they get explained, but I don't think this will be one of them. More balanced/realistic allocation of damage within a ship sounds like a good thing to me

Dan

(edit: perhaps the details would be better on a separate thread - I think the change is separate to the "uberfleet" discussion, as it is a good thing in any rate...)

If you cannot think of any other attack than a large fleet attack, I'm happy to have you as an adversary. I can think of plenty of "non-dull" things to do.

Goth

Goth is right, there is plenty of room already for small hit and run fleets. All you have to do is make sure you can get away from your target the next day. The game mechanics allow this if you get your ship configs right and do not choose the wrong target (and of course don't mess up).

Nothing in space combat is easy, the biggest mistake you can make (in my opinion) is sending all your ships to attack a target without having an idea what you are facing and without a working retreat plan for all possible outcomes.


Thomas

I'm happy to have just the empty space numebrs added to make it slightly more real and nothing regarding uberships change. Layers, for me at least, seem to be flawed.

If uniques is a problem just give a higher chance of things getting fried when a ship explodes.

Personally i'd rather you do discuss, mostly because i want a chance to complain if i think something is a bad idea. I belive this game will improve if there is player feedback, and i personaly have no problems with people pointing out the massive flaws in anything i suggest, comment on or complain about because thats how things improve.

If a change were to be made I still think the only thing that would make sense would be to remove the pins at the end of a day's combat. Messing around with sizes of ships and speeds that will still extend pins for more than the day's rounds of combat will only lead to player tweaking the pinners.

The simple solution would be to remove pinning at the end of a combat day.
Goth

Does that all depend on how our physic behind pining works.

If its a ship proximity thing then you should assue smaller ships, with less powerful engines etc, aren't as good at pinning as large ships.

How close does the ship have to get to 'pin' another ship, if it's point blank then yes the pinned ship should get to ignore the dodge as the pinner is matching movements, also if it's that close shouldn't other ships had issues fireing into the locked pair? obvoiusly it depends how close close is

Ships that don't fire and just spend the round (or day) trying to break free should get a higher chance to do so, imo at least.

If the problem is that ISR can't be engaged in a gravity well, though, then ship mass clearly can make a difference.

If you can't engage your ISR/jump drive in the proximity (pinning range) of another ship then you can't ISR or (safe) jump away while pinned.

Whether or when (and perhaps why) you can ISR or jump away while pinned is a different question entirely I think.

If you have ever watched two flies in aerial combat you will realise that even though they seem to maintain a roughly fixed position relative to each other for the short period, they are still close to being a blur from an outside observer, i.e. they are still very much dodging.

By the same token however the pinned ship (if Starwars, Buck Rodgers and Battle Star Galactica are your influences) will almost certainly bring the pinning ship close to his allies, i.e. the dodge of the pinning is virtually negated as to remain pinning the ship has to run the gauntlet of the allies.


Irrespective of which view you subscribe to:

The tiny/weakly defended ship pinning the heavy monster that could destroy it easily if only it could actually hit it, will no longer be such an edge - providing that the pinned fleet does not try to bugger of on the next day.

This will in no way however prevent players from sending everything, so this cannot be considered anything more than a brick in the overall wall of solutions and improvements - if it is to come in that is.

Well, if we have this:

A <- B

(B pinning A)

Yes, both appear to be dodging around (in fact A is trying to lose B and B is sticking to its tail).

Then we have

A <- B <- C

(B pinning A but C attacking B)

Yes, B is effectively still dodging around (sticking to A) but is not directly dodging C. There should be a reduced dodge against C in any case, but what if A stopped dodging B and just flew straight? In that case either B gets no dodge against C or A breaks from the pin while B dodges C)

Tactics tactics TACTICS (how many times to I have to write this? Tactical withdrawl to break pinning.)

Also why absolutes? Apart from pinning, little in this game is absolute. Any ship faster than a ship it is trying to pin will have a change to pin the enemy ship. If it is a lot faster then this is guaranteed. If less than 1.0 (say) in combat speed, then the enemy ship has a chance to flee. This is after tractor beam hits from previous rounds have taken effect.

I don't think that dodge should be zero whilst pinning. Just because you are chasing a ship (which is in effect mainly stright line spped, so combat speed), it doesn't mean that you cannot barrel role or whatever to miss things. However, if the pinning ship is being attacked by other enemy ships then the pinned ship obviously has a far higher chance of escaping since the pinning ship has to consider what is hitting it. If pop guns are being fired at it, then I doubt that the pinning ship cares. If photon batteries or space bombers are hitting it, then it is going to take a lot more notice.

Perhaps some formula such as:

Effective combat speed (of pinning ship) = (actual combat speed) - (damage after shields/scins/AR) / 10 - (some random number based on combat speed differentials)

It has to be damage after scins/shields/AR otherwise missile damage, which does little to a heavy hulled warship, will make too big a difference.

Nik

Been thinking a bit more and the damage idea wasn't implemented properly (too much bias against the pinning ship).

As an approximation, if you are pinning a ship and get hit with a broadside (damage taken after scins/shields/AR) then the captain has been more interested in pinning the ship than getting out the way of the incoming fire. So there shouldn't be any negative applied to the pinning ship.

If the pinning ship dodges out of the way of the broadside, then the captain has been more interested in missing incoming fire than pinning the pinned ship so the pinned ship should have a higher chance of leaving next round. How this is calculated, I'm not sure.

You can then also tie this in with the ship size of the pinning ship. 500MU damage to a 10 heavy hulled ship is a lot more than 500MU damage to a 100 heavy hulled ship.

Nik

Pinning ship is around 20 HH, has 1 sensor, battlebridge, 1 tractor beam, minimal bunks and, ISR4. The rest of the space is combat engines. It's delivers no damage but has a high combat speed such that it cannot be hit under most circumstances. I cannot see how this formula improves the situation or in fact realistically changes it at all. Basically ships that are geared up to smack pokey little pinners are jack-all use for anything else and as they do not deliver any damage anyway, they not only do not break the pin reinforcing their pointless construction.
Their only use is to ensure ships do not leave combat, again pushing the combat towards establishing the monster warfleet and a pitched battle that results in one side taking all.

The aim of fleeing combat is only to produce sufficient distance from other positions in order to activate ISR drives. By definition the purpose of pinning is to ensure that your vectors are close enough to the pinned ship to prevent this happening. Pinning can therefore be considered to be extremely close range (we are still talking lots and lots of km's).

How about allowing ships to open fire while fleeing, but only against ships that are pinning them and modifieing dodge as the pinned ship is leading the chase and a proportion of the pinning position's combat speed is dedicated to simply keeping the pin?
A formula such as
Pinning ship's actual combat speed = full combat speed - pinned ship's combat speed
seems sensible.

With respect to tactics:
I would be interested to see a breakdown of tactical withdrawal proposals based on a range of scenarios.

e.g.
Where B has many more ships than A and B is significantly faster than A.
Where B has more ships than A and B is significantly faster than A.
Where B has roughly the same ships as A and B is significantly faster than A
Where B has fewer ships than A and B is significantly faster than A.

Speciallised ships is reasonable, and makes sense of fleet combat.

However an actual battle say i was the captain of a 100HH gunship being pinned by this 20HH fly what would stop me aiming directly at it and acclerating? I have no doubt that the craft would be nimble enough to get out the way but then we would both be heading in opposite directions at high speed letting me get away for a time, long enough to jump?

Secondly a small nimble ship is still going to be vaugly predicatable if it's trying to match my velocity all the time and stay as close as possible, if i altered direction suddenly it has to be assumed that i could get a close enough prediction on how it would follow me to allow for a far more accurate shot then it's speed would normaly give?

These lead me to suggest some way of either (or possibly both) getting bonuses to hit your pinner (and allowing combat vessels to NOT automaticlly pin) and to allow for some withdraw order which would allow my ships to move away from the pinning craft, although may take some time to do.

However having said that i'd be perfectly happy with the empty space issue sorted so ships aren't gutted before they explode all the time, and everything else left as it is because people have conviced me that it will tend to sort itself out with other new rules added.

If a 20HH ship is pinning a 100HH ship it must be at least as maneuverable (same or better combat speed). Therefore how would you be able to maneuver yourself into a position to fly head-on at the small ship? It would just match your turn and stick to your tail. That's what pinning *is*. If it can't match your moves (it has a lower combat speed) it can't pin you and so you wouldn't be trying to lose it.

Whilst I've no doubt that ships would make evasive maneouvres, I've always found it a little difficult to imagine a 50, 75, 100, or 200 hull ship barrel rolling or pulling of the kind of maneouvres that you would normally associate with a fighter.

It's always seemed a little strange to me that capital ships can avoid a barrage of missiles and torps through dodge. The target size and the stresses involved in trying to avoid a missile just seem too large.

Acutally i wasn't thinking of turning but rather rolling an axis perpendicular to the direction of movement and accelerating in the opposite direction to your current motion, something i imagine a fighter plane would have problems with .

I don't think any craft however maneuverable could move in a way to avoid you doing that, although i suppose if it timed it right it could do that same thing but that would put it facing away from you directly in your line of fire and moving along a completely predicatable path.

Out of interest....what happens if a ship activates ISR drives when another ship is in range?

- would, for example, the Captain of a 100 hulled ship pinned by a 50 hull ship thats hasn't actually caused him/her any damage decide the damage that activating ISR drives would cause, would be less damage than if he either

a) hung around for a second days battle (with less allies and potentially more enemies around), or
B) attempted an emergency jump?

...and, in the process, by activating drives the pinned ship would cause damage to the pinner (which on a smaller ship could potentially be more fatal...)

Why? I have no idea what speed peoples ships can reach but just playing around with the ship editor i doubt the accelarations are much over 8g at the top end, so your combined stress from a manvouver is unlikly to reach over 20g, not that much really for a vaugly sphere shaped object made out of something tough.

Of course my physics isn't great so i might be way off here, but it doesn't seem to unreasonable to me. The creatures inside might get crushed by the g-force mind you...

Assuming you take damage and it's not just that the ISR field fails to activate

I think you misunderstand - i will not change the game without ppl haveing discussed it and generally agreed. I will add things to the game that don't constitute a change and are just an addition. The second statement may crotradict the first from time to time but not on purpose.

I'm just not in the game of arguing what is good and bad for the game anymore with players, because i'm most likly wrong about it.

True!!
But evrything still has mass,even in the zero G of space.
Even if say a 20 hull ship packed with hi tech combat engines and tractor beams tried to pin a much larger ship,surely the mass of the target is still to great for the pinning ship to handle???
Once the smaller ship has locked on,the target ship with it's much greater mass should be able to move and just tow the pinning ship behind it,effectively negating the pin!!

Not so. The effect of a tractor beam isn't to join the two ships, but to increase the mass of the target ship.

Used to be, now it is to counter the thrust of the target ship.
The reason for the change (a couple of years ago) was to allow ship to be reduced to zero speed, thereby allowing it to be held by a stationary object.

I like this idea and would like to see it implemented on its own merit.

Bah, well, if you're not going to update the rulebooks ;-)

So it "counters thrust" but does it "tow"? If so can we use tractor beams to move objects that could not otherwise move (platforms, engine-less ships, asteroids...)

See now this is why i said the rule books should be wikis

I see absolutely no reason why this should be the case. If tractor beams somehow counter/negate thrust then size/mass has no effect at either end of the tractor beam, although you might say that larger ships are easier targets so smaller can hit bigger easier than bigger can hit smaller...

Also, just because, or even if, most sci-fi does it one way doesn't mean we can't do it another.

But I'm sure I've seen a Star Trek shuttle craft tractor something larger (maybe it wasn't a shuttle but the space equivalent of a tug boat?

Edit: When tractor beams increased mass, then smaller ships were effected more than larger ships, but that isn't true anymore.

Agreed, which is why I changed it! What's your thoughts on the new one? Given your stats on the pinning ship above, 24 space bombers would still hit the pinning ship knocking out a number of CEs (no point defence) thus reducing the pinning ships CE significantly. After the second round, where even more SBs will hit, the combat speed maybe low enough for the pinned ship to flee round 4.

Nik

Still true. Speed is total thrust/mass. Small ships with relatively large number of engines will still only have a modest overall thrust.

Simplifying the equation for purpose of demonstration:
100 HH ship has total thrust of 40k, but mass of 40k giving value 1
20HH ship has total thrust of 10k but mass of 5k giving value 2

Both ships are hit by 10k tractor.
100 HH ship has new thrust of 30k still pretty much 1.
20 HH ship has new thrust of 0k now stationary.

Humm, not sure how your statement makes it fairer to the pinned ship? Have I missed a post with a modified equation?

I would just move all my tradeships to an tuesday day and start doing my trade turns on sunday...

Also, don't forget if the new rules means that if ships are able to stack TU"s then it means that smaller ships will be defenseless against pirates.. the only ships captured now by pirates are those who are sitting waiting for new TU's.

...although pirates would have to abide by the same rules, and with a boarding attempt costing 50 TU's that leaves little room to move to intercept a ship that has been spotted

I dont like the idea, simply because it adds to the real world complexity of doing turns.

If it did go ahead, then it should only apply to ships that have naval officers; so cargo ships carry on as now. It would mean pirates arent affected either – would that be a good thing?

Mark

But how would you patrol against the pirates? (Or escort your ships?)

If you operate trade ships without escort then you run the risk of being pirated, particularly in certain areas.

I run freighters in the DHP without escort as the risk in minimal, but if I had freighters in the Outer Capellan I'd definately put an escort on it, if only an armed Surveyor or something to occupy the pirate long enough for the freighter to escape.

This risk *should* be part of the game I think and should not be an argument against a particular suggestion. But that's just me and I freely admit that I don't do much trade (but I'd just adapt to the risks if I did).

Yup, this is why I no longer like the idea. Fickle ain't I.

Fine I won't bother making suggestions then!!!

Can't really do this when you only use the online ordereditor, which as i tend to do orders from different locations i don't have much choice in the matter.

And the point is if they reset tus on a maintence day then your wait for tus order might take a whole lot longer than you expected. Unless of course you carefully move units on the right days, but again taht adds complexity without really giving any benifit.

Didn't you just say it wouldn't be?

I vote yes to what Thomas' suggests.

/Erik

these are questions regarding your theories and not totally dismissing them.....

if the whole fleet is moving away from the pin, i assume they will all unpin at the same time? if not, then say for instance if out of 100 ships 50 get unpinned in the first round this leaves 50 for round 2, the enemy force will then retarget to the remianing 50, lessening their chances of becoming unpinned massively, and so on, until i would say a good percentage of these ships would then become "on their own" and completely destroyed. Again this battle assumption regarding pinning is also based on the fact that the enemy doesnt re-inforce the position massively.

also if at the start of the battle attempt to flee if pinned, i dont think it should be flee, it should be attempt to break the pin. there is also the issue again that ships that have no real combat effectiveness pinning these ships, will retarget to another ship during this battle once its original target has "fled" and create the same overall problem of the "non damaging pinning" ships causing large combat vessels damage due to the retreat issue, when as i say they couldnt cause these vessels damage for a substantial amount of time. (IE) if they were firing for a full year the only damage we would have is integrity loss and a little bit of paintwork to replace on the outer hulls

possibly a flee "on round4" if pinned, seems logical to me that on round 4 that some ships should start to attempt to break pins if they want to, other wise main warships will be leaving the battle due to the "no damage ships" they would then move onto another ship, and the same again, and potentially move onto another ship etc. OR are you saying that if a fast ship pins a ship in round 1, once this ship has fled this fast ship is UNABLE to pin anyone else for the remaining 3 rounds?

i am not fully dimissing your ideas.......

i think the pinning idea's at the start of your "rather long" writing are good, i also agree pinning does need to stay in the game in some form, and that your first 2 paragraphs make sense to me, i am going to have to read it all again to make sure ive read it right........

This is the only bit i have issues with, mostly due the the "a day" basis off it. Personally i'd prefer one pin attempt every 4 rounds, whenever that round happens to be, of course that would mean storing more informations from day to day in battle.

I just feel 'the day' concept is a little artifical, i mean i know it's all day based 60tus etc etc, just my thoughts though

I had the same concerns as you - that is right up until the time Thomas slapped me round the head with a wet kipper and explained the idea in more detail.

What Thomas is saying is that a small pinner ship will only have a small chance of pinning the large 100 hull heavy as it is a small ship with relatively less thrust than the 100 hull heavy. So in the scenario of 100 100 hull heavies against 100 20 hull pinners only 20 100 hull heavies would ever get pinned in the first place. 100 20 hull pinners is a sizable investment by any means to only pin 20 ships. Now those 20 ships have a large chance of breaking the pin over 4 rounds and escaping. So in your scenario i would guess only 4-5 ships would be pinned at the end of the day. This is a great improvement over the current state of play.

20% of your 100 fleet not being able to fire back because you set flee if pinned is acceptable. 5% of your fleet actually being pinned at the end of battle is acceptable.

This is an extreme situation naturally both sides will have pinners. Large pin ships are an option but this is a significant investment in hulls when it might be better to produce big bulky warships.

welcome to the game, you will find your brain is always on this game after a while thats why i had a few days gap before re-reading and posting on this board, it takes over sometimes...............(re-focus)

In Andies example (and by my original suggestion) the 80 20 hullers that did not successfully pin an enemy at the beginning of the battle would not be allowed to try and repin a second time that day.
The 80 100 hullers that resited beeing pinned at the beginning of the battle would either stay in the battle because they resisted beeing pinned because of their base chance (basevalue + combat thrust + cpatain bonus) or leave the battle because they had 'flee if pinned' set and had the base chance + additional advantage to break the pin.
20 100 hullers are pinned in round 1 and are targetted by the 100 20 hullers (who have no real weaponry). Lets just assume every round 5 100 hullers manage to break the pin (based on either base chance and stay, or an improved chances and flee the battle).
At the end of the day nobody remains pinned and the arriving cavalry hits nothing the next day (or only very few very slow ships). ...would have been a different matter if 100 really fast 50 hhulled pinners came along with some support ships.

A lot of options come up and you always got some scope to get away, but mistakes will still cost you, and good tactics will still have scope.

All the options and variants that have been put forward should all be considered and discussed, I tried to make my intial suggestion 'simple'.
Some comments on suggestions so far:
- 'flee if pinned' should try to get yourself out of the battle location and thus you cannot participate in the battle any more that day. Simply assume it to hide behind that lump of space debris etc etc, basically you'd take extreme maneuvres that move you out of the action for sure that day
- 'break pin and reenter combat' option is what every ship should automatically have when another position tries to pin it. If you successfully resist beeing pinned without taking extreme maneuvres (and put yourself out of action) then you are still in the battle. Simply easier and one less setting you can mess up.
- the base chance could also be improved by special tech (stealth, decoy, ?)

but certainly there are other useful options


I also trust that Mica and David (regardless of whatever is implemented) will get any chances and probabilites right (e.g. how likely will a 100 hh of 6g combat speed and captain experiance of 50% flee against a pinning attempt from a 50 hh with 20% captain experience (to stay in Andies example)) so that we will not end up with a different problem and everybody will be able to define a proper strategy for their fleet.

Thomas

Why should a smaller find harder? I'm still not certain on the way pinning stops ISR movement and jumping but i know it's to do with proximity. If the mass of the vessel has a significant effect then of course it should be easier for a larger ship. But i'd really like an explination behind your thinking here.

I still don't like this, your just rebalancing it the other way to make pinning almost never happen. Designing a fleet solely to pin the enemy should be a viable stratergy but if you only allow pinning the first round in battle then there are problems

I also don't see how you came to the conclusion that A will have more ships pinned at the end of the day if B has many more ships than when only more ships. Assuming i have enough vessels to pin all of A's ships at the start of the day then any more ships i have in the fleet are wasted, where as they should really be able to support the pinning ships and make it harder for A to escape.

I like most of what you've suggested but I don't want to see a push to far in the other direction just because pinning has problems currently.

The basis used for pinning is based solely on remaining close enough to the target to disrupt attempts to create an ISR field, thereby preventing the position from skipping lightseconds away and out of combat range.

Disruption of the field formation has not been considered beyond, "if you are close enough, you can just do it".

Amending this to "if you are close enough, you can attempt to disrupt the field formation but it's not guaranteed due to X, Y and Z" as suggested by Thomas seems very sensible as are the the various options of what to do if pinned.

I would also like to see different pinning rules/modifiers for different locations. For example, in the depths of space there the combat field can be hundreds of thousand of km from anywhere so it simply comes down to manoeuvring and establishing distance. In orbit however, you suddenly have two directions that cause you to leave the field of battle - leave orbit and land that are only a very short distance away (a few hundred km).
Should we ignore this for simplicities sake? Should the pinning craft prevent a ship from leaving orbit or landing? Should we make it imposible to pin in orbit or should we have the pin setting, follow target, causing the pinning ship to also leave orbit, continueing the fight in the orbital quad?

Good luck!

Oh I very much doubt it

It should be harder to pin in orbit. (but not impossible)

If it can be implemented, a "follow target" option would be very interesting. It could result in battles spreading out over whole systems, ships retreating and leading persuers into ambushes, as well as a whole range of non-combat applications that I'm not going to go into any detail about

Ooh, I like the sound of that.

This sounds like it has wide ranges of positibilties for tatics and genernal funness, as well as causing innocent bystandards a lot of hassles

Sounds good to me...

I'm not sure if it makes sense from a physics point of view but i do like how the results play out.

The BHD martyrs would love that one :-)

Fill a 100 Normal Hull ship with as much exposives as possible, minimal mk I equipment then crash it into an IMP starbase

Ptb wrote:
"I still think just making the pinning ship easier to hit by the pinned ship would solve the whole ultra faster pinners that can't really do anything problem. Or if the ratio of the ship sizes is high enough and they are close enough then why can't i form my irs bubble around their ship too "

Perhaps relative ISR strength between the ships involved should come into play.

Combat speed -> used to close the distance to get into a "pinning" position.

ISR engines -> ratings + number of engines of each vessel compared to see who has the most strength to either create or dissipate the ISR fields. Ships may not have the mass to prevent ISR formations, so the pinning vessels begin engaging/disengaging their ISR drives to disrupt the local subspace to prevent the formation of stable fields. Larger engines are better at disrupting and harder to disrupt...

If you attempt to pin an ISR 1 Warship with your ISR 4 combat engine loaded Yacht, you could end up being thrown half way across the system as it overloads your ISR drives.

Could also provide a balance that allows Hit/Run tactics but only for specially designed vessels (heavy hulled warship with ISR 1 are a minority from what i've seen). The ISR1 result in a reduction in offensive capacity for the hit and run fleets but gives them a better chance of making it home safetly.

That would give some point to having isr mk 1 drives on ships that tend to have 300tus and be one jump from their target, which would be nice. The only reason i have any isr mk 1 ships are becuase i like the discription of them