Somethings Up?

[ali-t-akua]

You are correct.  Fighters will always fight from DepLoc 1.  At issue here was the defensive bonus that you get for not being in Deploc 1. 

 

Even if the fighters are in DepLoc 1 their damage will still be reduced by any defensive bonus that the target has.  In this case the target was sitting in Deploc 6 or 7.  If you figured 5% per location back from the front you would get a bonus of about 25-30%.  This would reduce all incoming fire by 25-30% before accounting for any other ship based defensive systems.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

sounds about right and then add in the fact that the 'missiles' fired by the fighters

were the same generation as the fighters themselves ie Gen 2 which would have given thier missiles an agility of 2. My ships manuver rating was 4 so the damage was reduced at least an additional 50 percent perhaps more.

 

My ship was using standard line battle formation and my strike fighters were using

the Cover FOO.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

In looking at the damage, a Fighter can generate and taking into account the fact that your ship was at Deploc 7, I figure your CA would have been destroyed in less than 10 rounds. Since it only suffered minor damage, I would assume that either your mobility reduced the damage or that the fact that your Strike Fighters FOO was Cover or both led to the reduced damage. Is there something else I am missing?

[General Miles Avatar]

You are correct.  Fighters will always fight from DepLoc 1.  At issue here was the defensive bonus that you get for not being in Deploc 1. 

 

Even if the fighters are in DepLoc 1 their damage will still be reduced by any defensive bonus that the target has.  In this case the target was sitting in Deploc 6 or 7.  If you figured 5% per location back from the front you would get a bonus of about 25-30%.  This would reduce all incoming fire by 25-30% before accounting for any other ship based defensive systems.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

sounds about right and then add in the fact that the 'missiles' fired by the fighters

were the same generation as the fighters themselves ie Gen 2 which would have given thier missiles an agility of 2. My ships manuver rating was 4 so the damage was reduced at least an additional 50 percent perhaps more.

 

My ship was using standard line battle formation and my strike fighters were using

the Cover FOO.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

In looking at the damage, a Fighter can generate and taking into account the fact that your ship was at Deploc 7, I figure your CA would have been destroyed in less than 10 rounds. Since it only suffered minor damage, I would assume that either your mobility reduced the damage or that the fact that your Strike Fighters FOO was Cover or both led to the reduced damage. Is there something else I am missing?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

That about sums it up. I think the mobility of the ship its deployment location and

my strike fighters all contributed. We also have a decent racial space combat

modifier but your guess is as good as mine as to effect of that.

[ali-t-akua]

You are correct.  Fighters will always fight from DepLoc 1.  At issue here was the defensive bonus that you get for not being in Deploc 1. 

 

Even if the fighters are in DepLoc 1 their damage will still be reduced by any defensive bonus that the target has.  In this case the target was sitting in Deploc 6 or 7.  If you figured 5% per location back from the front you would get a bonus of about 25-30%.  This would reduce all incoming fire by 25-30% before accounting for any other ship based defensive systems.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

sounds about right and then add in the fact that the 'missiles' fired by the fighters

were the same generation as the fighters themselves ie Gen 2 which would have given thier missiles an agility of 2. My ships manuver rating was 4 so the damage was reduced at least an additional 50 percent perhaps more.

 

My ship was using standard line battle formation and my strike fighters were using

the Cover FOO.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

In looking at the damage, a Fighter can generate and taking into account the fact that your ship was at Deploc 7, I figure your CA would have been destroyed in less than 10 rounds. Since it only suffered minor damage, I would assume that either your mobility reduced the damage or that the fact that your Strike Fighters FOO was Cover or both led to the reduced damage. Is there something else I am missing?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

That about sums it up. I think the mobility of the ship its deployment location and

my strike fighters all contributed. We also have a decent racial space combat

modifier but your guess is as good as mine as to effect of that.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The racial modifier may also be counteracted by the opposing force. Also,they may ahve had a less aggressive FOO too so it is not clear what impact their factors had on the battle.

[General Miles Avatar]

You are correct.  Fighters will always fight from DepLoc 1.  At issue here was the defensive bonus that you get for not being in Deploc 1. 

 

Even if the fighters are in DepLoc 1 their damage will still be reduced by any defensive bonus that the target has.  In this case the target was sitting in Deploc 6 or 7.  If you figured 5% per location back from the front you would get a bonus of about 25-30%.  This would reduce all incoming fire by 25-30% before accounting for any other ship based defensive systems.

 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

sounds about right and then add in the fact that the 'missiles' fired by the fighters

were the same generation as the fighters themselves ie Gen 2 which would have given thier missiles an agility of 2. My ships manuver rating was 4 so the damage was reduced at least an additional 50 percent perhaps more.

 

My ship was using standard line battle formation and my strike fighters were using

the Cover FOO.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

In looking at the damage, a Fighter can generate and taking into account the fact that your ship was at Deploc 7, I figure your CA would have been destroyed in less than 10 rounds. Since it only suffered minor damage, I would assume that either your mobility reduced the damage or that the fact that your Strike Fighters FOO was Cover or both led to the reduced damage. Is there something else I am missing?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

 

That about sums it up. I think the mobility of the ship its deployment location and

my strike fighters all contributed. We also have a decent racial space combat

modifier but your guess is as good as mine as to effect of that.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The racial modifier may also be counteracted by the opposing force. Also,they may ahve had a less aggressive FOO too so it is not clear what impact their factors had on the battle.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

You are absoulutely correct. Inquiring minds want to know in a bad way.

[Locklyn]

I'd really really really like to see some sort of report on the battle of the effect of racial space combat modifiers, morale, experience, leaders etc. There is no way today to even see if it is in play, especially the racial modifiers and what ever happened to boarding combat?

 

/Locklyn

[ali-t-akua]

I'd really really really like to see some sort of report on the battle of the effect of racial space combat modifiers, morale, experience, leaders etc. There is no way today to even see if it is in play, especially the racial modifiers and what ever happened to boarding combat?

 

/Locklyn

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Yup,. I mean doesn't this create a disadvantage for the pirates if they can't board a ship?

[sir smeg]

Yup,. I mean doesn't this create a disadvantage for the pirates if they can't board a ship?       

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

True, however thanks to the advances in colonising, those pirates will have to settle for pillaging the colonys instead.

 

Offcouse this would lead to some problems with carrying away the loot for any decent sized colony.

 

Sir Smeg

[Hughestrog]

There is no way today to even see if it is in play, especially the racial modifiers and what ever happened to boarding combat?

 

/Locklyn

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Hadn't Ur Lord or WKE been experimentaing with boarding, and had gotten some success?

[WKE235]

There is no way today to even see if it is in play, especially the racial modifiers and what ever happened to boarding combat?

 

/Locklyn

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Hadn't Ur Lord or WKE been experimentaing with boarding, and had gotten some success?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Not me. I did have an Exploration ship (40,000 tons, no weapons) taken by an enemy Corvette (3,000 tons) ... which I then battled and destroyed the next turn with my own corvettes.

 

In another battle, I had a Corvette which destroyed an enemy ship with no weapons. 3,000 ton corvette -vs- 180,000 ton Transport ship, from Dep Loc 7 to Dep Loc 7. I figure the battle must have lasted 360+ rounds before I destroyed the transport. I was the faster and more nimble ship, and had weapons ... but there was no surrender.

 

Beyond this, nothing else. Based on other tales, I think boarding is a random very low probability event, which may be modified based on the type of weapons in use.

[Locklyn]

This is one of the problems I have with combat in this game. Everything in this game is a lot of number crunching, input the wrong numbers you input the wrong orders and you are fubar. I've asked many of these questions in the past but have yet to get an matter of fact answer.

 

While we are given some numbers through years of actual nagging like weapon strength, armor integrity etc, mainly because early battles showed alot of things were not correct in the system we still lack relevant ones in battle like for example:

 

Racial Space Combat Modifier:

What does it modify? Damage dealt? Taken? Defensive ratings or what? This has never been shown on battle reports and could for all that we know be missing...

 

Experience and Morale:

What exactly do the various levels entail in combat, and what do they apply to? Just like with Warp Survey Strengths and character skill levels just knowing the lower levels and what they affect would be a great start.

 

Defensive Systems:

There was talk with the new draft that defensive systems were being overhauled and changed but since then there has been no word on it and no new or any numbers for that matter has been shown for defensive systems leaving most people just wandering down the armor and shields route since they know this works and from experiment the high end Stasis Field Generators that are so hideously expensive both to research and construct fail miserably at their job, these dividers that are hinted at in the draft, what numbers are we to expect there? Will we see them in ANZ in the future?

 

Boarding Combat:

 

The draft speaks about capturing ships and disabling crews for the duration of the combat, are these effects just fluff or real? Three years ago Pete mentioned that he thought it was too easy to capture ships and opened up for abuse so made it harder, now it would seem to be an almost non existant feature, which is a bummer if you have put points in for Close Combat for your racial design.

 

Damage:

Does damage inflict a straight % decrease in ALL ships systems? Ie a 13% damaged ship will inflict 13% less damage when it attacks etc? The repair facilities mentioned in the draft, have they come into play yet?

 

Leaders:

So far we know that Naval characters give fire control, the draft also mentions that some leaders might increase defensive systems and "offensive firepower coordination" which sounds like Fire Control again but if not then are these effects in play, what leaders affect space combat and can their effects be listed in the battle reports?

 

Orbital Degradation:

 

Pete has several times said that atmosphere affects weapons fired into and out of it. Could we please have a list of which weapons are affected and to what extent. Any race should be able to have that information since test firing is likely when they built that first surface fortress

 

Installations:

What do exactly the various naval installations affect? Naval Combat Bonus...is that something which is added to the racial space combat bonus or what? How does it affect combat and could we have a spot on the battle report for that as well or some way to gauge or effectivness?

 

I could go on and on but let's start with these puppies...

 

While Pete many times answers in a general mystic tone to keep the "mystery" the sheer complexity of building and managing large fleets and actually going to battle with them is one that requires that you have all the numbers and not just some especially with a spate of mysterious combat results that get "fixed" post combat without actually leaving many wiser as to what went wrong in the first place. Erroneous ANZ, integrity calculations etc etc etc have all been detected by the hard work of players who have tried to work out the numbers without actually having them given to them through the game system. Their work is helping keeping the engine less riddled with bugs and it would be a whole lot easier if they had more correct tools to work with and would entail a lot less "quickfixes"

 

The longer and more complex battles become, the harder it will be for the player to discover things like this fighter issue, which as far as I can see has still not been explained factually, with the correct numbers at hand we can also assure ourselves that we're not being cheated by an unbalanced game engine that has decided that today is a good day for all our battleships to sporadically explode when facing those pesky two pathfinders

 

While some think this removes too much of the mystery I would claim that not knowing just how many Dreadnaughts are waiting on the other side of the warp point for my surprise attack is the mystery and the charm of this wargame

 

I am one of the lucky ones to be in a big alliance filled with bright people who love to crunch numbers through spreadsheets even though there were no numbers given so we've always had a feeling for them but the solo players who have to rely upon the data given them through the rules, ANZ, FOBs or battle reports are vulnerable. It has come to the point where I and my nearest ally would get more use out of simulating combats with throwaway ships against our combat fleets for some almost real numbers, than performing a FOB. This of course means a lot more combats, which means slower processing which noone wants so I think more numbers is good all around!

 

Ponder it, debate it, air your views for and against, be civil and rational and tell me what you think

 

Cheers

/Locklyn

 

 

Yeah I'm back...know I'll disappoint a few

[RTGPete]

Wait, you forgot one thing -

 

I could add the names of every pilot and gunner to the game, so you could track their personal careers and even their family lives. Dang game just isn't complex enough - definitely needs more

[Locklyn]

Actually those were serious questions for game relevant data that could make the game less complex when one has the numbers and can put them into the spreadsheets. It is questions that players have asked time and time again on a lot of threads on the boards.

 

And I think it deserved a bit more of a serious answer than that or am I wrong?

 

/Locklyn

[RTGPete]

Actually those were  serious questions for game relevant data that could make the game less complex when one has the numbers and can put them into the spreadsheets. It is  questions that players have asked time and time again on a lot of threads on the boards.

 

And I think it deserved a bit more of a serious answer than that or am I wrong?

 

/Locklyn

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'll get more detail in when I can - but SNROTE is already an incredibly complex game with gobs of details provided on all sorts of things.

 

I absolutely do not want to provide so much detail that players come up with their own battle programs to pre-determine battle results. Not only does that take a lot of fun out of the game, but it just gives them reasons to complain when their battle program doesn't provide the same results as the real thing.

 

So - I'll come up with more, and more detail - but it won't ever be 100% - there are all sorts of bad side effects that result from doing that.

[Ur Lord Tedric]

Actually those were  serious questions for game relevant data that could make the game less complex when one has the numbers and can put them into the spreadsheets. It is  questions that players have asked time and time again on a lot of threads on the boards.

 

And I think it deserved a bit more of a serious answer than that or am I wrong?

 

/Locklyn

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'll get more detail in when I can - but SNROTE is already an incredibly complex game with gobs of details provided on all sorts of things.

 

I absolutely do not want to provide so much detail that players come up with their own battle programs to pre-determine battle results. Not only does that take a lot of fun out of the game, but it just gives them reasons to complain when their battle program doesn't provide the same results as the real thing.

 

So - I'll come up with more, and more detail - but it won't ever be 100% - there are all sorts of bad side effects that result from doing that.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

Dear Pete,

 

What we really need is information, not necessarily data - data just happens to be easier for you to provide, so that's what we ask for.

 

Yes, we do bug you - because there simply isn't enough information for us to have confidence in the battle system.

 

We don't always need hard numbers and I'm all for a quite reasonably large amount of random/luck effect.

 

I will always come back to the statement I've always made:

"We need enough information in the Battle/FOB reports to allow us to design our ships with some understanding of what they will then do!".

 

It's quite simple - there's absolutely no reason to have all these different and nifty modules to build ships with, unless we know what they do - and have the confidence that they work.

 

The wonderfuly complex Tech Research Field is not matched by the confidence we need in the battle system.

 

Ur-Lord Tedric, the Chief Warmaster and every other single bugger in the Conclave of the Star League

[RTGPete]

Fair enough. One of the problems is that I've already provided a ton of answers to these very questions. The combat system is both complex and simple at the same time; some have described it as paper-rock-scissors, and in a way that's true, with a deep tech tree, sixteen different defensive systems, and the scissors/rocks/papers moving all over a really big map.

 

Here's the basic rundown. When a combat takes place, both forces dish out damage in each offensive category. They deal them out in globs, the number of which is based on their respective fire control ratings. Bonuses, primarily to firepower output, are provided by installations and leaders among other things. When a ship is hit, it suffers damage from each offensive category in which the enemy has firepower. It degrades that damage based on its defensive systems appropriate to those offensive categories. Shields soak up damage directly after the degradation has taken place. Some systems such as fighters provide fleetwide umbrella defense by distributing their capabilities (point defense, for example) over many ships in their fleet. Damage during a battle is applied against the damaged ships, which suffer degraded behavior as a result. Fire continues to be delivered by both sides until one or the other has been destroyed or, in extremely rare cases, until so many shots have been fired that a standoff results (this is usually in the case of a Pathfinder firing on an unarmed 20 million ton transport - quite often such battles end with both sides remaining alive). Damage remaining after a battle is repaired over time; it doesn't take long for damage control parties to repair a ship, greatly favoring large vessels, but it does take some time. It isn't hard to develop strong armor to crank up the structural integrity of a ship to very large values, making it a hard nut to crack. This reduces the effective damage, by %, that it takes during a battle.

 

Here's the short answer to your question about designing your ships. I can provide more information in the FOB results, but there's not much more info to give. Two general types of battles have emerged since the game began running. Big ships with low fire control, and big ships surrounded by hundreds or (rarely) thousands of tiny screens.

 

In the case of the big ships duking it out, there's not much to say. Everybody seems to understand how that works - the ships simply batter each other until one side wins. Pretty high confidence in the battle system there - it works great.

 

In the case of the screens, the non-screened side, if any, simply needs to extend the battle in a superior fashion than his opponent. After all, that's the entire purpose of screens - to extend the battle for so long that he has a chance to deliver fire into the enemy in a more efficient fashion than he is suffering. The non-screened side either is not non-screened, bringing a lot of small ships himself, or he raises his fire control to such a degree that the enemy screens are obliterated rapidly enough so as to negate the battle-lengthening effect that they provide. In some cases this means devoting a fair percentage of one's fleet to computers - if you have a 20 million ton fleet and possess fire control computers that provide, say, 49000 output per 100 tons of computer, you could have a fire control rating of 98 + your leaders (precise details on the leader effect has been published elsewhere) by devoting 20% of your fleet to fire control. That's 4 million tons to give yourself a better-than-100 fire control and virtual immunity to all enemy forces with even extremely heavy screens.

 

Since large screened forces seem to have become the big "thing" when talking about how to win battles, it is very important to consider reality over just talking. How many empires have you seen who have actually built huge numbers of screens? I don't mean a thousand screens, because that's nothing when put up against a 100 fire control force. I mean ten thousand screens or more. The answer, and I'll give it right here, is none. Nobody is insane enough to build that many. The work required to construct them is monumental, it takes a huge effort just to move them anywhere, every 1000 of them is at least a million tons of utterly wasted tonnage, they make for a horrible offensive strategy because they are by definition not transwarp-capable and they can get swatted out of existence in a few combat "rounds" against a prepared enemy. Never mind warp assaults - they get popped en masses if they hit the wrong warp point. And they can be wiped out by a stream of high fire control suicide attacks should they be caught on the defensive.

 

In the end, way too many battles are fought with only extreme fleets in the minds of the players - fantasy battles played out in nightmare mode. The reality is that there are about a dozen significant battles every turn cycle, and countless more minor skirmishes (mostly between scouting vessels on the far frontier), and the combat system works beautifully. I can think of only a few battles that might be considered "nightmare mode" for the loser - and those are almost always horrible fire control against a large, screened enemy. Occasionally there's a blip, something odd happens, and I correct it.

 

Rather than provide precise details on every aspect of everything, I'd be more than happy to discuss strategy, such as I've done above. That, after all, is what it's all about. If you're not confident that you can design your ships to meet a particular threat, that's a strategy question. I'd be more than happy to talk in those terms, general advice on how to meet a real or reasonable threat.

 

Fair enough?

 

Oh, one last note - I, personally, would not be confident in my main battle force if it had a fire control of 5 plus maybe another 12 from my best admirals if I had to put it up against an enemy with 1000 screens or more. That would take my force a lot of shots to clear out those screens, and unless I'm screened, my cruisers would be suffering all-too-efficient hits while the enemy was just losing screens. I should have devoted more than a trivial research effort to fire control computers and certainly more than a couple of % of my tonnage to fire control. That is....if I know or fear - with confidence - that the enemy is actually heavily screened.