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mj12games.com/forum → Posts by dream4
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I was pfaffing about with conversions from Starmada X: Brigade myself but I stopped when the book was announced as I didn't want to step on the product. Would you be interested in what I've got so far?
the destroyer Yukikaze sacrifices herself to allow Captain Okita's battleship to get away
may spend a command point to "siphon" a certain amount of damage from incoming weapons fire
I like these options, but Starmada being mostly simulationist I'm at a loss as to how the mechanics would work (which no doubt why I am not a world-famous celebrity game designer). I know Starmada can model AEGIS cruisers but again that presumes the existence of fighters/torpedoes.
Do you want 5 superships to cover your empire
you can't build a hundred battleships to send to every little problem
Guys, I never said "build nothing but battleships", I said:
What reason would there be for a navy in your setting to build anything smaller than a light cruiser?
Destroyers and other small escorts are generally eggshells with hammers, but the hammer is the torpedoes I was originally talking about.
I break off a few destroyer escorts to their flank and my esteemed opponent will break off a couple of his big ships to deal with them
This I find interesting, because it implies that the battleships can't simply stay where they are and swat the DEs from a distance. My impression of Starmada designs is that range tends to far outstrip engine ratings as a general rule. Would you mind posting stats for some of these ships?
TBs had been deprecated long before Jutland; by 1916 destroyers had already begun to serve their ASW function
That merely proves my point, though: a submarine is just a torpedo boat you can't see coming and can't easily intercept. Destroyers are still serving the same function: keep the torpedoes away
from the big expensive battleships.
That being said, your question is a good one: what are escorts FOR? I would posit that depends upon the overall makeup of your fleet -- but also (and probably more importantly) the makeup of your enemy's fleet.
I would posit it entirely depends on the makeup of your enemy's fleet. Specifically, absent the existence of a cheap, hard-to-intercept but relatively short-range shipkilling weapon there's no need for escorts as long as economy of scale is a thing. We're back to Trafalgar where you build the biggest ships of the line you can.
Frankly, I don't think there is a single answer to your question.
I wasn't seeking one - a single one, anyway. I was asking the people who write up force lists what their escorts are screening the capital ships from, and whether that role is better served by escorts or just beefier battleships. Of course it's going to be setting dependent; I've just seen lots of force lists that follow the Jutland model but never include anything like a torpedo delivery unit.
I generally play campaign games where player-driven R&D results in new unit and weapon designs and it's fairly common that unless there are other cost factors that make building larger units more expensive than the same CR value of smaller units, they'll build bigger units and load them down with better defenses and anti-fighter/seeker weaponry because that's always more combat effective than screening units.
I hacked this together quickly: Modulating makes them quite nasty. A single torpedo hit can do significant damage to an Indomitable Battleship; two are likely to destroy it.
Hull: 1
Engines: 6-3
Weapons: 1-1
Shields: 0-0
---
Torpedo | G []O // (1)
MA 8 | 2x5+/2/2 (Cts/Exp/Knt/Mdl)I have often joked that starship combat games are either Trafalgar, Jutland or Midway, depending on what they try to emulate.
Out of the box, Starmada is pretty solidly in the Jutland camp, but there's a bit of a problem with that. Historically, fleet composition and tactics is determined by the weapons technology available. The reason why Jutland-era battleships needed escorts in the first place was the homing torpedo - a single cheap torpedo could sink a very expensive battleship, and could be carried by fast, nimble, equally cheap small craft. Destroyers (nee torpedo boat destroyers) only exist for the explicit purpose of keeping torpedo boats beyond torpedo range from the battleships.
In Starmada, there's no such shipkiller weapon, although it might be possible to build one - under SAE I created a PoC using the custom Seeker flight rules that could do a fair job of at least severely damaging a battleship-sized ship. I haven't tried under the new Seeker rules. Regardless, in Starmada you can still shoot down Seekers; there was no way to intercept a torpedo.
Even if you assume that fighters fill this role, the best defense against fighters in Starmada is other fighters, and now we've got Midway instead of Jutland.
So given all this, to people who have created their own force lists &c. - what purpose do escorts serve in your fleets? Are they protecting the capital ships from anything? If so, what? What reason would there be for a navy in your setting to build anything smaller than a light cruiser?
[...] strikers and seekers, especially fast versions thereof, could in theory attack ships with virtual impunity and that only fighters could engage them before they attacked ships.
I've been thinking about this myself, as I tend to prefer a WWI/Jutland feel for my space navies, with big ships slinging big guns at each other and smaller ships buzzing around on the periphery.
(Daniel's Law of Starship Combat Games: all games are either Trafalgar, Jutland, or Midway)
I had been thinking of ways to improve the AF capabilities of ships but they revolved around the use of slow 'interceptor platforms' designed to remain on Combat Interception to intercept strikers and seekers on their attack runs, but that wasn't a perfect solution--and besides, it didn't allow the ship itself to attack their potential killer.
Well, historically this is exactly what happened when fast automotive guided torpedoes were developed (and later on, combat aircraft). There's a reason no one builds battleships any more.
The simplest fix is to just remove weapons that drive the tactics - eliminate seekers and fighters, and restrict what you can do with strikers in terms of changing the default parameters and traits.
The second suggestion focuses on making Anti-Fighter Batteries more effective in their primary purpose, by also allowing them to engage fighters on their attack runs.
The fix I've used (but wholly inadequately playtested) is to eliminate AFBs as equipment (feh, there's a set of universal weapon design rules for a reason) and modify the dual-mode trait: a weapon is either in anti-fighter mode or anti-ship mode. If it's in anti-fighter mode, it can only target fighters, can only be used during fighter activation, and fires after fighter movement but before fighters resolve their attacks. A Range 3, DMG 1, RoF 5 weapon works pretty well for this. You could add a Battery trait to allow a RoF 2+ weapon to split its RoF across multiple flights.
This seems pretty balanced; it allows ships to chop up fighter flights more effectively at the cost of one of their weapon batteries, and it allows small ships to have a dual role main gun.
Actually piercing started as x1.5, was changed to x1.4 in revision 1 and now Quote Dan:
"Honestly, I don't know why the numbers 0.7 and 1.4 came about in the first place.
I always assumed it was 1/sqrt(2) and sqrt(2), myself. I assumed Dan was trying to have an power function curve for effect vs. SUs.
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