After Action thoughts; four way battle of 10 April 07

John asked me to post the rules, so I have just done that. I'd like to have posted them as an attachment, but I can't figure out how to attach text documents. Pictures seem to be fine and so do links, so most of the time we're sorted out on that.

Next; some thoughts on the effort last night, because it throws up a couple of things which need to be thunk about.

Firstly, and obviously, four unconnected forces doesn't make for much of a game, but then that's what putting in place a campaign was all about. However, since Eddie - at least - wants to tinker some more with tactical concepts before committing himself to actual force composition, we may well see ourselves doing another fight of that kind before the campaign proper.

In an email to all of you I've already sketched out what I think THOSE battles ought to be like; they should be grounded more in the problems the campaign will throw up, and they should reduce the action to two sides, since FT doesn't work well with more that two sides.

Fleshing that out; the next exploratory game will have the following very loose scenario.

Each player brings a force which he considers adequate to the task of subduing a neutral system in the face of possible intervention from other players. Two things to keep in mind in putting this force together; Firstly you're working within the campaign's overall force limits of 4000 pts, and this is what you're sending to deal with a neutral. Secondly, the defence strengths of a neutral world in most cases will be below 105, so a force of more than 1100 pts will be overkill for planet busting.

Once the players are on table, they're paired up; largest with smallest, two middle players together. If there are only three players, largest goes up against the two smaller players together. In any case the system defences are thrown in on the side of the overall smallest force if there's still a serious imbalance.

From a purely hardheaded point of view, there's no point in thumping a neutral planet unless you generate more income from it than you're going to lose fixing up your fleet after you take it. Although there's always the thought that if you can ensure that someone else has taken even more damage - and thus become less of a threat - there's a profit in that as well.

With those thoughts in mind, take a look at the fight between Colin and myself.

I sent in 16 vessels and brought out 8 intact. On the one hand, everything which came out came out almost undamaged; on the other hand I lost both the heavy units entirely.

Colin lost all his lights and two heavies and only had ten hull boxes left on his three surviving heavies.

I came out facing a serious replacement bill, but almost no repairs were needed. The replacement bill was for more than 1000 - in effect, I was never going to replace the heavies in the course of the campaign, but the survivors were still a force in being, and could take on a similar sized force with a good chance of making a fight of it.

Colin had a small enough replacement bill, but all of his survivors needed to seriously repaired. Without seeing his list, I don't know just what was going to be involved, but actually, I'd be surprised if his actual economic cost of the battle was any higher than mine. The real difference was that the survivors were no longer combat capable. In fact, if he hadn't bugged out when he did, my survivors would have taken him out with the next round of combat.

I don't know that there are actually lessons learned here, but one thing which strikes me is that a big ship can hand you a big repair bill, but it's still cheaper over all to fix a big ship than to replace an equivalent points cost of small ones outright. When you replace a ship outright you pay for everything; when you repair a ship, you don't have to buy the hull all over again or any of the stuff you forgot to break.

This argues for either smallish ships which will be painless to replace, or large ships which are too big to knock out in the course of a cost effective engagement. If that's right, cruisers of all weights start to look like a bad idea; you're just too likely to lose them outright in a serious fight.

That said, how many really serious ships can you afford in the context of a 4000 pt fleet? My sketchy guess is that anything below 500 points is going to get blown to bits; my two UN heavies were about 300 points each and they fell apart in the space of two rounds of combat apiece.

Which leads me to what killed them.

Kravak K-guns are genuinely worrying things, and much though I hate to say this, if we're going to see them in heavy use, we're going to have to get more rigorous about fire arcs and turning arcs. The weapons are perfectly balanced in a world where a narrow firing arc means something. In our somewhat sloppier implementation, not so much.

MKPs - in the correct FB2 version - do an average of 2 2/3 points per shot out to 12". SMPs are not quite that good; they average 2 points at close range (6") 1 1/3 pts at medium (12") and 2/3 pt at long (18"). (It's too fiddly to work out the additional damage from hits on a 6, but I'd be surprised if it adds more than a half point at close range)

K Guns (and to be honest, most really heavy weapons of all kinds) are going to need us to get more serious about turning arcs. Thoughts on how to measure 1/12 of a circle easily are welcome.

MKPs and SMPs are a one shot weapon, and as such completely balanced as things stand (the MKP is more potent than an SMP, but on the other hand Kravak have no missiles or other long range weapons, so this is fair enough). My one concern with them is that logistically, expendable ordnance systems ought to be more of a chore to keep supplied than energy weapons. So I find myself considering the introduction of bills for expendable ordnance, if I can think of a way which is fair and doesn't involve crazy book keeping. At the moment, 1 credit for every shot seems fair; it's between a quarter and a third of the cost of replacing the entire system and it's easy enough to keep track of.