Sunday 22 April 2007

Paying visits to planets; a revised etiquette guide

Following a question which made me think a bit, some changes to our earlier programme

Fleet orders are issued before departure to new systems.
Permissible orders are
Stand off; fleet will manoeuvre for advantage until it elects to withdraw, is attacked, or changes its orders to attack after assessing the situation
Fleets on Stand Off orders do not attack against either fleets or planetary defences, and do not count as interdicting the system if they are still present at the end of the turn.

Attack; fleet will attack what it finds on arrival; first attacking other fleets on attack orders (attack posture is readily distinguishable from stand off because active sensors are switched on), then other fleets on stand off orders, then planetary defences.

Attack orders give +1 to initiative rolls

Withdraw if contested; fleet will withdraw if any hostile mobile forces are present in the system. If only planetary defences forces are present, a fleet in "withdraw if contested" may remain, and change its orders to attack following recon of the defences.

This does not answer the question as posed. This was whether a fleet under orders to bombard the planet could be given conditional orders to attack the planet if there was no hostile fleet, but otherwise to stand off. After a bit of thought, I came to the conclusion that there was little real point to such a conditional order. If your force can't take on a hostile fleet, it should bug out full stop; putting it on stand off just makes it vulnerable to an attack order. So I amended Withdraw If Contested to give the same net effect and changed Stand-off to make it clear that a whole bunch of fleets on stand off are dancing around on the edge of things and don't have any real effect on trade in and out of the system. (Because otherwise people would throw stand off fleets into everything to deny money to people). And note the +1 for attack orders.

Based on returns to date (which are sketchy, but suggestive) actual forces coming into a system will not have large numbers of ships, so we should be able to use the scouting rules from FTII without much fuss.

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