Re: [FT] Battle report - Dreadplanet vs KV

stiltman@teleport.com wrote:

>>>Yeah, my test with my wife involved ships with only thrust 3
>>>rather  than thrust 6, albeit with far more scatterguns than 
>>>usual and class 5 K's rather than class 3's.
> 
>>Thrust-3A explains why she didn't attempt to maneuver. My 
>>main problem was that I constantly had to choose between 
>>aiming my beams where the KV would be if they decided to 
>>attack *this* turn, or pointing my PBLs where the KV would be if
>>they decided to attack on the *next* turn - and thrust-3A 
>>ships wouldn't have given me this particular headache.
> 
>Would it really make that much difference?

Yes. Using PBs or SMs is all about predicting which movement option the
enemy will choose on both this turn and the turn after that (since you
need to turn your ship in the right direction this turn to hit him
where he'll be after the next turn's movement). 

With thrust-3A the KV only have at best one movement option if they
want to go from circling to attacking, and they need to be rather
careful in how they do their circling in order to have even that. Even
if you (as the PB or SM player) fail to predict their single possible
attack option correctly, they're usually too clumsy to take advantage
of it by moving to an attack position in the arc where you can't launch
plasma or missiles.

With thrust-6A they have several different options to set up their
attacks, and if you guess the wrong one they're nimble enough to take
advantage of it before you can recover. The downside is of course that
they carry less weapons than the thrust-3A ships, but they're much
better able to avoid your heavy plasma or missile barrages.

>>Why did she use K5s, BTW (ie., why did you give her K5s, 
>>since IIRC you designed her ships)? [snip]
> 
>The reason I picked the K5 was pretty simple (and, possibly, 
>hasty):  
>it's the best damage:mass ratio gun that needs anything but a 6 
>to inflict double damage.  Perhaps I didn't look at all the math 
>quite right and the K3 actually winds up doing more 
>damage:mass ratio overall than the K5.
> 
>Let me see... K3's are mass 5, right?	So it's 11 K3's to 5 K5's...
>K5's are going to do 45.8333 damage (40.8333 on hull) if they all 
>were to hit on average, the K3's would do 49.5 (38.5 on hull).  So 
>if you had an unarmored ship, the K3 would probably do a bit 
>more damage, whereas if the enemy was armored, the K5 would 
>be better.

It's a gradual changeover, though - the higher the target's armour:hull
ratio, the better the K5 is. The changeover armour:hull ratio, where
the K5 becomes better than the K3, is somewhere in the 1/6 - 1/5 range.
With less armour than that the higher raw damage of the K3 is more
important; with more armour the K5 wins. The armour:hull ratio of the
DPR is roughly 1/33, so in this case the K3 is definitely more
effective :-/

'Course, if the target has Phalon-style multiple-layer armour, the K5
immediately gets better!

>I'd be more inclined to go with the K5 overall.  There's a lot of
>different equations one can draw up here for mass to damage 
>ratios depending on whether the target's armored, not armored, 
>screened, not screened, etc...

Indeed. That's the main reason I collect FBx designs - to use them for
weapon evaluation (aka "target practise" <G>). FWIW, of the designs
currently in the archive, about 40% are more vulnerable to the K5 and
the other 60% more vulnerable to the K3.

Comments on the maths more than on the actual numbers:

>		K5		K3		PT-1
>Mass		11		5		4
> 
>Avg. Dmg/Hit	9.1666		4.5		3.5
>(per mass)	0.8333		0.9		0.875
>(per cost)	0.2083		0.225		0.2916
> 
>Avg. Dmg/Hit 
>(Hull) 	8.1666		3.5		1.5
>(per mass)	 0.7424 	0.7		0.375
>(per cost)	0.1856		0.175		0.125
 
When you compare systems with different Cost:Mass ratios (eg. K-guns
and p-torps, or beams and Pulsers) the "per cost" comparision also
needs to include the cost of the weapon's proportion of the ship's
engines and the cost of the basic hull structure holding the weapon and
"its" engines. This means that the damage/mass and damage/cost ratios
will depend on what engines you use, and sometimes means that a weapon
which looks superior with one engine configuration is *in*ferior using
another.

The "hull" damage values assume single-layer armour. A reasonable
assumption as long as you don't fight Phalons or start using
multi-layer armour in mixed-tech designs, but the numbers change
rapidly when you add armour layers.

>		SML (3 mag)	SMR		PBL-1
> Mass		9		4		5
>Avg. Dmg/Hit	10.5		10.5		3.5
>(per mass)	1.1666		2.625		0.7 
>						(x #targets)
>(per cost)	0.3888		0.875		0.2333 
>						(x #targets)
>Avg. Dmg/Hit 
>(Hull) 	4.5		4.5		???
>(per mass)	0.5		1.125		???
>(per cost)	0.1666		0.375		???

SM armour penetration is half (round down) of the *total* damage from
each salvo, not half (round down) for each die, so the Avg.Dmg/Hit
(Hull) is a flat 5. (FB1 p. 9) Not a very significant difference, but
it is there.
Against 2-layer or thicker armour the SMs (and the P-torp above) would
have to destroy all the armour before reaching the hull.

PBLs don't penetrate armour at all; they always have do destroy all
armour boxes before they can damage the hull.

Comparing a single-shot weapon (the SMR) with a multi-shot one is
rather iffy. If you look at the example SML's Mass *per shot*, it is
only 3, not 9 - but this takes neither the SMR's higher chances of
overloading enemy point defences nor its lower vulnerability to
threshold checks into account. 

The number of bolts a PBL gets to fire during a battle is undefined,
but is IME 3-4 in normal-length battles. Very long, drawn-out fights
like the DPR/KV one can stretch this to ~5 shots per PBL, but in these
cases the PB hit rate is invariably very low (or else the battles
wouldn't *be* drawn-out! <g>).

>All of this math is just for the stuff that actually pierces
screens... 

PBLs don't ignore screens; in fact they're even worse at punching
through screens than beams are.

>if you want to assume that we _don't_ have to worry  about screens
>B2's start looking halfway good at most ranges that the above weapons
>cover, too. 

The B2 looks quite OK compared to P-torps against level-1 screens,
particularly when you take its wider arc of fire into account. The main
effect of the wider arc of fire is to allow the weapon to fire a bit
more often. I'd (hopefully conservatively) estimate this to +20% shots
on average, but it can go from 0 (eg. in hit-and-run attacks like the
KV did in the present battle, where the target either is completely out
of range or else is in the arc of both the single-arc and the 3-arc
weapon) to over +100% extra shots if the targets dance a lot.

Making a meaningful comparison between template weapons like SMs or PBs
and direct-fire weapons is *very* difficult, since there's no good way
to determine the hit probability of the template weapons while those of
the direct-fire weapons are very straight-forward :-(
 
>(Apologies if your mail reader handles tabs in a way more ugly 
>than mine)

The mere fact that it handles them *differently* form yours scrambles
any ASCII table. I'm used to it :-/

>>>My own tactic probably would've been to put the PBs in 
>>>greater concentration and take the gamble.  Yes, it probably 
>>>would've meant that I would've cleanly missed a fair amount 
>>>but it also would've meant that one good hit would've decided 
>>>the battle (by reducing scattergun count to ineffectually low 
>>>levels).
> 
>>This has been tried but found wanting. In our group the 
>>standard KV response to such a gamble is to wait until the 
>>PBLs fire a heavy barrage, then attack on the next turn when 
>>they know that most of the PBLs are recharging... that way they 
>>don't have to burn very many scatterguns :-/
> 
>I've thought of that.	Either all-at-once or half-and-half-
>continuous, either way keeping a fair amount of concentration.  

I did the latter, or at least I tried to. The problem was that most of
the KV attacks went into what was my (AS) or (AP) arcs in the PBL
launch phase - the exceptions were the 2nd attack which went into my
(A) arc, and the final attack where the KV had split up and half of
them were almost exactly on the border between my (AS) and (FS) arcs.
With the PBL layout used (2xAP/FP/F, 4xFP/F/FS, 2xF/FS/AS), I simply
couldn't concentrate the barrages the way I wanted because I only had
one launcher which covered the arc the KV would arrive in... on two
occasions, bolts launched at the very edge of their launchers' fire
arcs missed the outer edge of the KV formation by less than an mu :-(

If I had spun "ahead" of the KV to be better able to concentrate the PB
barrages, I'd not only have forfeited my chances of using the needles
and far broadside beams against a KV attack but also given the KV an
free attack run into my "plasma-free" arc. Didn't seem like a very good
idea.

Changing the PBL layout to half AP/FP/F, half F/FS/AS might have worked
better, but that variant gives up all hopes of hitting the KV with more
than 2 PBs at a time. Putting all the PBLs in the same arc would create
such a wide "plasma-free" arc that it would've been trivial for the KV
to attack into it :-/

>Most likely the latter if they had a _lot_ of maneuverability (as in
this
>case).  It wouldn't be a situation where you'd necessarily decide the
>battle on _one_ hit (though 16 dice of plasma can still reduce a lot
of >scatterguns) but you could keep the heat up enough that they'd have
to >dance a lot and, after two hits, you could probably attack pretty
much at >will with your fighters.

A good KV player with thrust-6A ships can reduce your 16 dice of plasma
per hit to 12 or less, which means that you need at least three plasma
hits to burn enough scatterguns to send the fighters in with a
reasonable chance of success (and that's with the fleet I faced; a few
big ships can be a lot more careless with the PBs than many small ones
since they don't take as much damage in total and can afford to take a
lot more damage individually!). Since the thrust-6A KV only need four
attack runs to destroy the DPR (unless they take heavy damage early
on), holding the fighters back to the fourth attack run is betting on
long odds indeed.

Sending the fighters in *early*, OTOH, means that they'll be chewed up
real bad - but if the KV use enough scatterguns on them to prevent them
from inflicting significant damage on the KV ships, the KV won't have
enough scatterguns left to see them through 3-4 plasma-opposed attack
runs on the DPR; if they hold enough scatterguns back to fend off the
PBs, the fighters will inflict serious damage and reduces the amount of
damage each KV attack inflicts on the DPR (thus increasing the number
of attack runs necessary to kill it). This is of course with your
fighter rules - if the fighter morale rules are in use, the fighters
get chewed up and then most of them are too scared to attack :-/

>>The fact that I took advantage of the fixed table edge (stopping
>>31mu away from it instead of 40-50 mu away as I had planned)
>>would've hampered this potential KV tactic, but, well... I didn't
>>actually intend to hug the table edge, and my opponents 

Sorry for the typo. Should be "opponent", not "opponents" :-/

>>*could* have invoked your suggested "fuzzy edge" ruling 
>>where ships accused of edge-hugging can be declared "off-
>>table" and thus removed :-/
> 
>It depends on how much you're hugging it.  If you're a solid 
>30" away from the edge we wouldn't eject you.	:)

Sitting 31mu away from the edge cut off a full 60-degree sector where
the KV couldn't circle the DPR without coming into its PBL range and
from which they couldn't attack. This drastically cut down their
ability to dance - not drastically enough to let me win the battle, but
it came close. In my gaming group, using the table edge to cut down
enemy maneuverability in this way is considered abusive, intentional or
not. That's why our own house rules specify floating edges :-/

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry