Re: [FT\DS2] Fleet and Army sizes for games

> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> > I've had an ambition to set up some sort of larger campaign game
where
> > resource management winds up meaning something.  OTOH, I could
easily see
> > that getting out of hand -- e.g. a carrier force attacking a
battleship
> > force, the carrier side trades their fighter complement (but no
ships) for
> > the opposing task force, nullifying both of their striking power for
the
> > time being, but the carrier side goes and buys much fancier fighters
the
> > second time around whereas the battleship side has to replace their
whole
> > task force, thus the campaign quickly becomes worse for whoever
falls behind.
 
> It costs at least 45 pts to field a fighter squadron (mass 12, MD 2,
> FTL, Hull integrity of 1, fighter squadron bay), plus the cost of the
> fighters (18 minimum).
> Yet I would fearlessly face an equal value of these carrierlettes in a
> single Konstantin (The Konstantin has interceptors*, the carrierlettes
> have whatever), because I know that with six squadrons on defence and
> level-2 screens, I should just be able to weather out the storm and my
> class-3's will be giving some of the enemy pilots dark thoughts about
> getting home

Oerjan touched on a fair amount of this, but I'll go into a little more
detail.  He's correct about my observation of fighter morale (i.e. none
:)
but we _do_ play on a fixed board, which makes things a little less
yucky
but not much.  We play simultaneous fire, all fighters in a pile fire at
once.

Even on a fixed board, a single Konstantin is highly unlikely to reach a
group of dedicated carriers alive.  (Oerjan calls them "soap bubbles"...
my usual designation is "Clams".)  For the amount of cost it takes you
to throw those six interceptors at me, I can as easily bring up four
Clam class carriers (weak hulled, MD 1 carriers with 4 fighter bays)
that will likely throw roughly nine heavy fighters and seven torpedo
bombers back at you.  The heavy fighters are an even match for your
interceptors head-to-head, except I've got half again as many of them.
My fighters will form a "Chinese wall" between your interceptors and my
bombers and make sure your interceptors never get a shot.  If there's
anything left of your single carrier and its popgun PDS armament when
the bombers are through with it (unlikely) the heavy fighters that
survived annihilating your interceptors polish it off.

> If you actually decide to defend these ships against enemy fighters,
> they need escorts that can survive.  This either requires more
fighters
> (expensive), or extra hulls that mount ADFC's and PDS's.

My usual tactics for a carrier force these days usually involve one of
two
backup tactics.  Either I'll have a front-line force of capital ships
equipped with PBLs, or I'll have a skirmisher attachment stacked with
needle beams.  In the former case, I'm figuring on simply overwhelming
your
PDS with plasma, with the escorts being the first things to go.  In the
latter case, the escorts lose their ADFC's to surgical needle strikes
before the bombers make their run.

About the only thing that can much hope to survive one or the other
tactic
is something loaded with scatterguns.

> A dedicated cruiser escort, a-la Atlanta class from WWII (mass 60, MD
4,
> FTL, 18 hull boxes,2xscreen, 2xADFC, 14xPDS), costs 202 and, with the
> fighter break off rule, can fend off 2, maybe 3, fighter squadrons
> simultaneously.  The tyranny of numbers means that it does have a
> limited anti-ship capability with its PDS suite, allowing it to finish
> off the defenceless 45 pt carrierlettes that tried to attack it.  A
high
> acceleration ship with a single class-4 beam can snipe away several of
> the carrierlettes while dodging the fighters (mass 50, MD 10, FTL, 10
> hull boxes, FC, PDS, class-4(F), cost 161).  In a desperate situation,
a
> quickly produced design of small escort(mass 12, MD 2, FTL, hull box,
> ADFC, 7xPDS, cost 47) should negate the power of min. pts per ftr
> carrierlettes for less cost.

There are several failed assumptions in this paragraph.

A typical carrier-based task force for me will consist of most or all of
the
following elements:

1.  A front line of three or four SDN sized ships, average hulls, mass
250,
MD2, two B3's (4 arcs), 6 B2's (all arcs), six fighter bays. 
Optionally, I
might yank some of the beams off and put in PBL's instead, but I haven't
actually ever used that variant yet.  (I typically call these "Star
Destroyers"
though they're not intended as literal copies of their namesakes from
SW.)

2.  A backup line of five or six "Clams", weak hulls, mass 60, MD1, four
fighter bays.

3.  A skirmisher detachment of either "Needle Shrikes" (cloaking light
escort cruisers with 8 needles, MD6) or "Armor Shrikes" (non cloaking
armored
strong-hulled battlecruisers, MD 6, 10 needles).

The total task force will probably have around 30-40 apiece of needles
and
fighters.

Pretty much everything you describe above would get shredded pretty
trivially
by this force.	Your escort cruisers would have Shrikes all over them,
if you
went all-PDS the Star Destroyers will munch them, if you went fast-B4
they're
not going to stay out of both fighter and STD reach very long on a fixed
board,
and if you went balanced I'd simply take my pick of going ship-to-ship
if you
specialized against my fighters or letting my fighters chew you up if
you
specialized to go ship-to-ship.  Since the prerequisite assumption in
this
campaign is that I've got the early resource advantage behind this
carrier
force, you've got a nightmarish task ahead of you playing catch-up
against me.

All I need to do is press this advantage against your production
centers, and
a carrier force against a battleship force will nearly always win a war
of
resource attrition once they've got the early lead -- the fighters are
far
cheaper to replace than the ships they destroy.  With the luxury of a
resource
advantage, the initial cheap fighters that the carrier-based navy lost
in order
to secure this early advantage can be replaced with much higher quality
stock.
And in simple terms of resource attrition on a fixed-board tactical
field,
there simply is no playing catchup against a well balanced carrier force
that
can achieve fighter superiority at will and has heavy torpedo bombers to
burn.
-- 
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
   http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
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