Federation Commander

I think it's been said before somewhere, but one compromise for FC fighters is to eliminate drone fighters.

That means only DF fighters which will reduce clutter and eliminate the issues above with fighter drones. So that only leaves ship drones and fighter counters. The DF fighters are existing units and fit well with the precedence already set of certain ships not being in FC (statis, maulers, etc.)

As a Kzinti, I think DF fighters are fine. I can send them in with ship drones to rake with their disruptors while the carrier sits back and plinks from range 15.

if you have to recover those flights of say 6 and you only have 4 undamged boxes?

There's a fallacy in this quote. This is a problem whether you have flights or no flights. What you just said was if you have 6 fighters and only 4 bays what do you do? You recover 4 and leave 2 hanging out in space.

I see good and bad with both Lee and MJ's points, and really don't think flights will ever make it. It's not a bad idea, but working them in is going to cause too many issues with the current rules. Yes they can be overcome, but that's a lot of effort and rule changes don't always go well with the customers.

I think the comment about if you're taking a bunch of fighters then you should expect a slower game is spot on. I really want to help lower that slow-down, but not at the expense of the rest of the game.

As for drone movement after ship movement...it sounds intriguing but it will require some extra and complicating rules.

Being a Kzinti player, I've tried this. It worked great until the target bypassed the drone without moving into it's hex. Using standard rules the drones would have hit on the first movement, but with movement at the end, the drones had to turn around and start chasing instead.

Yes, this could be overcome by a rule saying the movement is actually simultaneous and the drone impacts if it moves through any hex the ship was in at the same time. But that adds a huge complication to the big battles where drones are the problem. With that, you would have to RECORD every hex targeted ships move into and than determine if the drone and ship were in the same hex at the same time. How is that speeding up the game? You just add a bunch of record keeping, judgement calls, and decisions to move drones a bit faster.

It sounded intriguing, but after trying it awhile back I can honestly say it slowed the game down as much or more than just moving the drones with the ships.

Dal Downing wrote:If an enemy can not target individual fighters then why is damage round robined instead of pooled. Total damage should starting with the weakest fighter apply enough damage to completely destroy it then move on to the next weakest and so on and so forth. This results in faster fighter kills reducing the numbers quicker. It also allows the surving fighters to remain combat effective longer.

I assume that the purpose of the round robin is to make the fire inefficient. When you fire at individual fighters, your damage will rarely work out perfectly. By doing the round-robin, you make sure that each weapon hits a single fighter in its entirety, which means the damage will not be applied perfectly.

Do note that there is a middle ground, where you still apply a weapon's damage against a single fighter, but instead of doing the round robin, you simply apply them to the fighters in order. Still allows overkill, but maximizes the combat effectiveness of the flight.

DNordeen wrote:I think it's been said before somewhere, but one compromise for FC fighters is to eliminate drone fighters.

Steve has already said, in this very thread, that this solution is problematic, as this causes the very nature of fighters to be virtually incompatible between SFB and Federation commander.

DNordeen wrote:There's a fallacy in this quote. This is a problem whether you have flights or no flights. What you just said was if you have 6 fighters and only 4 bays what do you do? You recover 4 and leave 2 hanging out in space.

Actually, assuming three fighter flights, you will have 3 fighters left in space and recover the other 3 fighters. The fourth shuttle box will remain empty. The reason is because flights are immutable (by definition).

DNordeen wrote:Posted: Wed Apr 10, 2013 8:26 pm Post subject:
As for drone movement after ship movement...it sounds intriguing but it will require some extra and complicating rules.

Being a Kzinti player, I've tried this. It worked great until the target bypassed the drone without moving into it's hex. Using standard rules the drones would have hit on the first movement, but with movement at the end, the drones had to turn around and start chasing instead.

I would argue this is not an issue at all. The restriction on using the HET would not be on the drones first move, but rather on its three moves as a whole. So, if using an HET allows the drone to hit at any point during its three moves, it may use an HET at any point in those three moves.

They key is to realize that you have to treat all three hexes of movement as "one move" in this case. Note that this comes from someone who isn't that interested in doing the whole "seeking weapons move all at once after everyone else" thing. But, seriously, it doesn't even break the rules to handle that issue straight up.

I assume that the purpose of the round robin is to make the fire inefficient. When you fire at individual fighters, your damage will rarely work out perfectly. By doing the round-robin, you make sure that each weapon hits a single fighter in its entirety, which means the damage will not be applied perfectly.

Do note that there is a middle ground, where you still apply a weapon's damage against a single fighter, but instead of doing the round robin, you simply apply them to the fighters in order. Still allows overkill, but maximizes the combat effectiveness of the flight.

The purpose of the round robin is to get as close to averaging out the likely result of trying to kill stingers, whilst not allowing either side to game it to their advantage too much.

I don't think round robin works out particularly inefficient or efficient. Shooting at stingers is time consuming as the attacker works out his best odds of killing/crippling each fighter without to much over kill. In the earlier example the cruiser maybe fired 4 photons and 8 phasers at range 6-8. Against 3 stingers he would have allocated it how? The round robin approach is probably fairly close to what you would see over the course of lots of such attack by multiple ships against lots of stingers. The attacker can probably guarantee 1 kill if he dumps on 1 stinger, but in my experince that doesn't happen except in rare cases, you go for a chance of as many kills, or at least cripples as possible. I'm not so interested in handling those rare cases when it is causing issues playig the battles in the first place.

Actually, assuming three fighter flights, you will have 3 fighters left in space and recover the other 3 fighters. The fourth shuttle box will remain empty. The reason is because flights are immutable (by definition).

I'm not overly bothered either way on that.

I would argue this is not an issue at all. The restriction on using the HET would not be on the drones first move, but rather on its three moves as a whole. So, if using an HET allows the drone to hit at any point during its three moves, it may use an HET at any point in those three moves.

It's simpler than that. The HET rule changes from HET current if ship is next to you, to: - HET if on the seekers first move the target is not in its FA. This ensures that a drone or plasma would always hit something that it would have hit normally. The trick of ending an impulse of the drones 2 or 6 and moving 24+ past it next impulse also still works.

Any other slight changes in the way drones impact are probably worth it IMO, I'd rather have a freer flowing game when playing Kzinti/Klink than worry whether it affects some corner case or what shield got hit.

Do flights have a place, yes in a setting like B5 or BSG or even WWII naval battles. In those settings a single fighter is so underpowered they have to bunch up inorder to start affecting the capital ships. This is not the case n the SFU Fighters care ship grade weapons and if left on check a hornet can slam some one with 20points of damage in a turn.

I have no idea about B5 etc, but I'd definatley say you are wrong on WW2 (or any historical era of carrier warfare) vs SFB.

In terms of what they can do to capital ships (with their 'ship grade weapons') SFB fighters carry less firepower comparable to WW2 carrier aircraft. If left to attack and hit without issue an SFB fighter hits for your example 20 points of damage, it can never take out a cruiser, it can never get through the shield. It takes about 6 fighters or so take a cruiser out, more for a DN level target (about 9-11 for that).

On the other hand A WW2 torpedo bomber could possibly take out a cruiser on its own - it carried a torpedo designed to sink a ship, 5 would probably be overkill on a cruiser. A dive bomber like the dauntless carried a couple of thousand pounds of bombs, that has to be considered capital level armanent (1 shot like the SFB photon fighter).

At midway each of the first 3 japanese carriers were destroyed by less than 6 bomb hits, possibly less than 10 hits combined took out all 3 carriers. No SFB fighter attack could ever hope to do that sort of damage with so few hits by these 'ship grade' weapons. Ten drone hits from SFB fighters would take out a single strike carrier, just about.

Reading the wiki on Yamato (about as robust as you get in WW2, and not loaded with ammo and fuel on carrier decks) which in relative terms would almost certainly be the equal of an SFB BB, was effectivey mission dead after about 5 bombs and 3 torps, and being abandoned by the time it had been hit by about 11 torps and 9 bombs overall. An FC BB taking 11 drones and 9 fighter photons might not even be crippled depending on how much batteries it ueed for reinforcement, 5 drones and 3 photons woud have barely scratch the paintwork.

There is certainly a lot more variance in the real world, where as SFB is prettty predictable. But WW2 carrier aircraft did not group together because they had some weedy weapons whereas SFB has some super weapons.

Dal Downing wrote: Instead of using flights and having to cobble together a bunch of exceptions that make fighter more powerful

Make them more powerful? I'm not doing that, bar the stacking bit maybe, but that is countered by the firing/facing limits to a large extent. There's a bit of give and take, both sides gain and lose in various ways.

One of those is ask for standard heavy fighters.

Probably at least in part because I'm not into SFB and, as I noted when you mentioned it before, I have no real idea what heavy fighters are. The fighters I'm aware of are the 'non heavy' ones that I remember.

Partly because I'm not asking ADB to ditch carriers and fighters, I accept that they are going to turn up whether I want it or not, but that therefore they should try and port them so they more streamlined to play. They are not at the moment.

Partly because Stingers are already in the game. They are in need of some mechanism to make them playable in any more than small games given they turn up in their 20 and 30s at squadron level fights.

Even if these heavy fighters take 2 spaces you are still seeing hydrans turn up with a good number. Plus Many hydrans have odd number stingers, does a Ranger have 4 big fighters and 1 small fighter?

Why when reading these do you want a flight instead of just asking for a fighter "swarm" counter?

Whatever term you want to call, flight, swarm, wing, squadron. Does it matter?

First the Hydran 110 Fighter fleet. Okay that is 2200 points of ships you could buy instead and leave the fighters at home. For 2K points you could buy 11 Paladins or 14 Dragoons or 45 Hunters. So there already is a mechnism to combine thesse fighters into flights and just use Hunters to track them with for the Hydrans. Nothing is stopping you from just carrying a bunch or Admin Shuttles and only a Squadron or two of Stingers and a handful of small ships. If you want to run 110 stingers then obviouly you just want to do it. Now as you said a more sensible fleet would probably only have about 70 stingers and if you used the above mention heavy fighters you wind up with 35 Stinger-Ss which can be represented by 12 Swarm counters.

As for that 3 Cruiser squadron it is more likely going to be a CC, a DG. and a RNG carrying about 15 fighters. Yeah it is hard to remember that the Rangers fighters compliment cost more than the Ranger itself but, that is the fact of life for the three legged methane breathing trash cans.

I had no idea where you got 2200 points from until reading that last bit. The Rangers stinger compliment does not out point the Ranger itself, I suspect you are thinking stingers are twice as much as they really are.

Bear in mind that was referring to Nerroths fleet limit link. Which is about creating 12 ship battlegroups (or whatever they call it). I wasn't concerning my self with points, just the ship composition. Whilst we don't use the link rules Nerroth pointed at, we don't have point based fights in our campaign rules, but just what ever happens to turn up in a region and what you can command (Our biggest allowed fleet being 11 ships).

FC has an empire called Hydrans that supposedly operate as ships plus lots of stingers. The stingers are very different to the ships. The stingers are not hunters by any stretch of the imagination (speed, weapons, EA, shields etc). I'd like to actually play them that way - Ships plus fighters. I'd like it to be as nearly as streamlined as any other FC game, and not waaaayyy slower and more cumbersome.

But the fighter rules make operating Hydrans very time consuming and fiddly. Just as they will with carriers. A squadron level game with just 'ships' has 3-4 ships per side to move, stack, shoot with, shoot at etc. A Hydran squadron can treble or even quadruple that number for the hydran player even if he only has 1 Ranger, he can have 10x the counters with 3 Rangers. Which in turn affects everything the other guy does.

Drones are in many ways far easier to handle than fighters - they have to seek the enemy and they don't shoot or generally require much thought as to how to take out, as they are usually auto kills at the point of fire, or you simply ignore them as you go past them. None of those things apply to stingers, which pose many more issues to constantly consider on both sides, and Hydrans can have more stingers than Kzinti can have drones. Yet for drones ADB has acknowledged that maybe there does need to be some way to reduce counter clutter and stop the game bogging down. Indeed they have refrained from even having carriers in the main game. Seeing the drones as the issue is really only half the problem though, fighters are also part of the issue as to why carriers are bad in FC unless you come up with a better way of handling fighters as well as drones.

Your bit about taking lots of admins and only a few stingers would be like saying that ADBs solution to the drone clutter thing is to say don't take drones, assume the racks are empty. Play Kzinti with only 1 rack full, or drone fighters with only the Ph3 as the drone wasn't available.

Shuttle Boxes on the SSD are not indepenedent from the fighters in the air. What happens if you have to recover those flights of say 6 and you only have 4 undamged boxes? They also represent repair ad supply capabilty yes it is being streamlined but there is a relationship. Otherwise why don't we load all the ships up with fighters and just skip the Admins?

You lost me there, what have admin shuttle got to with fighters?

But yes the ship boxes are independent. The remaining boxes on the ship has no relationship to how many are still in the air. You have room for 4 fighters left, whether the fighters are out flying or not, and whether they operate as flights as not. Or vice versa. Sure you could change the ships to have flight boxes, but that is far from needed.

Given how rarely I've seen fighters land and rearm I'm not realy that bothered how that ruling would go, but it is fallacious to say that there would have to be a change to the ships.

When dealing with large number of fighters yeah something may have to give but instead of pushing a flight as the answer what about advocating for a BoM ruling that for firing purpose when 4 or more fighters are in a single hex and targeting the same target it is assumed one of them really is an Elecrtronic Warefare fighter that is providing targetting data allowing upto 6 fighters to fire out of a single hex side with no penalty? This is really no more or a stretch than the F&E Leader Rule for F5s.

I still have X fighters to move indivudually, face individually, determine firing for individually, the other guy still has to sit working out individually shooting down each one. You could say fighters can shoot 6 per hexside without some EW thing, they are simply smaller and cause less obstruction.


And remember nothing I've suggested would stop you and your group sticking to the SFB style 1 fighter per counter. If I'm only playing with 8 or 9 stingers I might as well.

The comparison to WWII battles is erroneous. One is a space combat game the other is war with real death. Most WWII air attacks took about 10 planes to score that one hit that severely damages a ship. At Midway to score the first 10 hits on the Japanese carriers required about 150 planes making individual attacks, with about 100 of them being destroyed. The Yamato attack that destroyed it was in excess of 200 planes for about 20 hits. Near misses on ships by bombs, exploding torpedoes and large shells can cause severe damage do to the water hammer effect, and the super cavitation void following the explosion.

Ships move and shoot back causing misses. Each attack that hits by fighter type ships in Fed Com should represent an attack by 10 fighter type ships if you are using any type of WWII analogy.


Nicole

One being a game and one being real doesn't mean all comparisons are erroneous.

But I don't necassrily disagree that WW2 may not be the best analogy, WW2 aircraft were not slower than their target, would hardly survive being hit by a main gun from a BB etc. Though for carrier ops it is the nearest analogy we have. I was just refuting the idea that WW2 weapons were not some how the same power as 'ship' weapons. WW2 air delivered weapons were at least as potent, if not more, as a hit from a ships weapon of the era (ignoring the crap US torpedos anyway).

The main strikes at midway though were not individual attacks (or not in a way I would understand such a phrase). Each of the carrier squadrons attacked as a squadron at one target, with a couple of strays.

Though many of the casualties at midway were caused by the enemy fighters - large numbers of fighters vs large numbers of bombers = large number of casualties. Fighters vs ships alone generally didn't suffer that level of loss. The attack on Yamato and its escort cost about a dozen aircraft/crew.

I would say, given when SFB was designed, and given who designed it, the Falklands War or other mid/late-1970s/1980s conflicts would be a better model.

There's reasons the Fed fighters all use US Cold War-era fighter aircraft nomenclature.

I don't think SVC ever intended to model Cold War Earth conflicts directly, but the influences are quite apparent, but adjusted to fit a vision and for gameplay.

Obviously, having one missile type weapon, from one fighter, mission-kill a starship would not make for good gameplay, so things were scaled.

However, in SFB a squadron of 12 fighters is a very, very big threat to a heavy cruiser, whereas in WW2 (barring "lucky shots") it often took several larger squadrons, acting in concert, to prosecute a successful attack (ex. battle of Midway, etc.).

Clearly the cold war was more the background for the SFB stuff. But WW2 is still the only conflict with clashes between major navies with carriers.

Maybe things changed after I stopped playing SFB, but in the SFB I remember 12 fighters, or come to that 120 fighters is no threat to a heavy cruiser. The cruiser can go so much faster and outrun the drones etc. A 10 second shift to warp 7 or whatever would leave the fighters way behind, lacking in fuel/endurance etc and having launched their drones, the cruiser then comes back and mops up. Fighters could only threaten static targets.

Even if the cruiser stayed ('cos you want to play the game), 12 fighters on their own were not much match for a cruiser as I remember, limited drone ammo made it hard to really threaten the cruiser, it had speed and defenses to avoid them whilst picking off the fighters. Once they are out of drones then they were as good as dead.

I can only assume that SFB fighters were greatly improved later on, as they always seemed like a dud weapon system to me, their best use being the hydran way - as close support to the actual proper ships. Either that or you put in some artificial map boundary to stop the enemy taking advantage of the fighters weakness.


All that is something of a tangent of course. Whether weapons are potent or not is no reason to have or not have flights. The point is that you can currently have more stingers on the map than kzinti can put out drones, they are far more involved than drones and just as ADB seem to be considering some streamlining of drones so they should consider some streamlining of fighters. If adding 12 drones from some fighters is considered a serious issue, then adding 12 fighters should be as well.

If fighters ever make it into FC, something will have to give somewhere. Neither side can get everything they want.

There's going to have to be a solution for map clutter and bogging the game down. However that solution is going to have to balance with the current rules and maintaining distinct fighters instead of a pseudo ship.

Flights may not be the solution, but they could be the starting point for the brainstorming...

What if, we kept the intent that the flight idea is going for without having flights. For example, introduce rules stating

1) All fighters from a single ship must be within the same hex and have the same heading. The background would be this is required for mutual support.
2) Fighters are exempt from the 3 unit firing limit
3) When firing, fire from all fighters from a single ship must target units that are sharing the same hex. (can't get that wording right; basically you can target multiple targets if all the targets share the same hex; they don't have to be in the same hex as the fighters)
4) Not all fighters are required to fire when fighters from the same ship fire. (This would mean you could fire a couple of shots at a weak ship and save the other fire for later in the turn.)
5) Fighters land and launch independently of their shipmates
6) Fighters are targeted and take damage independently of their shipmates

It has the effect folks are looking for from flights, but maintains each fighter as a separate and independent unit.

As part of our campaign we played the Gorn assault on the Fed Home world/Starbase last night. Between the SB and a drone cruiser plus other ships there were quite a good number of drones, suicide shuttles and the Gorn plasma.

We played using my earlier proposal of moving seekers after all ship movement.

All 4 of us thought it made a noticeable difference to the speed and flow of the game. There were, as expected a couple of occaissons where the shields impacted might have been different, and some other subtle differences, but no one avoided drones that would have otherwise hit, and the Gorns still used speed to slip past them where they would have done so normally as well.

As noted earlier we didn't record anything to do with whether a drone would have HET's at x,y, or z. We just use a rule that says a drone that isn't facing its target in its first move HETs to face the target. It doesn't make any huge difference to how things work out and means there is no worrying about paperwork etc.

I was part of the game Lee is referring to and I agree it had a noticeable effect on speeding up play. The Fed (drone firing force) had a drone cruiser and spread his force out so that there were drones all over the place! Reducing the micro-decision of deciding each drones slip and turn greatly sped up play. The key part was that any drones that would of hit using the standard system also hit using this system. There was only one case I can recall where a drone swarm possibly hit another shield than it would in the standard system , but this had little or no impact on the game and the increased speed of resolution was a definite plus...

Captain Jack was controlling the drones (he is a big fan!) Maybe he will post with his observations. I expect we will be using this rule again in our next campaign.

It is pretty good.

I did a little one player test with the cruise drone scenario. It did make a noticeable difference in just playing that one. I hadn't thought about the "HET" change until MJ mentioned it, but it really did work.

I tried very hard to take advantage of the drones not moving, but it made no difference. The one time I skimmed by it, the HET change ensured there was an impact.