Armies of the Fifth Frontier War, Impressions Not Errata

[tomfreshwater]

It says it is a source book in the game itself...

on the cover: "For Use with Traveller"
then: "Fifth Frontier War is a Traveller campaign game portraying the progress of a far-reaching interstellar war and its effects on the many worlds that are its battlefield."
at the end we get two pages of integration with the role playing game, including:
"ROLE-PLAYING
Role-playing appears to Traveller players to be a simple series of adventures in which situations are presented, dealt with by the players, and resolved. The Traveller referee knows that there is a lot more to running a consistent, interesting Traveller campaign; preparation for each situation is required, contingencies must be foreseen, and background laid out. Fifth Frontier War is intended as a partial solution to the problems of presenting situations to Traveller players."

I don’t think a ‘partial solution’ is quite ‘take all the initial conditions of this game as how the canon war started’. But it was probably inconceivable at the time that 4 decades later people would be arguing about the finer details of what it all means so they didn’t consider to clarify, the fools.

I think it is safe to say the squadrons are the way they are as a rule set already existed from imperium. So you/we can decide what ever we want about those. I have various ideas.

 

[Sigtrygg]

The designers opted for a squadron/fleet level granularity, I would have happily had a game that detailed each ship rather than each squadron, but the designers went with squadrons, likely as you say because they had already used that with Imperium.

Better still a way to generate fleet combat factors by tallying the individual ship capabilities...

 

[actionman]

If you know everything your enemy is doing before they do it, then you win.

But it is still a hard-fought conflict. The Allies faced many tough battles despite the Red Orchestra, cracking Enigma, and cracking IJN cryptography. Those gave them a huge advantage, but still, the war was decided by resource depletion.

I suppose in a modern conflict and a TL15 conflict, the advantages gained from enemy comms being an open book would be orders of magnitude greater.

 

[tomfreshwater]

The designers opted for a squadron/fleet level granularity, I would have happily had a game that detailed each ship rather than each squadron, but the designers went with squadrons, likely as you say because they had already used that with Imperium.

Better still a way to generate fleet combat factors by tallying the individual ship capabilities...

That is the dream eh?
I think given the recent mongoose developments I have started to think of the imperial CruRons as being task forces of 2-3 sqds worth. After all they list 40 CruRobs in the spinward marches OOB. Once you add 16 each from Corridor and Deneb, could be a comparative total.
And the slightly over strength zho sqd are quite a good for fit for the fleets of the 3rd rank.
After making an overly detailed version of FFW. I was starting to work on a more ‘Arcady’ version where every dynamic was a fun mini game in its own right. In this version I lost everything smaller than a corps for armies and used a dynamic I can only describe as risk with lots of different dice sizes.
And the CruRons were bolt ons to the BatRons that gave them special abilities. I also replaced pre-planning with zones of control. Fleets started ‘in the past’ and as they entered each others zones they had to catch up with real time. Low initiative low jump fleets had small ZoCs and so high jump high initiative fleets could get right to them and then have loads of extra goes allowing them to attack and then slip off back into the ‘fog of war’.
Absolute genius dynamic if you ask me. If they ever remake FFW I really should have the job.

 

[MasterGwydion]

But it is still a hard-fought conflict. The Allies faced many tough battles despite the Red Orchestra, cracking Enigma, and cracking IJN cryptography. Those gave them a huge advantage, but still, the war was decided by resource depletion.

I suppose in a modern conflict and a TL15 conflict, the advantages gained from enemy comms being an open book would be orders of magnitude greater.

Yeah. Imagine knowing where your enemy is because you are tapped into their battlespace computers, showing all of their locations and load outs. You can view their helmet cams and stay out of their view and they never even know you are there unless you screw up or until you ambush them.

 

[actionman]

On a slightly different topic, I've just noticed something else which has me scratching my head.

From the section on psionics, page 30:

You can train yourself to deceive telepaths without being a psion yourself? If this really is a thing, it would be great to have actual mechanics for it, because Travellers, being the adventurous sort, are likely to come into contact with telepaths or have telepaths on the team.

Is this a special skill that people can train? Does the target get to oppose the roll somehow? Do they increase the difficulty of the telepath check? Is this something a player character can learn to do? Or is the concept just imperial propaganda and doesn't actually exist.

Anti-telepath training would be something like learning to visualize and meditate on something innocuous to keep oneself from thinking about something a telepath might want to learn. Maybe a deep trance state. Splitting an agent's personality into self-contained alters is another technique. Lying and deliberate misinformation is another technique, like telling maintenance personnel that they are refurbishing a ship because it's going to be mothballed at Depot, when it's really going to be part of a super secret task force.

Whenever things like this are in games or stories, it's important to figure out how they plausibly work so you can understand what they are capable of and why, and how they interact.

Consider an engine. How does it work? We don't know, it just does. Does that mean I can drive my car underwater? Or on the moon? When we define that engine as an airbreathing internal combustion engine, then we know how it will respond when some enterprising lad tries to drive his car underwater. How does telepathy work? Is it reading the electromagnetic fields of the brain? Are all sophonts somehow mystically connected? Who knows, the rules say it works so it just works.

Consider a jump drive. Nobody knows how it works. But we do know it uses a lanthanum hull grid to do who knows what. Then, we can reasonably conclude that if a hostile ship shoots up the target ship's lanthanum hull grid, the target ship might not be able to jump. Are lanthanum hull grids still canon? I guess the ritual of squirting LHyd all over the place appeases the space spirits and they fling the ship wherever.

 

[Sigtrygg]

That is the dream eh?
I think given the recent mongoose developments I have started to think of the imperial CruRons as being task forces of 2-3 sqds worth. After all they list 40 CruRobs in the spinward marches OOB. Once you add 16 each from Corridor and Deneb, could be a comparative total.
And the slightly over strength zho sqd are quite a good for fit for the fleets of the 3rd rank.
After making an overly detailed version of FFW. I was starting to work on a more ‘Arcady’ version where every dynamic was a fun mini game in its own right. In this version I lost everything smaller than a corps for armies and used a dynamic I can only describe as risk with lots of different dice sizes.
And the CruRons were bolt ons to the BatRons that gave them special abilities. I also replaced pre-planning with zones of control. Fleets started ‘in the past’ and as they entered each others zones they had to catch up with real time. Low initiative low jump fleets had small ZoCs and so high jump high initiative fleets could get right to them and then have loads of extra goes allowing them to attack and then slip off back into the ‘fog of war’.
Absolute genius dynamic if you ask me. If they ever remake FFW I really should have the job.

Sounds like fun, I have used everything from Power Projection to Squadron Strike, Mayday to Battle Rider.

Mongoose have several boardgame/wargames in their belt. I am a big fan of Victory at Sea, it is a very playable naval wargame, and their A Call to Arms efforts were good fun too.

The talent and the rules are definitely there to do a much better space warfare wargame than the hopeless High Guard fleet battle rules.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Anti-telepath training would be something like learning to visualize and meditate on something innocuous to keep oneself from thinking about something a telepath might want to learn. Maybe a deep trance state. Splitting an agent's personality into self-contained alters is another technique. Lying and deliberate misinformation is another technique, like telling maintenance personnel that they are refurbishing a ship because it's going to be mothballed at Depot, when it's really going to be part of a super secret task force.

Whenever things like this are in games or stories, it's important to figure out how they plausibly work so you can understand what they are capable of and why, and how they interact.

Consider an engine. How does it work? We don't know, it just does. Does that mean I can drive my car underwater? Or on the moon? When we define that engine as an airbreathing internal combustion engine, then we know how it will respond when some enterprising lad tries to drive his car underwater. How does telepathy work? Is it reading the electromagnetic fields of the brain? Are all sophonts somehow mystically connected? Who knows, the rules say it works so it just works.

Consider a jump drive. Nobody knows how it works. But we do know it uses a lanthanum hull grid to do who knows what. Then, we can reasonably conclude that if a hostile ship shoots up the target ship's lanthanum hull grid, the target ship might not be able to jump. Are lanthanum hull grids still canon? I guess the ritual of squirting LHyd all over the place appeases the space spirits and they fling the ship wherever.

I don't really care how it works as long as there is a consistent mechanic that allows the fluff to be more than fluff. It is the game mechanic that limits the use of ICEs in game. They need a compatible atmosphere, so their use is limited to certain Atmosphere Codes. (some editions enforce this more than others) Same with jump drives. The mechanics tell us how they work, everything else is just fluff. We know that under 100 diameters it becomes less safe to jump. So that tells us that unlike the ICE, it must be used outside of a gravity well or least within a gravity field of a certain strength or lower. The mechanics determine how a thing works. Just like in the real world. Game Mechanics are the Laws of Physics in our fiction worlds.

 

[actionman]

Yeah. Imagine knowing where your enemy is because you are tapped into their battlespace computers, showing all of their locations and load outs. You can view their helmet cams and stay out of their view and they never even know you are there unless you screw up or until you ambush them.

Your artillery would be hideously precise, you'd be able to hit them exactly where they're weak, leading to brutal breakthroughs and encirclements. You be able to pre-plot artillery on their planned assembly areas, axes of advance, and objectives. You'd be able to devastate supply lines, etc. But, IMO, it would need to be combined with intel capabilities, orbital surveillance, recon drones, etc. to reach full effectiveness. Something to consider though is that your troops on the ground can't be doing all that because they need to be fighting. A popup window in a troop's hud showing the helmet cams of hostile troops would only distract him. A war robot or AI drone would be able to exploit that capability though. Think of a killer drone moving silently on a single grav module with a real time update of every enemy soldier's field of vision. They wouldn't see it even when it kills them. I think the most powerful advantages would be found at the battalion and higher echelons.

 

[Sigtrygg]

And of course the Zhodani have no trained telepathic interrogators that can break this conditioning...

 

[actionman]

I don't really care how it works as long as there is a consistent mechanic that allows the fluff to be more than fluff. It is the game mechanic that limits the use of ICEs in game. They need a compatible atmosphere, so their use is limited to certain Atmosphere Codes. (some editions enforce this more than others) Same with jump drives. The mechanics tell us how they work, everything else is just fluff. We know that under 100 diameters it becomes less safe to jump. So that tells us that unlike the ICE, it must be used outside of a gravity well or least within a gravity field of a certain strength or lower. The mechanics determine how a thing works. Just like in the real world. Game Mechanics are the Laws of Physics in our fiction worlds.

I suggest that knowing how something works at the writer/designer level allows game mechanics to be written sensibly and consistently. That way the "physics" of the game world function reliably.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Your artillery would be hideously precise, you'd be able to hit them exactly where they're weak, leading to brutal breakthroughs and encirclements. You be able to pre-plot artillery on their planned assembly areas, axes of advance, and objectives. You'd be able to devastate supply lines, etc. But, IMO, it would need to be combined with intel capabilities, orbital surveillance, recon drones, etc. to reach full effectiveness. Something to consider though is that your troops on the ground can't be doing all that because they need to be fighting. A popup window in a troop's hud showing the helmet cams of hostile troops would only distract him. A war robot or AI drone would be able to exploit that capability though. Think of a killer drone moving silently on a single grav module with a real time update of every enemy soldier's field of vision. They wouldn't see it even when it kills them. I think the most powerful advantages would be found at the battalion and higher echelons.

You don't commit the ground troops until you have orbital supremacy.
Your artillery is in orbit, shooting down with meson bays and spinals. If a B-2 Spirit can fly halway round the planet a drop a bomb accurate to 1m I would assume meson fire direction at TL11+ is just as capable.

If you can compromise the enemy electronics you may well be able to take over remote control a lot of their weapon systems...

 

[actionman]

And of course the Zhodani have no trained telepathic interrogators that can break this conditioning...

I'm sure they do. But they'd need to have the person in their custody, and it would probably take time. Resistance techniques would probably be effective against Zhodani telepaths who are infiltrators at a noble social function or something similar.

 

[tomfreshwater]

Get rid of TL11 meson bays. Spoiling all the fun.

 

[Sigtrygg]

They should never have been in the rules in the first place, Mongoose author strikes again. It is almost as if they have never read LBB:5 High Guard...