Fleet allocation points

[Omnipotent]

Didn´t want to bring back a 15 pages long old thread to make my suggestion (still can´t test new iedeas cause all my opponents are either on vacation somewhere or in some other city working :x )

Well, my idea is as following:

Make choosing fleets the same as in Warhammer fantasy battles (or 40k as far as I know), but "backwards", meaning that if we play 5 point raid, instead of having a minimum of 2+ patrol level ships we have a minimum of 2+ raid lvl ships, then u can choose your ships freely. This mainly means that if u play a 5 point war, u need to take atleast 2+ war level ships etc. Now I know this would not eliminate the swarm fleet problem put it would surely help alot.

It would look something like the following

5 point raid, 2+ same lvl ships
4 point raid 1+ same lvl ships
3 point raid 0+ same lvl ships
2 point raid 0+ same lvl ships
1 point raid 0+ same lvl ships

5 point skirmish 2+ same lvl ships
4 point skirmish 1+ same lvl ships
..etc.,etc.

- no restrictions in buying upwords.

A few problems I see, would be if some race would have a bad i.e. raid lvl ship in a 5 point raid would some, but hey they SHOULD make up for it in other levels.

I could see this help some, also maybe speed up the game a bit since u can´t get 10 skirmish ships u only get 6 in 5 point raid ...Comments?

 

[l33tpenguin]

Its even worse for races that LACK a choice at that level.

 

[CZuschlag]

While it would go some distance towards helping out the problem, the actual problem is the breakdown structure itself. I can't see a chap way out of it, either.

You just gotta fix the chart.

I saw evidence that swarming was prevalent in Armageddon-edition, too. The 5-Battle 3rd Age EA fleet I posted in an earlier thread (5 Hyperions, 3 Olympus, 2 Oracle, 10 Hermes; mostly Flash and Thunderbolts) was just horrific. Swarminess, and lots upon lots of guns. I'm not sure just going back to Armageddon-style breakdown charts are going to solve the problem in the slightest.

I know this proposal won't be popular, but I thing we had the best FAP balance with the Sky Full of Stars breakdowns. Easy to work with? Absolutely not. Power-game-able? Sure, some breakdowns were better than others -- those could easily be manually fixed (there was one breakdown that was just too often used, but I forget what it was). But, when you got right down to it, you were encouraged -- not forced -- to use ships of the priority level of the battle or near enough to it. And that is better that what we have now.

I sense incoming fire.

 

[Lord David the Denied]

Maybe I'm sleep-deprived, insane, just plain wrong or possibly all three, but the real, core issue I see here isn't swarm fleets as such, it's the ability of large, high-level units to counter swarm fleets.

That issue, as we know, rests on the critical hit table and the dependance on critical hits in this game. When talking about ships with 50+ hit points being shot at with weapons that can, without criticals, produce only 6-10 damage per turn, you absolutely need critical hits to kill the target. Compare that to BFG, the game ACtA borrows so much from. The largest, nastiest ships in that game have 12-15 hit points at most and a few rounds of concentrated firing from a few ships can destroy them without ever rolling a critical. That's what we realistically need in this game, a reduction of hit points across the board and a re-write of the critical table, to achieve two things - one, the reduction of the chance of a large ship being written off in one hit due to losing most or all of its weapons, and two, the removal of dependancy on critical hits to kill ships.

 

[Omnipotent]

Maybe I'm sleep-deprived, insane, just plain wrong or possibly all three, but the real, core issue I see here isn't swarm fleets as such, it's the ability of large, high-level units to counter swarm fleets.

That issue, as we know, rests on the critical hit table and the dependance on critical hits in this game. When talking about ships with 50+ hit points being shot at with weapons that can, without criticals, produce only 6-10 damage per turn, you absolutely need critical hits to kill the target. Compare that to BFG, the game ACtA borrows so much from. The largest, nastiest ships in that game have 12-15 hit points at most and a few rounds of concentrated firing from a few ships can destroy them without ever rolling a critical. That's what we realistically need in this game, a reduction of hit points across the board and a re-write of the critical table, to achieve two things - one, the reduction of the chance of a large ship being written off in one hit due to losing most or all of its weapons, and two, the removal of dependancy on critical hits to kill ships.

Yup, a hole new revisted ACTA would be the best, but as that is not going to happen in a while, ideas on how to try to counter the current issues without making "new" stats/charts etc. would be nice

Yeah, I realise that ships with no raid level ships would be in a wierd position, they could be forced to take a ship above the lvl played? Or should we say everyone would be entitled to this, taking a battle level ship in a 5 point raid would count as the minimum 2+ point raid u would have to take.

 

[CZuschlag]

Oh, rats. I just couldn't go 4-for-4 with you, could I, Lord David? I had a good streak running, too.

I don't like the idea of just reducing the his on ships becuase it minimized the positional element of the game. There wouldn't be much long-range planning, just close-and-kill.

I generally like the ratio of maneouver to firepower in the game, but, if anything, I could stand to see more manouver and less firepower. So, a reduction in hit points moves this away from where I personally would want the game to go.

That, however, is just a gaming-style preference, it's not an argument based on balance. Fair enough.

When it comes to needing criticals to kill a ship, I'm not quite so sure. It certainly helps, but much of the help comes from the extra damage and crew generated (espeically with DD and TD weaponry, and it's very important to the Abbai, who need all the help they can get). I do agree about the nature of the critical effects -- they aren't proportional. The -1 AD crits are excellent proportional critical effects. The others, not so much. However, to go down the road to proportional, you need fixed to have stable loss of engine thrust, which is different from ship mass, so when figuring out what your new speed is ....

... oh, dear. I just went into the realm of Star Fleet Battles. Good game, but definitely not what we want here!

You're right on this much -- it's the critical effects bit that really gums up the works. Credit where it's due -- the new Automatic All Hands to Deck solves a lot of it, until you lose the rights to do Special Actions at all, or, worse yet, the Engineering deck. Some supercriticals are important to a game like this --- that's why we have the 6 criticals --- but we need to tone down the critical hits on 1's through 5's. We had a thorough discussion on this idea here, and Scipio, tschuma, and I have taken our free cracks on goal, but this would be a MAJOR change that would need to go through heavy review by the Mongoose, and it ain't happening in time for Powers & Principalities at this point.

Or, I certainly can't think that it would make it in time .... shrug.

I've been made to look like an idiot before. However, that is much more likely to happen when I have a golf club in my hand instead of a keyboard.

Only more likely, so it's still not infeasible.

 

[Joe_Dracos]

Mabye a table that works like this?

One PL below: 1 ship PL dirrectly below, 1 ship PL 2 PL's below.
Two PL below: 3 Ships
Three PL below: 6 ships
Four PL below: 9 ships
Five PL below: 12 ships

No 2-for-1 ships

Odd numbers are kinda funny to work with though... makes for complicated break downs.

Maybe this instead?

One PL below: 2 ships
Two PL below: 4 Ships
Three PL below: 6 ships
Four PL below: 8 ships
Five PL below: 10 ships

Favour ships closer to the PL your actually playing at.

 

[CZuschlag]

Joe,

Ripple, Davesaint, and I did a whole bunch of math, a ton of "what does a standard Skirmish ship look like", what the ratios are, and all that, and came up with ....

1 Skirmish = 0.63 Raid.

Which is almost EXACTLY what your first suggestion is. I agree Fully. Patrol followed the same general ratio.

We didn't do Battle- and War-level calculations and value ratios, but the values seem to hold awfully well.

At 4 and five ships below, I'm not sure your ratio holds up quite right --- but that's so rare (War down to Patrol) ... sure, why not!

Yes, the breakdowns are complicated, but gosh darn it, they're right.

 

[l33tpenguin]

Joe,

Ripple, Davesaint, and I did a whole bunch of math, a ton of "what does a standard Skirmish ship look like", what the ratios are, and all that, and came up with ....

1 Skirmish = 0.63 Raid.

Unfortunately, and yes, you mentioned this, the 0.63 ratio figure doesn't account for how much more lethal critical effects are on larger ships. Nor does it factor in how much better it is, tactically, to have multiple units.

 

[Ripple]

Actually we did try to take that into account.

We talked a lot about critical hits, and the effect on larger ships. We definitely talked a lot about the value of a 'sink' or 'activation'.

If you look at it, two skirmish were pretty close to 110 to 115 percent of a raid ship... or 55 to 57% of a raid. The extra 5% to 10% we added had to do with the activations and crit effects.

The real issue with the FAP breakdowns is that you have to give all races ships at all levels to force breakdowns across the pls. If you aren't willing to do that, you have to find a way to make five war hulls equal to 50 or more(?!) patrol hulls, and that will always be hard.

Ripple

 

[Omnipotent]

That system does need every race to have a ship at every lvl, not an impossible task if u ask me. Although the "forced" points system I suggested only needs u to have a ship at the current lvl or above.

I could see how this could be abused, by saying 6 point raid could be 3 point battle or the other way around, but that could be countered by simply stating that it´s a 6 point raid...


Not easy to come up with a good yet unique system for "choosing" your army :roll:

 

[Karhedron]

You just gotta fix the chart.

Agreed, I am not a huge fan of the FAP system but if Mongoose plan to stick with it then sorting this out is a priority.

I know this proposal won't be popular, but I thing we had the best FAP balance with the Sky Full of Stars breakdowns. Easy to work with? Absolutely not. Power-game-able? Sure, some breakdowns were better than others -- those could easily be manually fixed (there was one breakdown that was just too often used, but I forget what it was).

I think it was the one where a Battle point could be spent on 3 Skirmish or 2 Skirmish + 1 Raid (same result was available for other PLs too). Kinda a no-brainer really!

But basically the proposition that the 2:1 scaling breaks down if you go more than 1 PL below the game level was a good one. IIRC a patrol swarm in SFOS was 15 ships for a 5 point Raid as opposed to 20 now. A 25% reduction in swarm tactics is probably enough to balance them without being too much of a Nerf.