Honorverse

[locarno24]

Just been reading through the Honor Harrington novels again, and one thing which always jumps to mind is how good a well-done tabletop wargame based on them might be.

Now, before anyone says "there is one", let me expand on that a bit. The Saganami Island Tactical Simulator is very much a wargame after the Harpoon school - trying to be as realistic as possible.

The upshot of this is a hex-based game which has 3d, newtonian movement, and multiple salvoes-fired-per-ship-per-round to track. The game is very much designed around single-ship duels or pairs of ships, as in the early Honor Harrington books like On Basilisk Station or The Honor Of The Queen.

Not a bad thing - there will be people who want to play games like that. But it's much like Starfleet Battles vs A Call To Arms; if you want to play the larger fleet actions (as a quick example, the opening battle of the war, the First Battle of Hancock, has a total of 6 dreadnoughts and 11 battlecruisers split between the two fighting groups, with attached screening cruisers, whilst the First Battle of Nightingale - far from the biggest in the series - has 80 dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts involved) it's not possible in any realistic time-frame. Like, say, the human lifespan....

A Call To Arms is the most 'fleet based' - rather than ship or at best squadron-based - space wargame I've played that's really going at the moment. I was thinking of trying to produce a set of home-brew rules for HH using it - although if Mongoose were to talk to the current licensees and do it officially, that'd be amazing...

Essentially, this is going to be a place for brain dumps and to try and poke people who've played the various incarnations of A Call To Arms (B5, NA, SF) for inspiration.

A big part will be how to make movement not 3d and not newtonian and still "feel right" - plus I'm tempted to suggest making a 'playing piece' be a division or squadron of ships, not a single ship in its own right (so numbers of AD for a weapon might well be X, 2X and so on, varying with the number of surviving ships). That plus scaling playing times out - so a missile salvo is fired and hits within one turn - may cut down the book-keeping a lot, which is the main thing I'd be very cautious about.

Big battles tend to be very much about manouvring formations to concentrate fire or to shield one formation with another's point defence, and - especially - to lap round the end of formations and fire into the gaps in a ship's defences at the bow or stern (the Honorverse's version of 'shields' are produced by the same system which produces the ship's engine field, and can't be closed ahead or astern, because handwavium physics)

What are people's thoughts? Has anything similar been done? Any suggestions or advice?

 

[locarno24]

70 views and no thoughts?


The A Call To Arms attack mechanic seems to fit (with a little judicious relabeling)

Attacker rolls to hit - you aren't going to 'miss' with a missile salvo, but there is a question of getting through the target's EW, so a variable roll to hit (as per the hull score in Noble Armada) to score a hit, although the target score is going to be dependent on a combination of the target's ECM strength and sensor signature (not sure if Honorverse Ship-Killers are IR, Gravetic or Radar Guided?) rather than armour (as per B5) or size (as per Victory At Sea).

Defender rolls defensive traits - There are three active defensive mechanisms in Honorverse worth mentioning - Countermissiles, Point Defence Lasers, and Rolling Ship (the 'top' and 'bottom' of the ship are essentially immune to fire due to the drive fields).
a) I'm not sure if the latter makes sense as a standard ability for a squadron (rather than a single ship) or as something you'd issue as a special action - "All Units Roll Ship!" rather than B5's "Close Blast Doors and Activate Defence Grid!".
b) Lasers and countermissiles, though, should essentially be point defence, like firing Phasers defensively in Star Fleet. Obviously, with dozen- or even hundred-missile salvoes, one AD cannot represent a single missile. Point defence needs to be an overwhelmable resource (so not like Gatling Lasers in A Call To Arms), but probably shouldnt be a (permenantly) depletable one like Anti-Drone - something more akin to B5 Interceptors would make sense, although I remember them being a bit book-keeping heavy.

Surviving AD roll DD (as per all games from Victory At Sea onwards). This is detonating laser heads 'porcupining' and firing bomb-pumped lasers into the target - the number of DD will be dependent on the size and quality of the missiles in the salvo, the target number would be ship-dependent - based on size (a laser head 'shot' could still hit the drive field or miss completely at this point) strength of sidewalls and the thickness of armour.

Criticals being dependent on '6's that beat the target's defence (as per Victory At Sea) is easy enough, but if a 'game piece' represents a dreadnought division or battlecruiser squadron, the criticals need a little thought; after all, only one ship can have taken damage.

For destroyers, it's probably no big issue; in a fleet-scale engagement where every AD represents multiple missiles, a destroyer taking a point of damage is probably either blown to crud or is sufficiently damaged that it's going to fall out of formation and take no further part in the game.

ACTA has historically had the 'medium-weight' game piece (e.g. Hyperion-class Cruiser in B5, Constitution-class Cruiser in SF) have in the order of 20-30 hit points, up to maybe 40 by the time you factor in Shields in NA and SF, or especially tough things in B5 (like the Narn).

If the equivalent here is either a heavy non-capital ship squadron (8 battlecruisers) or a battleship division (2 battleships), you have very roughly the same weight of metal (just shy of ten million tonnes) and using squadrons for non-capital units (destroyer, cruiser, battlecruiser) and divisions for capital units (battleship, dreadnought, superdreadnought) represents a logical break point.

However that means that for a 24 hit point unit, a single battlecruiser is only representing about 3 hit points.... a detailled critical damage table seems somewhat redundant. That in turn scales down (more or less in line with displacement) to have heavy cruisers having 2 hit points and light cruisers and destroyers only 1 each.

scaling up, a battleship division with 24 hit points gives a single battleship 12 hit points - going up in scale with displacement puts a Dreadnought at 18 and a Superdreadnought at 24 - so a superdreadnought division as a 'game piece' would have 48 hit points - more or less what you get in the biggest ships you expect to see multiples of on the board at once, which seams right. It also means that tracking the odd critical to a single battleship or dreadnought is not unreasonable; a ship may well lose a meaningful proportion of its armament before it finally explodes, and a 'golden BB' shot that results in a fusion plant going up, or the inertial compensator going down, can kill a unit worth an entire battlecruiser squadron's worth of durability in a single hit.

As a final thought, if I peg a superdreadnought division of two ships at a 48 hit point unit, that's roughly on a par with Battle-priority ships from B5 ACTA - which would suggest that a big game (which used to be 5 points at War priority) can just about support ten of them - which is 5 superdreadnought squadrons. That's 20 ships of the wall - which is the scale of battle of the First Battle of Nightingale, which is more or less what I was hoping for....

 

[Reynard]

I'm trying to wrap around the concept you're looking for. ACTA is definitely a fleet sized game but, from what I see between Noble Armada and Star Fleet, fleet values are 1500-2000 with Star Fleet topping at 5000. NA ships range from 10 point fighter to 600 point dreadnaughts averaging about 150 points while SF ranges fro 85 point cutters to 340 point dreadnaughts averaging closer to 180 points. In any case, the fleets usually have around 10 ships each with SF maxing at maybe 20-25 ships. Battles with dozens of of the biggest ships seems to complicate things. I guess you could combine ships into single stand squadrons having huge AD pools to simulate the stories. I understand you want to retain the feel of the stories but is it really necessary? The idea that makes ACTA attractive, to me, is keeping the mechanics as simple as possible while allowing fleet level actions with a manageable number of ships.

 

[locarno24]

I guess you could combine ships into single stand squadrons having huge AD pools to simulate the stories. I understand you want to retain the feel of the stories but is it really necessary?

I'm not necessarily intending to have a huge AD pool - ACTA is pretty balanced as it is; if you massively up the number of AD (or the amount of DD each AD produces) then you move to a one-hit-kill situation. One of my biggest bugbears with B5 Wars - ACTA B5's predecessor - is that it makes you track loads of detail (damage to and reload times of individual weapons, redirection of power, etc) but it's all pointless bookwork because two equivalent sized warships blow each other to dust bunnies in one salvo; if there's no 'ongoing effect' of critical damage, you might as well roll for "you're hit, you're dead'...

Essentially, I would like to be able to play some of the battles later in the series or mentioned in the background, so...yeah, I'm not going to die in a ditch over 'it must be done this way' but to feel like the battles in question, using 20-40 of the wall plus screen is not unrealistic. The Honorverse stories are very much 'formed up fleets' with a Trafalgar/Jutland feel to them, rather than the one-to-three ship duels you normally see in a star trek setting, or the squadron of half a dozen capital ships you see in Babylon 5.

It's definitely possible to play SF ACTA with 20-odd ships, but the game system starts to 'creak' a bit at that scale, and by comparison, the big engagements of the Manticore-Haven wars include 40+ ships of the wall, plus escort craft. More importantly, ships being formed up into units and maneuvring as a 'block formation' is something that is mentioned throughout the series, so having a token/piece represent a division or squadron just seems to make sense to let you zoom the scale out

The idea that makes ACTA attractive, to me, is keeping the mechanics as simple as possible while allowing fleet level actions with a manageable number of ships.
I'm trying to wrap around the concept you're looking for. ACTA is definitely a fleet sized game but, from what I see between Noble Armada and Star Fleet, fleet values are 1500-2000 with Star Fleet topping at 5000. NA ships range from 10 point fighter to 600 point dreadnaughts averaging about 150 points while SF ranges fro 85 point cutters to 340 point dreadnaughts averaging closer to 180 points. In any case, the fleets usually have around 10 ships each with SF maxing at maybe 20-25 ships. Battles with dozens of of the biggest ships seems to complicate things.

I guess you could combine ships into single stand squadrons having huge AD pools to simulate the stories. I understand you want to retain the feel of the stories but is it really necessary? The idea that makes ACTA attractive, to me, is keeping the mechanics as simple as possible while allowing fleet level actions with a manageable number of ships.

To me too. But if in a different setting, a 'fleet level action' is substantially bigger, I'd like to see if I can get the game system to cope with it without massively tweaking it. ACTA is a nice open-ended tool-set of rules.

Imagine a 30 hit point 'playing piece' with a 'broadside' of half a dozen AD in its primary armament in a given arc. That's not especially unreasonable, and you can find examples in B5, SF and NA that fit that broad description.

Now imagine this is a suitably epic battle, so that's not one ship, that's a squadron of six warships formed up into a defensive wedge. So your damage score isn't 30, it's 6x5, and your broadside isn't 6AD, it's 6x1AD - because each 5 damage that gets through has blown away a warship and its respective launchers. You can play tunes about how damage gets allocated to units within a single 'playing piece' but at that basic level, there's virtually no additional bookwork, but there's just enough difference to feel like you're tracking loses of multiple ships.




Other thoughts:

Missiles versus Energy Weapons.
In the Honorverse setting, "energy range" gets mentioned a lot, but it tends to only happen by plot contrivance - it's very much automatic-shotguns-at-five-paces level damage; battlecruisers and even battleships get torn to pieces like logs in a woodchipper. However, the range is about half a million Km - which, compared to the 6 million Km powered range of missiles even at the start of the series, means that if you gave a formation's missiles a 12-24" range (about normal for 'normal' weapons on a standard size board for a wargame), then the ship's energy broadside would have only a 1-2" range. This means that energy duels are essentially a close range "I move into contact with you" type attack, which would replace NA's ramming and boarding and provides encouragement for sensible manouvring, because even a battlecruiser moving into energy range of a dreadnought undergoes what can best be described as "spontaneous existance failure".

 

[Reynard]

"The idea that makes ACTA attractive, to me, is keeping the mechanics as simple as possible while allowing fleet level actions with a manageable number of ships."

And there's the gist! Very important to make it manageable. Crowding a board with dozens of ships individually or large numbers of divisions of ships might represent the spirit of the novels but won't make the game easier. What should be important is well thought design of each ship depicted in the stories with unique characteristics then run fleet actions closer to ACTA ship numbers of 10 or even 20. Look at other ACTA ship designs for the various books you have to understand features used then find each description for Honor ships classes and develop unique systems to your ship universe.

 

[Reynard]

Found this: http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Ship_Classes

Should aid in breaking down each ship system to convert to ACTA. 400G acceleration?! Ow. That may be fun to convert to a game scale.

 

[Rick]

Found this: http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Ship_Classes

Nice, a bit more up to date than my Jayne's Intelligence review books of the Manticore and Havenite navies. They have the ship-killer missiles with sophisticated targeting systems, but differentiate between a missile firing solution and a snapshot; which probably means that the concept behind the Honorverse ships are modern-day submarines; ship-killers equate to torpedoes and the impeller emissions spectra that they use to identify/target a ship equates to a sonar cavitation signature, with lidar as active sonar.

Personally, I would go with 1 ship as 1 model, and then do a 'big battle' variation where each model is a squadron and the rules are simplified. Most of the ship combat in the books (at least the earlier ones) was of small engagements, with huge fleet battles a rarity.

 

[locarno24]

Gravetics are indeed essentially a passive system - that's why fleets manage to surprise each other by using powered down wedges and/or stealth in several major battles (Second Yeltsin, Hancock, Cerberus, etc).

Crowding a board with dozens of ships individually or large numbers of divisions of ships might represent the spirit of the novels but won't make the game easier.

I really don't get this. If a fleet has no more game pieces, and no more hit points per game piece, just resolves damage against it differently to represent that damage track being several seperate units, I don't really see why it's crowding the board.

Most of the ship combat in the books (at least the earlier ones) was of small engagements, with huge fleet battles a rarity.

True, but even A Call To Arms starts to creak when you have upwards of a dozen major warships on the board.

 

[AdrianH]

I've played a battle in which I had 12 ships on the table, though it was relatively easy as these were Shadow ships with only one weapon each. Still, if Honorverse only has a couple of weapon systems per ship rather than the half dozen or more on a large non-Ancient B5 ship then a game with a dozen or more ships to a side should be practical, especially if you organise them into squadrons.

Now, I know nothing about combat in Honorverse except what I've read here, so please bear with me. It seems to me that there are two general weapon types: long range missiles and short range energy. Missiles have about 10-12 times the range of energy. Defences are point defence, which can be overwhelmed, so basically B5's interceptors; and shields, which only cover the side arcs

So my tactic would simply be to turn my side to you at long range and start trading missiles. If you want to close in to use energy weapons then you're exposing your unshielded front to me and are going to take more damage from my missiles then I'll take from yours, probably being down some ships by the time we're in range to start trading energy. (I'm probably missing some important feature of Honorverse combat which prevents this. How quickly can ships close in to energy range, and can missiles do significant damage in that time?)

By the way, it's perfectly possible for ACTA to have weapons with longer range than 24". B5 has plenty of weapons with range 30" or more, several with range 35, and Earth can declare its missiles to be lower power long range missiles with range 40". If Honorverse missiles are also range 40 then energy range expands to 3"-4", possibly more if you're not too concerned about keeping the range ratio of 12:1. This is significant because range 2" means the ship models are likely to be touching and range less than 2" is physically impossible unless the ships are on small bases (or unless you scrap the normal ACTA rule of bases not being allowed to overlap).

 

[locarno24]

More or less correct.

Sidewalls are very much 'screens' - in the sense of B5 Gravetic Energy Grid or Noble Armada Armour than Shields as Starfleet describes the trait; they're not an ablative defence.

The tactics you describe are pretty much the standard 'battle tactics' - at least, early on in the series; ships trade missle broadsides and seek to cross in front of another ship to shoot "down the throat" or "up the kilt" in the unshielded stern or prow. And yes, this was a classic reason that a lot of battles aren't fought to the last man - if I'm losing, and try to keep the range open, you can only close to keep me in range (or close to killing range with energy batteries) by crossing your own 'T'.

The counter-argument to this is that (again, early in the series), missiles generally aren't lethal enough to stop a ship of the wall. Hurt it, yes, and concentrated missile fire from a task force will kill component individual ships in its opponent, but realistically one fleet cannot stop another similarly sized fleet purely with missiles, so you tend to end up with an energy duel at some point if one side is determined to force action.

I'd suggested 2" because 2" is boarding action/grapnel range - essentially special close quarter attacks - but yes, if we're not being overly scientifically accurate (which ACTA isn't - it's a game designed for playability and fun) then you can proportionally increase the range of energy batteries.

The main reason I didn't want to push missiles much above a 24" range is because of the tech advancements mentioned above - battlecruiser missiles are one thing, but capital missiles should have a discernable range edge, and then on top of this, multiple-drive-missiles start appearing during the later part of the first war and the second, which have a massive range edge. Doing that to scale would be difficult, again, but there needs to be rules 'space' for them - as noted, the EA Long Range Missiles pushed the range band up markedly.

I'm thinking that splitting out countermissiles and lasers deliberately might make sense - have lasers be unlimited use (as per Noble Armada gatling lasers) whilst the countermissiles have a big cycle time and hence are one use per turn (that one use might represent several salvoes, though) but give them a range - a big part of the narrative of battles is a task group's ships providing point defence cover for one another with co-ordinated countermissile fire.

Sidewalls are probably best done with something resembling the Armour trait. So any AD which hits and isn't intercepted generates 1+ DD as normal.

DD need to beat the armour (including any bonuses for Armour Piercing, etc as per Victory at Sea), with Sidewalls giving you bonus armour if you're firing through their arc.