Further of Nerhesis last post on the spinal damage paradigm and my own re-evaluation.
The key point that was provided in Nehersi’s post was this -
Let’s compare this battle rider to something realistic - not sending in 15,000 ton battle riders vs a 150kton battleship but against a 72k battleship. This ship has 25% of its space left for weaponry, which is barely squeezing in a 7DD weapon. 13,475 damage per hit after armour.
And was followed up by this
That 3x15kish ton battle-riders are somehow equivalent to the 72k cruiser. Chas would argue that the tender required to carry these should be somehow factored in evenly. A tender is basically 80-90% fuel and is dirt cheap (cost wise and TL wise) - you can build your TL13 tender with Jump 4, low armour, low thrust because it is jumping in out of system (as per naval tactics - you dont jump in with ANY fleet right on top of the planet unless you're sure it's a forgone conclusion anyways).
This is a no brainer that everybody can appreciate – if as in this example 45 tons of battle rider are fighting 75 tons of Jump 4 cruiser, the cruiser is going to have a hard time. If this ratio changes, if we have only 20 tons of battle rider fighting the 75 ton Jump 4 cruiser, it’s a completely different ball game.
Everything depends on this relative ratio, what I’ll call the carrying ratio. Its realistic value is something we have to estimate as we best we can. This involves how we value the tender that the battle riders are being carried on. It’s not a straight forward discussion, but there must be some yardstick, you can’t have someone saying, oh I’ve doubled my carrying ratio without a rationale behind it.
I’d done my first examples and explanation post based on a tonnage comparison, I’d said then that a cost paradigm may be more correct and that I hadn’t looked at it thoroughly. If we take what Nehersi has done above, to get to his “something realistic” it’s essentially using a cost paradigm rather than the tonnage. Having gone back and examined this in more detail and I would say that yes, the cost paradigm for this discussion is better. And it does move my suggested damage ratio of around <2 hull points: 1 spinal ton downward a chunk. But still some distance to the degree as shown in Nehersi’s example.
My original weight balance of cruiser vs. battle rider had both sides working on a very high cost build; deliberate apples to apples. If we make Nehersi’s dirt cheap budget tender then the cruiser is also allowed to be so designed. The budget tender gets to move its weight around to match the optimum cost, so do does the cruiser. And when we do that, the size of the cruiser starts moving up, a lot. (I’ve been building my ships far too focused on minimizing weight I’ve found). It’s effective firepower in spare tonnage for spinals and bays don’t move so much, but critical for the battle rider the cruiser’s hull points and hard points get a big boost. My (admittedly short, no deliberate disadvantages, full weapon review not completed) analysis had the cruiser getting up to 110,000 tons to the battle rider’s tender 140,000 tons rough ratio for 45kton battle riders being carried. I’m not going to do the full details here and now, it gives us a guide about what is happening and the fine tuning can wait till we get to make actual ship designs and some of the other rules get bedded down. And we want to consider if there is any other factors we want to incorporate regards this tender 'value'. There are design considerations also - do you choose to strip the tender of any weapons at all...
That Nehersi’s initial realistic value there is a bit off doesn’t need a spreadsheet to explain. If you simply half the weight of the cruiser vs. the tender, a big chunk of the cruiser’s key components are now half the weight of the tender: the tender’s jump engines cost twice as much, the price advantage due to dispersed hull vs. close is now gone, etc.
We will need to watch this realistic carrying capacity carefully as the scaling for technology of the spinal, boosts and negatives for Primitive and Advanced ships all impact this. -50% cost for 1 Disadvantage needs study.
Important: is the rule about having riders 2x the size of the spinal. If this rule is out, then we get a change is the other key complicated factor in rider build – the firepower efficiency / ton of whatever is in the rider. You can build more riders with the same spinal for the same carrying ratio, greatly increasing the firepower efficiency of the riders.
We have stuff moving on multiple axes here and both the carrying ratio (relative weight of rider carried to capital ship) and the firepower ratio (the effectiveness of what is in the riders) so nobody is saying it’s easy.
Going back to the example on hand I’d say as a tentative first look the general carrying ratio for Jump 4 is about 1:2 (pending the Feb update impact!) for ease of use.
That is if have 45 tons of rider that will fight 90 tons of cruiser (however I’d put the effective weapon efficiency of the cruiser well down from the previous 25%, pending with build examples).
To be reviewed.
Would I now recommend changing the current spinal damage / ton of weapon up a notch? No. Let’s see the fall out of the Feb rule set and get a better understanding of this with actual builds first and align properly with Matt's preference for better battleships. Also if there are any other recommendations we want to make, like at least having a 1.5 x spinal requirement for the rider. (one thing – it’s a lot easier to design riders with a hard requirement like that in :wink: ). How the carrying ratio and firepower ratio scales across TL will want review.
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To come back to some other points that have been in discussion -
But you make the logical jump in that this small-as-possible-spinal should be overly powerful. This I utterly disagree with and the numbers prove it is not necessary. If I can bring in 5 battle-riders doing 3DD, vs 2 cruisers doing 5DD - I am still ensuring victory. My damage drop-off due to casualties is way better. My ability to evade fire and present multiple targets is way better. And those cruisers carrying the best possible spinal have pretty much sacrificed MOST if not all other weaponry because they chose to do so. This is assuming linear scaling of spinal size - as per my example.
Low fire power high weight is VERY favourable for battleriders. Extremely so! Because that means a cruiser, that carries the best spinal it can, will not be able to take out the battle-riders before they easily take it out.
The more bay/turret/barbette weapons you pack on cruisers, the more you're favouring battle-riders because you're not going to do enough damage to 1-shot the riders anymore. IF you remove spinals from both, the comparison is incredibly ugly where you have battle-riders nearly matching the firepower of Jump-4 ships nearly 3 times the size
So basically, the cruisers that are deadliest to battle-riders (pure numbers wise), are the ones with the biggest spinals. Of course this doesn't take into account things like very-long-range bays-only cruisers.
b) Spinals are long range. Other weapons are very long range - how come we arent' discussing the fact that each battle-rider can be shooting 25 medium particle bays, until the end of time, without the cruiser ever coming into spinal range?
This is all true. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ about these statements and I quite see from where you have been basing your position Nehersi. BUT, these statements are conditional. They’re conditional on the carrying ratio that was discussed above, it needs to be reasonably high. Before I was looking at the math and saying – where is the conditional factor (which I now understand from your example) it is critical.
The importance of this carrying ratio is easy to show, and also brings into play a third moving axis into the total balance picture #atletsnotmakeitaseasyaspossible – the effectiveness of the cruiser’s turrets (and any barbettes it can squeeze in), what we can call the tertiary weapons
If we look at this statement
Low fire power high weight is VERY favourable for battleriders. Extremely so! Because that means a cruiser, that carries the best spinal it can, will not be able to take out the battle-riders before they easily take it out
This doesn’t work at low carrying ratios because the rider is leaving hull points and hard points back on the tender. The cruiser never loses it hard points i.e. it never loses its turrets plus any barbettes it can fit in. At a low carrying ratio the rider combo is reduced total weight and effective firepower - having to put it's available tonnage into a low firepower weapon, which means longer fights vs. the higher hull point cruiser - while the turrets of the cruiser are doing more effective damage. An example 100,000 ton cruiser is highly likely to be throwing 500 x 3 advanced missiles a turn against a target that has very low point defence. That’s 3,750 hull points a turn. As the carrying ratio drops this works against the riders by removing PD and hull points, the tertiary weapons of the cruiser come into play destroying a rider say every 2 turns. And so does the secondary weapons of the cruiser become more effective. The 75 K cruiser I did has 4 large bays of torps on top of the missiles. As the rider firepower efficiency goes down, it cannot slug it out. Playing very long range sniping with a cruiser that has effective turrets is not an option for the spinal rider (though granted there will be specialist sniper riders that are just large bays!), it means the rider wants its high thrust burner to get into long range and engage it's spinal as soon as possible.
We can’t over emphasis the importance of the carrying ratio – as it moves, it has multiple factors rapidly pulling the advantage to one side or the other.
We can look at it more with actual build examples. This will have to wait till a proper read of the Feb release though.
