Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » The Academy » Capital ships and escort ships
| Capital ships and escort ships |
Thu, 27 September 2007 04:39  |
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 Machalot |
 | Crewman 1st Class |
Messages: 20
Registered: September 2007
Location: Santa Clara, California | |
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I have only played against the computer and against my brother. Neither of us is what I would consider an experienced player in terms of long game strategy.
From what I've read here about the progression of most games, people are referring to a "BB era", which I assume transitions eventually to a "Nub era". Does that mean that FF/DD/CC hulls become obsolete for combat?
The reason I ask is that these ships seem to be modeled after the hull types of great naval fleets that battled in the two World Wars. In those battles, the fleets would consist of, say, 4 to 6 BBs, 15 to 20 CCs, and 50 to 60 DDs and FFs. The escort ships played very significant roles, perhaps even moreso than the BBs. But based on what I'm reading, it sounds like those hulls (with the exception of FFs as cannon fodder) have no place on the battleboard alongside BBs.
I'm thinking of cases where DDs or even submarines landed killing blows against BBs. It seems like in Stars, the DDs are just simply brushed aside by a volley or two of missiles, and the "real" combat takes place entirely between capital ships. Somebody please tell me I'm wrong!
[Updated on: Thu, 27 September 2007 04:41]
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| Re: Capital ships and escort ships |
Fri, 28 September 2007 05:12  |
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| Machalot wrote on Fri, 28 September 2007 04:15 |
That's disappointing that you can't really have battles between different types of ships. Some of the best stories from WW2 are from battles between unequal fleets: several BBs versus multiple CCs and DDs, and it comes down to fancy strategery or luck.
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Well, you can take on BBs using your CCs if you want. Eg. if:
enemy BB is equiped with: any engine, 16 HB, 4 Phased Sapper, 7 cap, 8 Bear
your CC is equiped with: any engine, 4 HB, 2 Phased Sapper, 4 Bear
Enemy BBs = 50
your CCs = 234
both fleets are in a single stack & both races have RS then you should achieve a marginal victory.
your CCs = 368
same conditions you should win the battle without losing a ship.
However, the overall cost of your fleet of 234 CCs will be considerably more than the enemy BB fleet.
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| Re: Capital ships and escort ships |
Fri, 28 September 2007 13:58 |
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| yartrebo |
 | Petty Officer 3rd Class |
Messages: 43
Registered: July 2006
Location: North America | |
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| Quote: |
enemy BB is equiped with: any engine, 16 HB, 4 Phased Sapper, 7 cap, 8 Bear
your CC is equiped with: any engine, 4 HB, 2 Phased Sapper, 4 Bear
Enemy BBs = 50
your CCs = 234
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You can build well over 50 of those BBs (assuming IS-10 engine - a must if you intend on getting 2 1/4 battle speed) for the cost of 234 IS-10 cruisers, so you're not comparing fleets of equal cost.
Also, those designs are pretty lousy. There are no overthrusters on any of those beamer ship designs. It's almost a given that the front slot on a BB holds an overthruster.
If you use the following BB design, the comparison only gets worse:
IS-10, 20 range 2 blaster (Mark IV), 6 cap, 1 overthruster, 8 bear.
This BB will shoot first, will set the range (range 2), and is much cheaper than your CC design because of efficiency of scale (you get 77% more out of each weapon, and use less engines/weapon and less engines/hp than lesser hulls).
The BB is an all around better ship than the CC, and is in turn outclassed by the Nubian.
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| Re: Capital ships and escort ships |
Fri, 28 September 2007 20:56 |
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| Machalot |
| Crewman 1st Class |
Messages: 20
Registered: September 2007
Location: Santa Clara, California | |
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There is a reason that in real life, the battleships grew bigger and bigger until WW2, and died out shortly thereafter. However, it seems that the BB has no disadvantages versus a cruiser or destroyer in Stars. The rules seems to be the bigger the better, whether you measure firepower, range, survivability, or cost, with virtually no tradeoffs, from the sounds of what you are all saying.
I don't think battleships (and, later, dreadnoughts) ever really owned the seas on Earth as they seem to in Stars (if you consider the Nubian to be just a larger, more flexible BB/DN) .
That's a bit of a disappointment.
I did read about one VML mod that reversed the initiative from smallest hull to largest. That seems to be a more realistic setup, as smaller ships with smaller guns should be able to maneuver and target more quickly. I don't know the details, but it seems like it would make sense to spread the base hull initiatives out so they are significantly different between light and heavy hulls, so the firing order would be more closely linked to class initiative. The true initiative comparisons where battle computers et cetera would really matter would be to determine the firing order within each class. Perhaps in exceptional cases for ship designs that are built for high initiative, ships could cross over into a higher initiative class.
It would also make sense if there was not a hard limit on the movement speeds. I would expect that smaller ships would almost always be faster and more agile than their larger counterparts of the same era, but the speed limit puts all ships on equal footing or even give the advantage to large ships with extra slots for OTs. That is the opposite of reality, where destroyers in the WW2 era cruised in the high 20 kts to mid 30 kts range, but modern ships are pushing 40+ kts. WW2 aircraft carriers cruised in the low 20s and modern supercarriers are just pushing into the mid 30s now.
Just some thoughts.
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| Re: Capital ships and escort ships |
Fri, 28 September 2007 21:58 |
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Well, Stars is first and foremost a game that has gone through considerable testing and evolution to provide balanced *gameplay* so that a player is truly torn between spending money on ships now or research for better ships, or colonization for more money and minerals later... So such gameplay considerations take precedence over any analogies to 20th and 21st century naval combat.
Second, it really is a Space game. We can't know what space combat will really be like. It might not even truly be feasible. But if one takes a few sci-fi concepts, says "ok, we're starting with these as true" and tries to work out what space combat might be like, there is again no reason why those analogies to 20th and 21st century naval combat should hold. For example, in water, ships experience considerable drag, which in turn imposes significant design constraints ... often leading to smaller ships being faster (although that wasn't true in the 19th century - bigger meant faster then). But the physics of how it would all work in space is a work of speculative fiction. So, you can come up with fictional physics where engines "push" against an underlying absolute spatial matrix, or where engines work with reaction mass like our physics, but there are ways of warping space to go FTL and/or manipulating inertia to reduce the amount of reaction mass required ... and depending on your fictional physics, it may make perfectly good sense that there's a maximum speed, or that bigger ships go faster than smaller ships or anything else.
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| Re: Capital ships and escort ships |
Fri, 28 September 2007 22:34 |
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| Machalot |
| Crewman 1st Class |
Messages: 20
Registered: September 2007
Location: Santa Clara, California | |
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I hadn't thought of it that way. That puts a different spin on my arguments from a "realism" standpoint.
However, I still wish there were more tradeoffs, rather than a strict bigger-is-better paradigm. Then again, I haven't been involved in any serious human v. human endgame combat, so I have no idea what kind of tradeoffs exist between different BB designs. Maybe there are enough to suit my taste already.
[Updated on: Fri, 28 September 2007 22:36]
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| Re: Capital ships and escort ships |
Sat, 29 September 2007 16:41 |
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| yartrebo wrote on Fri, 28 September 2007 13:58 |
| Quote: |
enemy BB is equiped with: any engine, 16 HB, 4 Phased Sapper, 7 cap, 8 Bear
your CC is equiped with: any engine, 4 HB, 2 Phased Sapper, 4 Bear
Enemy BBs = 50
your CCs = 234
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You can build well over 50 of those BBs (assuming IS-10 engine - a must if you intend on getting 2 1/4 battle speed) for the cost of 234 IS-10 cruisers, so you're not comparing fleets of equal cost.
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More expensive yes, as I said: | AlexTheGreat wrote on Fri, 28 September 2007 05:12 |
However, the overall cost of your fleet of 234 CCs will be considerably more than the enemy BB fleet.
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But, in fact, if 2 fleets are both range 3 the CCs could use QJ5 while the enemy BB used TS-10 & the result would be identical. Of course, I wouldn't use the QJ5 because the enemy is likely to have a few missile boats that would stuff things up good & proper & such slow ships would be useless against a base (unless you use battlegrid manipulation).
| Quote: |
Also, those designs are pretty lousy. There are no overthrusters on any of those beamer ship designs. It's almost a given that the front slot on a BB holds an overthruster.
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Why? BBs often have no OT - it all depends upon your strategy & what designs/counter-designs are in the game.
The victorious Vorlon alliance in Babylon5 v2 hardly ever used an OT - their final BB design used 7 computers. Battle speed is often a big advantage but there are plenty of circumstances where it is of no significance & even some cases where it is counter-productive.
| Quote: |
If you use the following BB design, the comparison only gets worse:
IS-10, 20 range 2 blaster (Mark IV), 6 cap, 1 overthruster, 8 bear.
This BB will shoot first, will set the range (range 2), and is much cheaper than your CC design because of efficiency of scale (you get 77% more out of each weapon, and use less engines/weapon and less engines/hp than lesser hulls).
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huh?? The CC will set the range because it is lighter & moves last (i.e. stays out of range). The CCs will always get 2 free shots until they are then usually cornered.
50 of your BBs will LOSE EVERY TIME against 117 CCs with TGD/4xHB/2xPhased Sapper/4xBear AND the cruisers would COST LESS. On top of that the CCs are more gateable & can be built at docks.
| Quote: |
The BB is an all around better ship than the CC, and is in turn outclassed by the Nubian.
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No question about it but, if your oponent has BBs & you don't even have the technology yet, you may have no option.
[Updated on: Sat, 29 September 2007 16:46] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Capital ships and escort ships |
Sat, 29 September 2007 18:54 |
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| Machalot |
| Crewman 1st Class |
Messages: 20
Registered: September 2007
Location: Santa Clara, California | |
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| AlexTheGreat wrote on Sat, 29 September 2007 13:41 |
50 of your BBs will LOSE EVERY TIME against 117 CCs with TGD/4xHB/2xPhased Sapper/4xBear AND the cruisers would COST LESS. On top of that the CCs are more gateable & can be built at docks.
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That's what I was looking for. There seems to be some disagreement on that point.
[Updated on: Sat, 29 September 2007 18:55]
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| Re: Capital ships and escort ships |
Sun, 30 September 2007 21:16 |
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I'll give a description of an arms race in a recent game that shows both "smaller can be better" and "bigger can be better". This should give Machalot some ideas about how different hulls can be used against each other, and when smaller can be better.
One player playing a -f race planned a cruiser horde as follows:
CC, TGSS, 2xOT, 4x MkIV, 3x Bear, 1x Jammer20. He had RS.
For the money, a very capable ship (speed 2.5 for rushing in on missle ships, does plenty of damage, cheap, can be built at Docks (he had ISB) and at mass 148 is convenient for gating through the 150/600 gate). So, it's a ship that can do well in "the cruiser era", but can also do well in hordes against BBs later.
Well, it worked pretty well as he first deployed them, but without missles in his arsenal, his opponents defended with ... wait for it ... miniblaster frigates. With RS too, a FF with a relatively cheap engine, 2x Bear, 3x miniblaster turned out to be a cost-effective defense.
Meanwhile, two other players were researching like mad, and got lucky with tech from the M.T. Those two players fielded Doomsday BBs and MegaD BBs (16 Dooms or MegaDs, 4 SychroSappers). Ultimately, the BBs won the game, but really it was because they had higher tech weapons, not because they were bigger. (But of course those higher tech weapons go better on a big hull with lots of electrical gadgets.) Also, this shows the strength of fielding a beamer design *and* missle design together.
[Updated on: Sun, 30 September 2007 21:19] Report message to a moderator
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there is. Oh, and there is one big advantage for lighter ships - they move last, so they can control range. A lighter ship with range 3 weaps will really mess up a heavier ship with range 2.
