Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » New Beginner Game has ended
| Part 2: War against Zoids/Arelu |
Wed, 07 June 2017 16:53   |
|
|
|
(As above I'll describe some things in detail which for the experienced might be routine and a bit boring but for the bginner new and obscure like how to calculate the size of your first attack fleet and some example ship designs.)
Part 2: War against Zoids/Arelu (Centre War)
The Zoid problem
In 2416 we verifyed that the Zoids were 3-immune. A bit later we saw that despite an assumed very low pop growth they were busily expanding and obviously putting quite an effort into optimizing their pop growth and pop transport to more and more colonies. In 2426 their ally, the Arelus, had colonized 2 planets in the centre... absolutely no good because that would give them not only direct contact but would give the Zoids also access to gates. The absence of gates is THE weak spot of all HEs, if that weak spot is successfully overcome by an ally intersettling and providing a gate network we had all reasons to worry.
SB/Do/F: Starbase/Dock/Fort
Green circles: habitable for Bizarres
Blue lines: wormholes (which became big trouble and led to 20 years of fierce battles in the SW-corner still ongoing in 2450 but that's another story and best told by the Humanoids who did all this fighting)
I assumed the Zoids to be a 3-immune-HE-monster of old with the ability to build at least 20 factories per 10k pop. Almost every Zoid planet was at 125k pop (the ideal 25% cap for HEs), busily exporting pop, with the assumed factory settings the prodcution power of such a planet was an estimated 500. As a tri-immune every planet was 100% habitalbe for the Zoids. You can easily see where that leads to when the Zoids growth wouldn't be checked and why above I had already written that the best strategy against HEs is: Try to smash them asap or watch them winning.
Humanoids and I were both playing HG-races which were, if I recall correctly, specifically invented as an answere to the old 3-immune HE monster. Having one of those old beasts in our universe felt like being part of an old order tasked with an ancient mission.
Thus several important criteria for an early attack fleet were met: there were green planets in the space to be attacked, we judged it smart to attack the HE and, of course, ancient Stars myth was clearly on our side.
So in the mid 20ies we decided that we needed to attack the Zoids first and soon.
Small excursion:As it turned out we were wrong about the Zoids' race design because it was neither a typical 2-immune nor a 3-immune but a kind of hybrid: 3-immune but with rather mediocre factory/mine settings to gain 7% instead of 6% pop growth. Wether an HE has 6 or 7% pop growth is almost impossible to find out: Scanners show pop on planets only within +/-20% accuracy and the Zoids were transporting pop all the time. Their true number of buildings was also very difficult to figure out because they built defenses and we answered with more bombers and most of the time overbombed the planets and thus got either none or inaccurate reports how many buildings we had actually destroyed. We realized our error in assessing the Zoids race design only after the game when the Zoids allowed access to their m-file and race design.
Preparations
The preliminary thoughts when and whom to attack I have once written down here:
# War: Assembling your first Fleet for Conquest (destroyer and cruiser era)
The earlier you attack the more important the questions raised there because resources are scarce. Building an attack fleet will stop you from developing your economy, so most definetly you will fall behind in relation to the other players. If your attacks succeed, your gains in looted minerals, gained planets, tech and position should outweigh this (or you shouldn't attack). But if you fail, you'll have gained nothing but nevertheless fallen behind and probably made yourself a very dedicated enemy.
Warship design
The first warship available and capable to do what we had in mind was a simple destroyer (DD). Early on DDs fare quite ok in comparison to cruisers (CC). A real danger to any DDs are much more frigates (FF) than CCs. But FFs have a weakness against station- or dockbased torps and suffer too much losses. All Zoid planets had docks.
Necessary tech: bazooka (weap 8), wolverine shield (en 6), the rest was starting tech for us.
Simple, cheap, easy to gate, due to the fuel pod with a long range and able to share fuel with the minibombers. No armor because armor is expensive, slows down the battlespeed and the survivability of a DD-stack comes not with armor but with a good sized stack and the shields (true at least until the missile era starts). A WM gets 0.5 bonus to battle speed (BS) which makes this DD design having a BS of 1.5 (movement on the battleboard: 2-1-2-1..., see Stars-help file: Guts of Combat: Movement...my most used help page and bookmarked). The changing battlespeed wether the DDs were in my WM or Humanoids hands offered a possible tactical option if the need would arise. Another fine thing about this simple DD design, it ages quite well because it can be used as a multi-purpose ship for a long time: in big stacks and early on as a planetary attack fleet, solo as skirmisher and in small groups as very efficient minesweepers.
Bomber
You need at least 41 m70-minibombers (more if you expect to bomb vs defenses) which add up to 41 x 2 x 1.2% = 98.4% bombing power. Ideally you kill the few remaining enemy colonists with a WP-1 pop-drop in the very same round which allows you to conquere the planet, might allow you to steal some tech and to load up all the minerals of the planet without the usage of a colonizer... and then you move on to the next target right away.
Size of DD stack
To calculate how big our stack of DDs should be, I used some simple rules of thumb:- capable to shoot down a fully armed/shielded/armored dock with 2 shots (=2 battle rounds)
- the DDs need to get into shooting range (WM-DDs get into shooting range in the 3rd battle round)
- the stack needs to survive this task with minimal or no damage, so the shield-stack should be high enough to suck up all the damage by the defending dock (this was important because we planned not ot attack one planet but the fleet was supposed to attack one planet after another in which case you can't afford to accumulate too much damage)
- our target dock we assumed to be equipped with better weapons than our bazooka(weap8)-DDs: with range-3-colloidals (weap 10) but hoped for not much better shields (wolverine, en6)
After calculating a bit, I came up with 60 DDs. Here the steps to get there (there are for sure more elaborate ways to calculate it, this is the one for minimal math knowledge everybody possesses):- Fully shielded/armored dock meant in the case of Zoids with RS: 48 wolverine 60 shields multiplied with 40% for RS and another 10% to include the actual regeneration between our DDs' shot 1 and 2... plus the 250 base armor of a dock, altogether 4686.
- Every laser (phaser, beam... all those expressions are used) looses a bit of its full damage when not shooting at range zero, at range 2 a bazooka shoots at about 90% efficiency, so the full bazooka damage of 26 is rather 23, every DD is quipped with 2 bazookas (=46 dm), so it's a simple calcuation:
4686 dock / 46dm / 2 rounds = 51 DDs
Our 51 DDs are equipped with wolverine 60 shields multiplied with 1.4 RS = 4284 shields
- Now we will do the check how much damage the DDs might have to suck up from the dock:
As mentioned we assumed weap 10 colloidal phasers with range 3, a dock can feature 48 of those. The dock has also higher initiative and shoots first. Additionally every weapon on a dock or starbase has a bonus of +1 to the standard weapon range, so a colloidal can actually shoot at our DDs already at range 4 (which in this example happens in battle round 2). Altogther the dock can fire upon our DDs 3 times before it is hopefully destroyed. To make it easier and to gain a safety margin, we assume lesser laser efficiency only for our DDs but not for the dock:
48 colloidals x 26dm x 3 rounds = 3744 damage
Voila, 51 DDs do the job and have enough shields to suck up all damage. As a matter of fact our DDs have also RS and thus regenerate shields inbetween shots. We'll leave that out here to make it simpler and to gain another safety margin. But the Zoids could also use delta torpedos which might let us loose some DDs, some of the shielding might be brought down by defending ships, so we rounded the 51 up to 60 DDs and this plus the already included safety margin here and there looked to us like a good sized stack we felt comfortable with.
Small excursion:
In my previous game I was playing IT, my ally was WM, competition extremely fierce, so we used every advantage possible which meant that all warships were transfered to my WM-ally for actual fighting. In this beginner game we did the opposite and, after our first fleet was built, decided to transfer all ships to my ally: the JoaT Humanoids. After all there is no better practice than practice. What I completly forgot: all calculations were made for a WM with RS but my ally was neither WM nor had he RS... which does make a difference.
There is much talk what RS and WM boni are actually worth and usually one thinks only about the 25% cheaper weapons which is rather feeble. So here another view upon it:
For a WM with RS our above calculation led to 51 DDs being sufficient.
For a JoaT without RS the same calculations as above lead to: 84 DDs.
Supply and auxiliary ships
The Zoids were starting build minelayers, so we needed an advance group of minesweepers. That was my job, the WM speed gives a great advantage. As already mentioned our DD was a multi-purpose ship, thus we were able to use it also for minesweeping. In the beginning we used an additional 10 DDs for this task.
Freighters: Pop-drops, colonizing and/or filling up conquered habitable planets with pop and that quite far away needed a lot of freighters which then again were used to ferry looted minerals back to the production planets which were still especially starving for germanium.
Scouts: We used lots of those, Humanoids but also mine, in general they were dieing like flies in a snow storm because soon enough the Zoids built a dedicated WM-scout hunter which I countered with a FF scout with WM BS of 2.5 which again led to a even faster dedicated Zoid hunter design but not before they reached cruiser tech.
Fleet production
In 2426 we started production. For the purpose of transfering ships and thus combining our production power we decided to use both identical warship and bomber designs. It was a nice idea and we, indeed, used identical designs but tech transfer was a bit lagging and in 2426 the Humanoids hadn't received en6 for the wolverine shields yet and weren't able to build our aimed for DD-design. Sometimes in Stars the years crawl and sometimes you get the urgent feeling that speed is of essence and every year counts. The idea of an early attack is not to get into heroic big battles but to surprise the enemy, to find him unprepared, with a low number of warships and those scattered and not stacked. So it is a very good idea to build your fleet as fast (to use every possible resource for ship production) and as secretly as possible and to put an immense effort into hunting down enemy scouts.
You can see the risk of building an early fleet when you compare our production base and the costs (without scouts, freighters):
The Humanoid economy was up to the task, the Bizarre economy, though,... not really to be honest. But on the other hand I am always getting very nervous when I haven't tried to conquere the first enemy HW around 2430 and we were rather late for that. Thus it took me 3 years to build 70 DDs, 1 more year for gating and transfering to the assembling point: Leopold. My economy had been lagging behind already before going on a building spray, now I was seriously falling behind and probably the Zoids passed me in ranks and the Bizarrres dropped to rank 3.
Report message to a moderator
|
|
|
|
Current Time: Sun May 05 06:11:56 EDT 2024
|
Members
Search
Help
Register
Login
Home
