Agent Sorchus wrote:You can't use a GDP boost on a home sector anyway. This isn't about the small numbers, it's about the aggregate. SUDDENLY we all have a third more military, and coalitions are necessary for anything. Like I said I don't care about the rest of the idea, but in this case it is more of some of us having now inferior OoB's. For Instance my Core Fleet unit is a Battleship squadron, and come in around 2,400. Yeah they'll defeat a homesector defense, but not if there are any reinforcements. And lets face it everyone has a home-sector fleet in addition to their central territorial defenses.
Remember that the system defenses can be defeated in detail.
This is an important concept, so to make sure it's clear I will explain.
A nation has (GDP/2) points of space defenses, roughly. However, these defenses are divided up so widely that it's trivial to mass an overwhelming force to crush the defense of
any one system. A 500-point mobile fleet would easily overpower the 100 point defense of each of five colony sectors, because something like the Lanchester square law applies- you always have overwhelming superiority at the point of contact, so you can just bust up little 100 point defenses over and over. You can do the same thing with an army, in principle- drop 500 points of ground troops on a colony world to utterly squash the ground defense, then pick them up and move them to the next world while leaving a relative pittance of occupation troops behind.
The practical result is that no system defense can stand up to a reasonable invasion fleet (say, 5000 points), not as more than a speedbump. And given the way nations in the game are laid out, 5000 points is really pretty minimal for a credible invasion fleet even without defenses- because most nations have fleets in the 30000-point range and up, and so can easily stuff 5000 points of warships
per sector in anyway.
Given that any invasion will have to reckon with enemy mobile fleet assets pouring into the invaded system, battles fought
between major fleets over a defended system will be so huge in scale that the system defenses become largely irrelevant. We've seen this during the MEH war, and while the total numbers will be smaller in a more normal war*, the net effect is broadly unchanged.
*(since the defense is less concentrated but the attacking fleets are equivalently a lot smaller than the 50-100 thousand point behemoths invading the MEH)
And with everyone quite capable of saying that they'll use there "offensive" fleet as a defensive unit now we do have to blow through a third more, and the approximate equivalent of two nations worth of offensive units. Yeah. Anything less than a coalition of three has no real chance of actually winning, and even then you are going to need a lot more for it to even be called easy.
Sorchus, you're barking at shadows.
In a war between two equal-sized neighboring powers, the war will tend to drag out with relatively little shift in the 'front' of controlled systems: observe White Haven and "Red vs. Blue." Which is the same damn thing that happens under the existing rules- no change there.
In the event of a
decisive large scale battle (one where one side loses a lot more points than the other), then the situation changes... and the system defenses become little more than a tripwire. If you have 5000 points more fleet than I do, you can pile enough ships into one part of the frontier to utterly annihilate local defenses and force me to give battle on unfavorable terms.
And you can say that you have to battle it piecemeal, that hardly matters. Just because you take them on one by one still means you have to defeat the aggragate, and as it is no one has tried anyway so why make it more difficult? Say Forcelord and I want to go out in a blaze of glory, this makes it far harder to actually have a good story doing so. (Not saying we will or anything, but that it is an option and I like options.)
The difficulty exists only in your mind. Overcoming a succession of isolated 100-point or 300-point or even 500-point garrisons is
vastly easier than going head to head with a single fleet of 5000 or 10000 points. Even a moment's strategic thinking should make this clear.
Any force you could send to conquer a star system that would actually get stopped by the system defenses, or even significantly slowed down by the defenses, would be swatted like a fly if it ran into the actual
fleets the defender can bring up to counter your attack within a 12-24 hour timeframe. It wouldn't be a credible invasion fleet unless it was strong enough to overpower the defenses in the first place.
Simon_Jester wrote:Two: I have somewhat clarified the rules on the use of ground troops for planetary invasion and occupation, or at least laid out guidelines for such a situation. Among other things, I address the question of what happens if you don't bring three times the strength of the defender in your attempt to conquer a planet: a protracted ground campaign fought over the planet, which one might mentally model as something like the fighting over Guadalcanal if one chose to do so.
Simon, why? Why can't we write the story the way we want too? Why must it be battle fought over a long period, and not say a successful intimidation that forces a capitulation of the enemy outside of a few hold outs?
Because you can't successfully intimidate the enemy if you didn't bring anything to intimidate them with.
Obviously,
if the enemy elects not to fight back, you can win easily by sending a squad of infantry to hoist your flag over their capital building, problem solved. No one would stop you from writing a story where that happened- I can't for the life of me imagine why you would think for a minute that anyone would; what kind of freak of nature do you think I am?
But in the event, however unlikely, that ground-based defenders actually want to make a fight of it, and that you don't
want them to make a fight of it... well, they can make a fight of it. Unless you bring locally overwhelming force and just drown them in troops to the point where they can't organize an effective long term defense because invasion troops are landing on the heads of everyone on the planet... which requires something like a 3:1 ratio under the old rules.
Also since when was the 3 to 1 anything but a bare suggestion? Though I have no problems if the majority of non curb-stomp battles take time on the ground I do not see why it has to be in teh rulez.
I seriously don't understand why we want this to be a rules level change.
I suggested it. That doesn't mean I think it's necessary.
I'm proposing it as a clarification of a rather muddy point in the rules, because I've been asked
repeatedly to answer questions about MEH system defenses and the like. This gives us a standardized guideline. Since (and I can't believe anyone would not remember this)
the point system has some flex in it, this does not "prohibit you from writing stories," since who would want to write idiotically wanked stories about their troops overpowering all resistance effortlessly?
I want to hear what a lot of people think about this proposal. That includes you, though I'd more or less predicted in advance that you'd oppose this, because you've consistently opposed pretty much everything I've declared or proposed that has any impact on the rules, for about as far as I can remember.
Often I find myself unable to fathom your reasons for doing so. This is turning out not to be an exception to that pattern.
What if other people do not want to play the game the same way you do? I don't want to try and hold outer territory necessarily. Trading territory to expose the opposition's supply route to extended hit and run tactics should be no less valid.
Go for it. You still want some minimal ability to deter small scale attacks, because it's
stupid to have situations where a major inhabited world can be held hostage by a lone 75-point
Battlestar Annapolis threatening to drop nukes on things.
But if an actual fleet shows up, your system defenses aren't going to stop it anyway, so
hell yes trading territory to overstretch the enemy's supply routes is a valid strategy... if you're dealing with an enemy big and concentrated enough that it makes sense to go for their 'supply route.' Which makes lots of sense when fighting a large fleet, but not so much sense when fighting a force of twenty or thirty raiding cruisers.
Besides I thought we'd already dealt with the idea that raiders are going to be able to do anything significant when we talked about listening posts and ftl warning sensors. ie even a sector level deployment of hyper capable assets should be enough to protect against a certain amount of raiding. (Not to mention ASAT abilities of ground troops.)
Space defenses can be modeled as ground-based ASAT weapons fired from planetary bases, if you like.
Early warning systems are good, but they work best when you're seeing one big blip on the radar that you can mass everything you have to intercept it. Having a large, diffuse threat that can feint and strike at multiple targets, and which cannot be met by a single concentration, is much more complicated. And given FTL travel times between systems, it would require a pretty impressive network to be sure of always being able to drop an interception force in front of any enemy raider before they could get to one of your systems... at least, unless you're actually leaving permanent mobile garrison fleets in every system, which you are of course free to do.
So basically... sector level deployments are good, but in practice what are they going to do if confronted with a raiding force that splits up into dozens of separate strike groups? Or carriers that can crap out hyperspace-capable gunships from midway between two systems, threaten to attack either, and still create a thorny problem for people trying to intercept them because they're free to run around in hyperspace while their strike groups carry out the mission, a la Steve's ADN aerospace bombers from TGG?
Besides which, you're the one with all the stealth warships that presumably have at least some ability to slip by early warning networks. Surely you can see the reason why people would want fixed fortifications in their systems to deter raiders from sneaking past the border sensors, or at least prevent a raider who does so from casually obliterating the economic infrastructure of a whole star system.