Ground Unit Question.

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BLHarrison
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Ground Unit Question.

Post by BLHarrison »

Am I correct in the belief that ground units (not wet Navy units) can have hangers? Such a unit could be used to represent a combined arms unit that includes facilities to create/maintain forward airfields and operate with attached air units (such as a real life MAU/SOC unit with a SEABEE unit attached). Of course adding AA to a ground unit could represent both ground based flack units as well as any attached Tactical Air units, but still bringing some of your flights down for tactical air support and baseing them might be useful
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Tyrel Lohr
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Re: Ground Unit Question.

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

BLHarrison wrote:Am I correct in the belief that ground units (not wet Navy units) can have hangers? Such a unit could be used to represent a combined arms unit that includes facilities to create/maintain forward airfields and operate with attached air units (such as a real life MAU/SOC unit with a SEABEE unit attached). Of course adding AA to a ground unit could represent both ground based flack units as well as any attached Tactical Air units, but still bringing some of your flights down for tactical air support and baseing them might be useful
All ground combat units (with the exception of Aircraft) will be able to be equipped with Hangar and Launch Bay technologies, yes. What this represents depends on the unit type, and some are more obvious than others. Installations with basing tech are airfields, Seacraft are aircraft carriers, and Troops that can base Flights have integral air combat support.

Aircraft are ground-based Flight units that follow all of the same rules as Flights, just they can only be used in ground combat scenarios. However, they are always capable of operating in an atmosphere, where Starships and Flights have to purchase Atmospheric tech in order to do the same.

Atmospheric Starships and Flights can directly participate in ground combat scenario and are treated as Aircraft for this purpose. Their Anti-Ship weapons translate into Anti-Ground or Anti-Sea, and their Anti-Fighter weapons translate into Anti-Air.

In the end Flights are still more versatile than Aircraft, but the Aircraft are cheaper if you want to use them for ground combat purposes. But why would you want to even build and use Aircraft, you might ask? Well, if your enemy has lousy Anti-Air capabilities, then building a large invasion force of aerial combat forces would make it that much easier to wipe out their ground forces with little to no losses on your part.

Alternatively, you could build some small Atmospheric Starship bombers to fill that mission role just as effectively, and still be useful in space combat. The only problem with that is that the Aircraft can be built more quickly, allowing you to replace combat losses faster.

-Tyrel
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Re: Ground Unit Question.

Post by Gareth_Perkins »

Tyrel Lohr wrote:All ground combat units (with the exception of Aircraft) will be able to be equipped with Hangar and Launch Bay technologies, yes. -Tyrel
What, no airborne carriers? That doesn't seem right!
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Re: Ground Unit Question.

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Gareth_Perkins wrote:What, no airborne carriers? That doesn't seem right!
While it would be nice to model some pulpish units like the Valiant from Doctor Who, you end up with a "Russian Doll" effect where you can end up nesting Flights within Flights or Aircraft within Aircraft. Special rules that increase the cost of Basing equipment for these units could make it less attractive as an option, but it would still be prone to massive abuse. A player could conceivably perfect a practically infinite-sized combat force of nested Flights/Aircraft that would be individually crap that, in aggregate, could completely overwhelm any potential opponent.

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Re: Ground Unit Question.

Post by Gareth_Perkins »

Tyrel Lohr wrote: A player could conceivably perfect a practically infinite-sized combat force of nested Flights/Aircraft that would be individually crap that, in aggregate, could completely overwhelm any potential opponent.

-Tyrel
That sounds suspiciously like there's a bug in the mechanic you are using to determine what size of craft can be transported by or launched from another craft,
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Re: Ground Unit Question.

Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Gareth_Perkins wrote:That sounds suspiciously like there's a bug in the mechanic you are using to determine what size of craft can be transported by or launched from another craft,
SIZ is relative for each unit type, so there is no way of distinguishing a difference between a SIZ 1 Flight and a SIZ 1 Troop. The only way to even try to ensure that a SIZ 1 Flight couldn't base another SIZ 1 Flight would be to make 1 Hangar cost more than a SIZ 1 Flight could afford. Doing so would make Hangars (and by extension, Flights and Aircraft) useless because it would cost more to base them than they are worth as combat units.

So it is a game mechanic issue, but isn't a bug. It could probably be mostly patched by simply doubling the mass costs of Basing equipment tech for Flights and Aircraft, but the logical inconsistency of allowing a based unit to base other units has seemed easier to sidestep completely by preventing it from happening in the first place.

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Post by Charles Lewis »

Would it be sufficient to simply say that any unit with any sort of basing capability cannot be based on another unit?
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Post by Gareth_Perkins »

Charles Lewis wrote:Would it be sufficient to simply say that any unit with any sort of basing capability cannot be based on another unit?
Perhaps,

What about "units with basing capacity may never base units of an equal or greater size"

Maybe basing should have an extremely limited ability to be "compressed" by TL as it rises? Most SciFi makes the assumption that most transports have an extremely limited ability to do anything else (i.e.: why doesn't the russian doll problem arise in the real world? Because the transports have no combat-ability), so most transports (e.g.: carriers) should be vulnerable in other ways perhaps?
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Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Gareth_Perkins wrote:
Charles Lewis wrote:Would it be sufficient to simply say that any unit with any sort of basing capability cannot be based on another unit?
Perhaps,

What about "units with basing capacity may never base units of an equal or greater size"
That would not really work as a blanket statement, as a SIZ 1 Starship can base a SIZ 5 Flight so long as it meets the minimum equipment requirement to do so. As a rule applied solely to Flights and Aircraft it could work, but it is just so much simply to just say that Flights and Aircraft cannot purchase actual Basing equipment in order to bypass the entire potential for abuse.

An optional rule could be added later on allowing "flying aircraft carriers" from being a possibility, but even then it will be difficult to balance that ability without ending up with a "Russian doll" fiasco.

Maybe basing should have an extremely limited ability to be "compressed" by TL as it rises? Most SciFi makes the assumption that most transports have an extremely limited ability to do anything else (i.e.: why doesn't the russian doll problem arise in the real world? Because the transports have no combat-ability), so most transports (e.g.: carriers) should be vulnerable in other ways perhaps?
I don't like making unit design exceptions for specific equipment types, because that makes the rules inconsistent. The better solution is, for the troublesome technologies, to increase their base Mass Cost values to a high enough degree to prevent small units from abusing them. If Hangar starts at 40 Mass and Launch starts at 30 Mass, then an empire at TL 0 would have to allocate 70 Mass to be guaranteed to bring a 75 Mass SIZ 1 Flight into battle. By TL 5 this would reach the ~35 equipment mass for 75 flight mass ratio, and even then small escort carriers won't be able to bring nearly the same number of fighters to bear that a larger carrier could.

-Tyrel
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