New Ground Combat System

Playtesting & Rules Development
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Tyrel Lohr
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Post by Tyrel Lohr »

Charles Lewis wrote:I'm not sure making ground units much cheaper is a good thing. Consider the cost of the US fielding a few divisions in a pair of low-intensity conflicts.
If the average ground unit cost 1/2 to maintain, then having 20 of them on a major world would cost 10 EP per turn to maintain. Now, if a portion of those units were lighter forces that cost only 1/3 to 1/4 to maintain, you could drop the cost to a degree, and even moreso if some or all of the ground units are placed into reserve status.

The enlargement of ground forces would still have the effect of making it expensive to maintain an active fighting force abroad; you are going to need more troops to have a chance of taking a major planet; invasions of major planets would become very costly affairs for both sides.
Rainer wrote:That might not be a bad thing though there should be some incentive not to stack dozens of units on every frontier low census planet. Otherwise you could have situations where you simply stack enough units on a planet so that you can be absolutely sure that the enemy cannot eliminate them all in one turn.
Possibly a hard limit equal to 4 x Census? Any more than that and you would need to emplace some sort of barracks or something to help house the additional troops.
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Post by MarkG88 »

Charles Lewis wrote:I'm not sure making ground units much cheaper is a good thing. Consider the cost of the US fielding a few divisions in a pair of low-intensity conflicts.
A worthy point, but a big part of this cost is paying for an all volunteer military (higher wages and recruiting costs and bonuses to maintain the experienced troops). In a VBAM setting, the empires with merit based governments would have ground units with higher maintenance ratings. BUT the costs of the military equipment, if massed produced in an orderly, none Pork Barrel influenced way, wouldn't be as expensive as our military hardware is. So ground units would be cheap, and should be cheaper if they're going to be less abstract (like the present VBAM system) and more specific (basically division size).
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Charles Lewis
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Post by Charles Lewis »

Who says space empires will be any freer from pork projects than we are?
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Post by MarkG88 »

Charles Lewis wrote:Who says space empires will be any freer from pork projects than we are?
Pithy reply: would you have the cojones to to charge the Emperor a credit more for the Death Star? :wink:

Reasoned response: it would depend on the the style of government, the corruption level, etc. But in general, a more enlightened and organized society in general typically comes to mind in your basic space campaign setting.

An average U.S. armor division costs roughly 1/10 of what a CVN does (based on Dunnigan's "How to make War" book(s) this is the rough figure). Since the proposed ground combat system is now basically simulating division-ish sized this can be the ruler for breaking down the costs both initial build and maintenance. I do think that it should be tied in with census though.

Census is "under used" in VBAM right now and future ground units will be population intensive even if most of the people are in a support and/or maintenance position (similar to our forces in Iraq: 160,000 troops more or less, only about 16,000 guys with guns going out on a daily basis).
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Post by MarkG88 »

mwaschak wrote:
Rainer wrote: Though I'd rather see some combat between divisions in a typical campaign.
I wouldn't mind that at all. It would be closer to Steve's GSCR system. I always wanted to make something that looked like WiF which some of your wargamers may know. That would be a serious commitment to play out though :) .

-Jay
Yeah, that hearkens back to GDW's "Invasion Earth" where you had regimental and brigade sized special forces and and mercs up through Imperial Army sized units with corps and divisions being the bulk of both armies. The presentation was cool (icosagon map of Earth flattened with the scale at 1,500 km per hex approximately). The combat system was...dry though. The corps and armies were all same size (worth five and twenty-five division respectively) so they should have been broken down making the division the largest operational unit (there were markers for army groups). Gunboat flotillas served as fighters for Solomani Confederation (defenders) and whomever had "space supremacy" could bombard from inner orbit box (premise was the Solomani Confederation [Terrans] had lost big civil war with Third Imperium and was holding out so its fleet is vastly outnumbered here).
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Post by MarkG88 »

Tyrel Lohr wrote: Possibly a hard limit equal to 4 x Census? Any more than that and you would need to emplace some sort of barracks or something to help house the additional troops.
Tyrel, I like this suggestion. That keeps the troop level on the frontier manageable unless you're willing to build up infrastructure necessary to support larger garrison (the barracks requirement).
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Emiricol
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Post by Emiricol »

I agree in principle too. Although since Census isn't a direct linear progression, a 1 Census system with 1 ground unit is in an interesting position.
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Post by jygro »

Emiricol wrote:I think some of the core stuff from the BattleTech conversion could be tweaked for what you mean. Light, Medium, Heavy, Assault units w/special abilities, with heavy focus on transporting ground units, and ground combat that can last several turns! Needs some heavy work to be usable as a more generic large-scale ground combat sub system though.
I have been looking at the battleforce 2 stuff for my solo campaign. In that I have decided to make each Assault level 10 points worth of mecha.
For transport purposes:
Light = 1pt
Medium = 2pts
Heavy = 3pts
Assault = 4pts

I'm still working on how it all comes together, but I'm close (I think).
-Bren
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Post by Emiricol »

Nice idea. It sounds like it should work pretty well.
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