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I've just finished playing through a combat for a (Star Trek) pbem game I'm running and something odd came up,

The Federation player has recently had problems with systems rebelling after pirate raids, and was in the process of retaking one of them. He had built up a pair of fleets, one with three squadrons of combat-ships and one with four squadrons of transport ships loaded with marines. And so sent them both in with landing planned for later in the turn.

The rebellious system had a poor economy and had only built up a few flights based on the planet to defend itself, and elected for a defence scenario which the Federation fleet readily accepted.

His overall flagship was a cruiser with CR7, which by letter of the rules means that all of his squadrons must be in the fight (none in reserve). With fighter opposition this would mean that his transports where going to suffer. Instead he elected to use a destroyer as flagship, allowing him to keep the transports back while the warships faced the fighters.

Now, I've considered this situation before, but it's the first time it has come up in battle. Whenever transports or civilian shipping are involved in a battle it's often best to use a sub-optimal command ship in order to keep them safe from harm.

Whilst it's an acceptable solution, it does seem somewhat counter-intuitive that the smaller vessel is better at keeping the transports safe than a command ship!

I'm currently working on a Honor Harrington conversion for VBAM and am working around this problem by eliminating CR completely, and simply allowing a player to hold reserve formations equal to the number of squadrons by which he outnumbers the enemy (instead of CR I'm using Flag points to allow the flagship to influence the battles duration, etc - and some hard limits on what can and can't be a squadron flagship, and maximum squadron sizes).

Has anyone else had this problem arise and what was your solution?

I apply the "3.6.3.11 Assignments Phase" rules from the start.

Specifically :

A Task Force flagship can only be assigned if it has the highest
command rating of any ship in the Task Force. If more than one ship has the same, highest command rating, the player may choose which ship will become the Task Force flagship.

Under the default rules, that only applies when selecting a replacement after the initial command vessel is destroyed (or moved to reserves after being damaged).

The only exceptions I allow are :
1)Crippled ships can be bypassed regardless of command rating.
2)Ships with an Elite Officer who posseses "Command" skills can be assigned over a nominally better vessel. Of course, I do not allow frequent reassignment - pulling a renowned officer from a Battlecruiser command to run a Destroyer tends to go over poorly with both the military and the civilian population. I only allow transfers in a few situations :
a)Current ship is crippled/destroyed.
b)New ship is a clear promotion (moving from previous generation ship to current, or small to large)
c)New ship takes advantage of the officer's skills and the old doesn't (officer has Fighter related skills, moving from non-carrier to carrier).


In the specific scenario, a player in a game run by me would have had to have made one of the following choices :
1)Send the whole group and risk the transports.
2)Do not send the Cruiser(s) at all - reduce the overall firepower of the group and increase the risk of the operation. This is almost as cheesy as the basic situation, but at least there is the price of not having the big ship's firepower available.
3)Send the transports in a turn later - after the rebellion's military assets have been neutralized.
4)Find a Destroyer that has a 'Command' Elite officer to be the flagship.

From what I understand, the CR limits the number of squadrons you have active during combat, the excess squadrons being kept in reserve, but nothing says you can start with just one squadron and keep everything else in reserve.

The CR should be a limit "up to", not a requisite must have. Even then, if you have more than CR warships , you can create CR squadrons and keep the transport in the excess ones.

That's especially true in a defensive scenario, where the transports could stayed very far away from the advancing warparty.

Cheers,

That makes a lot more sense (I must have misread the reinforcements pool rules at some point),

Although with some backgrounds I can see that being able to keep squadrons safe "at will" being a fairly nasty tactic (I suppose the scout rules for "including" squadrons make a lot of sense in that context).

It probably would never have come up if it was a ship-on-ship engagement, but because it was flights (which you cannot engage directly) it had the potential to get very nasty... Thinking further perhaps he should have assigned warships to his transport squadrons as escorts anyway, certainly something to discuss with the group at length,

Around page 53 of the core rules there is mention that the only way to keep ships out (beyond a lack of command) is the use of Scouts/Intel to exclude the ships.

I would interpret the lower quality ship taking command of a task force to keep ships out of the battle as the main command ship keeping command of all the ships while a vanguard detachment is sent forward to deal with the minor defenders.

/sulfurdown