Given ADB's position on the Andromedans not leaving credible threats in the LMC, before moving on to the Milky Way, you need a convincing reason that the Chomak were a strong enough nut to not crack now, but not a threat left behind. A timetable to conquer our galaxy could be all push they needed to cover the odd behavior we have seen. Perhaps if they do not move NOW it will not matter, they are dead.

To do that the Chomak need major defenses, not unlike Web, or Vudar Ion Storm generators, and a major limitation on how far they can travel outside of their space.

My suggestion on the travel question would be to have a limited transport network, perhaps super point to point transporters or warp gates. Moving the needed transport stations may make them very vulnerable to destruction, leaving them easily bottled up for now.

By Nick Samaras (Koogie) on Tuesday, June 04, 2019 - 02:21 pm: Edit

My original post was simply to point out that empires make decisions that sometimes don't work out (and with all those cases, with disasterous results).

The Andromedans were satisfied enough for whatever reason (arrogance, confidence, lack of information, lack of experience, whatever) that the Chomak and remaining LMC forces were no longer a threat that they did not upgrade the third Desecrator or bolster its defenses, or repair the crippled Desecrator, and take on most of the Milky Way (without finishing their Devastator battleships first). At a time when the alpha sector was at peak ship production.

Maybe their time table (Omega was in disarray, the alpha sector in economic exhaustion) forced them to shift focus from the broken Magellanic forces.

Perhaps the same programming that caused the lack of Andromedan innovation resulted in them under estimating the resolve of the Magellanics to continue operations against them.

Perhaps the Andromedans did not face such opposition or resolve in the conquest of Andromeda and they could not/did not adapt, and like the examples I gave originally, they made the wrong decisions.

Or perhaps this was all a ruse and there is a massive Andromedan force in the Greater Magellanic Cloud building up its forces, developing X-technology, with a dozen Desecrators and using the initial invasion as a learning/intelligence gathering exercise...

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Tuesday, June 04, 2019 - 02:22 pm: Edit

The Klingons and Lyrans conquered the Hydran Kingdom in Y87. It took the Hydrans more than 40 years to recover and build a fleet to retake their kingdom. From the standpoint of the Coalition, they could reasonably expect the Hydrans, having been defeated and driven from their kingdom a second time, to not be a serious threat for at least 20 years, giving them time to concentrate on finishing off the Kzintis (whose Homeworlds were still resisting after the Hydran homeworlds had fallen a second time). Then the Federation began making, what to the Klingons were obvious, signs of intervening in the war. So the situation changed again.

Given known history (that period between Y87 and Y133 when the Hydrans were a conquered kingdom), and the Coalition's understanding of just how the Hydrans funded their rebuilding the first time (they were not going to allow freighters full of raw materials to head into the Old Colonies this time) and the effort to construct the "firewall" bases, the Coalition decision to focus on known threats right now (the Kzinti capital worlds, the Federation) against a threat they thought would take at least 20 years to materialize is perfectly reasonable. Sorry, but it is when you take the known data points into account.

The Andromedans versus the Chomak is not the same thing.

The data the Andromedans have on the Chomak starts with what they gleaned from the Magellanic empires they defeated. Those empires FEARED the Chomak. The Chomak were able to circumnavigate the Magellanic Cloud. The defeated Magellanic empires DESTROYED one of the three Desecrators planned for the operation, and crippled the second, which destroyed the original redundancy in the communications lines back to Andromeda. Apparently whatever the resources available to the Andromedans were, they COULD NOT REPLACE THE LOST BASE OR REPAIR THE CRIPPLED ONE, which left their entire operation dependent on one communications node, and the Chomak were a threat to it.

Ignoring the Chomak with that level of knowledge does not compare to Hitler turning his back on Britain (however much the designer wanted that to basically be the Andromean rationale so that the Chomak could be the ultimate cause of Andromedan defeat, not Operation Unity.

I am sorry, but unless you wan to invent at least one more fully functional Desecrator in the Magellanic Cloud (and that is not currently an option as things stand), ignoring the Chomak and going ahead with the invasion of the Milky Way is simply not, I say again NOT, an option. No matter what you add to Chomak defenses to try to make the Andromedans ignore them, those very defenses only make it more necessary for the Andromedans to remove the direct threat to their one remaining line of communications. There is no redundancy left, and thus no threat to that one line can be tolerated.

By Nick Samaras (Koogie) on Tuesday, June 04, 2019 - 02:39 pm: Edit

Then the Andromedans bet centuries of planning and the invasion of a galaxy on that one Desecrator. And they are a strategically sound empire?

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Tuesday, June 04, 2019 - 04:47 pm: Edit

The Andromedans just do not seem to get the psychology of the empires they attack. Their plan was pretty bad. When they invaded the Alpha octant they went for the ISC first and then went galaxy wide which seems odd. They reduced many of the empires (except the Kzinti, Feds, and Klingons) to a small area of space around their capitols instead of hitting some central shipyards.

If I were the Andormedan Admiral/Overmind/Queen/Whatever I would target the Romulan/Gorn border and wipe out the ISC there to cut their route home and strand their expeditionary ships then invade the ISC proper and bring it down. Then the Romulans next as they are still reeling from the devastation of Remus and Rolandus's civil war. The Alpha powers might have solved the rest of the ISC problem themselves in vengeance for the Pacification campaign. While the defeat of the Romulans would worry the Empires no one has a strong incentive to want to defend them.

Then tackle the Gorns and the Feds (who will probably fight to support each other) and then move on.

I theorize that the Andros sort of understood that there were various empires but couldn't see them as discrete entities. Maybe conquering the LDR finally convinced them but by then the general invasion was on. I suspect their psychology is just too alien and they were playing by a different rulebook and were frustrated by how they could not predict the Alpha powers doing what they should and the Alpha powers found the Andro strategy incomprehensible too.

By Nick Samaras (Koogie) on Tuesday, June 04, 2019 - 05:01 pm: Edit

I wonder how the galactic powers would react if the Andromedans had taken out a more major power than the LDR. Say the Hydrans for example, after they retook their capital.

What if the Andromedans had sent a more powerful force and wiped out the Hydrans before they rebuilt their empire. What would the Klingons and Lyrans have done? Would they have let the Hydrans die first and then together try to retake Hydran territory? Or would they have assisted the Hydrans based on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"?

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Tuesday, June 04, 2019 - 05:40 pm: Edit

Nick Samaras:

No, they did not. They bet on THREE Desecrators, and then had to play the hand they were dealt when only one survived. There is a difference.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Wednesday, June 05, 2019 - 08:05 am: Edit

Going by the LMC hex map from Module C5, a "round trip" of the outermost edge of the Cloud, departing from one side of the Chomak Cluster and arriving at the other, would cover 64 hexes of "foreign" space - if one were to make a conservative assumption that the Chomak "supply grid" (in Federation and Empire terms) extends no farther than the Cluster itself.

While (MS1.26) states that Magellanic ships are no faster than Andromedan ships operating off the RTN, we don't yet know exactly what that means, since the details on the Andromedan side of things might need to wait until F&E Andro War is in the works. In any case, a ship capable of moving six hexes a turn in operational movement while "in supply" (or a "cruising speed" of Warp 7 according to this file), such as a Federation Galactic Survey Cruiser, would take 10.667 "ship turns" (or 5.333 years) to cover that distance; a ship with 5 hexes of operational movement per turn would take 12.8 "ship turns" (or 6.4 years) to do the same; while a ship with 4 hexes of operational movement per turn would take 16 "ship turns" (or 8 years) to cover the same distance. In the post-Unity LMC, a first-generation X-ship such as a GSX, which has seven hexes of operational movement per turn while "in supply", could cover the distance in 9.143 "ship turns", or 4.571 years.

As it happens, there are rules in F&E (509.1-O) and (509.5) which cover the use of a Hydran Caravan tug (R9.20) with a fighter conveyor pallet (R9.22) in support of the Hydran Expedition. In this instance, the tug and pallet combo provides twenty "ship-turns" of supplies, along with 27 spare "fighter factors". Given that the P-FC has 27 cargo boxes' worth of spare fighters in SFB terms, and that the Caravan itself has 32 cargo boxes on its SSD, this would seemingly equate to 1.6 cargo boxes per "ship turn" - but I would defer to the F&E experts on that front. In any event, the key point is that each ship in the Hydran Expedition, to include the tug itself, may draw from this stack of "ship turns" and still count as being "in supply". (On a side note, I was speculating elsewhere on whether or not such rules ought to be adjusted for use by Paravian tugs and/or raid motherships, when supporting their own long-range raiding expeditions.)

To get back to the Chomak, if one were to design a tug and pod combination which enabled them to stockpile enough "ship-turns" of supplies for a circumnavigation of the Cloud, one could then account for the occasional task force of 3-4 ships being sent out on such long-range expeditions. Perhaps the Chomak might be granted an exception to (MS1.26), which might both allow them fewer "ship-turns" required to get around the Cloud, and perhaps give them an operational advantage - albeit not a decisive one - when the time comes to deal with the Andromedan threat to the Cluster itself.

Not least if they had prior arrangements with the two-to-three Jindarian Caravans of the Cloud, in which the latter were willing to trade for additional supplies. After all, from the perspective of the Jindarians, who have been in the LMC for over 100,000 years, even the era of the Chomak Community has been a mere blink of an eyelid...

By Nick Samaras (Koogie) on Wednesday, June 05, 2019 - 02:00 pm: Edit

Movement in the Cloud is limited to four hexes per turn based on the F&E rules for the Cloud that were around eons ago.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Wednesday, June 05, 2019 - 02:26 pm: Edit

If the Magellanics are slower then the Andros off the RTN then they are slower then Alpha Octant ships. Part of the Andro background is that in "off the RTN" strategic speeds they are much slower then the Alphas to the point that setting up big attacks using multiple motherships becomes very difficult because the Alphas have a lot of time to react if they come in on normal engines.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Wednesday, June 05, 2019 - 02:27 pm: Edit

Or, if the Cloud slows them as Nick says, maybe everyone is just as slow as the Andros in the cloud.

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Wednesday, June 05, 2019 - 03:53 pm: Edit

SPP;

For what it may be worth, my suggestion on the Chomak was acknowledging that some of the background needs to change, eliminating the circum-navigations was assumed, but not explicitly laid out.

My intent was to lay out a workable Chomak, with the least alterations to the current history.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Wednesday, June 05, 2019 - 04:35 pm: Edit

Jon Murdock:

Some kind of cross posting error in that I posted a reply to Nick Samaras's 2:39 pm post at 5:40 pm, and at the time I did your 4;47 pm missive was not there,

Suffice to say the Andromedan campaign was more economic. They basically for the most part avoided directly confronting the star fleets and used the RTN to attack the logistical and economic supports before the Star Fleets could defend them. I admit that I wrote the article that explains all this in Module C3A, but given what the Andromedans were it works and makes sense. It is the same strategy they used in the Magellanic Cloud.

You have to realize that the Andromedan campaign is more an "internal" problem. There is no "front line" as there is say on the Federation-Klingon front, or the Romulan-Gorn front. You cannot deploy the 5th battle fleet to block an Andromedan drive on Coloden IV, because the Andromedans will not go through the 5th Battle Fleet but will attack Reston III instead. They can attack anywhere in your empire, there is no one direction from which they have to come as is the case with a Klingon invasion trying to reach Earth.

The result was that the battle fleets were dispersed trying to guard everything and the logistics system to keep the fleets in operation began to collapse. Given the weakness of the Andromedans in any kind of major fleet battle, they had to force the star fleets to disperse so that they could in effect mass against small groups of ships at a time to win, and that is what they did. And they did not want any empire not under threat to provide logistic support to one under threat, so they divided them to defeat them in detail.

By Nick Samaras (Koogie) on Wednesday, June 05, 2019 - 05:42 pm: Edit

The in-universe reason given for the lower movement in the cloud was increased density of interstellar matter. But it seems more of game balance issue as the cloud is small and moving six hexes makes everything too readily reachable.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Thursday, June 06, 2019 - 01:51 am: Edit

SPP:

Makes sense but it seems the plan was doomed. The Andromedans did not have an economic base in the galaxy or the means to build ships so they were stuck with what they had. Eventually they would have to start attacking capitols. Based on the history as I remember it this shot them in the foot. If I remember right every major empire but the Kzinti, the Feds, and the Klingons (the latter two due to their "shaky" alliance) was reduced to effective control of only a small cluster of hexes around their homeworlds.

Eventually the Andromedans were going to have to attack the capitols and the bulk of the opposing fleet would be there. A pair of Dominator-sized ships cannot take a capitol. Even a pair of their battleships would be hard pressed to pull that off. That means eventually charging in a mass of Andro ships under normal drive to attack simultaneously. While the Andromedan disdev limitation means only two ships can use that device the secret advantage they do have is that they have no command limits when they go in under normal drive. In F&E terms they would be the only power that could show up at a capitol with more compot then the defense and the defending fleet.

Now admittedly this attack would require coming in slow so the enemy can mass all their ships but they are still dealing with command limits. If I were the Andro "admiral" I would take all my ships early on and gut the capitol when some of the defending fleets were still at the border. Admittedly that makes for much different history. I am curious though how it will be covered in Andro War in F&E. In normal F&E rules the Alphas best bet is probably to hunker down at the capitol which has about a third of the economy of most empires anyways (so they can continue to churn out warships) and meet them and beat them when they arrive.

I guess it could be seen as the Andros isolating the various Alpha powers in preparation for such an attack? Perhaps when their battleships were ready? It does concentrate the target empire's fleets but keeps other Alpha power fleets away.

By Jeffrey George Anderson (Jeff) on Thursday, June 06, 2019 - 11:23 am: Edit

For my 0.02 quatloos worth, I remember reading that the Andromedans attacked the Alpha Octant full force way earlier than they had planned because they saw the massive build-up of militaries during the ISC actions...

... Aaaand it made me think of how Germany went to war with France and Britain before they'd built up the Kriegsmarine.

As to why they also stepped up operations in the Omega Octant, I gotta admit that, as much as I like the Omega Octant, I don't know its history that well, so I don't know if there was any particular expectation of potential resistance resurgence going on there at that time.

Then again, who knows...

Maybe the Andromedans, who WERE able to travel between the regions, weren't as aware of how total their isolations were and thought the Omega regions were in communication with the Alpha regions, and believed they HAD to act against them simultaneously.

And, yes, I also honestly think that they felt they HAD to act against the Alphans when they did despite not having finished things up in the Cloud.

It was a gamble and, again with the comparison to Hitler, they took the risk and it cost them. Big time.

By Norman Dizon (Normandizon) on Thursday, June 06, 2019 - 12:37 pm: Edit

Jeffrey, there is a Dominator hovering outside your window. Two MIB Robots are at your door asking for you.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Thursday, June 06, 2019 - 01:30 pm: Edit

I suspect the Andros rushed because the X-Ships were becoming common. Andros have a hard time fighting X-ships in my experience and the Andromedans did not have the infrastructure to upgrade their fleet or build ships tailored to fight them. Focusing on bigger satship sizes is really their only shift.

If they send a message back about what they are facing it is what? 20 to 50 years before the new ships show up. Then you are facing X2 ships. The Andromedans should pick a fight with the Selt galaxy. That they could probably win. You are already immune to their secondary heavy weapon.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Thursday, June 06, 2019 - 01:37 pm: Edit

Jon Murdock:

Again, the issue was economics. The Andromedans were attacking the sources of wealth, not the things that turned those sources into actual wealth.

You have a capital shipyard, but if the freighters that are bringing the raw materials to the shipyard to be converted into ships stop coming, the shipyard shuts down. You have that wonderful industrial base that can produce the widgets that keep the ships operating, but if it has no raw materials to create the widgets, the ships start having problems with normal maintenance and remaining operational.

You need dilithium crystals to operate your warp drives, and if the freighters are no longer bringing those in from the distant mines...

As noted, the Andromedans could not defeat any of the star fleets (except some of the really small ones) and conquer the empires, so they resorted to destroying what those star fleets needed in order to exist at all.

Because they were "everywhere," there was no "front line" where their advance could be resisted, they concentrated on wrecking the economic pillars that supported the star fleets and basically avoided major battles unless they could arrange odds heavily in their favor.

In a sense they operated more like Orion Pirates in that they could appear anywhere in an empire to make an attack, but a star fleet could not be everywhere in an empire to mount a defense. And while the Orions would rarely commit massacre (if you destroy everything, it is hard to come back and loot it again, that includes mugging freighters), the Andromedans committed mass slaughter (so the freighters could not continue to carry goods to the core regions, so the mines could not continue to produce ores to be converted into metals in the core regions, so etc.).

And they were winning, until the Darwin. That singular event changed everything because the Star Fleets now knew to hunt down the RTN nodes, and so restrict the ability of the Andromedans to strike anywhere. Prior to the Darwin the workings of the RTN were not known. The Star Fleets went from an increasingly hopeless defense to a grand strategic offensive that broke the back of the RTN, limiting the Andromedans' ability to strike anywhere and forcing them to defend their remaining nodes in hopeless circumstances.

As noted in the background, in Y195 the Andromedans destroyed the LDR and a Romulan Starbase. This was part of their selective terror campaign to force the Star fleets to go on static defense at what they thought were key points, while the Andromedans would continue to slaughter the merchant ships and colonies that were the life blood of the star fleets. And by attacking those, they were attacking the core of the Star Fleets as crews began to mutiny (even in the Federation) to take their ships to defend their own home planets rather than act in concert with the fleet as a whole.

The reason it (the Andromedan invasion) failed is that the Darwin found out how the RTN worked, and that every Andromedan base was a key link in it, and destroy those and you break the links and limit the Andromedans' strategic maneuverability advantage.

The point here is that the Andromedans waged a war they could win (wrecking the economies and causing the militaries of the Milky Way to collapse for lack of logistical support, just as they had done in the Magellanic Cloud) rather than a war they could never win (facing the Star Fleets in open battle ship to ship). As long as the secret of the RTN (which penetrated all through the Alpha and Omega Octants, set up before the Andromedans began their offensive) was not lost, the Andromedans held the initiative, and their smaller numbers did not really matter. (Although if they had had more ships, they might have won sooner.)

Jeffrey George Anderson:

Always remember that Hitler believed England and France would not support Poland. He thought attacking Poland would not trigger a larger war. He did not "go to war with England and France before he had built up the Kriegsmarine," England and France went to war with Germany catching Hitler by surprise.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Thursday, June 06, 2019 - 05:08 pm: Edit

In all seriousness, barring the bad luck of the Darwin discovering the secret of the RTN and surviving to deliver that data to the Federation, and through the Federation the rest of the Alpha Octant, the one real strategic mistake the Andromedans made was not immediately withdrawing from the Alpha Octant. Had they done so, the Alpha Octant forces probably would not have initiated Operation Unity. And the Andromedans could have completed the conquest of the Omega Octant, and built up their forces and invaded the Alpha Octant at a later (much later, say after defeating the Xorkelians) date and basically having the logistics of the rest of the Milky Way to deal with the Alpha Octant.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Thursday, June 06, 2019 - 05:31 pm: Edit

Jon Murdock:

I think what is going on is you are thinking of the Andromedans being a "traditional opponent" in the mold of the Klingon Empire versus the Federation. The Klingon Empire, to defeat the Federation, has to essentially build a logistics network from their capital to the Federation capital. The Federation defends against the axis of advance, and basically everything in the rest of the Federation is a "rear area" which continues to provide raw materials to the Federation capital complex to build the war machine that is resisting the Klingon advance.

Yes, there are pirates, but again they are not practicing "massacre" but their own version of economics (they want to rob that freighter again, raid the colony again, etc.).

So there are no where near as many Federation ships in the Federation rear area because the Klingons (and later the Romulans on their own axis of advance) cannot really interfere with the Federation rear area. While there are economic factors, the war is largely "traditional." The bulk of the Star Fleet opposes the Klingons and the bulk of the Klingon star fleet clashing with them creates a "front line."

The Andromedans did not operate that way. There was no front line. The "core" of every empire was basically secure (a larger area in the case of the Federation and Klingons and some others). The Andromedans could not even attack and destroy the core regions of the Hydran Kingdom or the Romulan Star Empire. Not as long as their basic economic systems were operational to keep their defenses intact.

So the Andromedan plan was to destroy the economies. And they could do that because they could strike anywhere. There was no safe "rear area" from which freighters could deliver resources to the prime manufacturing point to support the war effort. To drive home that point the Andromedans also initiated terror operations (the LDR, Romulan Star Base Sanguinax). The object to further isolate the various empires from each other and make them concentrate more on defense as the Andromedans continued to wreck their economies to the point where even bases began to fall because outside supply (even though the bases are supply nodes, they do not create the supplies but marshal the materials that arrive) was no longer reaching them.

The Andromedan War was not like any war that had previously been fought in the Alpha (or Omega) octants (or the Magellanic Cloud). It was fought according to how the Andromedans wanted to fight it, and as long as they had the secret of the RTN, they controlled the tempo of operations, retained the initiative and dictated the terms of the fight.

But the Andromedans could not win a "stand up fight" with the larger empires unless they were starved of resources and weakened as a result. And that is what the Andromedans were doing. They intended to defeat the Alpha Octant in detail, breaking it into smaller and smaller bits and destroying each in its turn.

All that being said, I agree that attacking both Alpha and Omega at the same time was a bad overall strategic decision on their part since the two were in no way supportive, but it does not change that with only one desecrator remaining in the Magellanic Cloud, they could not ignore the Chomak, and could not begin an invasion of the Milky Way at all until the Chomak were defeated.

By Jeffrey George Anderson (Jeff) on Thursday, June 06, 2019 - 06:44 pm: Edit

SPP...

... i KNEW that...

AAARRRRGGHHHH!!!

Almost makes me feel as dumb as when I hit the "Intruder Alert!" alarm the LAST time there was a Dominator outside my window!!


All that being said, back in the `80's, I'd formed the opinion (rightly or wrongly) that the wars presented in the history of the SFU were meant as analogies for the great wars the United States was involved in during the twentieth century (to that point), with the Andromedan War being an analogy for Vietnam.

Part of the reason was the lack of true "Fronts" in the Vietnam War; attacks could come from anywhere, and troops had to be ready 24/7, something similar (at least to me) about what I've read on the Andromedan War.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Friday, June 07, 2019 - 12:42 am: Edit

The empires of the Omega Octant were fighting more of an uphill battle during the Sixth Cycle.

Technologically-speaking, the first war cruisers and war destroyers were only fielded there in Y187, while "volatile warp" gunboats and first-generation X-ships would not appear until after the invasion was well underway.

Logistics proved a pressing issue also. The numerous Vari cells and Hiver Queens had been more or less able to collaborate when faced with "traditional" enemies, but found it difficult to keep each individual cell or Hive afloat when the Andromedans set out to isolate them from one another; not least since the invaders could effectively destroy an entire Hive in one go by assassinating its Queen. The Alunda were limited by the biological constraints of their living ships. The unexpected prospect of developing "Sig-Tech" would not, in and of itself, have been able to turn the tide. Even more "traditional" metal-hull empires like the Koligahr and Trobrin were struggling to keep things together, despite (or perhaps because of) the added firepower (and associated cost) of their small and large civilian freighters.

To make matters worse, the only species to uncover the truth behind the RTN, the Iridani, was unable to make their findings widely known until after Andromedan power had been broken by Operation Unity, leaving the others struggling to find a viable way out of the crisis.


But then, there were the Souldra to consider. Omega was faced with not one, but two full-scale invasions in the Sixth Cycle. While each Omega ship or base defeated by these crystalline invaders was one less which the Andromedans themselves had to destroy, the challenge posed to the Andros was threefold: there was a distinct set of tactical mismatches in play for both sides when trying to fight one another; worlds drained of life were no good for the Andros to try and conquer; while the Souldra home base at the Black Sun system was inconveniently located deep in the Alpha/Omega Void. Plus, there was no guarantee that the Loriyill, even if left unchallenged, would eventually succeed in ending the Souldra onslaught. And even then, how much time would the Andros wait to let the Loriyill mop things up before they made plans against the Home Stars (and/or the Splinter Collective) in turn?

In short, while the Andros were on course to conquer the Omega Octant already, and likely would have done so earlier had the invasion of Alpha been deferred, one might wonder to what (if any) extent the presence of the Loriyill and Souldra might have complicated matters. As in, with more Omega forces being defeated by the Andros directly, there'd be fewer ships left to help the Loriyill fight the Souldra (and thus enable the Loriyill to spare the resources needed to reach the Black Sun), and thus a greater potential for more problems were the Andros forced to fight the Souldra more directly.

By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Friday, June 07, 2019 - 10:38 am: Edit

SPP:

I do get the difference in the nature of the war. I am curious though how F&E: Andro War will try to convey this in the system because under F&E rules the Andros are doomed. The Kzinti were reduced basically just their capitol and the off-map areas in the General War and were still maintaining all the ships they had and building new ones. In F&E terms smart move if the Andros can appear anywhere is to give up everything outside of the capitol. The capitol produces a ton of the empire's supply base and F&E has no maintenance costs so the Alpha fleet will just keep growing and knocking out all the other logistical points will hurt the economy but it will not bring down an Empire.

This is in F&E terms. I get that the Andros do not allow for a front line. They just hit the Alpha where they are not. I do suspect major rule changes will be needed to make Androwars work.

By Steve Petrick (Petrick) on Friday, June 07, 2019 - 01:29 pm: Edit

Jon Murdock:

Valid question and something the Federation & Empire players are going to have to resolve. If you just stacked up known Andromedan Order of Battle against known Alpha Octant Order of Battle, the game would be over because the Andromedans simply cannot fight that kind of war.

As to the Kzintis, again, the Kzintis capital (admittedly in its case because of the way the rules work) was never cut off from the rest of the Kzinti economy (albeit mostly reduced to just the off map area). Freighters still operated and brought the raw materials from the off map provinces to the Capital to be converted into the sinews of war.

Strategically, the Andromedans only work if they can cut off everything outside of the capital hexes, and can raid at will into the capital hexes (to destroy shipping and minor colonies, not attack the major homeworlds themselves).

That is not "rules changes," but "rules for Andromedans."

Supply still works normally, that is if you are within six hexes of a supply point, you are in supply, and disruption works normally, i.e., the Andromedans can block one of those six hexes resulting in your being out of supply.

But how do you account for the Andromedans not just disrupting a province (by putting one viper in it) and basically slaughtering merchant men in multiple provinces resulting in a gradual reduction in how far you can be and be in supply?

I do not know how the Andromedan War will be handled in Federation & Empire, but given the fact that the Andromedans historically had far fewer ships than the Alpha Octant powers, simply lining up battle fleets and rolling dice is not playable.