A cheaper conversion for 4-pt escort program will help out the cash-strapped Alliance when they are feeling the cash problems when the Coalition is swarming over the borders.

If the Kzinti's replace 6EFFs (from their build schedule) they are saving 3 EPs to go build something else.

By Daniel G. Knipfer (Dgknipfer) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 02:05 pm: Edit

If the conversion cost for the H-AH, K-E4A, Z-EFF & CLE, and the F-ECL where changed to .5 EP would that work for the pour & old escorts?

Then if the HDW-E, K-AD6, Z-BCE, and any future NCA-E (including R-FHM) & CA-E based escorts where changed to 2 EP would that work for the heavy and more capable escorts?

No change on the cost of Lyran escorts, plasma escorts, or the F-NAC because they fit the range of average escorts for their race. Is this worth proposing?

By Craig Tenhoff (Cktenhoff) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 02:23 pm: Edit

Not sure about only 0.5 EPs for a F-ECL. IIRC it is a 4-6/2-4 and gets the [1] FCR factor later in the war (can't remember the year right now).

I know I often cripple the F-ECL as the inner escort and then fix it for 1 EP making it very cost effective escort.

Besides that, the list looks good. The Klingons may still not convert E4As, but they now seem more cost effective.

By Daniel G. Knipfer (Dgknipfer) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 02:35 pm: Edit

Okay, I had forgotten that the F-ECL got the [1] FCR bonus. Any complaints or disagreements with the others? Any pour escorts missing from the list?

By Christopher E. Fant (Cfant) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 03:01 pm: Edit

A discount for really bad escorts I would go along with.

I could not agree with the Fed ECL getting a discount for Craig's reason above.

The CA class escorts could go up a little, 2 EP is not all that bad and most of them are one-offs.

The HDW-E should not change at all, since it is a modular system at work there.

And Kevin, thank you for the compliment. Perhaps we better understand one another now

By Christopher E. Fant (Cfant) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 03:01 pm: Edit

Oh, I also do not think the Kzin CLE should be messed with. Just the small FF escort hulls.

By Christopher E. Fant (Cfant) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 03:02 pm: Edit

The CLE is a louzy ship, but it is still a big hull. At 4-6 it is not horrid, just worse than the MEC.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 03:03 pm: Edit

A discount for really bad escorts: NO.

By Jimi LaForm (Laform) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 03:37 pm: Edit

so much for that idea.

By Scott Tenhoff (Scottt) on Friday, April 01, 2005 - 04:13 pm: Edit

And there was much rejoicing!

Between this and the Hvy P2 Fighter topic, somebody must of made SVC mad on this April Fool's Day.

By Mark Ermenc (Mermenc) on Sunday, April 03, 2005 - 01:06 am: Edit

The real issue with trying to mesh F&E and SFB is that there are aspects of either which just don't make sense in the other.

F&E damage laws don't apply to SFB. In SFB, if I don't like the carrier, I target it with a fleet's worth of disruptors/photons/hellbores, and it goes away. The escorts can do nothing to save that carrier but beam off crewmen as it blows.

So, to say that a carrier group that's down it's escorts wouldn't do well because of "insert SFB reason here" only really applies to the carrier duel scenario. In a Kzinti-Klingon carrier duel, those escorts might as well be made of solid gold, because all the damage is coming out of drones and fighters, and that's what escorts do.

So, perhaps if you think that's what "pinning" is about, then maybe there may be an arguement, but the F&E pinning rules are a kluge, only there to make the strategic level game work the way SVC wants it to work, not because it has an SFB reason. In SFB, enemy ships can't drop you out of high warp. Even if they could, or could find some terrain you had to slow down for, and they could actually act as a screening force, then they would have to fight you or let you carry on. As it is, they can pin, put up a round of minimum composition and leave, having succesfully blocked you, which makes no sense in either SFB or F&E, so coming up with a rational explination is kind of redundant. It's an artifact of the game, there to prevent guerrilla warfare by allowing a larger force to fully contain a smaller force.

As you can guess, I'm none to happy with that fact, but that's the design flavour of the game.

As it stands, I only see forwarded fighters in my game when the carrier is particularily weak (LAV, SAV or GNV come to mind). The loss of the carrier's COMPOT is usually enough deterent to avoid it. A 6-density non-battlegrouped addition to a line tends to pull down the line by 2-3 points as it is.

Oh, and as an aside, when playing the Kzinti, I would never, under any circumstances, pay 1 EP to degrade a perfectly good CL to a CLE. You can make do for a few years until the MECs see service. Just ad-hoc the CL ... it's only 1 COMPOT less, and then you can do something useful with that hull. Someday. When you have money. Real soon. Honest.

Thank you, Craig, for pointing out the crippled factors of the Fed ECL. I now understand why they are built. I hadn't looked that closely, and assumed they were the same 6/3 as a CL. Now I actually have something for those hulls to do: take one for the team.

By David Slatter (Davidas) on Monday, April 04, 2005 - 04:35 am: Edit

I always thought ships could drop others out of high warp. The thinking was that if a ship did not come out of warp, it could easily get distroyed by a single disruptor, so it had to fight, at least until it can realign itself away from the enemy to redisengage by acceleration.

CLE is still better than an ad-hoc CL. I used to build it because I thought ad-hoc CLs did not get protected by outside EFF's. On reading the rules, they do, and thus the CLE is very marginal.

By David Slatter (Davidas) on Monday, April 04, 2005 - 07:42 am: Edit

Mark

I think in fleet battles, SFB carriers will not be put in a place where the enemy massed heavy weapons can cripple them. While this means that the carrier's weapons will not contribute much, I make the following observations.

1) Nearly all big battles in F&E involve a full fleet and a base. If the carrier is attacking a base, it's fighters are going to be much more useful attacking a static target - fighter heavy weapons will get in range, fighter drones/plasma must be dealt with. Given that the carrier will be spending a lot of its power on providing EW support for its fighters and recherging weapons in this situation, it will be effective in other ways.
If the carrier is defending, its fighter will be useful in keeping the enemy away from the base and dealing with seeking weapon/fighter attacks. While the enemy could technically just stay at range 30 and try the pummel away tactic (thus making fighters less useful), that requires an extremely good fleet to work against just a BATS due to the effectiveness of base EW at long range.

2) In open space battles, I will admit that the fighter is vulenerable, and you would probably prefer it if you could use the carrier's guns. However, most open space battles results in one fleet simply retiring before any real damage is done. If your fleet want to retire, your fighters can cover its retreat well in an emergency. If the other fleet is retreating, then it probably won't be pointing its guns in the direction of your carrier, and if it does turn around to pop your carrier (assumning it can), it will pay a heavy price for doing so.

3) The third case is when one side is surprised, say in open space. If you are doing the surprising, and you have fighters, then your position is wonderful, as your fighters might get to R2 of an unprepared enemy. If you are the one surprised, then at least your fighters (and perhaps escorts) might help get your fleet out of dodge by mitigating the enemy missile/plasma swarm.

So, this notion that carriers have compot problems in a fight is a bit of a phantom, because the number of times they would be much better used as a cruiser is relatively few - those big open space equal fleet battles are simply rare. More, in F&E, they tend to be between fleets that have plenty of ships to spare, so if one were to play out the fight using SFB, one could pick an all war cruiser fleet with a flagship, including 1-3 scouts (such fleets are extremely effective in open space).

By Tim Losberg (Krager) on Monday, April 04, 2005 - 11:38 am: Edit

---

Quote:

CLE is still better than an ad-hoc CL. I used to build it because I thought ad-hoc CLs did not get protected by outside EFF's. On reading the rules, they do, ...

---

---

Quote:

Standard warships serving as ad hoc escorts can be targeted by directed damage even if not the smallest (outer) escort.

---

By Mark Ermenc (Mermenc) on Monday, April 04, 2005 - 08:45 pm: Edit

If F&E were played out by SFB, and I had 100 ships attacking a starbase, they would all enter the map at the same time. In SFB, there is no reason why you can't message all your fleets with a "we attack on thursday, 06:00" command, and pop them all onto the board.

Hence, it is a bit ludicrous to compare SFB's confused melee with F&Es rotating-rank "gentleman's combat". F&E uses command limits for game playability. It gives command ships a role in the war without having the traditional miniatures-style "Command Radius" effects, which are kind of silly in a space combat game.

Once we admit to that difference, it's easy to see that there will always be problems with F&E/SFB comparisons.


Nonetheless, in F&E, a carrier forwarding it's fighters is vulnerable to directed damage if the attacker is willing to pay a "bad" exchange rate to shoot the moon. To me, that sounds an awful lot like "The carrier is at 30 hexes, the fleet's at 15. Who do you shoot?" in SFB. In that case, a dedicated fleet can still demolish the cruiser, it's just "wasting" damage by not attacking the closer targets.

If the fleet really wants it dead, though, it's dead. The escorts can do nothing for it but write a sternly worded letter on its behalf. There's no "rule of war" saying you have to take out the escorts first. They can't "jump in the way" of the photon salvo. In SFB, you CAN shoot the officers first.


With regards to carrier deployment, Fighters are mobile terrain for a good chunk of the war. They're low speed and low range. Their drones/plasma have limited endurance, and can be outrun. They're simply too slow to close in on a fleet that doesn't want to think about them, and running away from them makes a lot of sense. Why fight what you don't have to. Simply pick them off at a range they can't respond from. Fighters are finite, and unless you're playing a Hydran "Fighter Anchor" or "Seventh Shield Fighter Assault", they are going to be sent out early to do their dirty work, and the carrier will slow to match them, allowing the other side the freedom to set the pace of the engagement. Erode the terrain from range, and then carry on.

Yes, I assume a floating map SFB engagement. Anyone who duels a carrier with cruisers on a fixed map has strange, strange ideas about how to fight a war, and is probably playing the Hydrans.

So, when fighting fighters in SFB, you simply ignore the carrier group for a while until the enemy runs out of fighters, then see if you have enough left to engage the carrier, or if it's time to disengage and call it a win on BPV. That's good sense in SFB, you can kill weapons systems for cheap. Sometimes even with systems you had little other use for: Klingon ADDs when you're NOT facing Kzinti, for instance, Fed G-racks after the ECM drone gets launched. ISC tail plasma.

You can clear out half the weapons in his force by destroying 1/3 of the hit boxes in his force. Even with wastage from overkill damage, that's still a good deal, especially if it's in front of the carrier. That's why you fight a carrier by stripping the fighters first, then seeing if it's greedy enough to try and finish off what it's fighters crippled.

Furthermore, in SFB, sweeping the fighters first is a good idea, because forcing the enemy to build new fighters hurts his economy (Fighters have an economic cost). In F&E, fighters are free (yet somehow drones cost a fortune). Hence, there's no way you'd want to do that, you'd love to target the carrier, blow it to kingdom come and then disengage, leaving the fighters with no way home. You don't see that result in SFB, because the VPs aren't awarded that way. Furthermore, it's higher risk, since it requires one to engage the fighters, which are otherwise easily avoided.

Hence, there's no way to really justify the differences between what happens in F&E and what happens in SFB ... they're doing different engagement styles with different victory conditions.


As for pinning, that's always baffled me. In SFB, there's nothing preventing you from writing "Disengage by acceleration" on your turn 1 EA. Hence, you can only be made to fight if you want to fight. Now, I'd be more than willing to believe that if 100 frigates and a dreadnought jump out from behind a rock and say "you shall not pass", then you're either going to have to fight them or admit your freighters are not getting through to you, no way, no how. So, if it came down to a "Stop and fight, or be out of supply", it would make a whole lot more sense than the current "Stop and fight. No, we don't want to fight you. No, you can't keep going, you had to stop and fight us. No, we don't have to fight, we don't want to."

The only thing in F&E that can readily translate to an SFB scenario is small-scale combat and raid combat. Your typical "Province Disruption" raid is an SFB scenario generator: Here's your ship, here's my ship, the freighters arrive on turn 10, and if I'm still here, I'm shooting them apart as they try and cross the map.

By David Lang (Dlang) on Monday, April 04, 2005 - 09:15 pm: Edit

several things

you can't disengage by acceleration towards the enemy. as such you useually need to turn around before you can try to do that.

take a look at the cost of type IIIXX drones and consider that a F&E drone bombardment (which costs .4 EP) uses 200-300 of the things.

yes you can have 200 ships arrive at the SB to attack, if you are willing to have your captians be unable to tell who is who and shoot each other as much as the base. F&E command limits apply to SFB scenarios as well.

yes there are differences, but you damage your credibility by overstateing things.

By Andy Palmer (Andypalmer) on Monday, April 04, 2005 - 11:36 pm: Edit

There's still no way that any, even 15-ship fleet, is going to cause any damage to a SB orbiting a planet with 20 PDUs (that's 60 GBDPs). Oh, I guess they could charge in for a few internals....at the cost of the entire fleet.

By David Lang (Dlang) on Monday, April 04, 2005 - 11:54 pm: Edit

actually each PDU only has one P-4 and they are spread around the planet. so you 'only' have to charge into the teeth of about 20 P-4's

By Dave Butler (Dcbutler) on Tuesday, April 05, 2005 - 12:01 am: Edit

Oh, bollocks. There's no restriction in my copy of (C7.1) that limits the direction one may disengage in. Further, even if there were, you'd use the mandated turn at "maximum possible practical speed" to, you know, turn around. Barring horrible initial range and/or unfortunate "terrain", I get to leave at the end of Turn 1.
As for "the captains shoot each other", what colour is the sky in your universe? (A) the ships will have IFF, (B) they're attacking a base, which is (i) immobile, (ii) at a known location. There's no logical reason "in game" why 200 ships couldn't evaporate a base; out of game, it can't be done because (a) what fun would it be, and (b) even with computer help, 200 EA forms is a PITA (c.f. (a)).
Regarding fighters vs. drones, well, there's no good way of comparing BPV to EP. However, in the early war, .1 EP buys the Kzinti on the order of 20 Type III-XX-M drones (based on the DF, assuming one F&E battle round empties its racks and cargo); this is 50 "points worth" (though it's ~33 BPV). By spending 2 EP, the Kzinti get 2 AAS fighters and 29 Type-I drones, 35 "points worth" but only 6 (E)BPV. I'll ignore all the chaff and such as being rolled into the carrier surcharge. So, ignoring the problem that there's no way to switch between "points worth" and EP, a fighter factor's worth on the order of 0.05 EP in the early war (and probably much more than that later on in the war). That might actually work as an optional rule; have to get rid of FFF, natch, but it'd be an interesting experiment.

By David Slatter (Davidas) on Tuesday, April 05, 2005 - 04:45 am: Edit

Dave.

On fighter costs)
In F&E terms, paying 0.05EP for replacing each fighter factor is effectively saying that fighters are free. It costs me 5EP to repair 5E4s, or 1EP to replace 20 fighters. To impact an economy much would need a cost of at least 20EP (less than repair costs of most major economies while at war) - that's 400 fighters. How may battles have you seen lose that many fighters on one side? How many fleets have you even *seen* with that many fighters??? Killing a fighter squadron on a carrier does not really hurt the enemy race at all. It's a token, nothing more. Kill the carrier, and that's his carrier production for 6 months.

on disengagement)
There are many scenarios which specifically say you have to disengage in certain directions.

on floating terrian)
I reiterate - very few decisive battles in F&E are played on a floating map. They all involve bases. That's a fixed map - or at least a floating map with a fixed point of reference. In base battles for SFB, fighters are much more important - for both sides, as speed is less important. If you are attacking those massed PDUs, you will really welcome the damage fighters soak up as you approach to the required range 5...
I suspect the damage from many of the open space battles in F&E will represent those few times when one side surprises the other, whereupon fighters are again useful. Most of the time the fleet will be running away from conflict and shadowing each other, fencing for an advantage.

on command limits)
We all know that SFB and F&E have to have command limits to work. If they did not, they would be like all those computer space games where you win when your fleet is better than the enemy - when the main fleets engage, it's game over one way or the other (most of the time). It's possibly artificial, but it's required. The only way I know to get round the problem of this is to have many, many, more targets (bases) than there are ships, whereupon you do better by splitting and reducing the enemy bases (economy) as fast as possible. I have actually played in a hand-moderated game in a galaxy with literally thousands of star systems. It endgenderd very different strategy and it's the only game where I really got a feel of the vastness of space - and yes, I split my fleet - things became a real guessing game over where the enemy would strike and with how much. Finding the enemy planets was the real challenge.

on pinning)
Well, this is something I don't fully understand either. I would say it makes a lot more sense to say that all ships in a pinning fleet must fight, but this is unworkable practically for reasons previously mentioned.

By Michael Powers (Mtpowers) on Tuesday, April 05, 2005 - 07:17 am: Edit

In SFB, fighters won't soak damage at long range, because fighters are harder to hit at long range. They have ECM built-in, bonus ECM because they're small, and they can go to EM to increase their ECM even further.

By David Walend (Dwalend) on Tuesday, April 05, 2005 - 08:27 am: Edit

Flashback to the F5 vs E4A as escort discussion:

The E4A is a 2-4/1-2 ship at at 3.5 EPs. The F5 is a 5/3 ship at 3 EPs. The F5 is 2-5/0-3 as an ad hoc escort under current rules -- a better ship uncrippled and better defensively when crippled.

How much worse would an F5 have to be as an escort for you to take the E4A for the extra half EP?

Is the real value in the F5 its ability to absorb damage (and protect the carrier)?

Would you buy the E4A if the F5 were a 2-4/0-2 escort? a 2/0 escort? How bad would the ad hoc escorts have to be?

Thanks,

Dave

By Mark Ermenc (Mermenc) on Tuesday, April 05, 2005 - 08:28 am: Edit

OK, this is obviously some version of the term "Free" I was previously unaware of.

In the game that I'm playing right now, at the end of scenario 1 (the wind) ...

(Can we agree there are less carriers in scenario 1 then there will be at any later point in the general war, and thus these are minimum fighter casualties?)

Kzinti Cumulative Fighter Losses: 811
Hydran CFL: 612
Lyran CFL: 296
Klingon CFL: 308

I'm playing the Kzinti/Hydrans, and I can tell you exactly what happens if someons says to me "Oh yeah, those fighters had a price, you owe us 0.05EP each in back taxes" ... we explode.

Kzinti (0.05EP/fighter): 40.55 EP
Hydran ("): 30.6 EP

There is no way we have that kind of money, we're trying to save up enough money to repair dreadnoughts, much less build new ones.


"Killing a fighter squadron on a carrier does not really hurt the enemy race at all. It's a token, nothing more. Kill the carrier, and that's his carrier production for 6 months."-Dslatter
An excellent summary of my point, thank you. In F&E, killing fighters does nothing, but if SFB, if you go in, sweep the fighters and disengage, you WIN the scenario. Period. Flat out. Unless the carrier has somehow managed to cripple you, there's no way he's making up that many points, plus commander's options.

The games use totally different concepts of victory. In SFB, taking out the fighters hurts the enemy economy, and thus gives you victory. In F&E, you couldn't care less about the fighters.

The bottom line here is that since these two games use different yardsticks, they will always be apples and oranges.

You see it all the time when comparing the two. I personally think the Hydran Knight is the best ship in the entirety of Starfleet Battles. There is no other ship anywhere that demonstrates such elegance in the point range. It's my favorite ship to play. In F&E, however, you'd have to hit me over the head with something heavy before I'd make one. I can get a Lancer for the same price, and the lancer has two fighters to absorb damage, pin, replenish other ships, whatever. Plus, the lancer converts better to whatever I may want to convert to. It's sad, but that's just how it is. The list goes on and on and on.


Floating maps are common sense. Wars are fought over terrain. Battles not necessarily so. Rommel did a handy job of stringing the allies out over a lot of hot sand. Having an invisible wall in space makes no sense, and denies the attacker the ability to set the pace of his attacks. If the attacker wants to call a break to lick his wounds, then unless he's fighting the tholians, there's no reason he can't. If the defenders have something to say about it, they can sally forth and do so, but they can't take their terrain with them. That's the advantage of attacking, you get to say when the battle happens, and what the pace of that battle is.

And yes, fighters are only good around fixed defences in the opening game. That's why I said that in open space, they were deployable terrain.

Still, terrain can be useful. Especially terrain that only shoots at the "bad guys". Personally, I think Dreadnoughts are terrain, too.

By Mark Ermenc (Mermenc) on Tuesday, April 05, 2005 - 08:46 am: Edit

Dwalend,

It's not just the Klingons ... it's the same in the Kzinti opening game: Convert CLs to CLEs to serve as medium escorts, or just ad-hoc them in ???

CL: 6/3 ... 3-6/0-3 as ad-hoc
CLE: 4-6/2-3

Let's face it, you don't want to be paying the 1.5 EP to repair either of them, and if the medium escort is crippled, the carrier group is probably rotating off the line for another to take it's place. After coalition 2, the Kzinti don't have that much to defend, and they can afford to start stacking up all their carriers.

In either case, the CLE is obsolete once the MEC comes into service, so this is just a stop-gap anyway. Why waste the money? The Kzinti literally cannot afford it.

If they target your outside escort, big deal, it soaks one less point of damage ... they would have targeted it anyway. Be glad the frigate bought you as much damage as it did.

If they target your CL, big deal. You don't have the money to convert them all to CLDs anyway, and never will. Take the 1.5EP and the damage it absorbed for you. If they actually run you low on CL hulls, start putting BCs in there.

In average service, the CL(ad-hoc) is one compot lower than the CLE. That's not worth the dollar, especially not when I have to pay for the privelege of un-converting it later.

Let's face it, folks ... if you're hard up for cash anyway (and everyone is ... silence, Lyran scum ...) and you've got better escorts coming soon (many races are smiling and nodding here) then it's just good sense to save the money. As an added bonus, if I recall the rulings correctly, you can detach the crippled ad-hoc from the carrier group at any time, so if they target to cripple your ad-hoc, you can pop it out for the pursuit battle, and not need to put the carrier group up (handy if it was the lone escort of a now vulnerable escort carrier, or if you're out of fighters, and want better density). Since it's no longer an ad-hoc at that point, it gets it's full crippled COMPOT. Yay it.

By David Slatter (Davidas) on Tuesday, April 05, 2005 - 09:04 am: Edit

Mark

And that's why I proposed the slightly different ad-hoc rule - they don't protect the carrier - all they do is take up the empty command slot. Then, the CLE becomes the worthwhile build it was in SFB histories.

Face it, these races are not fools. They would be able to make military projections and work out that the CLE and EFF were abysmal (if current F&E rules are "correct"). But they built them anyway. There must be some reason other than the Zin and Klingons "were idiots".

on your game)
Your fighter casualties are quite considerable - somehow, the Zin managed to lose over 100 fighters per turn. I assume this sum is number of fighters replaced, and not fighters lost. Because we can redue it by at least 200-300 if one includes all the fighters on Zin PDUs and bases that will have been blown up.

If this is fighters replaced, then I have never managed to do anything like this with the Zin. I would be proud if I managed to have 2/3 that number of fighters replaced.

And no, on a big scale, 40EP for the Zin is not much at all. A CV group (at 0.05EP/fighter), and a few frigates. Considering that you would have been able to build a lot more carriers under this system (they become dirt cheap - Zin now build FCR, CVE, CV, and convert BC/CVL->CV each turn), you would have gained at least that money back in reduced build and repair costs. Ditto Hydrans, they can churn out DEs, UHs, CVs and the like a dime a dozen, not to mention their HRs becoming a wonderful deal at 5.15EP (instead of 8).

The coalition, of course, would be doing exactly the same. You would see fighters literally everywhere.

SFB BPV has absolutly nothing to do with economics. From a combat power point of view, you win if you kill the enemy fighters. From an economic point of view, those fighters cost a pittance.

Lastly, if each fighter is really only worth 0.05 F&E EP, that is cheaper than the current annuity system anyway. How many carriers do you see lose their fighters more then 40 times - the number of times required for that figure to become the 2EP per factor we are currently paying? To do that over the entire *war* would be quite an achievement.