One way to increase ship kills is to introduce a rule which allows one side to require the other side to fight atleast one more round.

The idea is that one side can hand in a chit and require the other side to fight a second round.

Maximum number of Chits useable per player turn is 1 (or 2) (so not a lot of extra rounds).

Basically, both sides start with a Single Chit and more can't be bought.

After a normal battle round is fought and prior to withdrawals - one side can announce they will 'push the battle' and a normal second round is then fought.

(Possibly it could be repeated a second time but I am worried that might be too much....).

If you declare your Pushing the Battle, you hand the Chit over to your opponent.

Once you have no Chits left you can't Push the Battle until your opponent does so - and thereby hands you a Chit to use in the future.

Pinning battle might be made more fun and will marginally help kill more ships.

Only major concern is where a group of crippled ships is jumped on by a large force - it may result in more annihilations.

Good, bad or horrible idea?

(Ideal borrowed from World in Flames)

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, October 01, 2020 - 11:54 am: Edit

I am going to cautiously watch this topic without comment.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Thursday, October 01, 2020 - 01:33 pm: Edit

Instead of adding a new "chit" to the game, what if you "spent" an Admiral to force the battle round??


Garth L. Getgen

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Thursday, October 01, 2020 - 03:26 pm: Edit

Garth

As Admirals are not in the basic game

To expand on it - in WiF - the map physically has 3 small boxes on it - and you slide the Initiative counter from one box to the other - both sides can use the middle box and you can use your own side box (hence max you can use it twice until your opponent uses it).

The chit is physically just to show who can use it - you could use 2 Carrier Group counters or any spare counter from the set - so it avoids printing new/additional counters (or a new map!).

By Peter Bakija (Bakija) on Thursday, October 01, 2020 - 03:34 pm: Edit

This one is not a terrible idea at all. But comments (as I always have those! :-)

1) Don't make this contingent on "buying" more chits; things that revolve around "gaining advantage by spending more money" is always going to be more of an advantage for the Coalition. I suspect that the best way to do this is just give each empire a number of chits (like Raid pool) that evens out, something like each side gets, what, arbitrarily, 6 chits, so the Klingons, Lyrans, and Romulans each get 2; the Kzinti, Hydrans, and Gorns get 1 each and the Feds get 3 (or something like that). Early on, the Coalition have the initial advantage; the Alliance have a minor edge to start after the Feds come in, it evens out when everyone is in the war. I mean, yes, you hand them over, so if the Coalition had 10 early while the Alliance had 2, eventually the Alliance would have those 10 to use, but still, the early leveraging is probably an issue.

2) While having more forced fights certainly isn't a negative in an absolute sense, I suspect that this would be a lot of added complication for essentially a wash (assuming an even number of chits); you'd generally only ever use them in fights where you have a significant advantage (i.e. you want to mangle a force that is ripe for mangling; you want to force more cripples for an advantageous pursuit, which, ahem, brings us back to the Coalition being able to benefit from this more due to the maulers...), so in general, this would probably result in an average of X more ships killed each turn, where X is chits. Which isn't at all a bad thing, but still, added complication for likely a wash. Unless one side can benefit more (see: maulers), in which case, it starts tilting to unbalance.

3) What happens when you use a chit to force a fight in a capital hex? If I spend my chit to force you to fight another round over my homeworld when you are stuck to -24 points of dead fighters, are you compelled to fight at that system? What about over a base? Can you fight the forced round as an approach to satisfy the fight? These are things thact certainly could be determined, but they would need to be.

By Sam Benner (Nucaranlaeg) on Thursday, October 01, 2020 - 05:56 pm: Edit

Looking at Peter's comment - yes, the Coalition would likely benefit more per chit. So why not just start with all X chits in Alliance hands? The Alliance needs to try harder to use them effectively, the Coalition can use them more or less whenever they'd like (denying a retreat behind a crippled base is powerful, and even the threat is worth having).

Slight advantage: Alliance. If that's too much, give one to the Coalition to start but more to the Alliance.

By Stewart Frazier (Frazikar3) on Thursday, October 01, 2020 - 06:39 pm: Edit

Very interesting ...

By Thomas Mathews (Turtle) on Thursday, October 01, 2020 - 10:07 pm: Edit

NO!!!!!

The ability to pin fleets out of their desired targets and only lose a FF for doing so is a key component of the game. Mostly for protecting bases that are being upgraded or established and planets that are having new defenses installed, regardless of the side one chooses. Forcing a player to fight another round in a pin battle means you might as well let them reach their desired target the first place.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Thursday, October 01, 2020 - 11:33 pm: Edit

How exactly would the defender force the attacker to stay and fight another battle round over a base or planet????


Garth L. Getgen

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Friday, October 02, 2020 - 03:21 am: Edit

Peter

Correct, no Chits are bought - and there is only 2 in the game - they just get transferred from one side to the other as they are used.

Sam - They could both start on one side if the balance needed it.

If used with a Base, it would require the Defender to accept an approach battle if they used it and attack the base if used by the attacker (unless the approach battle is accepted by the Defender).

i.e the User can't benefit from their base.

Thomas - You might be right - but would only be used occasionally so either would add flavour or add 500 words of a rule never used...

Garth - See above - it would only be at the base if the Attacker used the Chit AND the defender wants it to be at the base.

For game wording - if the Defender uses it, they have outflanked the Attackers and the Attacker is unable to retreat as quick as intended.

By Thomas Mathews (Turtle) on Friday, October 02, 2020 - 05:58 am: Edit

Garth, read my comments again. I wasn't talking about battles at bases or planets. I was talking about pinning battles in hexes next to them. The same thing would apply to the FRD park that you have in range of things like a capital hex.

By Peter Bakija (Bakija) on Friday, October 02, 2020 - 07:43 am: Edit

>>Correct, no Chits are bought - and there is only 2 in the game - they just get transferred from one side to the other as they are used.>>

Oooh. My apologies; I read that sentence as "both sides start with a single chit and more *can* be bought". Never mind :-)

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Friday, October 02, 2020 - 12:22 pm: Edit

Thomas, my comment wasn't in reply to your post, but rather a general question about the main proposed rule which didn't mention battle hexes with bases / planets.


Garth L. Getgen

By Jason E. Schaff (Jschaff297061) on Saturday, October 03, 2020 - 08:37 pm: Edit

Quote:
==========
The ability to pin fleets out of their desired targets and only lose a FF for doing so is a key component of the game. Mostly for protecting bases that are being upgraded or established and planets that are having new defenses installed, regardless of the side one chooses. Forcing a player to fight another round in a pin battle means you might as well let them reach their desired target the first place.
==========

Ok, that is rather absurd hyperbole. Proposing that changing one pin-out battle per turn from losing 1 or 2 ships to losing 2-4 ships will somehow break the game or that it would somehow become preferable for a defender to let the enemy savage his FRD park or kill his base upgrade rather than lose those couple extra ships falls into the category of histrionics.

As to the proposal itself, I think it's a kind of cool bit of chrome that adds an additional (small) bit of interesting strategy to the game.

One thing I would suggest is that chits can also be sued to cancel an extra round, at the cost of your enemy ending up with both chits at the end of the turn. i.e. if we each have one chit and you play yours to force an extra round, I can play mine to stop the extra round, but you then end up with both chits for the next turn.

By Thomas Mathews (Turtle) on Saturday, October 03, 2020 - 09:08 pm: Edit

Jason, it may be absurd. That doesn't make it any less true. How many times you have been pinned out of the hex you wanted to reach and stayed for more than a round? There is very little sense in fighting open space battles where you know you are going to lose a ship only to fight more rounds to lose more ships that you can ill afford to lose. It doesn't matter which side you are on in this situation. Sure if you Coalition early on in the game, you want might be willing to fight more rounds to kill more Kzinti escorts. However, your supply of F5s is limited. So is your supply of Lyran small ships.

By Jason E. Schaff (Jschaff297061) on Saturday, October 03, 2020 - 10:21 pm: Edit

It's definitely true that at least one side won't _want_ to fight the second round in most cases. In fact, one or both sides may not _want_ to fight the first round and are doing so only to prevent or permit some other event. That doesn't mean that forcing a second round once (occasionally twice) a turn will create some sort of catastrophe; it just provides players with an additional set of choices they need to consider:
Is the objective I'm trying to achieve worth losing one or two extra ships?
How far can I push a situation before my opponent will spend his chit?
When is the benefit of spending my chit worth the later cost of my enemy now having it?
If there are several places I could spend a chit, which one provides me the greatest advantage?
Giving players additional choices to make and forcing them to adjust prior strategies doesn't, in itself, mean that a change breaks the game. I can't see any remotely plausible scenario in which the proposed rule would make someone not want to pin an enemy out of his FRD park, or something similar extreme, yet you seem to consider it an automatic and necessary consequence.

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Sunday, October 04, 2020 - 07:48 am: Edit

"Speaking of SSC, how are you going to resolve the ability to take a casualty as a retreat against your chit idea? "

Thomas - It could just nullify a retreat casualty (noting it wouldn't require the other player to choose a different option to replace the retreat, as the casualty is counted as resolved) - so a further SSC round would be fought.

That might be pretty powerful though - but SSC is random enough that a key enemy retreating wouldn't be auto killed in a second round.

(i.e. even at +3 say, a SSC roll of 4 or less would allow the enemy to just retreat still)

By Alan De Salvio (Alandwork) on Tuesday, October 06, 2020 - 03:02 pm: Edit

I am not sure what part of World In Flames you are referring to - offensive chits? Intelligence chits? Neither work like this proposal.

I don't like it because it breaks to many things. As a counter proposal, how about a chit (or chits) that can be expended (and turned over to the opposing side) at the beginning of any battle to convert that battle into a multiple location battle, akin to a capital assault (each side must have sufficient ships to form sufficient minimum battleforces). Each chit expended adds another (no non-ship unit) location, and the trick is each side must commit at least a minimum battleforce to each location. This won't change the approach, the pursuit (much) or anything else, and should meet your intent without breaking retreat and pin battles.

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Tuesday, October 06, 2020 - 03:50 pm: Edit

Hmmm. Alan De Salvio's idea could be problematic if the opponent has a small force, but too large to effectively withdraw before combat. When the attacker demands multiple battles, the defender could be forced to field multiple small lines that end up getting crushed by SB-busting lines. The result could be more ship kills than simply handing in a chit that forces another battle round.

Overall, either Paul's idea or Alan's will ultimately be pro-Coalition. As I mentioned over in the "multiple direct" topic, increasing kills on both sides favors the Coalition, due to the disproportionate affect that an even exchange of kills has on the relative navy sizes between the Coalition and Alliance. Increasing kills on both sides only works for games where the two sides start out roughly equal - which is not the case in F&E.

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Tuesday, October 06, 2020 - 05:16 pm: Edit

Alan - if I remember correctly it was the start of the turn initiative to decide which side went first (it's about 13 years since I last played it...so might be misremembering some aspect of it!).

As Ted said - that's a big change and could see several additional ships* die in a battle hex - which makes the rule relevant, but a pretty big pro-Coalition boost.

* - Two lines risks a lot more ships than having a second battle round.

By Peter Bakija (Bakija) on Wednesday, October 07, 2020 - 10:41 am: Edit

Ted wrote:
>>As I mentioned over in the "multiple direct" topic, increasing kills on both sides favors the Coalition, due to the disproportionate affect that an even exchange of kills has on the relative navy sizes between the Coalition and Alliance.>>

See, I don't think that increasing the number of direct kills in combat is actually going to do this, assuming the number of increased direct kills is roughly even.

Even if both sides lose an even number of ships (roughly) in line combat, the Alliance is still likely to kill more ships overall, because:

A) The Coalition attacks Capitals, where they likely lose a disproportionate number of ships to the Alliance due to either directing or just huge piles of damage being dropped on them, while in return, are likely just killing PDUs a lot of the time.

and

B) The Coalition loses *way* more ships that are holding provinces/planets down than the Alliance do (or at least should, if the Alliance is not squandering FFs in a futile attempt to hold space they can't hold).

As noted in the other discussion, in a 34 turn game where both sides directed pretty much as often as possible, and a total of 2060 ships were killed over the course of the game, the spread was something like the Coalition *still* losing about 20% more ships than the Alliance, and the Alliance did fine; yeah, they lost, but it was a marginal loss (about a 10% VP differential), and if the game had gone 1 or 2 more turns, they probably would have turned it into a draw (which always comes back to "we still need a better way for the game to end!").

Unless an increased killing rule pushes ship death to a point that is more than "how the game currently works if both sides direct a ship kill pretty much as often as possible", it's gonna be fine.

Like, I think *most* rules for ship killing that are floated seem to be "we want to increase ship killing in games where there isn't a lot of ship killing already". And as I noted in the "Direct 2 or 3 times" thread (which, to be fair, I don't think is a good idea), if the current auto-kill rule got tweaked so it happen twice as often (say, it hit on a 5-6 instead of just a 6), *still*, I think the effect on actual play would be minimal. As you'd then lose, like, 50 ships to a forced auto-kill over the course of a 34 turn game instead of 25. In a game where 2000+ ships can die. Which is a drop in the bucket.

For this particular rule suggestion, I think what would happen with this in play is that you'd generally only use it when you had a wild, disproportionately large advantage, and were going to totally mangle the other force. As such, everyone would just tweak their ship distribution so that all fights where either:

-4 ships on the attack (so if things go weird, you just lose an FF and run).

-8 ships on the defense (so if things go south, you just lose an FF and run).

or

-Significant fleets that can survive 2 rounds of combat (so if a chit is used to force a second round, you don't get mangled).

Given that one can already play a game like this (I usually do already), it probably wouldn't be that big of a change.

That being said, I don't know that this sort of thing needs to be implemented at all, but at least it is an interesting idea that seems worth exploring.

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Wednesday, October 07, 2020 - 11:15 am: Edit

Peter,

It may be worth a playtest to see what happens. On the balance, though, I think it would still result in a *proportional* change to the number of ship kills, even with the factors you are taking in. I.e., your 20% more Coalition losses in your 34 turn game might only be 15% Coalition losses if the Coalition is able to kill more ships - particularly on non-phasing turns. It also *will* impact how many fighter losses the Alliance will take, and it will be fewer. The Coalition will not want to "waste" damage points on fighters, unless the intended to take the hex (and sometimes even then), and so there will be proportionately more Alliance kills.

Now that being said, that's all armchair quarterbacking. I'd say I would agree that hard data is needed to see if that actually bears out in real play. Additionally, even if I am correct in guessing the relative impact, it's not clear that would result in a "game breaker" change to F&E. It might very well not affect the *outcome* of the game much. Dunno.

Maybe one of my next games I'll playtest these ideas and see how they pan out.

By Peter Bakija (Bakija) on Wednesday, October 07, 2020 - 03:21 pm: Edit

All fair, Ted.

Like, with all these possible rule ideas floating around recently, I like this particular one (the "force a second round" chits) the most; I mean, it might be a *terrible* idea, but it also seems fun and interesting.

Overall, though, I think if folks want to up the number of dead ships incrementally (as opposed to just a wholesale overhaul of the game), I think the best thing to do is just tweak the existing auto-kill rule.

Make it hit on a 5-6. Or make it work on R1. Or both. Or lower the threshold to 90 compot (90+ compot is common as dirt; 100+ compot is not at all uncommon, but *much* less common than 90+ compot). You could easily tweak here and there, and see how it goes.

By Joe Stevenson (Ikv_Sabre) on Wednesday, May 10, 2023 - 05:01 pm: Edit

I'm with Peter B on this. Rather than add a new rule, if there is a problem (and I'm not convinced there is), it would make more sense to me to tweak the existing rule, rather than add a second. More rules to accomplish the same effect just adds more complexity, and more room for error.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, May 10, 2023 - 11:56 pm: Edit

I have yet to be convinced there is a problem to be solved.