From: jcoleman@a2t.com To: babylon5-wars@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU Date sent: Wed, 29 Apr 1998 23:48:01 -0500 Subject: [B5W]: Battle Summary, 4/29/98 Send reply to: babylon5-wars@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU 1 T'Loth escorted by 6 flights of Frazi (1 player) vs 2 Hyperions w/ 4 flights of Starfuries. (2 players, 1 H + 2 F each) The T'Loth is on its way to invade some poor piddlydink planet, escorted by a heavy complement of Frazi. The EA has sent the 2 Hyperions, the Bolitho and Hornblower, along with 4 flights of 'Furies to intercept. (The fighter carriers are hiding somewhere off the map). House Rules: 1) Fighters are suppressed by taking a crit (don't care about specific crits, though) 2) Drop-out during the Critical Phase of combat, D10 > structure remaining 3) Roll to-hit for each fighter (instead of using Flight table) 4) Roll damage for guns, total it, subtract double armor. Subtract double structure armor from overkill. (double armor because 2 guns per fighter. If there'd been Nials, they would've subtracted 3x). 5) Allocation phase ordering: Allocate Energy, EW, Accel; Declare; then roll Init. 6) Pivots can be changed into turns by expending the appropriate thrust to turn in the direction facing. 7) # pulses hitting from Pulse cannon determined by flight-like chart. Battle plans EA: Hold off distance, pummel T'Loth w/ heavy lasers, use Starfuries for defense Narn: Hold off T'Loth a bit, let the Frazi soften the Hyperions and possibly the 'Furies before closing. Everything started slow (4-5ish) except Frazi at speed 10. They closed and hit on Hyperion all from one side. One of them attacked a 'Fury flight. 13 hits got through, Hyperion said bye-bye to its side and some primary structure. The Frazi then went screaming out, and two of the Furies gave chase. The Hyperions tried to maneuver to bring more heavy's to bear - got two hits on the T'Loth. The T'loth got a long range hit on a Hyperion. Ended up blowing out its Starboard thruster - at which point the Hyperions had to part company as the first one had lost its thruster on the Port side. The Frazi split, partially went after 'furies, some went after the Hyperions. Everything tangled for a little bit, then we ran out of time (we BS'd a bit too long before the battle *sigh*), without any clear victors. This battle didn't descend into the usual close-range slugfest as we experimented some with the fighters. Tactics-wise, the T'Loth probably should have closed a little more quickly to bring its guns to bear sooner. The 'Furies which pealed off after the Frazi got in one decent turn of shooting, then some poor tactical judgement and loss of initiative got one of them decimated. The EA players were not allowed to communicate for targetting of guns (figured they wouldn't have enough time to coordinate well), and were only allowed minimal time for communication of plans, etc at the starts of turns. This seemed to work out well, and some of the targetting was not as effeciently selected as otherwise would have been the case. We REALLY liked the way the suppression through damage and the drop-out at the end of the turn worked with the fighters. With the heavy hitting stuff here, any hit did about 2/3 damage to a fighter and it seemed VERY reasonable that such damage should prevent the fighter from making its attack run. We seem to have liked (haven't gotten much feedback on this yet) the way the damage by the fighters worked out, as well. We also liked rolling to-hit per fighter. Even though it averages out to what my suggested Flight to-hit table is, it does give you a bell-shaped curve (Yes, I've been thinking about this a lot). For example, given a to-hit of 8, you only have a 4.67% chance of all 6 fighters missing instead of a 35% chance (that's a 35% chance of your flight being completely ineffective!). Likewise, you only have a 0.41% of all 6 hitting compared to a 15% with the flight chart. We've been playing with turn order of assigning Energy, EW, and Acceleration before rolling for Init for quite some time. We've found it really makes you consider possible tactics more, because you DON'T KNOW if you have initiative. This is a big plus for us. However, we felt that defensive fighters still don't provide quite enough suppression of attackers. They were averaging about 2 attackers prevented from shooting per flight of defenders, which doesn't seem quite in proportion with what we see in the show, or what we'd expect IRL. After all, these are fighters which aren't being shot at by anything and have all the time in the world (almost) to line up on fighters which are focusing on attacking the cap ship. Not that they should get more kills, but they should provide more suppression (i.e. prevention of the attackers from getting clean shots off). After all, the primary purpose of the defenders is not necessarily to destroy the attackers but to prevent them from hitting what you're protecting. To a large extent this is handled with the jinking, but we're finding that to not be quite enough. And there's no real impelling reason for an attacker to go after a defender - it won't help out the other attacking flights any. We're going to refight the same battle with an additional bonus of +2 for any flight which is NOT under fire, and see how that works out (the idea is that a fighters which aren't being shot at can concentrate on lining up their shot. This will make defenders want to spread out their shots a bit more to negate the attackers' bonuses, make defending flights a little more dangerous, and give the attacker a little more reason to jink as much as possible or maybe even go after some defending flights. In other words, it will add a little more tactical depth to the use of fighters rather than just sending them in as ship killers). Jamie Coleman jcoleman@a2t.com Application Engineer, Ann Arbor Technologies