Wartopia | 18 Apr 2010 7:17 a.m. PST |
Should morale at the ship-level apply in spaceship gaming? Fighters? This came up in our Friday night game and someone else mentioned it in another current topic. I never really considered it but while watching "Horatio Hornblower" (Gregory Peck) last night the idea popped up again. The Sutherland comes upon a French brig. It starts to run but a shot across the bow convinces it to stop. So does morale have a place in spaceship games? |
Steve Hazuka | 18 Apr 2010 7:27 a.m. PST |
The men are cast of metal! They need no morale! Fight on! Fight til the last drop of YOUR blood! Nah most space combat results in really cool cinematic explosions anyway. FIGHT ON! |
Wartopia | 18 Apr 2010 7:31 a.m. PST |
That's exactly how I feel, especially with warships. But on Friday night we had a civilian tanker on the table. The question arose as to whether or not it could be forced to stop by pursuing enemy ships by merely shooting at it. The crew knew the ship was more valuable intact than not. In the end the pursuing frigate damaged the tanker's engines and boarded it. But should the tanker have been stopped before that point? |
Steve Hazuka | 18 Apr 2010 7:37 a.m. PST |
Tanker filled with fuel? Either explode by design or by accident and they might let you go if you give up. Well you'd have to have a back story, has there been precedence? Have other tankers been emptied then released if the crew surrenders does the captian and crew get executed? Those are the real answers. Merchant ships in WWI when approached by U-Boats knew that if they surrendered they would be taken to a port or given supplies for the life boat then the ship would be sunk. How gentlemanly is your war? |
John the OFM | 18 Apr 2010 8:02 a.m. PST |
If you are going back to Hornblower time, you put a Prize Crew aboard the tanker and split the proceeds of its sale with the crew and the Admiral commanding the squadron. Civilians are not inclined to fight to the last man. Tankers and freighters will not, or SHOULD not fight. Now, if your race has a history of eating captives, that's a differnt story. |
BlackWidowPilot | 18 Apr 2010 8:12 a.m. PST |
Why the Hell not? If you want to use morale rules -and I've penned some optional morale rules for Silent Death in my day- I say why not? Unless you can come yup with some valid enough reason not to, morale rules are IMHO an added layer of authenticity and actually help to enhance the tactical challenge of your game. Leland R. Erickson Metal Express metal-express.net
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McKinstry | 18 Apr 2010 8:25 a.m. PST |
Morale should certainly be a factor in fleet/squadron level games. Unless your forces are the last barrier to a genocidal horde or have the instinctive racial aggression of a horde of rabid wolverines, at some level of casualties or bad correlation of forces, most rational navies, armies or space forces are going to break off and preserve the billions of dollars of hardware and thousands of trained crew to fight another day. |
commanderroj | 18 Apr 2010 9:38 a.m. PST |
I wrote about this in a thread a while back, but IIRC, the balance of opinion was against. I am all for morale in space naval games, and would also favour seeing crew quality and commander (ship captain)quality factored into fleet actions. The trend in air games seems to be toward pilot quality being the most important. In my reading of WW1 naval, captains decisions were of critical importance. While you can argue that communication advances would lessen this, these could be blocked by jamming, causing even more chaos as captains have to use initiative. |
bobblanchett | 18 Apr 2010 10:04 a.m. PST |
this is an idea for quick and dirty morale effects I had back in 1997: link |
Norrins | 18 Apr 2010 10:17 a.m. PST |
"Should morale at the ship-level apply in spaceship gaming?" – Absolutely!!! It's a great excuse for doing 'bad' William Shatner impressions when you need that little bit extra from your crew. ;-) |
Sargonarhes | 18 Apr 2010 10:43 a.m. PST |
Would not crew morale only come into play if the ship is being boarded? After all the decision to surrender the ship is going to be made by the Captain even on a civies ship, whether or not the crew stands down is a different matter. Just thinking of that ship last year boarded by Somali pirates as an example. I would think it depends on what the tanker/freighter is being attacked for. Are they attacking just to cut off supplies, or is it a raid for loot. |
commanderroj | 18 Apr 2010 10:55 a.m. PST |
The captains hand may be forced if his crew are too panicked to undertake their roles effectively. |
SECURITY MINISTER CRITTER | 18 Apr 2010 12:44 p.m. PST |
No retreat, no surrender!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! |
The Black Tower | 18 Apr 2010 1:44 p.m. PST |
Just how much say will humans have aboard future ships? Computers will weight the odds and set the strategy like master chess players. they may even sacrifice their own ships if they think it will give the fleet victory. |
WarpSpeed | 18 Apr 2010 3:41 p.m. PST |
Norrins ,does this mean you fall out of your chair whenever an opponent gets a good hit on you? |
Wartopia | 18 Apr 2010 3:48 p.m. PST |
Norrins ,does this mean you fall out of your chair whenever an opponent gets a good hit on you? Sometimes when my boys and I are playing video games together we offer to provide "force feedback" to the other person's chair (or body!). When playing Start Trek Legacy this often entails sharp pokes to the other guy's side to simulate photon torpedoes! :-) |
WarpSpeed | 18 Apr 2010 3:55 p.m. PST |
The ribbing and nudges only occur round my table when the beer is running low.Most capable is thus designated the beer run. |
WarpSpeed | 18 Apr 2010 3:57 p.m. PST |
The ribbing and nudges only occur round my table when the food/beer is running low.Most capable is thus designated the food/beer run. |
Wellspring | 18 Apr 2010 6:49 p.m. PST |
I think it's more about leadership / crew discipline than morale. Not only is the better crew better able to operate during battle, but it's also an indicator of the quality and maintenance of the ship itself. e.g. A better crew constantly maintains and fine-tunes its engines. During battle, when the ship goes on special orders to go to full thrust (I'm using BFG leadership here; IMO the best such system in spaceship gaming), the quality of the engine, its high level of maintenance, and the crew's ability to red-line it without being damaged are all dependent on the crew's hard work over the weeks and months BEFORE the battle. |
WarpSpeed | 18 Apr 2010 8:08 p.m. PST |
Star Trek tactical combat simulator does it best with the capt effic rating and crew effic ratings ,successful tests allow extra power/shield ,wep or manuever options. |
WarpSpeed | 18 Apr 2010 11:18 p.m. PST |
On light side when pop ,food and beer was low ,games slumped,Yes your morale question is valid . |
bobblanchett | 19 Apr 2010 2:25 a.m. PST |
my approach is that morale effects model suppression/loss of effectiveness/control rather than "surrender". Surrender to xenos is highly unlikely and naval (space or surface) combat differs from land combat (Hughes, here) in that the morale of forces isnt broken by encirclement nut by destruction. Attrition and effectiveness do and should trump morale, hence my emphasis on suppression FT effects this attritional effect well in its damage system. |
Top Gun Ace | 19 Apr 2010 12:08 p.m. PST |
I think there is a place for it, but it needs to be balanced. My guess is most crews will follow orders, at least before the battle, and before suffering heavy damage and casualties in large numbers. Once that occurs, morale will plummet, so withdrawal and/or surrender is much more likely, especially if the vessel's engines are out, life support is failing, etc. |
TheDreadnought | 19 Apr 2010 2:25 p.m. PST |
I put morale rules in Naval Thunder, but for our starship game I'm relying more on breaking the morale of the player. If you setup the situation where a player stands to lose a lot more by letting their ships be completely destroyed, instead of getting them out of the combat zone once they've been heavily damaged, then "fighting to the last man and shell" becomes a lot less alluring and you see players trying to retreat damaged ships, or staging heroic holding actions to allow the rest of their fleet to escape. |
Lion in the Stars | 21 Apr 2010 10:18 a.m. PST |
The captains hand may be forced if his crew are too panicked to undertake their roles effectively. I want you to picture something: You're working in a place where failing to act *will* kill you. You've been trained to the point where your initial reactions to any emergency are *muscle memory reflexes*. You don't think about what you're doing, you just do it. Starship crews are even more highly trained than submarine crews, and work in an environment that means one hit = a catastrophic kill for the most part. Morale? What's that line from Andromeda
"The human race's tendency towards violence is exceeded only by it's refusal to give up when personal survival is threatened"? |
Mehoy Nehoy | 04 May 2010 6:04 p.m. PST |
Wartopia, I wasn't intending to plug my own game here but it's situations like you've described that prompted me to write Captain Ferk III. I'm with Leland and commederroj – morale makes for some tense and challanging games! It's a vital area of wargaming that, along with command and control, many starship games neglect. No captain or crew is infallible, no matter how brilliant or well trained they are. Should anybody ever build a starship and send it to war, it will not be a gigantic, compliant chess piece, but it will be full of people with families at home, trained to fight together but fighting for many different reasons. And, as McKinstry says, only a maniac would fight to the death when it would make more sense to withdraw. Modern navies do not entrust thousands of lives to suicide bombers
My game focuses less on the tech and tries instead to reflect those 'Hornblower moments' where the human factor comes into play. I don't expect you to ditch your current rules but perhaps you might find some ideas in mine you could adapt for specific scenarios or for general use. Here's the link anyhoo: captainferk.blogspot.com |
D for Dubious | 06 May 2010 7:10 a.m. PST |
I've always imagined that surrender with a starship unless done before the opposition starts firing, would be difficult to do. Communications system might well be early casualties and without them you can't tell the other side to stop shooting. I more imagine POW would be the guys still alive when the winner checks the various wreck after the battle. Look at the problems some of the Russian ships had surrendering at Tsushima |