"More ship types or more modifications??" Topic

Okay all. My group is working on a large fleet action scale game based on squadrons, not individual ships. We are looking at two possible ways to offer players variety in building there fleets.
The one way is to offer a large variety of squadrons with different stats, abilities etc. The other way is to offer more "generic" squadrons and to offer the player the choice of adding and changing their stats/abilities.
Does anyone have an idea of which they think they would enjoy more????

Personally, I dislike 'special rules' for every mini. It leads to things like having a card for every mini or a large roster sheet for your forces, ie. clutter.

So I would vote for a variety of squadrons that are easily identifiable on the table (a Super Fast Cruiser Squadron should look different from a Normal Speed Cruiser Squadron).

Good point, makes sense. We plan to have some add on cards as is for special crews, figures, etc so………….thanks.

I think that if we ever see space battles the basic precept of "commonality trumps variety" will apply, because masses of disparate ships mean logistic, training and C3 nightmares.

I agree, and am sure there would be standardized designs for certain missions and would use as many of the same parts as possible.
That being said, in real life navies there are at least some variety in the types of war ships built and many are "specialized". So I was thinking in those terms as well as game mechanic's wise, what would be the most fun for players and economical as far as number and size of game cards, sheets, etc needed and still keep the game fun, fast and easy to play.

Thanks,
Travis

I did not mean no or little variety or no specialization, but but rather we would not see the Star Fleet battles approach where you have a Romulan Front advanced technology revised arc drone command cruiser AND a Romulan Front advanced technology revised arc command drone cruiser AND a Romulan Front Advanced
technology command revised arc drone fast cruiser AND…..

Ah, got yah, yes I agree as much as I loved SFB they did spit out a lot of variants of almost everything and most really did the same job, just in a little different way.
No, I wasn't thinking of anywhere close to that kind of variety. Each squadron would actually "behave" a little different with different strengths, weaknesses and be tailored to specific jobs, offering the player one "type" per faction to do one "type" of job or fill one "type" of need.

I think the Jovian Chronicles ships are the most likely. They all have common modules, and some class-unique parts.

For example, the lighter ships all have the same drive housing, but it holds up to 4 of the same main engines. The biggest ships (tenders, heavy carriers, and battleships) use a 5-engine drive housing instead. There are 3 different habitat rings, holding 2, 3, and 4 hab sections. The supply section can have almost any number of cargo modules stacked on it, but you usually see less than 6 rows.

Starting from the aft end, you have the:
- drive fins (heat sinks),
- the common drive housing,
- the supply section,
- a hab ring, and
- the forward hull that is unique to each class (in this case, the Majestic-class fleet carrier)

Note that the Fleet Carrier isn't the biggest forward hull by volume, the Lennox-class cargo ship is just as big and the Gagarin-class fleet tender has a repair bay large enough to ingest any ship without a hab ring installed to allow work in a shirtsleeves environment! The Gagarin-class is so big that it needs a 2"x6" base with two support sections. IIRC, the repair dock is a little less than 5" long internally, which makes it able to drydock any ship less than 500m long! (models are 1/4000 scale, which is close enough to 1"=100m)

Anyway, back to the gaming question.

If we look to the US Navy in WW2, most squadrons are single-class, occasionally with a larger ship as the squadron leader. So you'd have Destroyers and a Destroyer Leader or Cruiser, for example.

One interesting discussion on Atomic Rockets is what to call the various roles of ships.

Frigates and Cruisers are equipped for long duration solo patrols, Frigates being the smaller ship for that mission. Cruisers typically have bigger guns (today, they tend to have a larger missile magazine with standardized missiles across all ships).

Destroyers are dedicated escorts, and may not have as much self-repair capability as a Frigate, they are the smaller escort ship. Cruisers may be available as escorts, their larger hulls can give better sensor ability and may give space for the screen commander's flag bridge.

What you call your capital ships gets into an interesting discussion. Carriers are largely improbable for realistic space combat, unless your 'fighters' are closer to the concept of PT boats than a 1-man strike craft. (It will take at least 2x the fuel/delta-v for a fighter to make a strike and depend on the carrier to come get it, and 4x the fuel/delta-v if the fighter is going to go and come back, compared to a completely expendable missile), but then you get into the dreadnought/battleship argument.

In wet-navy terms, a pre-dreadnought is a mixed-armament ship, with ~4x ~12" guns, 6-18 ~6" quick-firing guns (secondary batteries ranged between 4.7" and 8", averaged 6"), and then lighter guns to deal with cruisers and torpedo boats that got through the screen. But when ships started getting hits on each other at 13km, well outside secondary range, proposals to upgun started.

An early proposal was "all big gun, mixed caliber," with 4x12" and ~10x9.2" or 10", reducing the number of quick-firing secondary guns.

The other proposal was "all big gun, single caliber" that we see in WW2 battleships. There were still some teething issues with gun location, as most of the secondary guns started out low in casemate mounts (as on the Pennsylvania through Colorado classes) before getting replaced by shorter guns in turrets for additional AA capability, but that's the basic idea. The US 5"/38 dual purpose guns were actually longer ranged than the longer-barreled 5"/51 casemate guns they replaced due to greater barrel elevation.

Note that HMS Dreadnought herself was obsolete in 5 years, and was 'only' 20,000 tons. Super-dreadnoughts were 25% heavier (the Orion-class was ~25,000 tons) and threw twice the weight of fire. The last battleships, the Iowas and Yamato class, were 60,000 tons and 72,000 tons, respectively.

So.

What are you going to call your big, fleet-combat ships? And are you going to have multiple sizes of them?

Battlecruisers were originally supposed to have battleship guns on cruiser armor, and be fast enough to outrun anything that could kill them. This very quickly led to a speed race among the battleships, as the Iowa-class could reach 33 knots (35 knots lightly loaded), and that was as fast as the destroyers and carriers. About the only time that the idea of "a ship fast enough to kill anything that it could catch and able to outrun anything that could kill it" was the American 44-gun frigates back in 1800. It hasn't been true since.

I agree with the 'one type per unit/Sqdrn'. If you do use the addition of cards, which seems to be – becoming the norm for a variety of games today, I would suggest something mentioned during a discussion of SW Armada.

Someone had mentioned to keep multiple cards from 'overtaking' and thereby slowing the game, they had agreed on the house rule of no more than One specialty card per ship. I think the same basic idea could work within the Sqdrn. idea.
For example a specific sqdrn could have a specialty card for…

Advanced Sensors: giving all ships in that unit either the ability to fire first or at least make a 'roll' to attempt to get in the first hit.

Reinforced Shielding: as named, the unit as been out fitted with additional 'shield generators' due to the mission area or type of vessel they expect to encounter.

Just a cpl of suggestions.

Thanks for the feed back. Right now we have two card categories, combat actions and crews, both are pretty self explanatory. Each squadron can only use one action card per turn and can only have one crew card assigned to it for the game.
We think the cards should be a part of the game and add to the fun/flavor but not dominate the game so that it doesn't feel like a spaceship miniature game anymore. Just our thoughts.
The "refit" card option would be the most economical way to allow players to have "mission specific" squadrons but may not look as nice on the table as having different artwork/models for different ships/squadrons, that is what we are going back and forth on. Especially in light of the scale we are doing to try and offer something half way fresh and do space battles on a "grand" scale that capture a similar feel to a historical table top wargame that involves perhaps a hundred ships per side and possibly 1000s of "fighters". Most spaceship combat rules still are based on one model equals one ship, we wanted to do something different. Players think in terms of flanks, over all strats, what area to defend/delay, what area to push/attack the enemy line, not individual ships. Even squadron combat is kept simple to keep the focus on the back and forth "flow" of a battlefield that covers part of a solar system:)
Good points all. Always a plus and a minus seems like:)

Travis

As noted above, wet navy ship designs evolved as technology increased, so I expect the same to be true with spaceships -- assuming you have the luxury of assembling squadrons of ships with identical designs.

If you are looking at extensive, well-organized, and well-capitalized combatants, then at the start of an intergalactic war such uniform, 'one-design' squadrons might be the norm.

As combat losses accrue, I suspect such uniformity gets sacrificed for maintaining squadron strength and firepower. As the war drags on, new technologies might get retrofitted onto older ships and newer ships might be added to bolster existing squadrons of older ships.

Use of cards may be a way of adding such improvements. I'd caution, and I'm likely the minority voice here, that adding too many cards detracts from tabletop gaming as people stop and sort through cards to find the fine print…I'm thinking X-Wing here, where you could customize every ship, but more casual players like myself kept having to stop and read the tiny print of each card to find a special mechanic because remembering attributes for a dozen cards was beyond my brain RAM. :)

Good point, I agree that the card involvement needs to be kept at a low level, like said a part of the game, but not what takes up lots of the gaming time.
We feel at this point, limiting the range/variety of cards and the amount you can use per turn will help with that. Plus, because you have to buy them, just like ships, players may choose to only have a select few in favor of having a few extra ships instead………….

As much as I love Star Trek, it kind of irks me how there seem to be dozens of active ship classes filling any given role.

Obviously economics would be different in that universe, but at times they seem to have a fleet of prototypes.

Actually, with how long it takes to design a ship, you will generally have the 'fleet of prototypes' in peacetime, and the massive fleet of similar designs (+-refits) during wartime. Also, as long as a ship isn't destroyed outright during combat, that's when they tend to be refitted during war.

See Also the Seawolf (SSN21) and Zumwalt classes in the USN. Both were intended to be standard production items, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union the Seawolf class was too expensive to be the general replacement for the Los Angeles class. The Zumwalt was originally intended to be a 'gun destroyer' like the Spruance-class (the Zumwalts continue the hull numbering from the Spruance-class). But again, they proved too expensive for the job to build 32 ships.

That does make sense, especially when you consider there is always new tech coming along that needs to be "field tested" to see if its better than what is currently being used. Cheaper to try it on one ship than a hundred:)
I guess its a matter of taste, some folks like lots of similar but different designs……….like Star Trek, others don't want to have to keep up with what exactly is different about each one(I guess?). So anyway, we are looking to try and meet in the middle somewhere.

You also end up with differences in some ships to test things.

Technically, SSN671, USS Narwhal, is not part of the 637 (Sturgeon) class. She was testing a whole set of 'quiet' features, and as the 100th submarine since the Nautilus, she was supposed to be just as revolutionary. The Narwhal had a single, multistage main engine that looked a lot more like an aircraft's turbine than a submarine's. This let her avoid having a reduction gear set, which is a pretty major noise source in a submarine. She also had 'scoop injection' main seawater to condense the steam from the main engine and turbogenerators back into water. Most subs use pumps for that, but the Narwhal was kinda like a shark, as long as she was moving forwards there was enough pressure to keep everything working.

Other subs in the series tested electric drive (yes, in the 1960s/70s), but motor tech wasn't there yet. Another sub actually tested a counter-rotating screw for a little while. I think another combat sub had an X-shaped stern planes arrangement for a while.

In the 688/Los Angeles class, there are 3 'Flights': The original 688s, then the 688s with VLS, and finally the 688i. 688i have bow planes instead of fairwater planes up on the sail. 688i also have VLS tubes, but their major change is the bow planes.

One or two subs at the end of the 688i series have pumpjet propulsors like the Seawolf and Virginia classes have, and a couple others have a different arrangement of stabilizer planes than the norm.

Also, at least with Trek, the external appearance of the various ships is another character in the series.

It's hard to visually describe the differences between the USS Georgia and the USS Kentucky (both Ohio-class missile subs), but they had *very* different personalities for the crew.