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http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 3/4/07, Zoe
> Brain <aebrain@webone.com.au> wrote:
ones
> > are getting a free velocity boost, while the "inner" ones are
The gist that I get from this is that symmetrical, circular formations are
easy to implement in FT, but they are similarily easy in 2D AV:T. In cinematic
FT, formations that are only a few MU across and a few MU long can be treated
as a single ship without breaking too many rules. It causes identical problems
when ported to either 2D AV:T or vector FT.
A possible situation in a fleet engagement is redeploying a destroyer screen.
You have a core of ships with devastating long range capabilities
(graser-3's or HDC-2's) that have sacrificed close in firepower, so you
have
a destroyer screen loaded with class-2 beams and submunition clusters to
make it really expensive for your enemy to close (Note: unless your opponent
has your equal in long range firepower, you really do want him to spend the
time to blow away your screen, as it keeps the range open). The problem is
having enough destroyers to completely encircle your core is equally
expensive, so you need to be able to keep your incomplete screen between your
enemy's fleet and your fleet's core. The formation may be too large to just
treat is as a single ship, and you may want to turn in one direction, while
rotating the screen in the other. Maybe your enemy has misjudged and moved
past your formation and you need to quickly get the screen to the other side.
Finally, as elements of the screen are destroyed, you need to close up the
gaps.
If you chose to go the HDC route for devastating long range firepower, you
really DO have to exert finicky control of your formation to keep the gaps in
your screen facing a likely enemy location.
BTW: I do not think grasers are unbalanced. At a distance they are quite
> The gist that I get from this is that symmetrical, circular formations
Any formation is eay, if you want to maintain line of bearing. Give the same
orders, and that destroyer which was 2mu east of the BB will still be 2mu east
of it. If you want to maintain relative position, though, that's quite
difficult. In that case, something like a diamond / box pattern is the
easiest--you're not actually maintaining the same position, and you may
switch who's in front, but you're still in a compact group.
> On Sun, Mar 04, 2007 at 03:28:32PM -0500, Laserlight wrote:
> Any formation is eay, if you want to maintain line of bearing.
The problems with formations in my experience are:
(a) you can't usefully mix thrust levels within a formation. Not a problem if
you're operating multiple ships of the same class, but it can be somewhat
limiting.
(b) when ships start to take drive thresholds, they have to fall out of
formation; this increases the number of effective manoeuvre units you have,
just when the game's already slowing down because you have to make lots of
decisions...
R
I would counter propose that this is two formations. One is a screen and one
is your long range hitters.
John
> A possible situation in a fleet engagement is redeploying a destroyer
> The problems with formations in my experience are:
My ships' accelerations tend to go from directly 4 to "lots, in all directions
simultaneously".
An FSE dream. We cover all possible points and hit with...everything.
:)
Roger
> On 3/4/07, Laserlight <laserlight@verizon.net> wrote:
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http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 3/4/07, John
> Lerchey <lerchey@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
Okay, it IS two formations. Now tell me what FT movement orders will keep the
screen in the correct position as the relative bearing between the heavy
hitters and the enemy changes while maintaining a linear formation across the
enemy's line of approach.
> > A possible situation in a fleet engagement is redeploying a
Am I missing something?
I do that all the time trivially. It's only when you need to rotate a
formation that a problem occurs. The linear thing is give the same order to
all the ships.
Roger
> On 3/4/07, Richard Bell <rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com> wrote:
There is no indivdual order that accomplishes this. You get to give orders to
each ship, like everyone else, and try to manuever them appropriately to your
plans.
Then again, if there IS a "group order" that maintains formation, you give
each formation appropriate orders so that your screen goes where you want it
to. If the enemy doesn't cooperate and outmanuvers your screen, then
you suffer.
Or do you maintain the screen is omniscient enough to always know where the
enemy will be, so that you can give it an order like, "Screen us" and they
will then always be in position?
J
John K. Lerchey Assistant Director for Incident Response Information Security
Office Carnegie Mellon University
> On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, Richard Bell wrote:
> On 3/4/07, John Lerchey <lerchey@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
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http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 3/5/07, John
> Lerchey <lerchey@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
and
> they will then always be in position?
You have nicely hit the point that I was trying to make. If you have not
experimented with it beforehand and "drilled your ship handlers" (by writing
down what actually worked onto a reference card), you are not going to get it
right during a battle, without immense amounts of luck or analysis paralysis.
The most important word in your first paragraph is "try".
Expanding my point somewhat, I was taking issue with the claim that the FT
rules for movement and order writing were hands-down better than trying
to handle a fleet than the AV:T rules. The FT rules, as written, lack the
granularity for some kinds of finicky formation handling. Shifting the
relative bearing of the screen to the core and rotating the screen's line is
no easier in FT than any other system (except Fear God and Dread Nought, which
conveniently provides examples of many of the coordinated maneuvers that a
formation of WWI warships would execute[which are easier to port to AV:T than
FT, but still rather difficult]). The only advantage FT has is that each order
is easier to write and the results of each order are easier to predict. The
sticking point is working backwards from the desired endpoint of a formation
to orders needed to get there from the current point. Being able to predict
what each possible order will do is of marginal utility if none of them do
what you want.
Useless trivia: the order given by the german admiral to the High Seas Fleet
of "Combined Turn, [180 degrees] to starboard", at Jutland was an act of
desperation, as no one expected that it could be pulled off in poor
visibility, while under fire, without somebody ramming someone else. However,
the consequences of doing a turn in succession of the entire battleline, under
the guns of the British Grand Fleet, were too horrible to
I've played SITS a number of times, but only played AV once. I did not find it
to be any easier to hold formation in SITS than it is in FT.
What I find is that holding and turing lines is fairly difficult, but if
you make a diamond or circle, it's fairly easy to stay on station in either
system.
<shrug>
J
John K. Lerchey Assistant Director for Incident Response Information Security
Office Carnegie Mellon University
> On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, Richard Bell wrote:
> On 3/5/07, John Lerchey <lerchey@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
and
> they will then always be in position?
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http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 3/5/07, John
> Lerchey <lerchey@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
In SITS, there is little benefit to any formation that does not have all of
the ships in a single hex, with the same attitude and same vectors. Energy
ranges being what they are, two ships more than one hex apart are nearly
incapable of providing any mutual support. Without an FTL-comm, they
cannot even coordinate a combined missile launch on a distant target. As I
said, it is not easier in SITS, merely that the difficulties of handling a
formation is mooted by there being no benefit extending any formation to
include ships not in the same hex/facing/vector. Holding a line-ahead
formation is trivial as each ship in the line does not initiate its own vector
change; until it reaches the hex that the lead ship started its vector change,
and then it performs the same vector change. If the magnitude of the vector
does not change much, the line even keeps its spacing.
For this discussion I'll assume the screening line is straight across the
table perpendicular to one edge.
Let's say I have 4 screening ships. I give one order to one of my ships and
tell my opponent it is for the entire screening force. I then move one ship. I
take the rest and place them in the same formation. Theey all must be facing
the same direction. they must have the original intervals. Most importantly
they must be straight across the table perpendicular to the original edge.
Roger
> On 3/4/07, John Lerchey <lerchey@andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
and
> they will then always be in position?
> Richard Bell wrote:
> Or do you maintain the screen is omniscient enough to always know
and
> they will then always be in position?
> "try".
Um... Richard? A day or two ago, you stated that you had only played FT
twice - once in Cinematic, and once in Vector.
If as you say you have only played each FT movement system *once*, then it
is no surprise if you can't work out correct formation-changing orders
on the fly.
If OTOH you had played half a dozen games with either movement system, then I
would've mildly surprised if you *couldn't* work out appropriate
formation-change orders with at most a few seconds' extra effort.
And if you had been a veteran FT player with scores or hundreds of games
under your belt, then I would've been *extremely* surprised to hear that
you had problems working out formation-change orders on the fly - with
that much experience it would, as Roger Books wrote, be trivial.
FWIW I'm prepared to bet quite a lot of money that I would not be able to
work out correct formation-change orders in my first-ever game of AT:V
or SITS without doing some experimentation first.
> The sticking point is working backwards from the desired endpoint of a
And at least for Full Thrust, a few games will give you enough experience
to do that working-backwards stuff (or at least it has for all FT
newbies I've taught over the years, so I would expect it to do so for you
too).
Since I've neither played nor read either AV:T or SITS I can't compare how
easy or hard it is to learn formation-flying in those games, but IMO
you're making an entire henhouse out of a feather over how hard FT formation
changes are supposed to be <shrug>
Regards,
The author of AV:T recommends that you not try to hit exact points in space or
do much of anything exactly. It greatly slows down the game even with
experienced players.
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> http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lRoger Books wrote:
> even with experienced players.
That's why /ships/ [will] have nav computers -- to get the fine details
right. Lacking those, /players/ have to accept a certain degree of
inaccuracy.
Phil
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http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn 3/5/07, Oerjan
> Ariander <oerjan.ariander@rixmail.se> wrote:
Drop the other shoe. What is the most complicated piece of coordinated
multiship maneuvering that you have done?
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http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lRemember when I
said "Trivial"? I do it just about every game. I'd say it doesn't gain me much
but it is rare for my big ships to take much damage. Not that they couldn't
but my small ships act as a screen and present much better targets.
NB: I would not consider myself much better than a fair player.
Roger
> On 3/6/07, Richard Bell <rlbell.nsuid@gmail.com> wrote:
> Richard Bell wrote:
> And if you had been a veteran FT player with scores or hundreds of
> multiship maneuvering that you have done?
In Cinematic, splitting a concentrated fleet of 38 ships up into three
roughly equally-sized (though not equally-*massed*) task groups to
surround
the enemy fleet, accellerate each of them to speeds of 30+, and then
converge on the enemy fleet from three different directions such that the
ships in the two groups that came in from behind the enemy were all within
12mu of their respective targets at the same time while the third group (the
one that attacked frontally) stayed more than 12mu away (ie., avoided
the enemy's point-blank (F) arc). During the enveloping movement, each
task
group changed formation to be in a double line-abreast formation (ie.,
one line echeloned behind the other) in the turn they attacked.
The difficult part of this was to predict where the enemy would go so my
task groups didn't converge on the wrong spot, and to get the third task
group - the one that was to attack frontally - up to the same speeds as
the others in time for the attack in spite of having a much shorter distance
to cover. The formation change part was trivial.
Regards,