Scouting and campaign

I wonder in what interesting ways scouting can be made into an interesting
scenario as well as fun to play.

In one-offs, everyone always seems to manage to get
their fleets in line abreast formation at slow relative speed at maximum
weapon range. I could understand them getting their ships in formation if they
had scouting, but how then do they justify the low closing rates?

If the fleets meet accidently there should be a lot of randomness in their
facing. If one of the fleet is deliberately intercepting, their vectors and
orientations should reflect that.

If you allow 1 Mass ships, when jumping into a system have 6 appear about 36"
from the main fleet entry area, and another 12 or so 36" beyond that. Your
scout ships should be able to pick up anything close to weapons range by the
time your fleet is sorted out from the jump. Likewise, when travelling in
normal space you should have a network of scouts beyond weapon's range if not
beyond sensor range of your fleet.

In a scenario you'd have several turns between the initial scout encounter
before the fleets even got on the main map. Perhaps there would be some
cruisers in front of your main fleet, screening it so that the scouts can't
get a good count of your main fleets strengths and composition.

Has anyone played with hidden victory conditions? If you have a referee who
knows the relative strengths of the forces he could say:

"One of you may have up to twice as many points as the other player. Both of
you have as an objective to find out as much as possible about the enemy fleet
and runaway if it is stronger and destroy it if it is weaker. Running away if
you are stronger will cost you, and not being able to inflict damage will cost
if you are stronger. If you are able to take the system without being
extensively scanned, that is a solid victory."

Basically, if the Admiral of the smaller force can prove how outnumbered he
was and get out with minor losses the intelligence he brings back will be
quite valuable. For one thing, the fleet he scans in this system can't be
somewhere important at the same time...:)

Defensive scouting should be a bit easier. They could set up "Sensor Mines".
Sensor mines cost the same as standard mines, have a passive scan out to 36"
but can only be detected within 6". They have no offensive weaponry, their
sole purpose is to detect. They should be a little easier to clear than
ordinary mines once you detect them, but you could stack live mines nearby,
set to go off if the Sensor mine is destroyed.

They can be detected on _active_ at standard ranges, but
that would give the Sensor Mines even more information.

If you allow fighters to have Thrust 12 to allow them to keep up with the
fleets, may I suggest that their speed relative to their opponent has to be
below a certain point, say 24"? Otherwise you could have fighters make
ridiculously high speed passes. Have a scouting board where 1" = 18" or so and
a good scouting network should detect the enemy fleet over 200" out.

Fighters could reach them quite quickly: Orders Speed Distance from Launch
+12       12     12                 +18  18  18
+12       24     36                 +18  36  54
+12       36     72                 +18  54 108
+12       48     120                 -6  48 156
-12       36     156                -18  30 186
-12       24     180                -18  12 198
-12       12     192

Or about 7 turns, or much less for a 18 speed fighter group. You might want to
increase the cost of fast fighter groups for play balance under these sorts of
rules.

For this to work you'd need 3 strategic boards, one for each player and one
for the referee. Fortunately, at 18"::1" the strategic boards don't have to be
very big. I'd recommend hex boards for easy coordinate references. You'd also
need a fairly big tactical board as well, although you might want to squish
the scale on the tactical board too.

All those really slow Superships would have a problem under these conditions,
but at least they'd have time to build a decent vector towards the ultimate
target.

If you want a justification for an upper limit on speed, how about:

All ships travelling faster than xxx take 1d6 radiation damage per YYY turns,
shields apply. All ships travelling faster than 2xxx take 4d6 radiation damage
per YYY turns. If you want an adjustment for larger ships having a larger
cross-section, multiply that damage by the square root of
the ship's mass, or have a fudge factor for streamlined, with streamlined
ships taking less damage.

In this way, you could have your dreadnoughts come in too fast to be
intercepted by fighters a long way out, but they'd be taking radiation damage
on the way in. And if they lose their drives their crews will die of radiation
damage.

With an obvious importance to scouting, ie, knowledge of where the enemy fleet
is enables you to launch fighters against them, fleet composition will include
a much larger scouting element. And that scouting element will come into
combat with their opposite numbers. Scouts will be designed to take out
scouts, not dreadnoughts, and to punch through the enemy fighter screens.

You could either work out all the scouting or have each player define their
scouting screen and just run a sample combat between the scouting screen. How
they define their screen depends on how far out they are likely to detect the
enemy fleet. You could have a very wide screen, but then you'd have to evade
the enemies denser scout screen.

If you define the hyper limit to be >600" from the planet, the Carriers may be
able to get several full Carrier strikes off before the main fleets hit. And
of course, with such a huge distance to the hyper limit it becomes very
important to know what you are getting into!

This would turn a single planet battle into a whole campaign, which is either
good or bad depending on what you like.

On a similar line: Given 100% knowledge of the composition of an enemy 3000 pt
force, and mutually agreed upon rules for what can be built and what sort of
encounter they would have, how small a force could you build that
would have a 50-50 shot at beating it?

If you could take the sleazy approach, like hit that Kra'Vek fleet with EMP
missiles, or hit the Federation A Batt ships with Fighters, how much of a cost
advantage do you think you could swing?

Anyone want to work up a good 3000 point force that would force people to
spend at least 2000 on a killer force?