KHR (who so ably notes that my rating is one-dimensional, which was
no secret) said there were problems in my rankings.
Anytime you aggregate a ranking from a diverse collection of weighted
parameters (formally or not), you introduce all manner of suspect
points: What are the parameters used/not used, what weightings are
assigned, how did you arrive at values for the ratings, etc.
The rating I gave was in terms of troop quality (meaning the quality of
individual soldiers and leaders, as an average). This encompasses training,
experience in small and large unit conflict (as it pertains to how well
leaders handle these formations), technology (as it pertains to how well they
train), logistics and support (as it
pertains to how good their training is - how often, how real, etc),
how often then conduct excercises (as it speaks to training), etc.
It wasn't speaking directly to combat power, just to the quality of the
average soldier. And a 2nd or 3rd rate power may not have been that far behind
a first rate power. The gradations and the scale of their differentiation was
never defined, though I didn't think of it as terrribly large.
The best arguments I've seen so far for changes to my rankings involve
downgrading Sweden and the Gurkhas for some of the same reasons I downgraded
Scanfed. I actually buy those, though I suspect the Gurkhas operate with NAC
and train with them and interoperate so well that they may actually gain many
of the NAC benefits without actually being a large power (this is one lure for
small client states and protectorates).
But I'd suggest, for interest, a larger write-in vote like the one
Beth did for the fleets. But the trick would be in clearly defining categories
that made sense and assigning them weighting wrt to the overall ranking tiers.
Such an aggregate rating could produce subratings like: average troop quality,
average officer quality, average NCO quality, national combat power, force
projection rankings, etc.
Anyone know of a non-subscription on line e-Poll place? That would
allow us to do this rather easily. Alternately, someone could
organize an e-mail poll.
I'd suggest the following areas to rate (by nation) (leaving the discussions
of weighting until later):
Individual soldier
------------------------
Equipment:
Quality - how good is their equipment
Reliability - how reliable
Uniformity - how evenly available is the good equipment
Training:
Breadth - how broad-spectrum is training
Depth - how intense (related to how many hours) is training
Uniformity - how evenly available is training
Mission / Combat Experience:
Breadth - how many types of missions/ops
Depth - how often and how long
Uniformity - how evenly is the experience distributed
Institutional/Cultural:
Cultural - is the soldier from a more or less martial culture
Institutional - does the military have proud traditions,
history, espirit de corps Leadership:
Breadth - have leaders had a chance to command varieties of unit
types, formation sizes, etc
Depth - have the leaders got a lot of experience due to high op
tempo or long training in mid-large size force excercises (and is the
force big enough to allow this)
Uniformity - is leadership skill divided evenly across the
force, or is it very spotty and intermittent
Ground Forces
----------------------
Size - how big is the military
Specialized units - does it support specialized units like
engineers, tacair, spec forces, etc and to what extent relative to its size
(average, more than average, less than average)
Cross-Training - are the troops generally capable of attempting
tasks outside a limited specialty and are formations capable of same
Equipment - how much of it? how good?
Maintenance - how well maintained is the equipment? how well
designed? how reliable?
Logistics - how much supply is there? how much ability to deploy
forces and support them? how professional is the log corps? how much
corruption is there?
Operational Planning - how good are the generals and senior
commanders at the art of planning operations, strategy, etc.
Investment in Personel - does the army suffer from under funding
or is it well funded for personel, training, manpower levels
Investment in Technology/Materials - same, but for equipment,
upgrades, quantity of specialized kit, etc.
Political Involvement - how involved are the politicos or other
powerful people (generally, the more, the worse.....)
Tradition - does the army have a tradition of victory, never
giving up, fighting to the death, glory, professionalism, etc or a tradition
of getting whupped, giving up, deserting, having discipline and morale
problems, etc.
That's a first cut at a more detailed assessment.
[quoted original message omitted]
TomB
> > That's a first cut at a more detailed assessment.
KarlHeinz said:
> You have written up a pretty ambitious list. How many people do you
Ah, but remember the "obsessive-compulsive" thread a while ago? Some
of us would do it. Now, someone would still have to collate it, a task for
which I'm not vlunteering
However, we'd still have to relate it to the tabletop. I'd suggest starting by
developing ratings for SG platoons:
% quality Y/G/B/O/R (the way JohnA does)
effect of quality on kit (ie veteran units often acquire unauthorized weapons)
% leadership 3/2/1
average actual strength as% of TO strength Relative quality of support units
(ie are your engineers, MPs, pioneers better, worse, or same as rifle squad)
Availability of support units Quality of combat vehicles (are you driving an
M1 or PzkwIII) Availabililty of combat vehicles (do you have just the one M1,
or 50 MkIIIs)
Are your electronics +1/+0/-1 compared to everyone else?
Same for guidance Ditto ECM
etc
> --- Laserlight <laserlight@quixnet.net> wrote:
> % quality Y/G/B/O/R (the way JohnA does)
Heh. . .
> effect of quality on kit (ie veteran units often
Sometimes. However, keeping unauthorized weapons fed is a doozy.
> % leadership 3/2/1
Unfortunately, everyone has overinflated opinions of their own favorite picks,
and deprecatory opinions of whatever faction they don't favor. I argue
incessantly in favor of downgrading IFed, PAU, LLAR, ESU for a variety of
cultural, ideological, historical, or doctrinal reasons. What happens? I get
accused of racism either outright or obliquely. If you can't say "This faction
stinks on ice" then rating them is pointless. You're lost in a welter of
politically correct "everyone is equally worthwhile" arguments.
My favorite is the (presumably rhetorical) question
"or are we just talking about Western-style
professional armies just like us?".
There's no such thing. There are good armies and there are bad armies. Every
good army is either Western (rating Russians as Westerners, 'coz they damn
sure aren't Asians and havn't been since at least Tsar Peter the Allegedly
Great[1]) or was trained by Westerners. There is no such thing as some
semi-mystical "Eastern" style of warfare. What people
usually mean by that is guerilla-style warfare.
Guerilla is a Spanish word. Europeans have been using it as an auxillary to
regular warfare for millenia.
Or they mean a doctrine which accepts massive casualties instead of using
firepower to win your fights. This is supposedly more "manly" or something.
It's a workaround to make up for lack of equipment or the training to use that
equipment effectively. A good army doesn't need to accept millions of
casualties. Proof may be offered by an analysis of the 1975 campaign in which
the alleged premier user of the "Eastern Way of War", the People's Army of
Vietnam defeated the ARVN using tactics and equipment that would be far more
familliar to General Zhukov than to
Mao Tse-tung. Once they had the equipment and the
freedom to maneuver it without the USAF blowing it to little pieces, they used
it.
Armies are either overall good (US Army ca 1985 onwards), good in certain
aspects which allows them to win if they use their strengths and minimize
their disadvantages (Red Army in WWII comes to
mind--superlative operational planning, massive use of
fire support even if it wasn't terribly flexible or
responsive, and large number of well-designed tanks
making up for tactical incompetence, poorly trained troops, etc), or just so
damn big that they can overwhelm their opponents at the cost of massive
casualties (PLA in certain situations, when they can find an open flank or hit
an unprepared enemy). Or they loose. Even the raw numbers tactic fails in the
face of a determined prepared defense. For which see:
Pusan Perimeter. There is no Western/non-Western
dichotomy here.
> There is no such thing as some
What I think people often mean by 'eastern' type warfare is the refusing to
come to grips, horse-archer style of warfare employed by eastern step
peoples. However, I do agree with you in that such a style of warfare no
longer really exhists, exceptions excluded of course, due mostly to
technological progress and increased organization of the states which this
style had previously preyed upon.
That being said, how do people generally rate sensor technology in FT
campains? In other words, do you know where the enemy is insystem in realtime
or only when one of your pickets bumps into him? Similarly on the strategic
level?
Thanks.
> Unfortunately, everyone has overinflated opinions of
a) not necessarily--IF is one of "my" countries and IMO there's no way
that they're as good as, say, FSE. Yes, I define the AE Imperials as being top
notch, but I throw in a couple of important exceptions ("but there aren't many
of them" and "only in their specific environment").
b) if we poll and take the averages, we should get a reasonable view. Now,
this isn't always a good thing, because it's more interesting to have a wide
variety of extremes (white, red, blue) instead of a few
near-identical armies (white, offwhite, eggshell). However, it should
avoid some of the "UK and Canada take over US? China and Russia merge? No
way!" disbelief.
What we really ought to do is take a few extremes and then make up a fresh
nationality to go along with it. Does anyone aside from me know, without
looking it up, what ethnic groups went into making the AE? If not, then when I
say that AE militia tend to be ineffective, no one gets stressed about it. And
it's more creative than the plague
of Celts-in-Space.
For instance, picking on Beth just because I haven't done that for a
while and I'm sure she's getting paranoid--if I were doing the IAS, I
might toss out something like this:
60% QD4, 35%QD6, 5%QD8 80% LDR1, 20% LDR2 Personal weapons are FP3 d12. Squads
tend to be fairly large, say 10
guys each--even though that's inefficient use of firepower, it's
better for morale. Support weapons are d12/d10* but on a double1 are
out of order--"perfected in the laboratory, needed a little more field
testing." Each platoon has a trooper with a GMS/P-sized missile
launcher which does damage like GMS/L, again double 1's means
something's screwed up. Troops are in d6 armor with chameleon surface, upshift
defense die vs spotting and vs shooting (but do not upshift armor die);
sensors are d8. They have 2 electronic warfare
techs per platoon. This army has more leaders than usual, but
attempts at command reactivations are treated a 1 die type worse
> -- "Z. Lakel" <zlakel@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
For practical purposes, sensors do not exist (Or are and all seeing
indistructable eye), and when they did exist in the FT2 book, the best one
coule hope for was to look at your opponents ship sheet.
G'day,
> For instance, picking on Beth just because I haven't done that for a
I was starting to think I'd gotten too respectable for you (or you'd written
me off as a lost cause);)
> --if I were doing the IAS, I
To my mind more like
60% Qd6 - IAS volunteers (we can learn to do things after all)
30% Qd8 - average hired mercs, the odd seasoned volunteer
10% Qd10 - the ones we keep around for a reason ;)
10% LDR3 30% LDR2 60% LDR1
> Personal weapons are FP3 d12.
At least frontline ones. Reserve units would have FP3 d10.
> Squads tend to be fairly large, say 10
Actually 6 volunteers with 2 merc commanders.
> Support weapons are d12/d10* but on a double 1 are
We gave those up for more reliable D10/D10, which can become D10/D12 or
D10/D10* depending on how long their users have had to tinker. Though
you're right on a double 1 they're stuffed if they've been tinkered with;)
> Each platoon has a trooper with a GMS/P-sized missile
Haven't gotten round to this yet;)
> Troops are in d6 armor with chameleon surface,
That's my Persians not the IAS. IAS have fairly standard d8 armour. The kit
they use does have "jammers" (one grade harder to spot), but once spotted
(i.e. sensors tuned into them) they're stock standard from there on in. They
have also made some lightweight stuff allowing for D8 movement, but it didn't
work so well in HTH and so is not standard issue as yet.
> They have 2 electronic warfare techs per platoon.
Yep and 4 others who are dying for their chance too;)
> This army has more leaders than usual, but
I don't give them extra attempts, and I don't penalise them with regard to
taking orders unless they've got non-mercs in command (say the commaders
have died and now the volunteers are a tad upset).
Cheers
> > For instance, picking on Beth just because I haven't done that for
The probability of this happening strikes me as rather remote.
> To my mind more like:
Yes, but this is more "normal" and I was deliberately going for extremes.