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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest)

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To Boldly Go... (a Starfleet quest) Starfleet Ship Design Bureau, Refit ("To Boldly Go...")
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Nix said:
By that definition every battle happens on a Base Strike mission for one of the sides (except for the rare cases when both sides actively seek out each other). Fleets that go off into the unknown without any goal can be safely ignored, there is only any reason to intercept another fleet if leaving it unchecked leads to something disadvantageous for you. The difference between Base Strike and Decisive Battle is whether you prefer to prefer to slip through and attack a base/fight defensively at your own bases, or to intercept a fleet on the way to reinforcing/attacking somewhere, and then pick off the bases afterwards if needed.
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You misread me. I was talking about the planned goal of the operation, not the bonus set that would apply to the actual battle.

Operation Return was planned as a base strike, because the objective was to secure DS9.

But it's also the kind of operation that a Decisive Battle focused fleet would run, because the best way to force an all-out battle is to attack something the other guy doesn't dare not defend.

There's going to be substantial overlap between Base Strike and Decisive Battle because a massed fleet strike on a crucial installation is a great way to force that decisive battle.

Which may actually be the biggest advantage of Decisive Battle: It can force the other side to play by its rules, because a giant fleet driving for a key world isn't a battle that can be declined.
 
pheonix89 said:
You misread me. I was talking about the planned goal of the operation, not the bonus set that would apply to the actual battle.
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And my point is that on that level of abstraction the planned goal doesn't actually differentiate between the doctrines (which judging by the rest of your post you don't particularly disagree with).
 
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I suppose the other thing you might consider is how it might correspond to target defensive doctrines. Decisive Battle will be somewhat stymied by a Fleet in Being defensive approach, for instance. Base Strike runs into problems with Forward Defence. Wolf Pack is an outlier in which it doesn't really think on those terms.
 
Wolfpack runs into different kinds of problems with either doctrine, but still problems.

Forward Defense means that the wolfpacks run a relatively high risk of being intercepted before reaching any important targets. But if you can get past the frontier defenses, the interior of their territory is a pretty soft target- it's Happy Time! Until you try to get back OUT of enemy territory and have to tangle with the frontier fleet again, anyway.

Fleet in Being means that there are a lot of patrols and defenders located near the targets the wolfpack would normally want to destroy. So actually accomplishing the wolfpack's mission becomes very exciting and dangerous and difficult... but on the other hand, it's a lot easier to get into enemy territory in the first place because the border defenses are more permeable.

...

Also... there's inevitably going to be some overlap, offensively.

A Base Strike or Decisive Battle fleet will do some raiding and reconnaissance operations into enemy space.

A Wolf Pack fleet will still plan major offensives and concentrate some forces into heavy battlegroups unless it's just stupidly stereotyped. Among other things because otherwise it has no counter to a concentrated enemy fleet that actually manages to amass enough force to push without total crippling of logistics.

A Decisive Battle fleet will plan some attacks against enemy fortifications; a Base Strike fleet may well find itself planning to hit targets so critical that the enemy will try to fight a major space battle to prevent the strike from landing.

The doctrines can't logically be about "only ever do this," they're about "focus on this, this is the part we expect to decide the war in our favor."
 
I think the pacifists and development factions would like Wolf Packs if they had to fight a war. Slowly picking apart the opposition economy with low risk disruption until they can't fight.

Solo or eventually paired Excelsior-As would be scary wolves. Able to take out almost any lone ship we know about and escaping with the d bonuses.

However, taking it assumes we are focused on slow conflicts with peer powers, and I don't think that should be our main focus.

Base strike is also focused on fighting peer powers or smaller powers that still have heavy installations. We could have used it recently.

However, Starfleet is focused on the unknown. Situations like the Biophage crisis are our largest duty and service. Being able to call and coordinate a large fleet and use it as we need it is the muntitool of conflict.

Decisive seems to serve the many needs of starfleet best, even if I hold sentament for Excelsior wolves.
 
@OneirosTheWriter, way back when you indicated that target priorities aren't mutually exclusive:
OneirosTheWriter said:
They're mutually exclusive, but I don't know how best to convey in the graphing software :X
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OneirosTheWriter said:
Actually, scrap that, better idea. Will unlock Target Priorities you can pick between.
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OneirosTheWriter said:
Picking individual tactics really isn't something that is ever going to raise up to the level of players. After all, Commander of Starfleet, not Captain of Starship.

In practice that means me :V which I'd pick based on situation, commander disposition, and any applicable standing orders.
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Pretty sure this means that target priorities & tactics aren't mutually exclusive if they're from the same overall doctrine, or from separate offensive and defensive doctrines.

But does this also mean that target priorities & tactics aren't mutually exclusive across different mutually exclusive doctrines, like between the three offensive doctrines, or between the two defensive doctrines?

For ex, would it be possible to choose and research all the decisive battle doctrine techs, then also research base strike doctrine techs to get "Target Priority: Hull+HP Lost" and "Tactic: Steamrunner Wing, enemy fleet value reduced, your critical hit rate increased" for our commanders to choose in battle?
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
I suppose the other thing you might consider is how it might correspond to target defensive doctrines. Decisive Battle will be somewhat stymied by a Fleet in Being defensive approach, for instance. Base Strike runs into problems with Forward Defence. Wolf Pack is an outlier in which it doesn't really think on those terms.
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Do we have a sense for what Defensive Doctrines the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians are using? We've certainly interacted with them enough.
 
The situation where there are fleets flying about to decisively battle isn't one that occurs without pressure or battles on bases (or shipping) first.

How do you get a fleet to come out of its fortifications so that you can fight it? The only way is to threaten something that doesn't have a big fleet protecting it, or that it cannot ignore. In other words, before you can decisively battle a fleet you have to hit some fixed defenses. As Ixaria demonstrated, the best way to do this and get a nice decisive battle out of it is to have two fleets. But doing so against an enemy that you don't outnumber 3:1 is to invite defeat in detail. So you hit where they're not as best you can and try to luck your way into fighting them either before or after you hit a base. Either way, you're going to be hitting a number of bases, and if your luck is bad then you'll have to fight at a starbase or outpost anyway.

Situations like Ghosts and Whispers are the exception and unlikely to occur in war scenarios. Because of the nature of space development, we should expect conflict that is going to be decisive to be focused around orbitals, unless one of the combatants has a commerce raiding strategy.

Alternately if you are on the defensive, why don't you want to fight at your fortifications, regardless of doctrine?

The very premise of Decisive Battle theory relies on assumptions about force superiority absent defences that I am not comfortable making. We won't enjoy such superiority against any major opponent nor will we have it in enough theatres at once. And if we're going for decisive battles under fixed defenses, then we'd be better served with Base Strike bonuses.

The punch-counterpunch nature of Base Strike and the bonuses therein give us a better chance at the lopsided battles we need to end a war, and as a whole would serve to reduce attrition, in ways that Decisive Battle is not focused on.

tl;dr: I disagree with the very foundation of decisive battle theory.

Now if there was significant attention in the doctrine slides to the types of operations necessary to force a decisive battle, or even fluff about them, then I would be more comfortable with it. But there isn't.
 
Wolf Pack is just uniquely bad for Starfleet because it's intended to create a slow, dragging war in which we slowly slice apart the enemy's ability to fight. Our problem is that, due to politics, unless we are literally fighting for the survival of the Federation we must have short victorious wars. We succeeded in the Licori conflict because we were willing to fight aggressively and risk severe losses in the name of a fast timetable. Both Decisive Battle and Base Strike emphasize short, furious conflicts. I still think more time in debate is necessary before we choose a doctrine, but Decisive Battle does have political advantages. It also has risks, but the ability to whistle up 50% of the member and affiliate fleets and use them like a wrecking ball has its advantages as far as prosecuting a fast war goes.
 
Forgothrax said:
Wolf Pack is just uniquely bad for Starfleet because it's intended to create a slow, dragging war in which we slowly slice apart the enemy's ability to fight. Our problem is that, due to politics, unless we are literally fighting for the survival of the Federation we must have short victorious wars. We succeeded in the Licori conflict because we were willing to fight aggressively and risk severe losses in the name of a fast timetable. Both Decisive Battle and Base Strike emphasize short, furious conflicts. I still think more time in debate is necessary before we choose a doctrine, but Decisive Battle does have political advantages. It also has risks, but the ability to whistle up 50% of the member and affiliate fleets and use them like a wrecking ball has its advantages as far as prosecuting a fast war goes.
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The Licori war was also an offensive war that had only lukewarm support from the very beginning. I suspect the Federation would be more willing to have a long war if it's to prevent Federation citizens or affiliates from falling under the yoke of undemocratic empires. In a situation where we have no offensive war goals, I can see a strategy of low-risk victory by attrition being popular. Now that probably doesn't include the likely Cardassian war, because we have some offensive goals like liberating Bajor we'd like to achieve if possible. But it's a situation I can see occurring.
 
Briefvoice said:
Do we have a sense for what Defensive Doctrines the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians are using? We've certainly interacted with them enough.
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For Klingons and Romulans, we have the "Well, They Try" and war updates to peruse. Cardassians have been limited to skirmishes and diplomatic maneuvers, despite all the interaction we've had with them. So it's hard to say.

Fleet design doctrines:
Well Oneiros already stated them way back in page 14 of this quest:
Klingon: Swarm
Romulans: "Lone Ranger doctrine + cloak"
Cardassians: Combined

Offensive doctrines:
Klingons and Romulans are already described as using "wide-ranging infiltration by wolf packs of Birds of Prey, from both sides, with surprise assaults occurring on many worlds, and accounting for many transports", but it's unclear whether such usage is mutually exclusive with other doctrines. In particular, we have the following text:

"Now, to that end, the Romulans are also focusing on raiding. Both of them are doing it, but the Klingons are more focused on bases, defences, and infrastructure."
"The aim of the Romulans is to overextend the Klingons, while further cutting their industrial base and ability to transport resources. Whereas the Klingons are looking to hit transfer between major worlds to undermine support for the Romulan Senate. As a result of all the wolf-pack operations, however, there are constant little skirmishes appearing, sometimes deep behind the fronts. A Klingon advanced Bird of Prey even destroyed a Freighter on within the Romulus system and then escaped."

Cardassians do have wolf pack-sized task forces, but they haven't been using them as wolf packs. We've only met them in fleet engagements deep in space, and back in G&S they had a huge fleet going down the Straits of Themis. I'm inclined to believe they have a variant on decisive battle doctrine.
edit: Actually the very existence of the Vanguard tech in Decisive Battle doctrine with its "cruisers fuck yeah" makes it extremely attractive to the Cardassians.

Defensive doctrines:
The fact the Klingons somehow caught the Romulans by surprise in the opening year of their war and that Romulan "lightly defended systems fell" is evidence that Romulans use FiB doctrine.

Can't tell what the Klingons used as the Romulans haven't gone on the offensive into Klingon space yet, except for skirmishes in the frontier.

As for the Cardassians, I suspect they have forward defense like us, since they need to maintain tight control of client states and protectorates, and with their logistics issues are probably paranoid of wolf packs.
 
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SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
The situation where there are fleets flying about to decisively battle isn't one that occurs without pressure or battles on bases (or shipping) first.

How do you get a fleet to come out of its fortifications so that you can fight it? The only way is to threaten something that doesn't have a big fleet protecting it, or that it cannot ignore. In other words, before you can decisively battle a fleet you have to hit some fixed defenses. As Ixaria demonstrated, the best way to do this and get a nice decisive battle out of it is to have two fleets. But doing so against an enemy that you don't outnumber 3:1 is to invite defeat in detail. So you hit where they're not as best you can and try to luck your way into fighting them either before or after you hit a base. Either way, you're going to be hitting a number of bases, and if your luck is bad then you'll have to fight at a starbase or outpost anyway.

Situations like Ghosts and Whispers are the exception and unlikely to occur in war scenarios. Because of the nature of space development, we should expect conflict that is going to be decisive to be focused around orbitals, unless one of the combatants has a commerce raiding strategy.

Alternately if you are on the defensive, why don't you want to fight at your fortifications, regardless of doctrine?

The very premise of Decisive Battle theory relies on assumptions about force superiority absent defences that I am not comfortable making. We won't enjoy such superiority against any major opponent nor will we have it in enough theatres at once. And if we're going for decisive battles under fixed defenses, then we'd be better served with Base Strike bonuses.

The punch-counterpunch nature of Base Strike and the bonuses therein give us a better chance at the lopsided battles we need to end a war, and as a whole would serve to reduce attrition, in ways that Decisive Battle is not focused on.

tl;dr: I disagree with the very foundation of decisive battle theory.

Now if there was significant attention in the doctrine slides to the types of operations necessary to force a decisive battle, or even fluff about them, then I would be more comfortable with it. But there isn't.
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In this case you are in a situation where you have your main fleet covering their fleet, just waiting for it to leave the support of the defensive fortifications. In the mean time you launch raiding forces picking off vulnerable targets and trying to force them to react, to send their own forces out. Now this works if you have a stronger fleet overall otherwise they will concentrate their forces and send them out to overwhelm your main fleet. Against Forward Defense you are hitting a force with weaker Starbases that also has their forces spread out on the outer edges of their territory taking more time to concentrate and reinforce. During that time you can cut off frontier sections with your massed fleet and force detachments to either battle, starve, or retreat and abandon the outposts or starbases on the front. Against fleet in being though you have stronger and more bases with a concentrated fleet that can move quickly to defend them.

Base Strike on the other hand is great for launching that first attack when your striking fleet is assembled to open up gaps in their defensive network before they can scramble their own forces to reinforce their defenses. That is why it does well against Fleet in Being which emphasis a single home system for most of the fleet to reside in and a strong network of starbases and outposts, with the bonuses of the doctrine you don't need as large of an advantage to do so, and thus you can hit more bases in your initial strike. Forward Defense is a hard counter as it encourages more forces in the borders which can fall back onto the forward outposts and starbases if pressed until the rest of the fleet arrives.

The key in either situation though is identifying targets they have to defend, and then maneuver so that it is on a ground of your choosing. What bases are key to defensive lines, where do the supply routes run, what of these can you overwhelm quickly before enemy reinforcements arrive.

A potential area where decisive battle can shine is where you have a small margin over the enemy in terms of mobile forces that can be brought to bear by both sides. At that point it goes down to baiting them to emerge or once again cutting off their supply and sieging the system. Now for this to be true Decisive Battle needs to have better bonuses for combat not involving starbases than base strike, while base strike would need the extra bonuses for attacking and defending outposts and starbases.
 
SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
The situation where there are fleets flying about to decisively battle isn't one that occurs without pressure or battles on bases (or shipping) first.

How do you get a fleet to come out of its fortifications so that you can fight it? The only way is to threaten something that doesn't have a big fleet protecting it, or that it cannot ignore. In other words, before you can decisively battle a fleet you have to hit some fixed defenses. As Ixaria demonstrated, the best way to do this and get a nice decisive battle out of it is to have two fleets. But doing so against an enemy that you don't outnumber 3:1 is to invite defeat in detail. So you hit where they're not as best you can and try to luck your way into fighting them either before or after you hit a base. Either way, you're going to be hitting a number of bases, and if your luck is bad then you'll have to fight at a starbase or outpost anyway.

Situations like Ghosts and Whispers are the exception and unlikely to occur in war scenarios. Because of the nature of space development, we should expect conflict that is going to be decisive to be focused around orbitals, unless one of the combatants has a commerce raiding strategy.

Alternately if you are on the defensive, why don't you want to fight at your fortifications, regardless of doctrine?

The very premise of Decisive Battle theory relies on assumptions about force superiority absent defences that I am not comfortable making. We won't enjoy such superiority against any major opponent nor will we have it in enough theatres at once. And if we're going for decisive battles under fixed defenses, then we'd be better served with Base Strike bonuses.

The punch-counterpunch nature of Base Strike and the bonuses therein give us a better chance at the lopsided battles we need to end a war, and as a whole would serve to reduce attrition, in ways that Decisive Battle is not focused on.

tl;dr: I disagree with the very foundation of decisive battle theory.

Now if there was significant attention in the doctrine slides to the types of operations necessary to force a decisive battle, or even fluff about them, then I would be more comfortable with it. But there isn't.
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It seems like you are misunderstanding what the difference between Decisive Battle and Base Strike actually is?

On a strategic level Decisive Battle and Base Strike are actually very similar to each other (at least on the offense) and both are equipped to fight a decisive battle at the enemies base with their entire main fleet (and it's hard to say which doctrine is actually better at it), but in neither case is that a desirable scenario at all, any doctrine that did not try to avoid such an objectively disadvantageous situation where possible would be stupid. It's not that Base Strike is fine with it, both doctrines try to avoid it by dealing with main fleet and fortifications separately, just in somewhat different ways.
To start with, if the enemy only has one location he needs to defend then nothing can be done, they can just keep their main fleet waiting there indefinitely. The key is that you can threaten multiple locations at the same time, and the enemy is forced to either split up (which both Base Strike and Decisive Battle are fine with, Base Strike perhaps a little bit more), or try to move their fleet such that they will defend exactly the place you try to attack. The difference is that Base Strike tries to exploit that situation by slipping past the main fleet and attacking the fortifications somewhere, while Decisive Battle tries to exploit that situation to initiate a battle away from fortifications. Both rely on the enemy being unable to just sit there and wait.

It is true that it might be better if more of the Decisive Battle abilities than just Sensor Pickets dealt with the crucial "initiate a battle" part, just like it might be better if more Base Strike abilities than just Attack Pattern Delta dealt with the cruicial "slip past the fleet" part.
 
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[X][PLAN] Base Plan Re-balancing Analysis
[X][STARBASE] Henn-Makad Engineering Institute : 2310s Starbase Design - Combat
[X][SHIELDS] Andorian Academy : 2320s Deflector Emitters
[X][BOOST] Tiger Team, Starfleet Infectious Diseases Institute, Generic Teams 2, 3, 4.
[X][DOCTRINE] Games & Theory Division: Base Strike Doctrine

Doctrine is really the only point being argued. Wolf Pack doesn't fit the Federation.
Ignoring the mechanics, my own feeling is that the 'canon' Federation is more aimed at Base Strike in a war situation, suffering somewhat when that is not an applicable methodology (i.e. Borg just ignoring the defences and having no bases within range to counter attack)
 
You know, if there was ANY power I'd expect to have researched multiple doctrine trees and be able to use whichever one they thought was appropriate, it'd be the Klingons.

Think about it. Doctrine researchers tend to be military theorists or experienced generals; the Klingons have a warrior ethos that produces at the high end quite a few thoughtful warrior-poet types. Think of General Chang; I bet he was a doctrine 'research team' for the Klingons up until his death. And I doubt he was the only one.

(Probably an advocate of Base Strike, going by his idea of an 'ideal' campaign against the Federation from the Klingon Academy game)

Moreover, doctrine research affords the possibility of victory not through having superior technology or greater numbers, but by just straight-up being better warriors and tacticians than your enemy. That has to appeal to the Klingon mindset.

So I would bet on the Klingons researching doctrine as avidly as we research, oh, computers or xenopsychology. Their answer to "which doctrine tree do they favor" may well be "whichever one we want this year, and we can switch if we have to, given a bit of time to work on it."

SynchronizedWritersBlock said:
The situation where there are fleets flying about to decisively battle isn't one that occurs without pressure or battles on bases (or shipping) first.
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Yes, but a large fleet can cause massive trouble simply by being present in an enemy's space. If you fly out and park your fleet right between two of their major colony worlds, they have to either reinforce both worlds with ships, attack your fleet in deep space, or accept a risk that your fleet will hit whichever world they neglected to reinforce.

They can't "sit behind their defenses and laugh" without either heavily reinforcing one place (to withstand the Big Fleet) and accepting the loss of many other places, OR without parceling their reinforcements out widely to many places, and risking defeat in detail. It's not as though a big Decisive Battle fleet is unable to batter down starbases and the like. It's just less specialized for the role than an equally sized Base Strike fleet.

So I think you're being far too fast to dismiss Decisive Battle as ineffective or impossible. If anything it's likely to work better in Star Trek than in real life naval warfare, because your fleet can physically fly right into the heart of enemy territory if they're not stopped. On Earth with ships this is impossible, because even for an island power, the ocean is by definition the edge of someone's territory, not the center.

The Germans could safely adopt Fleet in Being because there was no way for the British to sail their fleet to a position directly between Berlin and the Western Front and dare the Germans to do something about it.

How do you get a fleet to come out of its fortifications so that you can fight it? The only way is to threaten something that doesn't have a big fleet protecting it, or that it cannot ignore. In other words, before you can decisively battle a fleet you have to hit some fixed defenses. As Ixaria demonstrated, the best way to do this and get a nice decisive battle out of it is to have two fleets. But doing so against an enemy that you don't outnumber 3:1 is to invite defeat in detail. So you hit where they're not as best you can and try to luck your way into fighting them either before or after you hit a base. Either way, you're going to be hitting a number of bases, and if your luck is bad then you'll have to fight at a starbase or outpost anyway.
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For combat on the scale we'd expect between the great powers, the fixed defenses of most systems are going to be a speedbump in and of themselves. You yourself ran this analysis in the context of Lapycorias some months ago- the starbase isn't going to help much if the Cardassians amass Combat 80 or 100 worth of ships, which they can.

Defenses on the scale we ran into at Ixaria and Gammon are a bit more of a problem, but those were the product of the Licori madly fortifying the bejeezus out of their star systems over the course of at least five years of total war against the Ked Peddah.

Alternately if you are on the defensive, why don't you want to fight at your fortifications, regardless of doctrine?
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As outlined above, if you have three or four fortified targets within range of the same fleet, dividing your forces to reinforce each of the fortified targets is a bad idea and invites defeat in detail. Parking all your forces in one fortified place preserves the safety of the fleet itself, but means that the individual fortified targets can be snapped up in isolation.

Flying out to accept battle starts to seem tempting- IF the enemy isn't obviously stronger than you are.

I don't think it's accurate to view "but the defender has fortifications" as some kind of hard counter to the potential of a major fleet battle to be decisive without specializing in counter-fortification tactics.

Now if there was significant attention in the doctrine slides to the types of operations necessary to force a decisive battle, or even fluff about them, then I would be more comfortable with it. But there isn't.
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There is now!

More seriously, the kind of operations required to force decisive battle are mostly the province of fluff that would have to be written during a war, rather than being the province of the tech tree.
 
All three offensive doctrines acknowledge the importance of shipping between the various loci of the enemy as the lifeblood of modern stellar states. Where they differ is in what they intend to do about it.

  • Wolf-Pack is set up to go in there and attack the veins and the various organs of supply-it literally has a pannel that says "The lifeblood of all stellar powers is that of exotic materials from distaff mine sites to their industrial hearts." They focus on humble civilian ships and defeating or foiling convoy escorts, or ambushing lone ships moving between ports.
  • Base Strike prefers to go for the actual industrial hearts themselves. These are heavily guarded sites, and heavy ships may be needed to break through the lines-but a smaller ship in a more numerous fleet can also break through the lines. At some point, everyone needs to assault some forts, break some blockades.
  • Decisive Battle is all about blockades ultimately. You want to impose them on the enemy, to make their industry grind to a halt and their population cry out. To safely blockade the enemy, you must take the fight out of them, so that your widely dispersed blockade formations are not at risk. Decisive Battle is the precondition, not the victory itself. But it's a dramatic and powerful precondition, and the loss of a large fleet alone might make the enemy sue for peace.
Our recent war experience has been a mix of Base Strike-we assaulted two planets-and Decisive Battle-we took down a fleet of enemy capital ships and won the war in a day. Which was more important? That's difficult to say.
 
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