So what were the thoughts on what vehicle we are designing. We have our "calvary" aspect seemingly covered by the bikes and mirage, so which grav hylux are we replacing next, Light or heavy? The heavy costs more, but if 40k has taught me anything, it's that trying to take on a superheavy platform (even one that the high-tech grav equivalent to a 16wheeler carrying a howitzer) without a comparable platform can cost you big.
It would give us a way to counter ork heavy metal like stompas depending on how much metal the works throw at us, and without something heavy of their own it should cause horrifying casualties to beaten because this is pre-wrath constructs.
On the other hand, it's really hard tk go wrong with just making a light/medium tank and working your way up from their.
We probably want to make at least one additional Fast Attack design so that we can declare that category done and rationalize it in an upcoming Stewardship action as part of our next steps toward a modernized military. Personally I'd back a gun carrier based on the speeder chassis, which is just barely able to hold a vehicle-scale weapon and a holo-field if all its slots are traded out. Stick a Starlance on that and we'd have everything we need to pop enemy heavy metal in an extremely mobile package. That plus the Bright Talon and Razorwind is probably enough to finish off our Fast Attack selections, but if someone else has a solid idea for another Fast Attack choice I'd be interested in hearing it.
After Fast Attack is taken care of, we probably want to modernize our Needlestorm IFV, since refitting those will cost less than designing a whole new one. Mostly that would be adding defensive systems, I think. A light tank wouldn't be a bad move either. A heavy tank I'd like to avoid this turn, as there will be a lot of weapon options opening up next turn (melta, plasma, three different types of grav weapon) and if there's any desire at all to include them on such a vehicle then we don't want to design it until we have those available.
Your regular reminder that Brigantine is actually roughly on par with Aspect Armor, and also looks kickin rad.
And we don't have to upgrade Literally Everyone, but getting our Militia squads into Brigantine with a Needler, and we can probably get several of our Militia Warhosts up to scratch.
Stick to just Brigantine if you want a fast and cheap refit that keep wasted EP to a minimum.
The Needlers mean it takes about as long as equipping alot of our forces with VGA. (VGA 6EP vs Brigantine 2EP+Needler carbine 4EP)
I get that we're swinging back to a more limited upgrade program given our ability for a much larger refit than the 5 detachment Warrior AP limitation but I think we can still split the difference and quickly overhaul our forces while still working towards long term goals.
8,206 EP to give all of our soldiers in our Militia Assault Detachments VG. 4,644 EP for our Militia Heavies and 11,388 EP for Militia Line detachments. 24,238 EP- less than 5 VAP. And I can guarantee that we're going to repurpose and reuse the VG warsuits quicker than we can 4000 brigantines.
Edit: even just giving the Guardian Fire Squads a VG sergeant with a Heavy Needler would give them a bit more resilience and firepower while being wargear we can easily reslot into other units once more systematic reforms are rolled out. 114 squads at 16 EP per gives 1,824 EP.
Edit2: VG for all of our Militia Assault Squads outside of the Bladestorms (which are all deployed) is only 2,820 EP.
The difference between we updated our entire army over to Brigantine or doing that with VGA is pretty huge in terms of speed. We expect a Biel-Tan attack soonish, we kind of don't have time to wait 3 turns to finish gearing up our forces just with better armor.
With Brigantine we can update our entire army for 3 FAG and also do some very limited weapons updates.
The speed part is a large factor here for me because at the start of next turn we can have most of our army in Brigantine vs only having done partial updates that takes another ~2 after that to finish most of the militia detachments in VGA.
The big part here is that the forge actions get freed up a lot sooner for boosting our either ships or get more foundries in place to build stuff passively.
I also don't see VGA sticking around for long, because it's likely going to be replaced the moment we do another armor design with at least a medium power armor version if not a heavy armor one.
We had several good designs for both that are around 7-9 EP per.
Ithilmar is the armor I expect to stick around for longer, but that is a bit expensive to do with the retrofit.
The difference between we updated our entire army over to Brigantine or doing that with VGA is pretty huge in terms of speed. We expect a Biel-Tan attack soonish, we kind of don't have time to wait 3 turns to finish gearing up our forces just with better armor.
With Brigantine we can update our entire army for 3 FAG and also do some very limited weapons updates.
The speed part is a large factor here for me because at the start of next turn we can have most of our army in Brigantine vs only having done partial updates that takes another ~2 after that to finish most of the militia detachments in VGA.
The big part here is that the forge actions get freed up a lot sooner for boosting our either ships or get more foundries in place to build stuff passively.
I also don't see VGA sticking around for long, because it's likely going to be replaced the moment we do another armor design with at least a medium power armor version if not a heavy armor one.
We had several good designs for both that are around 7-9 EP per.
Ithilmar is the armor I expect to stick around for longer, but that is a bit expensive to do with the retrofit.
I think the idea we're going to replace VG is largely fantasy. Ithilmar is the suit of armor we knew was obsolete the moment it was designed because of the ludicrously bulky and over priced gravity shield designed for a ~10-100ton vehicle being slapped onto an infantry man. I think it's objectively wrong to keep Ithilmar in service longer than VG because the former is fundamentally a half-assed solution whereas the former is a perfectly functioning design that can at best be hand wrung over for not going far enough.
Furthermore, if you look at my estimates and reasoning we should only be concerned with the ~6 Militia Warhosts we have undeployed and the Warhost we're raising this turn. Once we actually focus on the units we can guarantee will be available against Biel-Tan we have a much broader remit for a comprehensive refit that both isn't throwing away EP on Brigantines for rainy days we are actively trying to ensure never come, fixating on our incredibly overpriced Ithilmar, or hypothetical Medium Power Armors that are totally cost efficient but don't exist and totally wouldn't get bogged down in desires to cram an infantry scale Grav Shield or Conversion Field onto them.
I want to give your argument the benefit of the doubt, but the moment I hear Ithilmar being treated as a better long term investment than VG when it's sacrificing half of its slots and nearly 66% of it's cost on a rushed grav shield it just elevates all my concern that defense is being overvalued for its own sake. Ithilmar is objectively an overpriced stopgap that ought to be replaced as soon as feasible by a proper design using an actual infantry scale Grav Shield.
I mean, you are probably going to be putting the vast majority of your vehicle crews in Brigandine armor, so a pile of it isn't exactly going to go to waste even if you do end up eventually replacing it in general service. Worst case scenario there is maybe flogging the stuff off to Meros or [some other ally here] for their army or shoving it into a vault labled "in case of horrible gribbly things".
I think the idea we're going to replace VG is largely fantasy. Ithilmar is the suit of armor we knew was obsolete the moment it was designed because of the ludicrously bulky and over priced gravity shield designed for a ~10-100ton vehicle being slapped onto an infantry man. I think it's objectively wrong to keep Ithilmar in service longer than VG because the former is fundamentally a half-assed solution whereas the former is a perfectly functioning design that can at best be hand wrung over for not going far enough.
And here we have difference thinking about the designs.
For me, Ithilmar is at least an okish Assault armor and is going to be kept around and directly iterated on when we get new tech, but isn't a high prio.
Edit: Overall for me at least a solid design that does what it should do. Keep the Assault Squads alive and make them stupidly hard to kill.
Meanwhile, I think that VGA is going to get an outright replaced the next chance we get with a heavy full power armor design.
Edit2: Fair point on only retrofitting the warhosts.
Ithilmar is mainly an armor for close combat, Targeters are pretty close to a wasted slot there.
And them having the vehicle grade grav-shield gen means they have a vehicle strength grav-shields it does impact how much they can block.
But yeah, most likely will downgrade that to infantry size and throw in a conversion field when we get the chance.
The point is still any update here is tech depended and not a high prio.
VGA is the one that will get the replacement the moment we get the chance for new armor designs.
No idea where this dislike for our Big Boy Pants suddenly comes from. The Ithilmar Armor is not bad. The Void Guard Armor is not bad either. It is just that they have not been munchkined, min-maxed and engineered to an inch of their Lives yet. They were designed and voted for.
The Brigandine is also okay. Getting it for our Guys as a Quick Fix and Building on that seems wort it for me. It is just a single Turn, not multiple turns of investment.
Broadly, both of our armors are Mk.1 Thunder Armor equivalent. Like, first-generation-out-of-eight early pre-Great Crusade pattern equivalent, if compared to Imperium infantry armor.
252 EP to give every single infantryman in a Militia Line/Assault Detachment VG (456 EP if we give the HG Ithilmar)- 354 for Veteran HQs to get Ithilmar
360 EP to give every infantry in a Militia Heavy VG (564 EP if the HG get Ithilmar again)- 462 for Veterans only
270 EP for the Battlecasting detachment (845 EP if the HG+Psykers get Ithilmar- 389 EP if only the Psykers get Ithilmar)- 491 EP for Veterans and Psykers only
192 EP for Militia Light Support (396 EP for HG to get Ithilmar)- 294 EP for Veterans only
156 EP for HG Skirmish (462 EP for HG)- 258 EP for Veterans only
180 EP for HG Line (690 EP for HG)- 282 EP for Veterans only
144 EP for HG LSupport (552 for HG)- 246 EP for Veterans Only
Total: 13,074 EP or 19,619 EP (Ithilmar for HQ squads and Psykers, not yet feasible)
120 EP saved per M.Line/M.Heavy (FGuardian brig)-1,680 EP
80 EP per Battlecasting/M. LSupport- 2,000 EP
40 EP per Assault- 240 EP
3,920 EP saved
Only issuing Guardian Fire Squads Brigantines brings the cost down to 9,154 EP
EG, we roll out the armor upgrades with an eye for some longevity in a single turn and can focus on vehicles, weaponry, or any detachments that return (like from Meros) the turn after. This still has us making ~1,200 VG suits that will be a serviceable infantry armor for about ~10,000 years give a century or two.
I mean, you are probably going to be putting the vast majority of your vehicle crews in Brigandine armor, so a pile of it isn't exactly going to go to waste even if you do end up eventually replacing it in general service. Worst case scenario there is maybe flogging the stuff off to Meros or [some other ally here] for their army or shoving it into a vault labled "in case of horrible gribbly things".
Yes, I'm not saying it's going to be completely wasted but we're not going to be fielding thousands of vehicle crew for a long while, and trading/stockpiling it is a tertiary concern. Here's the math for how unfeasible a universal VG roll out is, but how feasible it is for melee troops and HG.
All I'm saying is we don't have to just print brigantine, we can actually take steps towards modernizing our military to some of the steps we've supposedly agreed on (suddenly the VG is on the chopping block and that I *do* vehemently disagree with) while still rising to the state of emergency.
And here we have difference thinking about the designs.
For me, Ithilmar is at least an okish Assault armor and is going to be kept around and directly iterated on when we get new tech, but isn't a high prio.
Edit: Overall for me at least a solid design that does what it should do. Keep the Assault Squads alive and make them stupidly hard to kill.
Meanwhile, I think that VGA is going to get an outright replaced the next chance we get with a heavy full power armor design.
Edit2: Fair point on only retrofitting the warhosts.
Ithilmar is insanely cost inefficient and is never ever going to see meaningful proliferation until every other problem in our army is fixed. A single 6 man squad of Ithilmar is often as expensive as the several squads of VG they might be leading. The fact you can talk about Ithilmar and just ignore it's price in the context of our EP budgetary constraints tell me we're not even discussing the same issue. It's Terminator tier armor... that will likely be outnumbered by the Terminators unless we get a lot more time to stockpile EP with no military expansion than we can reasonably expect.
Any assessment of a armor/weapon system that ignores cost effectiveness is incomplete.
Different worlds of budgetary constraints. Ithilmar is functionally never going to see much use outside of specialist squads, VG does quite literally every single thing we need from an infantry suit at as good a price as we're going to see. Any hypothetical 'VG replacement' either is contingent on VG being easily replaceable, VG never seeing active service at all, or is really just a case of us designing specialist medium power armor for rolls an assault armor isn't suited for.
No one insisting on the VG being a dead letter ever seems interested in how we're going to be doing that. Not issuing it at all until then feels incredibly counterproductive and Ithilmar just isn't going to see much proliferation.
No idea where this dislike for our Big Boy Pants suddenly comes from. The Ithilmar Armor is not bad. The Void Guard Armor is not bad either. It is just that they have not been munchkined, min-maxed and engineered to an inch of their Lives yet. They were designed and voted for.
The Brigandine is also okay. Getting it for our Guys as a Quick Fix and Building on that seems wort it for me. It is just a single Turn, not multiple turns of investment.
It's not dislike, it's that it's not something we're actually able to use all that much in it's current state when someone considers the cost of it. The VG is perfectly suited and is pretty well optimized- it's just not Power Armor, which means people think it's intrinsically a stopgap compared to the Ithilmar which *is* a stopgap.
I'm not coming at this from the angle of 'how effective is this as an armor system in a vacuum' I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who's actually running the costs and staring at the bill. I had misgivings at the time assauged by the Warrior AP limitations, now I'm down to saying 'we can maybe put 49 psykers out of 2,000+ soldiers into it cost effectively'
Ithilmar is mainly an armor for close combat, Targeters are pretty close to a wasted slot there.
And them having the vehicle grade grav-shield gen means they have a vehicle strength grav-shields it does impact how much they can block.
With the weapons we have, if would be a waste to say it's just for CC. With a smaller grav shield and targeters it would be perfect for general use.
I think the grav shield will still be too expensive for widespread use among troops, so ithilmar will be an elites choice, with the troops version getting a conversion field.
With the weapons we have, if would be a waste to say it's just for CC. With a smaller grav shield and targeters it would be perfect for general use.
I think the grav shield will still be too expensive for widespread use among troops, so ithilmar will be an elites choice, with the troops version getting a conversion field.
We don't know how expensive the Conversion Field would be either. We could stop at Heavy Power Armor with Holo-Fields and still clown on pretty much everything else.
Blazestar Light Gravtanks are equipped to engage other vehicles, mounting a turreted Starlance with a coaxial Fatecaster Rifle for anti-infantry duty and hull-mounted Lascannon as a secondary weapon. The crew are supplied with Wraithweave Voidsuits, but not weapons.
CP: 3
Is our current light tank, and it does not list any defenses so a new version with a grav shield + holo and holo field is something we should design.
Different worlds of budgetary constraints. Ithilmar is functionally never going to see much use outside of specialist squads, VG does quite literally every single thing we need from an infantry suit at as good a price as we're going to see. Any hypothetical 'VG replacement' either is contingent on VG being easily replaceable, VG never seeing active service at all, or is really just a case of us designing specialist medium power armor for rolls an assault armor isn't suited for.
No one insisting on the VG being a dead letter ever seems interested in how we're going to be doing that. Not issuing it at all until then feels incredibly counterproductive and Ithilmar just isn't going to see much proliferation.
Ithilmar isn't going to be used in the refit because it is too expensive, yes.
But it is going to be used extensively in our own designed Detachments due to use in the forgefire squad and void spears.
I am mostly looking forward at how long it takes us to set up the Armor foundry so we aren't burning our forge actions on directly producing EP (and do the same for pretty much all the other gear).
Part of wanting a very fast and cheap retrofit is so we can use the forge actions to help boost out foundries faster.
And if only the retrofitting of active warhosts is the goal, this turn is potentially all we need to do that with the 10k we have depending on what load out we go for (personally still expect that take 2 turns and ~3-4 forge actions)
With the weapons we have, if would be a waste to say it's just for CC. With a smaller grav shield and targeters it would be perfect for general use.
I think the grav shield will still be too expensive for widespread use among troops, so ithilmar will be an elites choice, with the troops version getting a conversion field.
We have two of our newly designed troops being fully equipped with ithilmar.
To be fair for Voidspears it's kind of stopgag, because the rifles they have are heavy and we wanted them mobile.
And yes it's an Armor very well-made for CC and not nearly as good for anything else so it gets used for that.
Personally, not looking to add grav shields at all to most of our ranged units. Conversion fields might get added as gear, but that comes down to cost.
A Holo-Field + medium armor is already incredibly levels of defense for any infantryman in the setting. A Medium/Heavy Power Armor with Holo-Field+Conversion Field (assuming similar costs- Conversion Field is probably costlier) can't possibly be cheaper than 9 EP and with almost any other upgrades it's 10 EP per. Where are we drumming up the funds to pay for that when we've already strained ourselves trying to issue the VG, let alone Ithilmar.
I'm making my guess on Conversion fields being cheaper based on the fact they cost less during character creation.
Intuitively, the Conversion field feels "worse" than grav-shields, so it follows that the price should be lower.
Easier miniaturization does not, in my book, make up for a 50% price hike in character creation.
A Holo-Field + medium armor is already incredibly levels of defense for any infantryman in the setting. A Medium/Heavy Power Armor with Holo-Field+Conversion Field (assuming similar costs- Conversion Field is probably costlier) can't possibly be cheaper than 9 EP and with almost any other upgrades it's 10 EP per. Where are we drumming up the funds to pay for that when we've already strained ourselves trying to issue the VG, let alone Ithilmar.
The answer is building lots of foundries instead of brute forcing things with the forge EP side of things.
Beautiful thing is that the forge is also able to speed that up a lot.
Takes a bit to do that after we crash retrofitted our armor, but for anything but the extreme short term it's the only way to get the masses of gear we needed.
Basically that. Long term, you absolutely want to be supplying as much of your army out of Production Infrastructure as possible, it's just significantly more action-efficient. In the short term, your biggest bottleneck is "how much EP can I afford to put out instead of doing other things with those actions"/"how many turns am I willing to gamble on not fighting a major ground battle." You can easily, for example, make enough Brigandine for your entire army as it stands in one turn, meaning that you could retire all three starting armor types from active service by 985 (accounting for the need to rotate deployments so currently deployed forces are back home for Refit), for example, with perhaps some weapons upgrades and vehicles thrown in. The Void Guard suits are nice, but there really is no getting around that they're three times the pricetag, and when it comes to doing a big equipment rollout quickly cheap and Good Enough is definitely desired.
Overall, we are in turn 2. As far as I understand, there were some choices made based on the bad understanding of the system; jumping into super-focused quality minmaxing straight out of the gate is not as good as we though.
How the situation gonna look ten turns down the road, we don't know. Super-elite armies still appeal to me for various reasons, but they do not seem viable without serious industrial build-up.
The Eldar tend to do super elite armies for their strike teams and stuff, don't they? It's certainly a model of warfare that works well with artisanry and results in a minimum of friendly casualties for an extremely casualty-intolerant faction.
Another advantage of doing Mass brigatine/needle rifles now is that we can give the old armor and las weapons to Meros so they can use them to raise a new militia warhost
Overall, we are in turn 2. As far as I understand, there were some choices made based on the bad understanding of the system; jumping into super-focused quality minmaxing straight out of the gate is not as good as we though.
Overall, we are in turn 2. As far as I understand, there were some choices made based on the bad understanding of the system; jumping into super-focused quality minmaxing straight out of the gate is not as good as we though.
How the situation gonna look ten turns down the road, we don't know. Super-elite armies still appeal to me for various reasons, but they do not seem viable without serious industrial build-up.
Most of the designs are very good.
We want to do as little reworking them as needed because that takes a ton of AP each time we have to do that.
Goal for now is is pretty much finish Retrofit with the 10k we get this turn (maybe spend another forge action next turn) and after that throw the forge actions into helping get the foundries up and running for the stuff we need a lot of (looking at mirage transports as a big example).
If we don't fuck up there by turn 10 a lot of our logistics for passive equipment creation should be up and running allowing us to create 2-3 detachments per turn with our new much more expensive troops.
