[X] Plan: To Create and Exploit Opportunities v.2, The Independents - And set up communication
Its not going to matter. but i'm voting anyway.
Its not going to matter. but i'm voting anyway.
A Different Breed (Warhammer 29K)
Jesus, Sorry man.
Its Been 30 C for a week here as well, Not as bad as your, but i'm canadian and have a dog kennel of sled dogs, neither me or the dogs are built for these temperatures, So I raise an ice cold bottle of water in solidarity. Stay cool, You can guarantee the players will be here when you stop melting.
Heavy Weapons Batteries are probably better than regular ones for a carrier since they aren't supposed to get close to their enemies in first place.
The more likely scenario a carrier faces is the need to help the rest of the fleet shoot down ships that are only just starting to getting too close to it since carriers should be the furthest ships from the enemy. The rest of your fleets standard weapons should be firing well before the carrier's standard weapons are able to fire and since we've got a kiting doctrine actually sticking around in close range engagements is unlikely.
As such you want it outfitted with weapons that can reach as far out as possible and hit anything that's approaching it before they get into standard weapons range.
I am aware of the fact that Canon Eldar aren't long ranged snipers, our tech-base diverges thanks to Spike Cannons (note as not being short ranged), Fatetwisters (Spike Cannons with literal aim-hacks), and Starlances (lances on steroids nuff said) which allow us to reach out further than Canon Eldar whose main Macro Weapons are based on the same principals as the short ranged Shuriken type weapons.
Anyways, my carrier proposal:
[] Dusk Shadow class Light Carrier (10 System | 3 Weapon Batteries | 1 Heavy Weapon Battery)
-[] Trade in 2 Weapon Slots for 1 Heavy Weapon Battery
-[] 2x Heavy Las-Lance 2 Heavy Weapon Slot (could replace with Thruster-Lances if you want more punch)
-[] 1x Suncannons 1 Weapon Slots (Could swap for a Vibro-Bombard if you want better close range self defense)
-[] 2x Æthersail 2 System slot
-[] 1x Plasma Thrusters 2 System slots
-[] 1x PD 1 System slots (prob suncannon PD)
-[] Holo-Field 1 System Slot
-[] 4x Hanger 4 System Slot
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Propulsion wise this is already more engines than our existing light cruiser the Battle Caravel but you could always drop the Plasma Thrusters for more Aethersails since this thing isn't supposed to be getting shot at to begin with or ditch a regular or heavy weapon slot for more engines.
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I have jogged four miles under a baking sun in the middle of summer, through rain so thick it looked more like a waterfall hitting the street than rain, through blizzards where I couldn't see ten feet in front of me. Those were good jogs. They made day to day life seem like a paradise.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
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Had it recently where I live. It was oppressive. Had to walk about ten blocks or so in that heat, and it just drained me. In the sun, it felt scorching.
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I think it's been shown that slot switch overs are costly moving up. Probably shouldn't bother. Switch too a clipper haul instead. 12 systems slots for grav shield to really ensure you can't be hit, and it comes with an extra heavy cannon so you can avoid the extra cost there.
In general you were always going to have to take your time building these since we don't have any hulls to convert or fighter foundries anyways. Other ships around it will be more accountable for fielding fighters and retrieving them than downing vessels. That role will go to other void craft, specifically it's escorts. I'm going to float you a design with 2.5 times the hanger, no heavies, because it will have escorts with heavies to accompany it instead.
[ ] Plan Wraith Nest Carrier (12 System | 4 Weapon Batteries | 2 Heavy Weapon Battery)
-[] Trade in 2 Heavy Weapon Slots for 4 system slots
-[] 2× Vibration Bombard 2 Weapon Slots
-[] 2× Thruster Lance 2 Weapon Slots
-[] 2× Æthersail 2 System slot
-[] Grav-Shield 2 System slots
-[] 1× PD 1 System slots (prob suncannon PD)
-[] Holo-Field 1 System Slot
-[] 10 × Hanger 10 System Slot
Two of these lets you field the same number of fighter craft as five of your light carrier models, with better defenses, but much cheaper, because your producing fewer weapons, Holo fields, grav shields, sails, suncannon pd, and overall haul mass than the light cruiser design. The weapons your giving up aren't really needed for a carrier to serve it's role anyway, and it will have sufficient carrack support armed with star lances or other weapons to not matter.
With thruster Lance to soften them up at range and vibration to tear them apart if they close, you'll have a good combo for defeat. Granted, Ideally escorts tear apart anything before it can get that close, so it maybe worthwhile to switch to all thruster lance, which are also cheaper than vibration bombards. There is also the option to go even cheaper with plasma or spike macros.
Naval grav-hybrid Bombard & Lance cost : 38 per vessel
Suncannon PD : 5 per vessel
Holo Field Capital Defense : 9 per vessel
Grav Shield Capital Defense : 12 per vessel
Looking at our caravel, it's an anti-fighter destroyer killer, which makes sense given the roll of light carriers in actual naval combat, and our next model should be the same. I'm going to wait to see what tech we have turn 6 before I make up my mind, but right now a plasma upgrade looks fine. Heavy suncannon, 2 standard suncannons, and 2 fusion mortars would do for weapons. For systems 2 PDA suncannons, 3 sails so it's faster for intercepting destroyers, Holo fields and Grav shields would do.
Thoughts?
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Now that I think of it, we've seen Zahr Tann's tech base, and they use Hellguns as the base weapon.
We're probably going to use Plasma guns as our base gun.
I wonder what the other craftworlds are doing (before standardization to shurikens)
My thought here is that the assumption that the Imperium will be the dominant power in the galaxy is heavily dependent on what happens in the next Millenium.
If we break the curses and recover the ability for Eldar to serially reincarnate
It's worth considering that like the Navigators and Astropaths, the Emperor put the Mechanicum on the tomorrow's problem list, and planned to eliminate them when they were no longer essential.
The Eldar seem to have managed as a society of serial reincarnators just fine for sixty five million years.
Things went wrong for the last 0.008% of Eldar history, but the Fall was probably a harsh enough lesson not to go overboard that it's not likely to be repeated for an exceedingly long time, if ever. Particularly as the Fall has permanently diminished Eldar capabilities, even if the Curses are broken, so there'll be a perpetual reminder.
Having immortal serial reincarnators around means they'll also be there to remind future generations of how bad what the worst that can happen actually is.
I think we're going to have to see what the production facilities output is. I can see ratios at which Star rather than Sunblasters are more effective, given how much more powerful the former are.
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Probably Needlers with one or two Spikers per squad for the more prepared ones, and lasguns for those that were not. Majors I'd guess plasma on elites at least.
Aeldmoot Pre-Day 2 vote count
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Starblasters cost exotic resources though. I don't think we will put those on the lowest troops.
They do, but it comes down to the interplay of the relative productivity of Starcrystal farms to weapon forges, the availability of Steward/Warrior AP to raise/equip units, and the relative effectiveness of the two weapons. As does the relative cost of building production facilities for their other equipment.
For example, if the BAP cost of creating production of X Starblasters is twice that of creating X Sunblasters, but they're more than twice effective and Steward/Warrior AP is relatively scarce, so is a limiting factor, we may be significantly better off with Starblasters. Assume also that making their weapons is only a part of the total cost of equipping a warrior, and it becomes even more clear cut. We'd have a choice between improving the defences of our warriors to keep the ratio the same, or keeping the defences the same and making the cost ratio much more equal.
When we're doing these comparisons, we should be comparing the total package, how much BAP does it cost to create a drip of all the gear they need, and looking at the trade offs between complete packages.
In this scenario, we'd raise more than half as many Starblaster units as we would Sunblaster units, and the end result would be a military significantly more than twice as lethal.
We are blessed with significant advantages in intelligence, tactical mobility, and strategic mobility, so we're much more capable of leveraging a smaller more lethal force than many factions are, and we also have a much more survivable army thanks to our superior armour, making us less fragile than many small forces would be.
To put it on a micro-scale, a unit of six Eldar with starblasters and higher grade defences may be both much more lethal and much more survivable than a unit of twelve Eldar with Sunblasters and less good defences, but they have roughly the same strategic footprint. This possibly gets magnified later in if things like mobility aids that act as force multipliers like jump packs become available, as it's much more viable to give them to forces which are half the size.
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The trouble with using exotics even on troops is that it puts them behind the same bottleneck as everything else.
Even in a small elite army, your troops constitute the bulk of what you are fielding. And if we are putting exotics everywhere from our troops to our starships, what's the point of even having other weapons?
Our primary enemy is orks, and a plasma rifle is sufficient to oneshot the average boy, and that is what our basic ground troops should be concerned about.
if you have a squad with ithilmar armor and starblasters, that's an elite squad. Because if those are your troops, what are you going to put in your elites slot on the force organization chart?
As I say, it really depends on the ratios. It could be that for our regular troops Starblasters are the way to go. We paid character creation points for them, so if they turn out to be better value at their price point that seems fair enough.
That would potentially leave Sunblasters as a dead end for infantry in all but the very long term (when we may exhaust our pool of recruits for expanding exotics production), yes, but that's just what can happen when we're working in a realistic scenario of incomplete information. It may be that plasma ends up a technology we primarily use for artillery, or grenades, or missiles. If so, we just accept it and move on.
It's similar to how most of the infantry scale grav-weapons we've invented may never see deployment at scale.
In terms of bottlenecks, there are advantages and disadvantages to exotics. Exotics are no different to foundries or forges. They're just part of the BAP cost of setting up continuing production. What they are is more transferable than other kinds of production facilities, as what they produce can be used for more than one thing.
Let's say that you want to equip your regular forces with Starblasters.
To do this, you spend BAP to build a mixture of Starcrystal Farms and Starblaster Forges, along with Weapon, Armour and Vehicle Foundries to make the rest of their and their transports' crew's gear. This is option 1, producing X squads worth of equipment a turn for no further investment.
The alternative is that, you spend the same BAP to build Sunblaster Forges along with the other Foundries above. This is option 2, producing Y squads worth of equipment a turn for no further investment
In option 1, for a given amount of upfront BAP investment, you can equip fewer soldiers every year than in option 2. Y > X. How many fewer is yet unknown, as are what the other constraints are*. However, in option 1 you also have the option value of repurposing the Starcrystal to something else that's more urgent at the time. That option value is worth something, and is an advantage to taking option 1.
Exotic production isn't a bottleneck any more than any other production facility is a bottleneck, it's just something else we need to weigh up the costs for. In terms of production, everything, in the end, has a cost in terms of BAP investment.
In terms of the threat profile, our line troops are likely to be phenomenally outnumbered by orks. They don't just have to be able to kill regular orks, they have to kill them very quickly in great numbers, and they also need to be able to fight enemy elites and vehicles, as our regular troops are likely to be outnumbered by those elites and vehicle alone. That's what makes the Starblasters so valuable; as it gives our infantry not just the ability to one shot enemy elites, but also to sustain an enormous rate of fire so they can carve through hordes of orks and their vehicles very quickly. Our regular troops don't just need to be able to kill an ork, they need to be able to kill him, his boss, his bosses' boss, and his thousand mates. Each.
* if Steward and Warrior AP are a significant limiting factor on army expansion in the short to medium term the choice may be between a small well equipped army and a nearly equally small less well equipped army.
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Exotic production is ALWAYS a bottleneck, because we do not have an arbitrary amount of time.
Using exotic resources on troops puts them in competition with everything else that we want to put them on, so you have to prioritize. Star lances for navy and titan hunting, our for base line troops? Which goes first?
Your also discounting that it takes 5AP to increase production of star lances by 40/turn.
The rate of exotic production has to remain ahead of the total automated consumption, because if we run out of exotics, the weapon production grinds to a halt, which would be a massive waste.
It is not possible to keep starcrystal consumption under the level of starcrystal production without a disproportionate investment. Assuming (for ease of writing/optimism) the rifle factory consumes the whole output of a star crystal farm (20 guns/tun), the cost of the rifle factory is 7AP, because it also needs a star crystal supply to run indefinitely.
7Ap/factory is just not feasible, especially when we have a dinky military numbering in the thousands that needs to expand (at least) twentyfold.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Ooof we've had a couple days like that here, you have my firmest sympathies. Take care of yourself!
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
I think eventually we can give our troops exotic weapons. Just not our baseline troops.
Exotic weapons will probably go into our elite forces, unless we find a way to more efficiently expand exotic production. But I think, ultimately, they will be to use what say, a plasma cannon is to the Imperium. Or a power sword.
A weapon you give your biggest goons to make them extra killy.
Our baseline troops will be using needlers, plasma guns, etc. Stuff that we can produce in bulk that isnt limited by an input.
Exotic production is no more a bottleneck than production of everything else, or steward AP, or Warrior AP.
I'm not discounting that it takes 5 AP to build an Exotic facility, I'm saying that AP is no different to the AP spent building Weapons Forges or Armour or Vehicle Foundries.
The only thing special about AP spent on exotics production is that it's more flexible as exotics aren't locked into making only a single end product.
Where I think you're going wrong is comparably only the weapons, not a complete package.
Let's say that it takes 7 AP rather than 2 AP to produce a facility worth of Starblasters (and it may well take less, depending on the production ratio of forges and star crystal farms*).
A unit would also require some number of vehicle Foundries to produce its transport, multiple Armour foundries to produce the squad and crews armour and other weapon forges to produce their weapon.
That means the total number of AP for production for a given unit with starblasters/sunblasters is not your 7:2 ratio, but something noticeably more favourable.
* For the Forge of Vaul, each star crystal is equivalent to 5 EP. If the same ratio applies to the cost effectiveness of production facilities, which I think should be the central case, as Starblaster Rifles cost 10 EP and 2 Starcrystals, then I think we should expect it to take 2/5 of a Starcrystal Farm to supply one Starblaster Rifle Foundry, so 4 AP worth.
A single Starcrystal farm is enough production to make 100 Starblaster Rifles a turn. I very, very strongly doubt that a Starblaster Forge can turn out 100 of them a turn, as that's a thousand EP worth a turn. That's more than twice what a BAP can produce, and we know that production facilities make gear much slower than investing BAP directly.
If the extra cost is 2 AP per Starblastee Forge, this makes using them even more likely to be favourable.
The thing is, we don't know the relative BAP setup costs, so we shouldn't make that judgment yet. If the setup cost of producing a squad with starblasters is, say, only 25 or 50% higher than the cost of a squad with sunblasters, I think we'd be foolish to rule that out at this point before seeing the relative cost and benefits.
For long run production we're probably going to be wanting to look at a metric like fractional BAP require to produce a squad a turn, and then compare the utility of that squad against that cost, taking into account Steward and Warrior costs that likely make larger armies more costly in those categories.
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That was my initial assumption too but that is actually not the case as according to the QM the space reserved for the two Regular Weapon Batteries is just used instead for a single Heavy Weapon battery.
Heavy Weapons are more useful for a carrier than regular weapons since a carrier is going to be in fewer situations where it's regular weapons will be able to fire compared to situations where only it's longer range Heavy Weapons can fire.
You're also only able to cram in so many hangars because you've gimped your designs ability to keep up with the rest of our fleet.
For reference our existing cruiser the Battle Carrack has 3 Aethersails and a Plasma Thruster while your carrier can't even match the Carrack's Aethersail count and has no Plasma Thrusters.
If you wanted to match the Battle Carrack's engine count you wouldn't be able to have a ship with more hangars than my 2 light cruisers without compromising on Grav-Shields and or Weapons.Battle Carrack said:
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That's what I'm saying. We have a force organization chart which has different unit slots for Troops and Elites.
Unlike the 40k I'm used to, troops aren't actually mandatory in the quest (used to be that you had to have 1 hq unit and 2 troop type unit).
We need to keep the cost of our troop type units relatively low for it to be feasible to scale up. Elite troop types can get the exotic weapons, and even then I'd be sparing on them there as well.
if the only difference between the troops is the gun, then 7:2 is the only ratio worth considering. To increase the rate of recruitment of a unit, you need all the other factories for both, so it cancels out.
And that's assuming that a Starblaster rifle factory produces the same number of guns as a sunblaster factory, in which case you would need more factories making starblasters, which raises the cost further.
I'll give you that a single factory is unlikely to create 100 rifles a turn and consume the output of a whole crystal farm. I was using the other number in the turn post, which is 5 times lower. 20 rifles per turn sounds a lot less far fetched.
It still doesn't change my opinion that star lances are better on starships where the extra range, RoF and damage does more per shot than on an infantry trooper. We are better off annihilating the Orks in space than in a ground battle, arming starships better will likely prevent the ground engagement altogether.
@Mechanis: The turn post gives two different values for starcrystal and fatescope production. For starcrystals, the current 4 produce 200 a turn each, but the new ones only produce 40. Same with fatescopes, but 30/6. Is that correct? Are the pre fall farms 5x better?
RandomTechPriest
He Who Steals Toasters
its 40 per year and each turn is 5 years.
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Well that was dumb of me.
RandomTechPriest
He Who Steals Toasters
On the topic of using exotic weapons in average infantry, I doubt we will ever get full coverage but making 1 unit per squad have a exotic weapon should be possible. Giving the SGT a Starblaster Pistol and Rending Blade or Starblaster Rifle should be within reason. As of right now our exotics are better used to increase the capability of our navy.
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
Right now everything is keyed to the five year turn, including the raising of new detachments. They take five years to train up, which is why you can raise new detachments without having kit immediately on hand as long as that kit is available by the end of the turn.Well that was dumb of me.