This is excellent analysis. In fact, I think this is worth threadmarking (at least for the duration of the vote).
I think it is worth examining the other side of the question our shark-in-chief is asking us: how would we like the combat system to change?
Not knowing how the combat system works currently, I have no idea how to answer this.
fasquardon
I think the system is on the whole functional. The only change I'd suggest to
@OneirosTheWriter is to do one of the following, to resolve a particular problem.
The problem is that so long as previous versions of the combat engine just simulated a big murderous fleetball-on-fleetball pounding match, there weren't really any judgment calls to be made. All your ships fight all my ships, blam blam blam. All the winner has to do is fite gud, as the Goshawnar would put it; the random number generator is the only thing in play.
The new system involves splitting the fleet into multiple elements that are suited for different parts of the battle. Depending on how this judgment call is made, Bad Things can happen. Commit too many of your fleet's best frigates to scouting and you get advantages early on, but you may lose the "pitched battle" phase by leaving your cruisers and explorers without escorts to thicken their ranks and force the enemy to spread their fire. Commit too few, and the reverse may happen. Ships that
used to be well designed for battle (that is, emphasis on the classic C/H/L 'combat stat' trio) may perform stunningly well in the Vanguard/Heavy Metal phases, and yet be horribly unsatisfactory in the Scout/Skirmish phases, invalidating entire swaths of the potential design space unless the ships can be kept back to the phase of combat they're properly suited to.
1a) Agree to carefully simulate the judgment of the commander on the spot in this matter, according to guidelines we can discuss with him advance.
1b) Allow us to deliberately separate frigate classes into "allowed to scout/skirmish" and "like most cruisers, never shows up before the Vanguard phase if there's an alternative" categories.
2) Find some way to engineer the scouting/skirmishing phase so that ships with weak Science/Defense can somehow contribute usefully to the 'team,' rather than being a pure drag on its performance. I have suggestions, but I'd have to sit down and talk with someone who knows more of the details of how it works.
That's not really fair, Rogers' design had shit science as well. We'd only be sacrificing presence, and wouldn't be gaining militarization per any of the formulas.
The point is more that this is basically
the same category of thing Rogers did. It didn't end well for him because things went wrong during prototype construction and because he tried to maneuver the Council into letting him build a combat-heavy battlecruiser they didn't want.
It might not go so badly for us (though the traumatic flashbacks on Councilor Rogers' face would be hilarious). But then again, it might. It's valid as a cautionary tale of "The Council really doesn't want dedicated warships."
I would actually like a heavy cruiser for fleet battles ... but because of the price I don't see any reason for it have shit presence. Anything that pricey NEEDS to be useful for response work, but it can afford to be in the 5 range.
Essentially what I want is a starfleet Riala-A.
The
Riala-A is a first-class battleship by any reasonable standard; C8 S5 H6 L9 P5 D6 is a heck of a statline. The
Rialas can go toe-to-toe with almost any ship in the known galaxy and win or at least put up a good fight. Furthermore, S5 P5 D6 is a strong event response statline.
What you seem to want is, say, a ship with a statline of... I'm just going to toss something out there, C7 S4 H5 L7 P1 D5, maybe? The problem is, designing the ship this way doesn't necessarily save a lot of tonnage and make it "more efficient" or "cheaper." The Presence stat doesn't necessarily consume a big blob of extra tonnage that could easily be allocated to weapons. And we've SDB types comment that it's nearly impossible to
deliberately engineer a ship to have very low stats in any single area without making decisions that would IRL cripple the ship- like even a ship with no weapons whatsoever has C1, and it's hard to design a ship that has working FTL propulsion at all but lacks D2 or D3. I'm not certain, but I suspect that to get P1 you'd have to remove the sickbays, for instance, which doesn't sound very smart on a warship.
You're talking about pretty narrow resource/cost savings, in exchange for a very significant reduction in the ship's ability to be useful to the owner,
regardless of who the owner is.
This seems like a solution in search of a problem, too; it's not like the member world fleets show much sign of clamoring for us to design them a pocket battleship. We
know what it looks like when a member world wants a ship to look a certain way and requests Starfleet help in accomplishing that goal; that's what happened with the
Constellation refit we now use, or the
Patroller refit the Betazoids (and Caldonians) now use.
