That's already true of fleet hit %, and ultimately all that matters is if the results are intuitive.
Combat mechanics as they stand actually aren't that intuitive, since it's an odd mix of fleet-abstracted damage potential and ship-specific durability simulation. A newcomer would expect either:
a) all ship damage and durability abstracted at the fleet level and later divvied up to ships after the fact - kinda like "auto-resolve" in many turn-based strategy games
b) a simulation at the ship level that models each ship firing and receiving damage throughout - kinda like combat in real-time strategy games
A good example of this is the Total War series, which showcases both approaches.
What we have right now is a combat engine that's a mishmash between these two approaches. It does work well enough and produces mostly intuitive results from the few times we've seen it used, and I don't think we need to move away from it, but it's also not perfect and immutable to improvements.
The fact that it produces intuitive results is very promising, and I would
really really really like to not try to radically alter it in ways that might break it.
It is very hard to construct good programs for modeling complicated systems in games, without blatantly unbalancing the game or creating a system incomprehensible to the users. Oneiros's combat engine is one of the best I can remember seeing for a game even vaguely like this; I would very much rather
not drastically alter its internal balance if possible.
At small scales, what you say makes sense. At larger scales, when ships are so numerous as to start looking like ants, ships intended for combat are not going to be flying around by themselves. As long as there is sufficient amount of ships so that cruisers can pair up with each other, larger combat-focused ships no longer have their own niche. Keep in mind, this is specifically about militarized ships, not the large exploration and science and diplomatic vessels that the Federation prizes.
Yes. The thing is, in Star Trek,
ships spend a lot of time operating alone. Even in wartime. There are a lot of opportunities for a single powerful vessel to terrorize smaller enemy vessels acting alone, as the
Enterprise-B illustrated during the opening phase of our struggles with Cardassia by repeatedly running off or defeating Cardassian cruisers. Those opportunities are amplified if (like the Romulans) you have cloaked ships... and the Romulans seem to be the only people trying to match us with heavy-tonnage ships right now.
Furthermore, the Federation canonically relies very heavily on its explorers, and if anything relies on them even more so in TBG. These explorers often operate solo and can accomplish quite a bit by doing so.
Anyone planning to fight us needs a counter for our explorers. One option is to have dedicated wolfpacks hunt down our lone explorers. The other is to build dedicated "explorer-killer" battlecruisers, that are built to the same scale as an explorer but somewhat more optimized for combat.
I'm pretty sure that Klingon war planning revolves around the first choice, which is why they apparently don't have ANY ships of over five hundred kilotons. If they want to kill one of our
Excelsiors they'd send a division of three or so
K'tingas. By contrast, the Romulans appear to have designed at least one class of heavy warbird built to the same scale as the
Excelsior-class and with comparable stats. So they seem to have picked the second choice, though they may have slightly misjudged just how powerful a ship they need to do the job.
The Cardassians still have a fleet composition based on decisions they made before they ever met us- which means they
don't have an explorer-killer class, not really. Presumably, nobody else they ever dealt with before us built ships as large and modern as our
Excelsiors. They made a good attempt to nail one of our explorers using one of their very few heavy battlecruisers, but the attempt failed due to colossal bad luck. And they seem to have drawn the conclusion that they're better off relying on the Klingon approach (2-3 medium ships instead of one heavy one).
By contrast, if the Amarki were our enemies, I'm pretty sure they'd have doubled down and redesigned the
Rialas as an even more combat-oriented class, precisely so they could use it as an explorer-killer.
Well I'm not seeing how this is less complicated than tweaking base combat mechanics to provide a niche for heavy cruisers.
I mean, I'm not actually opposed to this approach, since it's appealing in its flexibility, but I'm seeing this as trading complicatedness for complicatedness. Or perhaps, trading complicatedness for complexity.
The extra complexity in my suggestions* is behind the scenes, because it involves things like the internal economy of the Romulans, or giving the Romulans bonuses on die rolls to avoid/seek battle that are totally invisible to us as the playerbase.
I feel like a mechanic that uniformly benefits ALL ships with high Combat isn't really us trying to come up with a rationale for why other people build battleships. It's us trying to come up with a rationale for why our
conscious decision to pursue an explorer-heavy fleet should be the optimal military choice, as well as being the optimal peacetime choice. And I don't think that's something we need to pursue.
If it turns out that swarms tend to beat lone rangers in combat, all else being equal... well,
darn. We'll just have to deal with that, either by modifying our own doctrine, or by leveraging the economic and diplomatic advantages of our lone rangers so as to bypass the enemy's combat advantage. I don't see why that's
_____________________
*Those being that Romulans might get political bonuses for building
D'Deridexes. Or that Romulans have tactical doctrines that reward their large ships in ways we can't immediately access. Such as a "Solitary Predator" doctrine that favors the use of stealth
and overwhelming firepower to deal with a dispersed enemy fleet.
I don't think you're following me, and I apologize if I was unclear. I agree that it makes sense to have a research phase before prototyping can start - no disagreement there. But after prototyping begins, it's unrealistic for research to simply stop at that point. Small setbacks are inevitable and more details still need to be worked out throughout the prototyping process. It's essentially a combined engineering and researching effort to deal with all the unexpected quirks, implementing details that weren't necessary to start the prototype such as software, and so forth.
From this point of view, the clear separation of research phase and prototyping phase is a simplifying abstraction, so that we don't have to deal with more complicating game mechanics like RP being spent on prototyping or whatever.
True, although there is a qualitative difference in kind between the largely drawing-board work done to resolve design issues before people start cutting metal, and the much more pragmatic work done to resolve design issues afterwards.
Enough so that modeling one as "research project" and the other as "this ship is just going to take a while to finish" seems fairly sensible to me.
There are many kinds of engineering, and the kind that you do to resolve a problem on a half-way completed ship due to a flaw in the blueprints is not the same as the kind you do in order to avoid having flawed blueprints in the first place.
I think you're conflating the concept of subsidies with the implementation details that I'm not even advocating again. My point is that if a member nation needs help, which is not an uncommon situation with our new or soon-to-be-new members, it's reasonable for the Federation to help them. Starfleet may be involved in this process in some way, if the member nation wants to modernize their fleet or build a starbase or something else in Starfleet's scope.
I don't disagree, I just don't want us founding whole new programs based on the idea that Starfleet has as one of its functions the redistribution of resources among the member worlds. That doesn't seem to be in any way related to Starfleet's mandate, and carries a high risk of us getting slapped down for overreach.
Doing it
in specific cases where a member world asks Starfleet for help through the usual channels (e.g. Starfleet security support in the colonization of Second Risa) is a good thing. But that's different.
Not necessarily. Consider the situation when Indoria is ratified as a member nation. Their military is relatively obsolete compared Starfleet and other contemporary militaries. The Federation is keen to help them out, especially because they effectively border Cardassia. There are two main options here to help with space military or other space infrastructure, and they're not mutually exclusive: increase Starfleet presence directly, or help modernise the Indorian fleet. The former is something we do with fleet and starbase/outpost build/deployment planning, while the latter is something we should be able to do via the MWCO or whatever other process that can help with such modernization.
I see no reason to assume we
can't do that.
The obvious thing to do is give them access to Starfleet designs, simple as that, and I'm pretty sure the MWCO as currently established can do that. The four founding members all use Starfleet designs for their home fleets; why can't the Indorions? Given that by inclination they're builders and not innovators, I'm sure they'd be well content to see proven ship designs that they can observe in actual practice (up to and including combat), with detailed instructions on how to build them.
So basically, the stuff we'd do to help the Indorions
as Starfleet is stuff we can already do, or that already happens in the background via whatever process the member world fleets got their hands on the
Centaur-A blueprints to start manufacturing them for their own use.
The technology transfers the Indorions need from the Federation at large are outside the scope of our organization. They need to work with groups like universities, archives of technical data, and research institutes (now I'm picturing Indorion/Gaeni collaboration, which could get interesting).
