Forgothrax
Not Going Gently
- Pronouns
- He/Him
One, we'd be attacking with two ships. Two, we don't captain both. The other ship can afford to take a few hits from the skiffs, but if the battleship sneezes at it, it will die. Or surrender. Statistically, it would get picked apart by the multi-attacker penalty alone.
Thankfully, per Packrat you can make Tactics+Speed checks to deal with the multi-attacker penalty, and Strategy checks are made at the beginning of battles to determine how good our set-up is. We not only have godly tactics but also strategy. Expect our good Commodore to have a means to reduce the multi-attacker penalty. It's not even going to be that heavy, because the outnumbering vessels are sub-scale and that halves the penalty. They're also going to be rocking low Tactics as their commanders are unlikely to be good (per Packrat the average cutter commander has Tac 8-9), and we have experienced crews. The Monitor is almost certainly going to try to punch us out, and our godly tactics being used to cover the CL and eat the brunt of that is what I expect will happen.
Three, while you are correct that we could probably take on their entire fleet with just the defenders, that is not the case if they have heavy defenses. Remember that pirate base? How durable the dang thing was and how many rounds it took to destroy when backed up? That is what we would be in for. These defenses would be shooting at us every single round of combat.
Actually, you're wrong. The defenses we got to see an example of in this very update. They were no threat to us, because they force a Strategy vs Strategy check. The enemy has to come to us, because as demonstrated by our PC, a HC in our hands can just dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee against enemy forts. What's going to happen is that we pick apart the defenses until we can engage the fleet, or they sortie because we're picking them apart without taking hits.
Four, the enemy Commodore is going to remain under the cover of the heaviest defenses despite heavy pressure to mobilize. He's either cowardly and stupid, because this is going to bite him in the ass, or he's smart enough to realize the situation he's in. Him having good strategy and tactics would be enough to flip the delicate balance required for the Endeavor to solo everything.
If he was good enough to be a serious threat, he wouldn't be here. The Nasty Vice-Admiral that we beat had Tac/Strat 14 and she had a BC and sector command; the Nasties promote for competence over stuff like noble connections, just like a 21st-century military, so if he was good he would be elsewhere. The monitor captain who doesn't even keep his ship loaded with ammunition is NOT a high tactics/strategy genius, he's a washed-up backwater commander who apparently can't even keep his ammo lockers full.
My largest concern, though, deals more with operational concerns.
We know that the Nasties are sending in reinforcements...
Right now though the NASP core worlds are rushing heavy reinforcements to the border, a dozen or more older cruisers and possibly a squadron of battleships to reinforce New Theia.
And this update we got confirmation that battleships are inbound; this system actually supports 3 of them. Against that we have 3 modern cruisers coming in, our Endeavor, and then our CLs/corvettes. And the Nasties are smarting from the pounding we've given them, they are almost certainly going to strike. One battleship and a couple supporting corvettes will go through anything we have the long way unless we are personally present and even that is a stretch if it comes with some cruiser escorts. Unless we are very, very lucky or can purchase a BC and have it delivered immediately*, we are in very big trouble coming up.
The best way to reduce this trouble is to force political concerns to tie up as many of these cruisers and battleships down. If we literally blow up every defense and every ship this system holds (the richest in local space) the screaming that this direct democracy will unleash will force the Nasties to keep a very large percentage of their ships at home. Maybe enough that the only task force that can be spared to hit us is one that we can actually deal with.
We can be in a non-ideal tactical position of our choosing this turn, or we can have a really non-ideal tactical position not of our choosing forced on us in the next turn or two when the Nasties get here and decide to start cracking heads. If they toss 2 BBs, 4 HCs, and some support ships at us we're dead and there's nothing even our high Strat/Tac can do about it. The only way to avoid that is to tie them up at home, and the best way to do that is to strip this system of it's defenses.
All this bleating about how now is the time to return home? It's tactically correct, sure, but it is ABSOLUTELY wrong on the strategic level. We've chosen to escalate hard and they are reverse-escalating right back at us with guns we absolutely cannot match with our current fleet. We are riding the tiger. Jumping off just means that the tiger catches and mauls us.
(*If we can get a BC rapidly with wealth, we need to. We can pull in a share with PC and spend wealth on the BC. That capital ship might be the one thing between us and annihilation. We can figure out funding it later.)
Last edited: