Ootini! TC (and a few sample encyclopedia entries)

[Jahled]

Tatcical gamemode... well, it would appear you've already started to get to grips with the basic essentials a shrewed player uses to ensure fleets are never lost....

 

Check this: Five glorious ISDs, twelve Lancer Frigates (and those are realistic proportions....) up against some rebel rag tag fleet of this and that; let's presume no one can flee...what to do..

 

At basic level, assign all fighter wings to a set point using the navigator tool, and keep them there! In waves send those lancers into combat, remembering to keep the final group in reserve... you'll find enemy fighters trapped between the frigates, your fighters (now being sent into combat), and your capital ships now cruising into the combat zone.

 

*munch munch*

 

24 fighters of any basic standard is enough to destroy a CC-7whatever cruiser, to enable capital ships to flee. No easy explaination...explore...

[Darth-Griffin]

Thanks.

 

One question, use the nav points on the fighters - ok, but do i station them on my side or the AI's?

[Jahled]

Thanks.

 

One question, use the nav points on the fighters - ok, but do i station them on my side or the AI's?

 

Question not very clear... use our lovely language again dude...

 

 

BTW: Where do thee dwell among these wind-wracked shores?

[AdmiralFishface]

His question was on which side of the battlefield the fighters should be ordered to stay. I'd say your side.

[teukros]

Well fighter vs fighter combat remains a bit mysterious to me (specifically, how damage is allocated amongst "individual" fighters), but I'm pretty sure that as far as fighter attacks on capital ships are concerned, the game treats the entire squadron like it is one highly maneuverable ship. Your hypothetical Lancer? Good luck to it to survive an attack from a full strength B-Wing squadron, with its ion cannon with strength of 864 with range of 12, and its laser cannon with strength of 576 with range of 20! And that's ignoring the B-Wing's torpedoes....

[Darth-Griffin]

At basic level, assign all fighter wings to a set point using the navigator tool, and keep them there!

Which side of the battlefield do you set this point? By the imp's ships or behind the rebel ones?

[Darth-Griffin]

One thing i did try was to reduce the maint & construct points of the TC by a quarter. To me this still makes the fighters expensive, but worth the extra armament.

 

 

Hmmmnn 12 b-Wings agains one little lancer.... Better hope that imerial ship has its hyperdrive online

[teukros]

Hmmmnn 12 b-Wings agains one little lancer.... Better hope that imerial ship has its hyperdrive online

 

In XWA, a single X-Wing or Y-Wing could sink a Carrack Cruiser or even a VSD!!! Which is probably overdoing it... just a bit.

 

But 12 B-Wings vs a Lancer? Like you said, hopefully the Lancer's hyperdrive is warmed up and its jump is calculated.

[Darth-Griffin]

Onboard the Imperial Lancer Frigate Nohope. -

 

"Admiral......ADMIRAL.... Now where the hell has he gone?"

 

"Captain the Admiral has just jettisoned in the escape pod", " Is there something we should know sir?"

 

"Commander we have twelve B-Wing fighters about to intercept us! Please inform your men to be prepared to get their heads down and kiss their a**es goodbye!!!"

 

On the viewscreen the B-Wings close in for the kill...............................

[teukros]

assign all fighter wings to a set point using the navigator tool

 

I'm usually too lazy to set points like that, I start every battle by telling all of my fighters to defend one of my ISDs (or whatever large ship is nearly front and center in my formation)! Then when they are all deployed and swarming around the ISD I vector them to their targets...

[Darth-Griffin]

Thanks for the tips guys

 

Will get back to you on the updated run through as i have changed a few stats and i am starting a fresh game to check them.

[teukros]

Okay the computer is trying to drive me insane.

 

I started two games and fast-forwarded 300 turns and saved so I could use "Traitor". When controlling the Alliance, the computer was building nothing but Y-Wings. This by itself might not be so bad except that (despite my lowering the costs to 19 MAT and 21 MNT) it had only one carrier - the one it had started the game with.

 

Then when I checked the other game, when controlling the Empire the poor stupid computer had something like 155 flights each of T.I.E. Fighters and T.I.E. Bombers. Again, that seems to be the only thing the computer was building (starship or starfighter wise).

 

My conclusion: The starfighters are way too cheap! I'll try to double the costs and see what the computer does then - sorry Darth Griffin.

[Darth-Griffin]

No problem

As a whole i am finding the TC very good to use. I have it now working with the increased AI hack and it seems to be working. I did notice the abunbance of y-wings though which was worrying as three of them took-out three lancers and a VSD1

After that i returned them to their base levels and it once again became, what i would call stable.

However i am always open to try new Tc's and your improvements are eagerly awaited

[teukros]

I did notice the abunbance of y-wings though which was worrying as three of them took-out three lancers and a VSD1

 

Well that's about what you'd expectfrom 36 Y-Wings.

[teukros]

Lancers notwithstanding (and Lancers were not that good), Imperial ships depended upon their T.I.E. Fighters for anti-starfighter defense. The Empire's emphasis was on planetary bombardment (and assault), ship to ship combat, and looking as impressive as hell.

 

The best thing about T.I.E.s was that they were cheap enough so that filling your ships with them could almost be an afterthought.

 

In the movies and in the books, the spotlight WRT the Alliance was always on their starfighters. In that fiasco at Endor, the Rebel starfighters ruled. In the end (though it was softened up by fire from MC ships), the Executor was destroyed by a single A-Wing. I think that even at that late stage of the war, the effectiveness and deadliness of the Y-Wings, B-Wings etc. caught the Imperial officers flatfooted. It just wasn't the war that they had been trained to fight.

[Darth-Griffin]

Where were the Defenders when we needed em eh?

[teukros]

Where were the Defenders when we needed em eh?

 

Yeah no doubt... a classic example of "too little, too late." The Empire had something good with the T.I.E. Advanced... they should have just produced that and not scattered their efforts. Heck, even replacing all T.I.E. Fighters with Interceptors would have been good. But around the time of ANH Palpatine's mind was going and the Empire was falling further and further behind the curve.

 

My view is that when the T.I.E. Fighter (possibly a blending of Old Republican and Chiss technology) was introduced, it must have seemed revolutionary. It also must have surprised and shocked a lot of people in the Navy. I wrote last year:

Put an overpowered Solar Ionization Reactor in between two cheap-ass engines and a couple of laser cannon, put a chair with a rudimentary flight control and targeting computer on top, and surround the (unpressurized!) pilot with enough armor plate so he doesn't fry in a tenth of a second... riiiiiiiiight

But of course it did prove to be, in the hands of a competent pilot, fast, maneuverable, and deadly. And it was cheap enough to produce in huge numbers.

 

The T.I.E. Fighter made it possible to design ships like the Imperial Star Destroyer, which was top-heavy with offensive arms but which had no short range defensive armament whatsoever. When the first ISDs were built, defensive arms would have seemed unnecessary (starfighters like R-41s and even Z-95s would have had no chance of making it through the T.I.E. Fighter screen).

 

The Rebels recognized this weakness and designed costly starfighters like the Y-Wing and the fast X-Wing to exploit it. Bust through the screen of T.I.E. Fighters and then fly straight to the target... remember that wretched scene from ROTJ of Rebel starfighters (Y-Wings weren't they?) flying unopposed down one of the longitudinal channels on the dorsal surface of the Executor?

 

The T.I.E. Defender, OTOH, would have been designed in reaction to the proven success of starfighters like the A-Wing and B-Wing, and was therefore ipso facto too little, too late.

[Darth-Griffin]

I agree

 

I have thought about changing the Imp's mainline starcruisers, such as the VSD & ISD to include laser cannons for anti-starfighter defence. Sort of move the whole thing forward in time to a period when the Clone Emperor appeared & blur the truth slightly so that Thrawn did not perish. With that in mind i am sure they would have eventualy added more laser placements to the capital ships to reduce the threat of the rebel starfighters. Also puts the capital ships on a head-to-head against each other and takes the emphasis away from starfighter warfare.

Sufficient numbers of starfighters would still cause an issue but not as little as now.

Just a thought i have had for a while now. Would need a lot of work to create the TC though

[teukros]

Well... that'd be like alternate history... but as a point of interest, the excellent Carrack Light Cruiser was designed so that it could have turbolasers, and in addition either ion cannon OR short range laser cannon. So the thought definitely occured to them back then, it just wasn't a part of the Imperial Navy's military doctrine.

 

(The thing that eventually doomed the Carrack to rear area operations? It wasn't designed to carry starfighters...)

[teukros]

that wretched scene from ROTJ of Rebel starfighters (Y-Wings weren't they?) flying unopposed down one of the longitudinal channels on the dorsal surface of the Executor?

 

 

You know, I might have been thinking of the "Alliance Victory" finale from Rebellion (and I think they were Y-Wings)...

 

It's a long time since I've seen that depressing cutscene

[Darth-Griffin]

Oh for a couple of heavy laser emplacements eh ?

[teukros]

Something to remember is that the range of guided weapons (heavy rockets, proton torpedoes etc) exceeds the range of defensive laser batteries. Therefore if your goal is to eliminate danger (as opposed to merely minimizing it), you've got to try a different strategy.

 

The cheap yet deadly T.I.E. Fighter was perfectly suited to this purpose (i.e., quantity has a quality all its own).

[teukros]

Sorry for rambling so much, but to expand on this at even greater length:

 

(I've been thinking about this for a couple of days)

 

 

In the aftermath of Yavin, it is impossible to conceive of any set of circumstances which would have made it possible for the Empire to continue to exist under Palpatine, and to eventually defeat the Rebellion. What could have led to this?

 

 

Dispersed across a huge and hostile galaxy, even the Empire could never have enough forces to be everywhere all the time, and any determined and resourceful insurgency (aided and abetted by a vast network of sympathizers and informers) would have been able to concentrate its forces to hit the Empire wherever it was weakest. The Rebels used their excellent starfighters and their infamous Hit and Fade attacks to attack the forces of the Empire almost at will. A seemingly unassailable Imperial Star Destroyer (moving from a drydock to a staging area perhaps), if devoid of starfighter support, could easily be destroyed by two Y-Wing squadrons.

 

Rebel propaganda, of course, capitalised on every Rebel victory, making it seem more significant than it actually was.

 

 

At this time, the Empire had not just one, but three fatal flaws:

 

1. The Empire did not have nearly enough popular support;

2. The Empire had no long term strategy (especially after Yavin) and was reduced to reacting to crises as they occurred (e.g. the debacle of Grand Admiral Zaarin's betrayal);

3. Palpatine's rule was becoming increasingly erratic, despotic and arbitrary.

 

 

The Empire's short-term military imperatives were also three:

 

1. Counterattack the Rebels wherever they could be found;

2. Develop advanced T.I.E. models with hyperdrives and shields;

3. Consolidate military assets into larger and more easily defensible formations and locations.

 

We know that the Empire did, in fact, carry out the first two imperatives and it seems likely that they would carry out the third as well (in order to preserve their remaining assets).

 

Of course the problem with consolidation is that it would have denuded larger and larger areas of the Galaxy of an Imperial presence, and wherever there was no Imperial presence, the flames of rebellion would rage unchecked. This would inevitably lead to a fourth imperative:

 

4. Terrorize the populations with brutal reprisals, making examples out of entire systems if necessary

 

which was, of course, exactly what Grand Moff Tarkin had been doing.

 

The destruction of Alderaan made the people of the Galaxy hate the Empire, and the destruction of the Death Star ended the myth of Imperial invincibility forever. After Yavin, the forces of the Empire were essentially under siege.

 

 

Paradoxically the Empire had to lose both its Emperor and its Capitol for it to have any chance at all. By the time of the Thrawn Crisis,

 

1. The various populations under New Republic rule had had a chance to become acquainted with their new rulers and were becoming increasingly disillusioned with them, so they were willing to give Thrawn the chance they would never have given Palpatine or Vader;

2. Thrawn clearly had a long term strategy and was willing, able and enabled to implement it;

3. And if Thrawn was not exactly a strong supporter of Sentient Rights, he was at least rational. In addition he was strong, charismatic, and undeniably masterful.

 

Of course Thrawn (and his Empire) failed because, an enigma to the end, the alien dictator placed too much trust in those upon whom he depended.

Edited March 3, 2005 by teukros

[teukros]

Lotsa changes... nothing uploaded to my geocities site yet, I still have a couple of "to do" things and I want to test everything out first. Might be a while.

 

The good news is, I managed to find a site with a copy of Resource Hacker so now I finally have my own copy!!!

 

Also last night I reinstalled Paint Shop Pro (4.14, I'm so cheap) and altered three cards... I didn't even look for the cards on line, it's been a while and I wanted to re-acquaint myself with PSP (see below).

 

- - -

done

- - -

 

The armor of the T.I.E. Fighter and Y-Wing starfighter were reduced by four points.

The basic starfighter unit was reduced from a squadron of twelve to a flight of four.

Naturally, the starfighter cost and maintenance was cut by two thirds, to reflect this.

One was added to the MNT of T.I.E. Bomber and Y-Wing Flights.

The fighter capacity of every ship was also tripled.

And then a fighter capacity of '1' was given to the Carrack Cruiser!

It seems the Carrack could have either Ion Cannon OR Laser Cannon. Ion Cannon dropped.

The Corellian Corvette's Hull was reduced to 400.

The Corellian Gunboat and Lancer Frigate were both insanely cheap. MAT increased by 50%.

The Laser Cannon of the Corellian Gunboat, Lancer Frigate, and Assault Transport were all given range of 20.

The Neb-B's fore and aft Laser Cannon were reduced from 180 to 150.

The MAT and MNT costs of the Alliance carrier were reduced by one third (to 21 and 19).

The Empire now starts the game with T.I.E. Bombers and does not need to research them.

However, the Empire will not be able to build the Neb-B until it researches Ship Tech Level One.

The Alliance HQ's two Y-Wing Squadrons were converted to six Y-Wing Flights.

Coruscant's nine T.I.E. Fighter Squadrons were converted to twenty seven T.I.E. Fighter Flights .

MAT and MNT costs of all starfighters doubled.

Production of mines and refineries doubled.

Production time for shipyards, const. yards and training facilities cut in half.

Mon Cal, Dauntless and Bulwark renamed to MC-80a, MC-80b and MC-90 (it doesn't look anything like the MC-90, but that name is a lot better than "Bulwark Battlecruiser" (gag)).

Remove planet from Corellian Corvette background.

Remove the planet and the stupid Alliance symbol from the Alliance Dreadnought and make it buildable by both sides.

Give Neb-B card an Imperial background.

 

- - -

to do

- - -

 

Replace the Bulk Transport card with the MC-40

Replace the Bulk Transport model with the MC-40

Replace the Imperial Dreadnought card with the Golan

Replace the Imperial Dreadnought model with the Golan

Make sure the Golan can't move

Check into making the MC-80b and MC-90 look more like themselves...

 

 

 

http://www.geocities.com/telamonian_teukros/Neb-B.bmp

 

http://www.geocities.com/telamonian_teukros/Corvette.bmp

 

http://www.geocities.com/telamonian_teukros/Dreadnought.bmp

 

(Aaack! How do I get this thing to include inline images!)

Edited February 26, 2005 by teukros

[Darth-Griffin]

Sounds great

 

For the images to appear just use the [+img+][+/img+] tags along with the url of the graphic. (removing the plus signs)

 

so you get this: -

 

[+img+]http://www.diplomats-empire.com/galactic_core/templates/subSilver/images/logo_phpBB.gif[+/img+]

 

Which with the plus symbols removed gives you this : -

 

http://www.diplomats-empire.com/galactic_core/templates/subSilver/images/logo_phpBB.gif

 

Hope that helps

Edited February 26, 2005 by Darth-Griffin