I know there are some Galactica fans out there. With the addition of customisable supply limits to the challenges screen, I think it should be possible to set the parameters to simulate the low-tech battles of that most excellent series. I’d much rather that this became something that the GSB community would get into - there’s not much point in just me sticking up a bunch of Colonial challenges and hoping people play them. Would anyone else be interested in playing / posting BSG-style scenarios?
My initial thoughts on the custom setup are to ban the following modules (set supply limits to zero):
Cruisers:
Beam Laser
Proton Beam
Fusion Beam
Defence Laser
Pulse Laser
All Plasma
Alliance Lightning Beam
Imperial Beam Laser
Notes:
I think that the guidance scrambler should be kept as missile defence will obviously be important and I don’t think that it’s outside the realm of the BSG universe.
Cruiser Lasers, Blasters and Ion Cannons all look like they could be types of BSG cannon, so they can stay.
Have kept EMP weapons. Picture them as Cylon jamming tech.
I’m not sure about Target Painters, as the visuals don’t really fit but the tech isn’t outside the realms of BSG.
Should the Cruiser Engine III stay? BSG ships aren’t exactly noted for their nippiness…
Fighters would seem to benefit the most from these rules; it would be nice to limit their effectiveness a bit as tractors and defence lasers are gone. But I can’t think how to do so. Even banning all engines apart from the basic one allows Icarus’s to get to speeds of 2.55 (IIRC). It would be ideal if each squadron fielded necessitated it’s own carrier bay, but this is totally unenforcable. Any ideas?
The Tribe also might be too powerful with the ban on beams, although the likely increase in fighter power might counteract this.
Thanks for reading, I’d be interested to hear any feedback.
i fear that battles might become pointless with that many bans, since it leaves little room for different ships.
and with nearly identical ships on both sides and even numbers (= even points) the outcome of the battle is somewhat predefined as a draw, i think; no matter what orders are given.
and yes, the tribe will become ridiculously op with ban on shields, long range beam weapons and its hull bonus.
Thanks for the comments. All good points. I guess my thinking was that if the number of modules was severely limited it would actually increase the importance of tactics, deployment, etc. Yes, you’d be operating within a narrow range of strategies (cruiser rushes would be tricky to pull off, for example), but I think this could actually lead to some interesting and close battles.
I’m probably going to toy around with this over the next few days anyway, sending myself challenges and so on. If the Tribe is too OP I’ll ban their repair units, that should bring them down to earth (Kobol?) with a bang.
EDIT: I also think that even with all the bans in place there would still be a decent variety in ship designs. Let’s not forget just how many varieties of armour, missile, engine and repair module types are in the game. Yes, most fleets would probably field the same basic types but I’m pretty sure each admiral would have a different idea about what makes an effective missile ship / carrier / CQC etc.
Trouble is, you had to ban whole classes of modules, so to speak. No beams, no plasma.
It appear to me that theres three weapon strategies left open.
Missile swarm (no point defence, yummy!)
Cruiser rush (cruiser laser is still in, that’s all you need really. You don’t have a shield breaker, but the only long range weapons to soften you up while you wait are missiles.)
Fighters (no tractor beams, no cruiser defence laser, no sheilds… so if you can kill the frigates, nothing will stop you.)
It almost looks like rock paper scissors, until you realise fighter > all, with all the ways to take the edge off them removed. Fast rocket fighters will be sick.
I’d strongly recommend banning the fighter target painter, but not the cruiser target painter. Cruiser one would give one way to help hit fighters. Skipping the fighter one prevents rocket+painter becoming a ‘this can beat everything on the board’ super ship (since there’s no shields to protect cruisers, and the cruisers can’t hurt them.)
I’d agree that Tribe need a ban from this format.
I’d give this format a go, happily. Should make for some fun battles, even if I do think it’s tactically a lot narrower than GSB usually is
So, changes are looking like:
Frigate rapid fire laser unbanned
Blanket ban on The Tribe (aww)
Fighter painter banned (makes sense to me)
Cruiser painter allowed
Fighters, as Dogthinker mentioned, are going to be a big problem. Would banning fighter engines II and III mitigate this to any great degree? As an added bonus, this might make an interceptor screen a bit more of a valid defence than it usually is. I have to hope so, 'cause if we’ve got hordes of unkillable fighters swarming around then this format is pretty much broken from the start. Man, I wish there was a cruiser flak cannon in this game…
Not going to be able to do any testing tonight myself, but I’ll have most of tomorrow to tinker with this.
this setup looks better and maybe with the coming supply limits, it will become easier to balance.
now to the engine bans: it wouldn’t help at all. why?
i’ve yet to equip the first engine III on my fighters. it’s heavy, it needs an additional power generator. it leads to the absurd result that the fighter is actually slower.
try this and you will see:
federation hawk fighter
equip one engine I, look at the speed
now equip a second engine I, look at the speed
delete the two engine I and equip a single engine II, look at the speed
try a single generator I and engine III if you want to, but you might figure the result already…
stupid, isn’t it?
(2 engines on a fighter get a massive 28% effectiveness decrease btw)
now, as weird as it might first sound, i suggest banning engines I and III.
however i’m not informed how fast vipers are compared to the gsb fighters.
yep, maybe the hawk is even the worst example, i didn’t test them all.
but i wanted to show the general problem, and icarus and atlantis are just outstanding fighters and can hardly be compared to every other fighter.
federation lepoard gives identical results, with a lasercannon you’ll need a powergen III to equip a fighter engine III and it is still slower. same with two engines I compared to one engine II.
no matter what you’ll do, the fighters of non-rebels are better with a single engine II if you need a powergen anyways, and banning engines I and III would give everyone else at least a chance to win against rebels.
at least, that’s what i think…
Tater: nice one. That’s exactly the kind of proper research that I should have done before starting this thread
More changes then:
PD allowed (both cruisers and frigates)
Should we keep Guidance Scrambler too?
Driver: I too have yet to mount an engine III on any fighter. I actually considered a ban on engines I and II, so pretty much every fighter would need a power plant (increasing fighter cost, and decreasing speeds).
Actually, after a couple of checks I wonder if this is the way to go. An Icarus with engine II and a rocket will go at 4.31. With an engine III (and thus a power generator) it slows to 3.04. The Leopard can get up to 4.23 with a rocket and engine II, but with a III and a power gen it’s 2.99.
The max speeds of laser interceptors would be 2.38 for the Leopard and 2.65 for the Icarus.
The corollaries of this approach would be, as mentioned, increased costs (a good thing) and increased fighter HP, which also fits with the BSG universe and it’s emphasis on carriers.
Damn. Ran this system on the other races. The Alliance would get a 2.13 interceptor and a 2.85 rocket fighter, while the Empire can field a 3.04 rocket Phalanx but can’t meet the requirements for any laser interceptor without going over the power limits.
Your idea of banning fighter engines I and III might have to be the way to go…but what’s going to shoot down those 4.31 Icarus’s?
EDIT: Just ran a couple of tests. Incredibly, even with several squadrons of max speed Rebel fighters in play, heavily-armoured frigates with anti-fighter missiles supported by rocket fighters and a cruiser with target painters were more than capable of holding the line for a good few minutes. Certainly long enough for the cruiser engagement to be all-but over by the time the fighter combat had played out. Additionally, no shields means that it’s really easy to armour most ships to withstand a fair amount of pounding by fighters.
This gets rid of the super fast fighters and effectively toughens frigates a little, making their lack of shields a little easier to stomach versus fighters.
It was quite rare in BSG to notice fighters firing rockets… Plenty of big missiles got fired (like torpedos) but after featuring in the initial battle the small missiles got dropped from the arsenal really early, except as something to drop on the floor (presumably because they seemed too effective, and BSG wouldn’t have been much of a series after all the Vipers were dead.)
Fighters are one thing that the new “salvo” (should be called “ready ammo” or something, it’s not actually a salvo) allows.
The fighter rockets should have a small number of ready rockets—6? 10? and an effectively infinite salvo interval.
That or massively increase the weight of rocket modules since they represent effectively more rockets than the fighter itself weighs. The basic premise that a fighter without a heavy laser and power required to shoot it might be faster is reasonable—until you realize that when you think of a fighter with missiles, (F-14, F-18, whatever) it only has a handful of them.
I’ve been playing around with a 400 pilot map; as predicted, fighters are way too powerful in the current setup. All you need to do is take out enemy flak frigates with rocket fighters and you’re basically untouchable as you wipe out the rest of their fleet. It makes for some pretty boring battles too; if both sides have fielded large fighter groups then things quickly descend into gigantic dogfights that last for ages (as we all know, interceptors are fairly incapable of actually intercepting to any great effectiveness).
Preliminary tests indicate that banning either fighter engine I or II doesn’t really make much difference at all.
Is there a solution, or is this format just broken? A ban on rocket fighters would certainly go a long way to fixing things, although it’s yet another ban on a ruleset that’s stringent as hell anyways. The only other solution would be to unban the cruiser defence laser, although I’m not sure how effective that really is. The rocket ban is probably more fitting with the BSG setting, and, as you said, would greatly enhance the lifespan of flak frigates.
They ought to. I just beat your challenge using one cruiser (the battle kept ending early before I added this, haha) and a big pile of rocket fighters. None of your slow cruisers even got a shot off.
And yeah… Armour is pretty nice with no armour piercing weapons left in the game, although it results in painfully slow ships.
Cost for cost, with frigates. The value of the frigates in that example fleet is substantially lower then the value of the rocket fighters you threw at them. Probably. I did post that generation of anti-fighter frigates on another challenge. Would be interested in seeing what kind of fighters that you can beat it with if you don’t use torpedo’s. To date I Haven’t managed it, But I’m not a fighter enthusiast.
But that’s the thing… It’s simply not good enough to have antifighter capabilities that can only defeat fighters of equal value, unless you deploy so many of them that you have enough to deal with the maximum (or close to it) spend on fighters that might come at you (in which case your fleet is probably horribly weakened, unless these ships are also dangerous to cruisers/frigates.)
The fact I can absolutely smash your armour fleet with well under half the overall point spend, makes it abundantly clear those frigates are not adequate (or that rocket fighters are overpowered with these restrictions. I didn’t test to see whether laser fighters can pull off the same horrors. They probably can, but with a closer result.)
it seems now that this setup is pretty much f****ed up right from the start.
i doubt it will work without modding or people who are disciplined enough to not exploit the weaknesses.
because the galactica has those flak cannons, which would really help against overpowerde fighters, i played around with the salvo option.
sadly, there is no area of effect damage or “firing corridors” in the game, as one would expect from flak cannons, so i tried to simulate that “something will be hit for sure” effect with
a very high tracking speed and rapid 3-shot salvos, therefore very low damage and somewhat high reload between salvos.
i can say: it…does…something…
i’m not satisfied. it just isn’t the same as exploding shrapnel fireworks. will do some more testing.
