When Rules and Stories Meet

Years ago I read Ben Bova's Star Conquerors, and H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, as well as E.E. Smith's Lensman saga, and I got the hankering for space combat games on the tabletop.

In the pursuit of this I tried a number of space combat rules. Star Fleet Battles was a lot of fun, until it got so complicated I felt I needed an advanced degree to play it. Full Thrust was great fun, though in large actions there was a lot of sitting around waiting for the other side's ships to finish firing. I had some issues with the handling of fighters, but ignored them as I was interested in the ship-to-ship action, and within the premises of Full Thrust, they worked. Besides, I had discovered a Ship Design spreadsheet for Full Thrust, and I could try my own ship designs.

By the way, I also played Red Chicken Rising, the only space combat rules that opens with a shower scene! Actually, in a lot of ways Red Chicken Rising is what you want in a space combat game. Nobody cares if you hit an unimportant part of a ship. You concentrate on the important parts . And you have either the boring and realistic movement rules, or the cinematic rules (come to think of it, you can have that in Full Thrust, too).

Then I read an account of a carrier action online. This was about the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, and dealt with sortie rates and deck handling in the US carriers (though not in the Japanese carriers). It made me revisit Full Thrust's fighter rules and the idea of having dedicated escorts. I also began to consider something I'd learned while reading about the Red Army of WW2: "Quantity has a Quality all its own".

Now the latter isn't quite true as it assumes a rough parity in quality. A Soviet WW2 Tank Army that went up against, say, a company of M1A2 Abrams would have some severe problems. But when you add the other cliche, "Mass, not Driblets", you begin to see some possibilities.

What this meant in Full Thrust terms was that I decided I could trade off individual toughness of ships if I got more firing platforms. I tested this theory in large actions (not small). Here the N-Square Law began to take effect. 20 cruisers vs. 12 cruisers, with the latter 20% stronger, still resulted in the destruction of the 12 cruisers. The marginal increases in quality meant higher losses for the larger side, but that was all. The real determining factor turned out to be the skill of both commanders. When the skill levels were roughly comparable then quantity won. For those who wonder, all 12 cruisers were destroyed for a loss of 10 of the lower strength cruisers.

Then I put together a balanced force where I added an escorting class of ships that were mostly Point Defense clusters with only a modest offensive threat. I tried this because we all had gone heavily into missiles, and I had decided to go with dedicated fighter carriers as well. The escorts reduced my opponent's options to beam weapons. Unfortunately it took a few games to evolve a doctrine for this force, but here the book on the Eastern Solomons proved invaluable. I just lifted parts of the USN's doctrine: hit early, hit hard, and then pull back to recover and rearm. Soften at a distance before closing for the second attack with fighters and ships together. And concentrate on reducing/degrading weapons platforms.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was evolving the tactical doctrine of the Families Navy. So when I started writing Firestar it was only logical that I use that Full Thrust spreadsheet to develop the various ships in that games' terms. I won't include that here, but suffice to say that a Families cruiser has higher acceleration but not quite the structural toughness of a PSK or Imperial ship. And the Idenux ships were designed for raiding, not slug-it-out-bulkhead-to-bulkhead-at-5,000 kilometers style warfare (though the Idenux battlecruisers were).

With the aptly named Escorts and Cruisers I had a logical progression of ships. I thought of capitol ships, but decided that the Families would not go down that path. Instead they went for more weapons platforms and sought incremental improvements (sort of like the Soviets up-gunning from 76mm to 85mm. This fit with the 'modular' approach the Families took to ship design, where improvements could be mass-produced, then simply plugged in. There are limitations to this approach, but not as many as people think when you mass-produce the way they do.

The Families did go for larger and more capable carriers. That produced some interesting changes in the games, too.

By the way, space combat games, just like wet navy games, or air games, get real interesting when you put 40-80 ships out there, not 6-10. It's like what I found with Little Big Battles, or Scotty Bowden's Empire 1 and Empire 2. Tactics are different in that size of battle. If it is a multi-player game you have to delegate and explain your general idea (sort of like in multi-player games of King's War). And concentration turns out to be a real key, not dispersal as everyone follows their own ideas.

I saw that years and years ago in a sailing ship action. The top commander of the French side was a very naval tactician, much better than anyone else in the game. So those of us on the British side decided to stay welded together in a line-ahead. We would do everything together, and trust the various subordinates on the other side to act independently as soon as they could. It worked. Five British 3rd rates fought off six French 2nd and 3rd rates (their largest ship was a 98, ours an 84) and came away with a prize for no loss of our own. On a ship-for-ship basis we were arguably out-matched; but we would roll 5 ships past 1-2 of theirs, and that made a huge difference.

I applied something like this in a Full Thrust game with multiple carriers and 36 cruisers (and 12 escorts). It was a madhouse, but the other side wasn't prepared for a fighter strike that was that big, especially when it arrived at the same time as a missile barrage. This busted their formation open, and after that it was a one-sided cruiser battle. Those who have read the Families War trilogy will recognize that as one of the battles Adana Korina fought.

And after a couple of battles like that the story began to evolve in its own way, though you can still model the ships in that conflict with Full Thrust.

p.s. - I strongly recommend buying copies of Full Thrust, as well as downloading Red Chicken Rising. The latter has some interesting ideas about the way ships take damage (catastrophic, not attritional), and besides, gives an "interesting" game. And who knows, I might make a story out of an incident from a game of Red Chicken Rising.

p.p.s - the book on Japanese Carrier Doctrine is out. Find, purchase and read Shattered Sword, the Japanese side of Midway from primary Japanese sources. It's not what you saw in the movie; the Japanese weren't just moments from launching a crushing blow against the US carrierswhen the dive bombers hit them, and the slow launch of one scout plane from a cruiser didn't compromise the entire Japanese battle plan. Nuts, read the book, you'll see. The best history books come from primary sources, and that's what this book does.

There is also a book now on the shelves about on the destruction of the US torpedo squadrons at Midway that is worth reading, too. It even goes into US torpedo problems, and why and how they occurred. Good stuff.