Power Projection: Fleet

[RKFM]

I'm a fan of Full Thrust, and I have used various house rules to adapt it to Traveller (or make it more Travelleresque). The primary reason I like FT is that is has fun tactical aspects and is simple and moves along smoothly (Unlike the stat battle of High Guard, or the complexity of Brilliant Lances).

However, as you know, many gamers (and Traveller players especially!) like to 'add' things to the game, and make it more 'realistic' to the point that they've just 'improved' the game to a slow moving, die rolling, complex nightmare.

I saw a review of PP:F and the author mentioned ships having hundreds (apparently no exaggeration) of beam weapons and a stat table to avoid rolling all those dice. I've been considering buying PP:F so I can convert HG designs to a FT like system (instead of the hand-wave approximations I use with my own converstions) but I don't want to lose the ease, simplicity and fun of FT.

I would like to know more about PP:F, especially how missiles and spinal weapons work. Anyone care to opine?

 

[Tobias]

I don't know regular FT per se, so I can only voice my general opinion PP:F. (I should mention that I was a playtester and contributed some design work, so I'm no exactly unbiased.) In my experience, the game plays best with vessels up to cruiser size (including battle riders), since the battleships and dreadnoughts indeed do mount hundreds of batteries in some cases, which can be somewhat tedious. The mass fire tables help, but it's still a little tedious. With cruiser-sized ships, of which the game supplies several, and escorts, you have manageable ship status displays, and enough tactical variety.

Generally, the game combines the vector-based movement system of Mayday (with previous and projected position markers) with the general rule structure of Full Thrust and the design parameters from High Guard. It definitely works well as a game.

As to spinal mounts and missiles...
Spinal mounts are rated from 3 to 7, expressing how many dice of damage they will roll. Spinal fire is resolved by rolling to hit (1d6 roll, as everything else), rolling to penetrate if it's a meson gun, and then rolling the damage dice. PA damage dice are reduced by armor rating (up to 3, 4 for planetoids.)
The system makes PA spinal mounts a lot more powerful than they are in High Guard, without being totally unbalanced with the meson guns - I rather like that. You also have none of the "can't hit each other" nonsense that High Guard produces especially for small ships.
Missiles are treated as other secondary weapons are: They roll for damage on a table (or a mass fire table handling 10 batteries at a time), which takes into account agility, armor and defenses.
There are three movement systems for missiles - you can choose whatever suits you best. 1.) Full Vector movement. 2.) Simple Movement (essentially non-vector). 3.) No movement at all, meaning missiles fire just as any other weapons.

 

[aramis]

I've got both... PP:F is never going to see play with me, since it's about an order of magnitude more complex than FT.

Understand the scale issue: PPF is roughly 1 HS=100Td... and traveller mainline ships are generally 50KTd to 500KTd. Further, it uses the HG design system, not FT, so it's incompatible. Ship hits are 1/500Td for "small ships" (under 10KTd)...

Even the smaller ships are overly complex by comparison to FT ships. A Cruiser or dreadnought is a half page sheet with smaller icons than FTFB... without the nifty fill text. (FTFB ships can generally be copy & pasted to make 6 to a page, 4 for DN's & CVAs.)

(If anyone wants to buy my copy, $20+Shipping. Very Good condition; minor shelf wear)

 

[tbeard1999]

No system that uses a linear data scale for damage will work well for Traveller if it must handle 100 ton scout ships and million ton super dreadnoughts with equal fidelity.

This has long been a problem with naval miniature wargames; one that I solved with a set of rules called High Seas Drifter. My solution was to optimize the rules for capital ships and essentially ignore/abstract the small stuff. It plays fast and is a lot of fun -- but it's pretty much useless if you want to fight battles between destroyers and PT boats.

High Guard solved the problem differently, by using logarithmic scales. The result was a playable rules set, but one that had odd, non-intuitive break points.

 

[aramis]

Simply put, Ty, PP:F didn't go far enough in the abstraction.

A FT Battleship is ~60 HP...
I'll use the Valley Forge Class as my comparison, it's almost as big as anything in the FT game.
Class: Superdreadnought
Hull 57 (15,14,14,14)
Beams: 7 (3,3,3,2,2,1,1)
Torps: 2
Point Defence: 4
Fire Control: 3
Squadrons: 2
Screens: 1
Core Hits: 5
Total hits: 24 crits, 59 hull

compare to thr 28KTd Anzha Battlerider:
Hull 38
Missile 10
Beams 2 (L+, PA+)
Sandcasters :6
Repulsors 2 (2,2)
Fire Con 4
Screens and Dampers: 4
Fuel 2
Core 4
Total Hits: Crits 34 Hull 34

And this is a small ship-of-the-line.

Now, the lurenti CB Battleship-Carrier (300KTd)
Hull 360 (90,90,90,90)
Missiles 220 (11x20 array)
Beams: 60 (20 Pa+, 20 Me+, 20 L+)
Repulsors: 9
Sandcasters 60
Battleriders: 7
Squadrons: 20
Screens and dampers: 2
FC: 2
Fuel: 5
Other: 2
Core:5
Total hits: Crits 402, hull 360

The smaller ships in PP:F are on par with the heavy craft of the other official settings for FT. For FT players, it may be a startlingly LARGE difference.

 

[RKFM]

Now, the lurenti CB Battleship-Carrier (300KTd)
Hull 360 (90,90,90,90)
Missiles 220 (11x20 array)
Beams: 60 (20 Pa+, 20 Me+, 20 L+)
...
Sandcasters 60
...
Total hits: Crits 402, hull 360.

See, this is the kind of thing I was worried about. This is almost antithetical to FT. I think I'll stick to my 5x Class 3 Beams rather than have to deal with 60 Beams.

 

[Hemdian]

Like Tobias I had a small contribution in the making of Power Projection, and have run demos of the game for BITS at various conventions over the years.

Not counting spinal mounts, the basic mechanic is a single 1d6 roll per battery to resolve to-hit, penetration, and points of damage. (Remember that for turret weapons, like lasers, there can be up to 30 lasers per battery ... 10 triple turrets). This works well for cruiser-sized ships but becomes unwieldy for dreadnaughts, leading to the bucket-o-dice syndrome. So for large ships a ‘mass fire’ table was calculated (by yours truly) that allows a single d6 roll to statistically match ten batteries, albeit at a courser granularity.

Thus the Tigress BB, for example, has 430 missile batteries IIRC. This can be resolved by 43 x 1d6 ... a lot but still an improvement on 430 x 2d6 x 4 that you had to contend with in HG!

A typical convention demo scenario matched 2 Chrysanthemum DEs and 2 Fer-de-lance DEs against 3 Zhodani ships. Games were usually under 2 hours with half that time devoted to explaining the rules (especially vector movement) to people ... some of whom had never played a wargame before in their life.

If I had a criticism of the game I’d say it’s in the area of sandcasters. Unlike in HG these are no longer just a form of shield centred on the deployer but can be deployed near by ... and then drift under their own momentum until off the board. This adds a much needed tactical element to the game that HG lacked but can be a bit of a pain when larger ships are run by captains who just want to throw tons and tons of sand at the enemy.

Overall I like the game, and if you need to play out a battle between two rival crurons I don’t know of any other practical way. One day I’d like to run the 5FW using PP:F to resolve all the space combat.

 

[aramis]

For a FullThrust Player, PP:F is an order of magnitude more complex, and 2 orders more dice throws.
For a HG player, PP:F is about as complex, provides more detail to combat, and cuts dice thrown by an order of magnitude.

 

[Whipsnade]

Gents,

While PP:F is indeed a monster of a game, we shouldn't forget it's smaller precursor, Power Projection: Escort. Because the ships in PP:E are smaller, they're easier to handle and closer to "player-scale". The conversion rules in PP:F can 'port HG2 ships for either PP:F or PP:E.

A quick way to describe PP:E is "PP:F without spinals and fighters."

As for game play, I quite like the way both games handle sandcasters. "Stacking sand" allows for all sorts of tactical shenanigans and when you add the nuclear detonation markers the shenanigans quickly multiply!

One aspect of the PP series needs to be emphasized. The 1D6 die makes adding player-character skills even more difficult than with 2D6 HG2.


Regards,
Bill

 

[Tobias]

High Guard solved the problem differently, by using logarithmic scales. The result was a playable rules set, but one that had odd, non-intuitive break points.

Well, High Guard requires as much dice-rolling as PP:F, and then some, since it has the same large number of batteries.
But you're absolutely correct, the large size difference between ships in Traveller is a big part of the problem. If I were to design a re-imagined Traveller, I would probably have useful capital ships max out in the 30000-50000 ton range, instead of ten times as much.

 

[tbeard1999]

Simply put, Ty, PP:F didn't go far enough in the abstraction.

...The smaller ships in PP:F are on par with the heavy craft of the other official settings for FT. For FT players, it may be a startlingly LARGE difference.

Agreed. But I think that this is because they attempted to accomodate FAR too large a range of ship sizes in a system with a linear data scale. The smallest Traveller starship is 1/10,000 the size of the largest Traveller starship. So the largest ship will theoretically need 10,000 times the number of boxes that the smallest ship requires. Even if you "clip the ends off" and limit yourself to an effective range of (say) 5000 tons to 500,000 tons, the largest ship will still require 100 times the information as the smallest ship. So if the small ship display is (say) 6 inches by 1 inch, then the large ship display will theoretically need to be 60 inches by 10 inches.

Similarly, resolution mechanics will need to be (theoretically) 100 times as extensive for the larger ship. Simplistically, this might mean 100 times as many die rolls. (And statistical resolution systems are just too dry IMHO -- they eliminate dice, which seriously reduces the entertainment value).

I faced this problem with my naval rules. At the end of the day, I went with a scale that alloted 1 hull box per 1000 tons of displacement. So a WWII battleship had ~40-60 boxes. Heavy cruisers, with displacements of ~10-13,000 tons can be modelled with acceptable fidelity. Light cruisers (5-9,000 tons) are pretty abstract. Destroyers are represented in flotillas of 4-6 ships.

Since the goal was to produce a game to take advantage of all the gorgeous 1/2400 scale GHQ battleship models owned by a fellow wargamer (he has the entire US and Japanese Pacific fleets represented at heavy cruiser and higher levels, as well as all the major British, German and Italian capital ships), this worked fine.

In my experience, one of the hardest things for a game designer is to accurately assess the limits of his design and resist the urge to stress the design with constructs that exceed the game's limits.

 

[aramis]

I pretty much agree that PPF's design is broken by being too focused upon accomodating the range of Canonical Warcraft. A comparison of scale range: PP:F accomodates a range equvalent to 20' motor launch through CVAN... on a scale conversion best for 50' PBR through 200' Light Cruisers.

If you're a FT fan, it will either work or not, but it's not intercompatible, unlike the other licensed adaptation of FT...

 

[tbeard1999]

Well, High Guard requires as much dice-rolling as PP:F, and then some, since it has the same large number of batteries.
But you're absolutely correct, the large size difference between ships in Traveller is a big part of the problem. If I were to design a re-imagined Traveller, I would probably have useful capital ships max out in the 30000-50000 ton range, instead of ten times as much.

Me too. High Guard was unfortunately overly influenced by the gargantuan starships of Star Wars IMHO. That said, a 1 million ton dreadnought is still fairly small by Star Wars standards (770m long, assuming width 1/4 length, height 1/8 length).

But if I were to design a Traveller starship combat game, I'd optimize it for a reasonable range of sizes. If I wanted to fight battleship class actions, I'd go with 50,000 dtons to 500,000 dtons and tell players who wanted to fight smaller ships to wait for the 5,000 to 50,000 dton rules set.

 

[aramis]

Ty:
the problem with that approach is that many players have been conditioned that a single fighter is a threat to a capship, even if only by a miracle shot, and that several are a danger to anything. (* you, Geo. L., * you!)

They expect both to be in the same scale, or at least readily cross functional. And Traveller, since HG, doesn't really meet that expectation.

 

[Icosahedron]

For me, statistical calculations are the way to go (look at your 'to hit' roll and calculate how many of those you're likely to get in 400 rolls on average) maybe you can figure it yourself, or there are a number of formulae/spreadsheets out there already.

If you find pure statistical resolution too 'dry', then just stat 90% of the rolls and roll the last 10% by hand, giving some of the thrill back. If you're a mathematical masochist you could even figure the standard deviation and roll dice for the potential deviation from the statistical norm instead.
Many ways to go, without spending hours rolling thousands of dice.

 

[Peter Schutze]

excel is your friend for buckets of dice while still keeping variability

break it down into say 10 buckets of rolls plus another for the extras eg 106 rolls - 10*1o plus the extras for the last 6

the random number function should be easy to find in help under random

 

[Hemdian]

I think some people are missing the point regarding the number of dice rolls in PP compared to HG:

If you have to resolve 10 laser batteries in HG you have to roll 10 x 2d6 for the basic to-hit. That doesn’t mean rolling 20 dice, it means rolling 10 pairs of dice and keeping each pair separate while you add them together to compare with a target number. Then repeat for penetration if necessary, then repeat for damage.

If you have to resolve 10 laser batteries in PP you have to roll 10 x 1d6 ... which you can roll all together as if 10d6 and just quickly count the number of dice above the target number. (Typically it’s 1 point of damage per success.) Done.

Not only is that less dice rolls in total, but moving to a 1d6 as opposed to a 2d6 makes a truly massive difference.

Firsthand experience shows this is ideal for cruisers such as AHL CFs, Atlantic CRs, and Gionetti CLs ... fast paced and with, as Bill says, tactical shenanigans. Even with computer assistance I doubt I’ll ever use HG for combat ever again.

 

[RKFM]

I think the issue of ship size scaling is a good one. I think in the early days of Traveller the rules envisioned large warships only in the thousands ton range. Looking how LBB2 limits jump range by size and maxes out around 5000 tons. Heck, before HG the Kinunir 'cruiser' was a 1250 ton warship. Which would have been barely a small escort to the HG battle fleets that came later.

Then again, Traveller/HG had to deal with some real sense of tonnage and size. Whereas FT abstracts 'mass' that doesn't really represent a fixed/known value.

 

[aramis]

I think the issue of ship size scaling is a good one. I think in the early days of Traveller the rules envisioned large warships only in the thousands ton range. Looking how LBB2 limits jump range by size and maxes out around 5000 tons. Heck, before HG the Kinunir 'cruiser' was a 1250 ton warship. Which would have been barely a small escort to the HG battle fleets that came later.

Then again, Traveller/HG had to deal with some real sense of tonnage and size.

Traveller is abstracted out; DTons are a volume measure, and CT didn't have a mass conversion.

Whereas FT abstracts 'mass' that doesn't really represent a fixed/known value.

Wrong. FT mass units are 100 Tons Mass each. While not spelt out in rules, it is implicit in that it is consistently used in the the Fleet Books (Vol 1 & 2).

 

[RockyMountainNavy]

I find PP:F an acceptable translation HG to a FT-style system. Not perfect, but still well done!

PP:F treats spinal weapons as "primary" and all others as secondary. One of the largest "canon" changes is that spinal weapons can fire every OTHER turn.

The mass die-roll resolution system works, but it still can turn into a yahtzee-fest if you have too many larger ships. PP:F can work with larger ships, but it is best in the mid-range (lesser than dreadnoughts).

I see PP:F as a mid-point between FT and HG...