Matrix Games Forums

Turn 31 sent on to Lunaticus. 
 
This month see's the first clash between Romanov and Cadwall ground forces on Circe. House Cadwall reports an important victory in the initial engagement as no less then 3 Romanov Legions are captured or destroyed in an ill-fated landing attempt on the main continent. One of those legions droped directly onto Cadwall's 31st Legion and was cut down almost immediately upon exiting thier Landers. It is still early in the conflict but the morale of Cadwall forces everywhere seems bouyed by this report of initial success. 

Turn on to Casus_Belli.
I like it that the Rebels are suddenly pretty strong and have some technology upgrades....
And as to Circe we will see how things come along long term...

Yeah,  Rebel strength varies a bit planet to planet but generaly the more valuable the planet the stronger the rebel forces there.... rebels are mostly militia but here and there they have some advanced units (rogue army units/security forces,  psionic covens, local warlords, robber knights, etc).

I did make the rebel forces on each players starting world weak in comparison. Wanted to give players the opportunity to build up a little momentum before having to deal with more powerfull stuff. Figured it would make sense from a scenerio standpoint... the home-worlds of each major house would likely be a little but more orderly and under control.... hence weaker rebel forces.

The one portion of the scenerio I'd like to beef up (aside from tweaking) would be to add some covert operations/spy stuff and also add more diplomatic options between the Houses (like trading resources, etc). Figure I can do most of that stuff with action cards...but it's a decent amount of work...so I may hold off on that until a future version....and just do some tweaking/bug fixing with the scenerio before calling this version done and pushing it out of the sandbox.

Well the rebels I saw had gunships and hovercrafts. Maybe all rebels on all planets pooled together to buy some research upgrades.
But is a lot of fun to play against.

Turn 32 sent on to House Romanov

Turn on to DeCastillo.
I am only slowly beginning to understand how the jumpgate influence playing. They make for an interesting feature.

Turn 34 on to the Romanovs

Hi all
I sent turn 34 to Casus Bello on the 21st Jan....
Who has the turn?
Best Regards

Please accept my humblest apologies, gentlemen [&o]. I thought I had sent the turn on, but apparently I have had it all the time. I've sent it now. I can only plead holidays and a full life as mitigation for the oversight. [8|]

So...

The files with me. I got it on the 31st. Sorry, things have been a bit hectic lately....will try to get it out tonight or tomorrow at the latest.

GrumpyMel

Turn 35 Sent on....sorry for the delay.

Turn35 sent on

The campaign in north-western Kesh is proving to be a gruelling slog, with both sides suffering losses without gaining or losing much ground.

Pressure on House DeCastilio is mounting, however, as Drako's supremacy in space allows those evil scum to reinforce, while forcing the gallant DeCastilian forces to fight with their backs to the wall .

The crucial battle is in space, although the seat of purpose, to paraphrase what's'isname, is on the planetary surface.

A similar dynamic is occuring on Circe between Romanov & Cadwall. I begin to understand the frustrations of the isolated Japanese garrison commanders in the Pacific [;)].

A well played game so far, by all involved. If you guys are enjoying the scenerio, you should definately check out the latest version I uploaded...lots of improvements (I think) there.

One thing I tried to address a little bit was to make the game a little more fluid while still retaining the ability to effectively isolate planets (as the Drako & Romanov players seem to be doing very well in our current game). I put in 2 small things that should add a bit of a twist in that regards....

- The player who has aligned the Guild can build a special ship type called  "Guild Smugglers". These ships have limited combat and carry capacity but can move (slowly) through Deep Space. Meaning that the can bypass the use of Jumpgates with these ships. Make's it a little bit harder to completely lock down a system against this player. Although their limited capacity makes it expensive to conduct operations with them and you'll only be able to get a trickle of reinforcments into a system via this method.

- All players, if they research Covert Ops tech get access to a Covert Ops Action Card which they can play against an opponent once per turn (The card costs a decent amount of PP to play as well). The card will generate small groups of partisans (under your control) in the opponents territory. The appearance of these partisans is random...so it's not like you can direct them towards a specific system. But it'll mean that an opponents planet is never entirely secure once they've killed off the rebels. Even if they've got access locked off from space...small groups of hostile forces can appear on the planet. Essentialy it means that a player needs to worry about maintaining some security forces in his backfield...even if it is otherwise safe from attack. I really wanted this option because it means that the action won't be entirely constrained to the one or two systems that compromise the "front line". The partisan forces generated are small enough and weak enough (and rare enough) that they shouldn't be much of a problem  for local security forces to deal with.... However, if a player leaves them entirely alone to build up over a number of turns... then they could start to be something which could threaten isolated production or resource centers.... meaning that you can't completely ignore them.

If you guys have any other suggestions, let me know. I'm happy to get feedback about what things work or don't work well about the scenerio....and about dynamics that I might need to tweak a bit. I've gotten some good feedback already which has made it's way into some of the updates.

I'd love to start again as DeCastillo with the new version, now that I'm familiar with the scenario.

Here are my thoughts:
Am enjoying the game. The naval war feels about right. Am slowly moving ahead on the ground. I also see the problem that the ground war just takes too long to bring to results. I am confident to win the war on Circe eventually since I can bring in new troops each turn but it just feels like it takes forever. As to reasons I see the following:
- there is no naval (space-based) artillery I could use
- ground troops and ground artillery move very slowly when not on plains
- artillery is not too effective and has only a range of 1 hex
- my airforce is effectively blocked by anti-air guns
- ships (ocean ships) are too expensive for the fact that I cannot transport them to another world
- no supply usage required by units
So would not mind restarting if some of the above concerns could be alleviated. I think the suggestions above make things more interesting but I do not think they would make the ground war more dynamic.
Here are some ideas which might or might not work:
- give the player who owns the orbit around a planet have some more influence on the ground war. Maybe a morale boost. Or some chance to drop bombs. Or some nice units which can only be produced in orbit
- have units move a little bit faster
- have artillery which can shoot maybe 3 or 5 hexes
- give air units a bit more survivability against air defenses
- on water planets make the war on the oceans more interesting. Easy to produce ships which can travel fast and bombard ground units
Best Regards

So who wants to restart? [:)]

Turn 36 sent on

I agree the ground war takes forever with huge losses on both sides on Kesh anyway i will take the system in the end but it will take some turns yet to acheive,ive blockaded the Jump gate to Kesh so my greater resource's will eventually tell, then i will have to break De Castillos blockade of his side of the jump gate this game could go on for a long time.

Some thoughts on the current ground situation...

I think the thing with the ground war is that both Casus & I concentrated more on ground units where you guys put more into space forces. So even though you are controling the systems and should eventualy win... you're having a pretty tough slog on the ground where we concentrated our builds.

On Circe, I was able to put a really good size force with a good mix of troops onto the planet before you were able to seal it off Lunaticus... so it's no surprise you are having a hard slog there. I also have some decent local production to replace losses. I have no doubt that you'll eventualy win the contest there unless something truely dramatic happens in space. However up until the last turn or so you hadn't even brought in enough forces to achieve numerical parity with me, let alone superiority.

You also had a very poor unit mix for the job. Armor is great for punching a hole through enemy units in open terrain and then exploiting the break through.... but if it lacks proper infantry support, it's going to have real problems...especialy if it has to attack into urban terrain or mountains (or heavy woods/jungle for that matter) and across a constrained front. You had very little infantry support for your armor...which is why I think you started running into some problems initialy. I think that you expected to rely on your air-power as a force multiplier to devastate my ground forces (shock & awe) and then mop them up with your own ground troops. Problem with this was that I actually had some reasonable air defense... in the way of my own fighter squadron and then augmented with a decent number of SAM batteries. Note that I made no changes to plane survivability vs flak numbers from vanilla AT... planes and SAM batteries use the same numbers in that regards as they do in regular AT.

In the regular game, air-power is king...but FLAK can be an effective foil if you deploy it in sufficient numbers and well dug in... you can neutralize an opponents ability to launch strikes at specific points locations. The thing is that FLAK is pretty localized in defense. In can only cover a limited area well...whereas Air has the range to strike anywhere. I think this is an important dynamic...otherwise victory is simply a matter of getting air superiority.

In the case of the Circe map... the islands are narrow with alot of choke points and with a backbone of hills and mountains...making a pretty good setup for the kind of localized defense flak is designed for.