Kusanoki Chronicles

  After several weapon test combats we return to the original combat to show how different things can be when upgrades impact things. The Red Ship - The Starter Broadsword lost the combat quite badly last time (and in a real fight would be lucky to escape). Since then her commanding officer, no doubt smarting under the embarrassment, has heavily reconfigured the ship. The most obvious problem was that losing a single AI Combat Navigator was enough to put the ship into efficiency difficulties which enforces four corrective options - Do nothing, it was luck that the AI Combat Navigator was hit so losing space to up crew factors wastes combat potential - Add more AI Combat Navigators for redundancy. - Add more Crew for redundancy - Reduce weaponry/items requiring crew factors - Increase officer leadership The last would be a mistake in a warship but it is listed as it 'is' an option and the first depends on your own attitude to risk. Crew are the safest response mainly ...

This ship was obviously hit be a lot of anti-matter missiles  Next in our series of tests of the battle system we will look at possibly the most popular ship killer in game with Missiles. We won't be looking at the dreaded anti-matter missiles as I don’t have any. Or even high mark missiles for that matter. Our two test subjects will be the same two ships as last time. I am not sure if the shielded exploration vessel even noticed the attack in the last post so it is still aimlessly wandering around doing science stuff. The scout ship though has re-armed and gotten rid of all the light photon guns equipping instead with a  single missile launcher, Magazines and ammo. In practice no warship carries a single tiny weapon like this and you will see ships with 100-200 missile launchers all trying to overwhelm the point defence of a defending ship. In this case the defending ship does not even have point defence (plus we want to see what the weapon 'does' not what it does if it ge...

The last blog post covered a full days battle with two relatively crap warships hammering each other. For the next series of posts we are going to get more nuanced which has the plus side of me not blowing up quite so much of my own expensively acquired gear in the process. My  two warships used in the last engagement are refitting post battle so to continue the test I have temporarily changed my starter exploration vessel and scout ship into ships at least capable of fighting. They both have normal/heavy hulls and some armour so I made one (without even a naval officer) have lots of shields and the other will endeavour to attack with a single weapon. Considering the amount of defences it is unlikely to do much if anything to the attacked ship but will allow us to ascertain how the defences cope with different weapon types. This test will cover two of the weakest combat ship weapons in the game - the Light Photon Gun Mark IV and a Photon Scatter Gum The Attacking Ship This is basic...

This is how I picture the starter warship of the 'Broadsword'  class We have now covered a fair amount of basic detail concerning combat which is all very esoteric so I shall now run through some test battle reports in some detail to show what actually happens and what conclusions can be drawn - hopefully these conclusions will reinforce this series of articles basic assumptions but you never know.  Test Battle Alpha  The scenario is that two new players have set up their own combat ships and bumped into each other both being ready and willing to fight. This battle will therefore validate/invalidate some of their design decisions. Both players managed to source some decent Photon Gun Ivs and they have decent Mark Targeting Computers and a few Shields at that level I have set up what we shall term as our 'Blue' ship which is an NHS flagged normal hulled, medium armour patrol ship. It has pretty good shields, poor speed, poor scintillators (only Mark I) and no less than t...

There are several different armour types out there with some (Light Plate) mainly used for fast ships not expecting to slug it out and others (Korondite Plate) mainly for stealth with much the same intention. We will not focus much on these as they are often attempts to avoid combat and we are concerning ourselves with a generic ship that slugs it out over several days. For these sort of warships there are two armour types that are head and shoulders above the rest and these are Armour Plate and Ablative Armour Plate.  Let us take each in turn. The most common is Armour Plate which is the workhorse of armour types and the most common you will (probably) have and encounter for major warships that are not toolkit smaller types designed for specific tasks. The basic Mark I armour provides a default armour depth of 80 and each mark increases this by 20 so Mark II = 100, Mark III = 120 and Mark IV (this is described as Advanced Heavy Armour on Battle reports) at 140. Since armour uses t...

   A Star Trek type Shield in place Shields are the second layer of defence and are one of the least 'seen' in primary line of battle combat ships. I am a fan personally but their main issue is that to get a large enough protective shield layer takes up more space than a Heavy hulled ship can spare. Plus when the most serious opposition uses Photon Batteries or anti-matter missiles then shield efficiency decreases rapidly. They are both useful and possible to carry in a normal hulled warship so it is still worth looking at. A shield functions much as every space tv/game shield you have ever seen does. Everything shot aimed at the ship must be dealt with by the shield and the more that is absorbed the weaker that shield gets.   There are three numbers to pay attention too with regard to shield and these are its Factors/Depth and recharge. The recharge is just how much the shields will refresh for the following day battle and as naval ships rarely waste space carrying ...

I picture scints as something like this - no barrier as such just a field surrounding the ship that diffuses any laser passing through it. The first thing  our incoming weapon has to deal with are the Scintillators. These are basically like a field that dissipates energy weapons that surrounds the ship like the shields. It does nothing versus missile/torp/rail weaponry. They tend to be common because they don’t take a lot of space for the added protection they provide.  For the given ship size a certain amount of scintillators are required for maximum coverage. Mark I scintillators provide 20 protection, Mark II 30, Mark III 40 and Mark IV 50 IF that minimum number is reached. Scintillator protection only drops as and when internal damage is caused to the scintillators themselves.  As with most protective items the damage blocked is calculated using the 3d probability bell curve so if your scintillator protection is '20' then you can expect a mean of 10 damage from every ...

It's a couple of big warships from the Starship Troopers Universe where you can imagine some of the Human factions fighting a Hex type group. For the purposes of moving through a ships defensive protection we shall be using one of the more vanilla weapons in the game - the Photon Gun. This is because many other weapons are designed to affect some damage layers differently and though we might touch on these in some of the individual defence blog posts most detail will be saved for looking at the weapon individually. This sort of weapon is also not impacted by point defence which removes an added complication. Photon weaponry is the main most 'energy' weapon type in game and ranges from light photon guns, photon guns to photon cannons and photon batteries. The Mark IV variant of this weapon does exactly 90 Damage if it hits an enemy (note that weapon damage is fixed so is always at that value, no randomness with the maximum damage it might cause). When a photon/nova weapon hi...

the 'force' does not impact the probability engine in Phoenix though you can have cool space fighters and bombers. Up to this point in this series of short combat articles we have been dealing with relatively set figures. For the next section we need to have some understanding of bell curves and probability. Now this is absolutely not needed to have a basic understanding of Phoenix naval combat so this is one article I only encourage those who are really interested in the system to read (or alternately you might understand it already without extra information..) Anyway if you are still here Phoenix uses a 3d6 probability engine for random figure adjustments. This basically means it generates a bell curve which is really, really prevalent in the world and the result will sit somewhere on the bell curve 1 . Now this is simple enough to view. If you roll a single dice the odds are obvious - you have a 16.66666666666667% chance to get any of the dice faces (allowing the dice is pe...