Aurora 4x
C# Aurora => General Discussion => Topic started by: liveware on June 27, 2020, 12:05:16 PM
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I have been theorycrafting a new ground combat army configuration. In doing so, I developed the following two units:
Light Armored Personnel Carrier
Transport Size (tons) 24 Cost 1.2 Armour 2 Hit Points 3
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.15 Resupply Cost 6
Crew-Served Anti-Personnel: Shots 6 Penetration 5 Damage 5
Desert Warfare
Vendarite 0.96
Development Cost 60
Machine Gun Nest
Transport Size (tons) 24 Cost 1.2 Armour 2 Hit Points 3
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.15 Resupply Cost 6
Crew-Served Anti-Personnel: Shots 6 Penetration 5 Damage 5
Desert Warfare
Vendarite 0.96
Development Cost 60
The first is a light vehicle and the second is a static unit. Is there any advantage to using the static unit instead of the light vehicle? They both appear to have identical performance parameters.
For RP purposes static units appeal to me, but from strictly performance-based point of view I would expect that the light vehicle would always be superior unless the static unit gets a fortification bonus (or something like that).
It seems that, according to the wiki article at least, static ground units are strictly worse than mobile ground units as they have increased chance to be hit by hostile fire during combat:
http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=C-Ground_Units
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The static unit has no evasion which means the enemy will hit it with more ease, in contrast light vehicles have 0.4 hit chance which means that they are the hardest unit type to hit (infantry has 0.6). Static units will also not have any breakthroughs.
However, defensively static units can fortify to the same level that infantry can which means that the evasion advantage of the light vehicle gets is overshadowed by the fortification of statics.
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Ah, perfect. So there is a fortification advantage for static units. That will synergize nicely with my plan to use construction units only with larger formation templates.
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The static unit has no evasion which means the enemy will hit it with more ease, in contrast light vehicles have 0.4 hit chance which means that they are the hardest unit type to hit (infantry has 0.6). Static units will also not have any breakthroughs.
However, defensively static units can fortify to the same level that infantry can which means that the evasion advantage of the light vehicle gets is overshadowed by the fortification of statics.
I understand that fortification and evasion stack, so this is not actually true. Statics at fortification six have a (1 x 1/6 = 16.67%) chance of getting hit, while light vehicles at fortification three have a (0.4 x 1/3 = 13.33%) chance of getting hit. It gets worse if you only allow self-fortification. (33.33% versus 20%)
Static units are strictly inferior to light vehicles with the same armour - their relative cheapness is where they shine.
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In the case of the unit designs I posted originally, they have identical cost, so statics are not always more cost effective than light vehicles it seems.
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The static unit has no evasion which means the enemy will hit it with more ease, in contrast light vehicles have 0.4 hit chance which means that they are the hardest unit type to hit (infantry has 0.6). Static units will also not have any breakthroughs.
However, defensively static units can fortify to the same level that infantry can which means that the evasion advantage of the light vehicle gets is overshadowed by the fortification of statics.
I understand that fortification and evasion stack, so this is not actually true. Statics at fortification six have a (1 x 1/6 = 16.67%) chance of getting hit, while light vehicles at fortification three have a (0.4 x 1/3 = 13.33%) chance of getting hit. It gets worse if you only allow self-fortification. (33.33% versus 20%)
Static units are strictly inferior to light vehicles with the same armour - their relative cheapness is where they shine.
The evasion stat is only used when units are on the attacking line while the fortification stats is used in all the other positions in terms of how hard a unit is at hitting. As soon as a unit starts fortifying it is no longer able to use its mobility and will for a time be easier to hit until the fortification level is higher. The To-Hit modifier only stack for terrain penalties.
From the ground combat rules by Steve...
To-Hit Modifier: Used to modify the chance of the unit being hit during combat (based on the mobility of the unit). This only applies if the unit is not fortified.
This actually mean that through self fortification a light vehicle will actually be easier to hit than if they are attacking the enemy as self fortification on light vehicle is only 2 and their evasion is 0.4... if there are no terrain bonuses as well that is.
Static units is straight up much better at defence as they can fortify up to 6 and light vehicle only to 3. Another benefit is also that Static can use heavier armour which make them allot less susceptible to light units and artillery if you know that is what you are likely to face allot of. They obviously will be more expensive but that can still be highly beneficial.
Light vehicles are still highly valuable as you can potentially use them to very good effect on offensive actions if or when you start to have a good chance of a break through. If you are on a defensible position I would generally allow my armoured forces to be attacking until I see them being able to generate breakthroughs on the enemy, then I would throw in my mechanised forces to provide an even more likely breakthrough chain and start overwhelming the opponent. This is a tactic for defensive armies that is. If you are attacking a colony I would just put all my mobile forces on attack and only formation with static units into defensive line to start fortifying.
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I do think the balance between static units and vehicles isn't great, but a defensive line with high fortification and preferably fortification-boosting terrain is the one context where statics stand a chance.
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I do think the balance between static units and vehicles isn't great, but a defensive line with high fortification and preferably fortification-boosting terrain is the one context where statics stand a chance.
In what way is it not balanced?
Static benefits: High maximum fortification level at 6, potential for higher armour values which are great against light units and especially artillery.
Static drawbacks: Can't make any breakthroughs and only have a 1 evasion bonus so are very bad at attacking.
Light Vehicle benefits: High mobility and a 0.4 evasion bonus when not fortified.
Light Vehicle drawbacks: Low max fortification level at 3, strongly susceptible to enemy artillery (medium and heavy)
As long as you allow both units to fortify to max level then static units will win in every scenario if everything else is equal otherwise light vehicle wins... that seems fairly balanced in my book. They both serve an important function in an army.
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Sure, they can have better armor than light vehicles. They also can mount better weapons than light vehicles unless you're an autocannon devotee.
But medium vehicles have more armor and hit points per unit. And also carry the big guns (probably not the super-big guns?) And are lighter and nearly as cheap on a per-weapon basis. They're bad if you're expecting the enemy to throw up a huge pile of MAV weapons, but otherwise?
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Sure, they can have better armor than light vehicles. They also can mount better weapons than light vehicles unless you're an autocannon devotee.
But medium vehicles have more armor and hit points per unit. And also carry the big guns (probably not the super-big guns?) And are lighter and nearly as cheap on a per-weapon basis. They're bad if you're expecting the enemy to throw up a huge pile of MAV weapons, but otherwise?
Medium vehicles also have less evasion which makes the fortification vs. evasion argument favour statics more.
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Sure, they can have better armor than light vehicles. They also can mount better weapons than light vehicles unless you're an autocannon devotee.
But medium vehicles have more armor and hit points per unit. And also carry the big guns (probably not the super-big guns?) And are lighter and nearly as cheap on a per-weapon basis. They're bad if you're expecting the enemy to throw up a huge pile of MAV weapons, but otherwise?
Well... no they are not...
Static Fortification with Medium Anti-Vehicle weapon
Transport Size (tons) 44 Cost 2.64 Armour 30 Hit Points 30
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.33 Resupply Cost 16
Medium Anti-Vehicle: Shots 1 Penetration 40 Damage 40
versus
Medium vehicle with 2x LVA weapons
Transport Size (tons) 50 Cost 4 Armour 40 Hit Points 40
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.5 Resupply Cost 12
Light Anti-Vehicle: Shots 1 Penetration 20 Damage 30
Light Anti-Vehicle: Shots 1 Penetration 20 Damage 30
or
Medium vehicle with 2x MVA weapons
Transport Size (tons) 82 Cost 6.56 Armour 40 Hit Points 40
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.82 Resupply Cost 32
Medium Anti-Vehicle: Shots 1 Penetration 40 Damage 40
Medium Anti-Vehicle: Shots 1 Penetration 40 Damage 40
In both cases the static still win on a cost to efficiency level by quite the margin every time with the same conditions above. Size only really matter when you drop troops on a planet and even with size statics will still be more efficient as long as you allow them to fortify to max level.
There are some interesting effects with how armour and penetration work. LAV is not tough enough to penetrate heavy static armour while medium pay allot of extra to kill the static unit so are not an efficient weapon to use from a cost perspective. Add in that static is much harder to hit and it will be very cost inefficient to use medium vehicles to destroy static fortifications. MAC weapons probably are them most efficient at destroying heavy static units but still not efficient enough.
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YMMV, when I look at those numbers I see the medium vehicle with 2xMAV being not that much more than double the cost of the static, and having nearly four times as much resistance against light weapons as one of the static units.
If you're expecting to die from MAV or bigger hits the extra protection is meaningless, but if you're worried about losses to infantry weapons or autocannon the vehicle soaks better. (Medium or larger bombardment slightly favors the static, since bombardment has high damage that negates medium vehicle HP.)
Medium vehicles also have less evasion which makes the fortification vs. evasion argument favour statics more.
Yes, but the fortification vs. evasion already is completely crushing as far as it goes. If you're fortified, light vehicle vs. static is no contest. If you're not fortified, it's just about no contest in the opposite direction, but I would be surprised to see static units in any offensive formation.
Unless maybe your enemy has an all super-tanks with big AV guns all the time doctrine and you really need the utmost in spammable heavy anti-vehicle units.
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There are some interesting effects with how armour and penetration work. LAV is not tough enough to penetrate heavy static armour while medium pay allot of extra to kill the static unit so are not an efficient weapon to use from a cost perspective. Add in that static is much harder to hit and it will be very cost inefficient to use medium vehicles to destroy static fortifications. MAC weapons probably are them most efficient at destroying heavy static units but still not efficient enough.
I'd agree medium vehicles vs. static MAV isn't a great match-up for the vehicles.
What is a great matchup against static is LAV infantry.
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There are some interesting effects with how armour and penetration work. LAV is not tough enough to penetrate heavy static armour while medium pay allot of extra to kill the static unit so are not an efficient weapon to use from a cost perspective. Add in that static is much harder to hit and it will be very cost inefficient to use medium vehicles to destroy static fortifications. MAC weapons probably are them most efficient at destroying heavy static units but still not efficient enough.
I'd agree medium vehicles vs. static MAV isn't a great match-up for the vehicles.
What is a great matchup against static is LAV infantry.
Not it you have a CAP or HCAP in the Static instead it is not... ;)
In terms of defending then Static will almost always be the best possible answer. Against infantry with LAV weapon then a static with no armour and an CAP is straight up better if both are fortified. You can always find a version of Static that is better than anything else depending on the weapon you put in to it.
If you then also mix troops then the Static usually shines even better as you can combine its good offensive and defensive ability for both cost and size well with especially infantry which enhance their killing power with the protection of the infantry against heavy weapons.
There is a few instances where infantry usually are straight up better utilising certain weapons and that is if they are specifically trained in Mountain, Jungle or Rift Valley training and using lighter weapons as the infantry will hit twice as often. On such planets statics are only better using heavier weapons in the defensive line which the infantry can't carry.
YMMV, when I look at those numbers I see the medium vehicle with 2xMAV being not that much more than double the cost of the static, and having nearly four times as much resistance against light weapons as one of the static units.
Double MAV medium vehicles are allot more expensive than Static units so you can get more than twice the number of Static units or you could imagine more both infantry and static units as a combination of units can often make allot of difference and enhance your strength considerably. This is why you generally have vehicle with a mix of weapons woth both anti infantry and anti vehicle.
Where vehicles really shine is their power to weight ratio which in terms of attacking power. On the defence then actual weight almost have no impact on anything other then mixing troops and here static are still quite space efficient for the cost of both infantry and the static units itself.
I would also add that you are not really going to see two fortified sides every fight, in fact I would not really allow that in my games and I would not abuse a passive NPR so I can fortify my troops and then fight, that is a bit abusive of the game mechanics (in my opinion). In multi-faction games I certainly don't allow that when factions are on the same body at the start of a war. If you play like that then statics are even more powerful as a defensive structure.
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There are some interesting effects with how armour and penetration work. LAV is not tough enough to penetrate heavy static armour while medium pay allot of extra to kill the static unit so are not an efficient weapon to use from a cost perspective. Add in that static is much harder to hit and it will be very cost inefficient to use medium vehicles to destroy static fortifications. MAC weapons probably are them most efficient at destroying heavy static units but still not efficient enough.
I'd agree medium vehicles vs. static MAV isn't a great match-up for the vehicles.
What is a great matchup against static is LAV infantry.
Not it you have a CAP or HCAP in the Static instead it is not... ;)
If you're willing to spend money on infantry, CAP and HCAP lose a lot of their punch. Heavy power armor and genetic engineering make a seriously strong bullet sponge.
Also, some medium bombardment behind that strong bullet sponge is well-suited to plinking static emplacements.
In terms of defending then Static will almost always be the best possible answer. Against infantry with LAV weapon then a static with no armour and an CAP is straight up better if both are fortified. You can always find a version of Static that is better than anything else depending on the weapon you put in to it.
Citation needed...and how are you expecting the static force to be the one that gets to cheat at rock-paper-scissors?
I would also add that you are not really going to see two fortified sides every fight, in fact I would not really allow that in my games and I would not abuse a passive NPR so I can fortify my troops and then fight, that is a bit abusive of the game mechanics. In multi-faction games I certainly don't allow that when factions are on the same body at the start of a war. If you play like that then statics are even more powerful as a defensive structure.
Yeah, I'm not clear why you've been talking about the situation where both sides are fortified considering how that is nearly impossible in actual gameplay. (Outside the SM'd up situation of sharing a planet peacefully.)
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There are some interesting effects with how armour and penetration work. LAV is not tough enough to penetrate heavy static armour while medium pay allot of extra to kill the static unit so are not an efficient weapon to use from a cost perspective. Add in that static is much harder to hit and it will be very cost inefficient to use medium vehicles to destroy static fortifications. MAC weapons probably are them most efficient at destroying heavy static units but still not efficient enough.
I'd agree medium vehicles vs. static MAV isn't a great match-up for the vehicles.
What is a great matchup against static is LAV infantry.
Not it you have a CAP or HCAP in the Static instead it is not... ;)
If you're willing to spend money on infantry, CAP and HCAP lose a lot of their punch. Heavy power armor and genetic engineering make a seriously strong bullet sponge.
Also, some medium bombardment behind that strong bullet sponge is well-suited to plinking static emplacements.
In terms of defending then Static will almost always be the best possible answer. Against infantry with LAV weapon then a static with no armour and an CAP is straight up better if both are fortified. You can always find a version of Static that is better than anything else depending on the weapon you put in to it.
Citation needed...and how are you expecting the static force to be the one that gets to cheat at rock-paper-scissors?
I would also add that you are not really going to see two fortified sides every fight, in fact I would not really allow that in my games and I would not abuse a passive NPR so I can fortify my troops and then fight, that is a bit abusive of the game mechanics. In multi-faction games I certainly don't allow that when factions are on the same body at the start of a war. If you play like that then statics are even more powerful as a defensive structure.
Yeah, I'm not clear why you've been talking about the situation where both sides are fortified considering how that is nearly impossible in actual gameplay. (Outside the SM'd up situation of sharing a planet peacefully.)
Why don't you just do the math instead of using gut feeling which it seems like you are doing. Power armour is NOT better than pure infantry as a bullet sponge and I can prove that with math if you wish from a pure cost perspective.
It certainly is true that armour does count in an infantry versus infantry fight if that is what you are after but not if you just use the infantry to soak damage from a cost perspective and expect other units to deal the actual damage as infantry don't do all that much damage to most enemies other than infantry. Therefore a combination with cheap infantry can do allot in these instances as they are cheap for the amount of HP they get.
If your intention is to delay the enemy then light infantry is cheaper and more efficient... so it depends on what your intentions are. A combination of say Statics with HAV and MAV and light infantry is more cost efficient than marines in power armour and the static when attacked by a combination of heavy and medium vehicles armed with a combination of CAP, MAV and HAV for example. The light infantry will do next to no damage but the space marines will also do so little damage that it will still not matter in conjunction with how effective the static weapons are. From a defensive perspective then the light infantry will still be harder to kill as you have allot more of them and they also take up a larger space in the battlefield and that way protect the static units better as well.
If a Space Marine cost 0.18BP a light infantry cost 0.06BP so you get three times as many. If the enemy attack using CAP weapons only for anti-infantry weapons they kill 0.44 marines for each light infantry but as you have three times as many of them then they still last longer for the same cost. light infantry will deal very little damage to enemy vehicles but so will the marines as well.
The same is also true with light infantry in combination with say HCAP static versus marines in power armour. The ligh infantry soak the damage while the static do the damage. Here the power infantry will do better if armed with LAV weapons though but still not effective enough from a math perspective.
Example.
1000 Space Marines with PWI, Power Armour (5000t)
160 Space marines with LAV, Power Armour (2560t)
versus
3000 Light infantry with PWL, Light Armour (9000t)
40 Static with HCAP and Heavy Static Armour (1280t)
round 1.
3000 LI kill 18 Marines (PWI) and 10 Marines (LAV)
40 Static kill 160 Marines (PWI) and 80 Marines with (LAV)
1000 Marines (PWI) kill 875 Light infantry and 1.5 Static
160 Marines (LAV) kill 140 and 8.5 Static
Total loss is 180 Marines (PWI) and 90 Marine (LAV) for 1015 light infantry and 10 static.
So one third of the LI and one quarter of the static for more then half the Marine (LAV) and one fifth the regular marines. The ratio at which you have the troops will matter as it is downhill for the marines from here as they loose firepower to take down the static fast enough for the static to mow down the marines.
If you also include artillery into the picture from both sides then the favour shifts even more to using the light infantry as a shield.
You also need to look at the logistical side. The light defensive side in the above example consume 1110 GSP while the Marines consume 2260 GSP. So the Marines need twice the investment into supplies to keep fighting as well and this is also significant.
There is no question that armoured or heavy infantry is allot more effective when you look at the actual space they occupy, but this is only important when you drop them from orbit from an assaulyt ship as you are limited to how much troops you can drop on a planet and you want as much protection and firepower as you can get while doing so.
But from a defensive perspective then light forces are more efficient, especially for making a fight last as long as possible for reinforcement to arrive in the form of a counter attack by your fleets for example.
If you want to defend on a planet with terrain such as Jungle or Mountain I would go with regular infantry as light infantry become too expensive to train as they are rounded from 0.075 to 0.08 in cost. Regular infantry will on the other hand be rounded down from 0.125 to 0.12 so are way more effective as they will deal more damage to the enemy and still be cheap enough to do the trick of soaking damage. Marines in power armour is also rounded down but from a higher level so does not benefit as much from the rounding in cost while it is detrimental to light infantry and very helpful for regular infantry.
You then have role-playing factors of saving human life from harm which means you need as much protection on your troops as possible, at least from the ones you expect to actually fight and not just police the population. But that is a very different ethical question... ;)
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I just did a combat to actually test the above and it certainly is contest of patience as the combat will drag on for a very LOOONG time.. ;)
The light forces actually start to get the upper hand relatively early as the moral of the LAV marines start to falter and the damage on the static drop faster and faster due to how moral effect the battle as well.
Starting forces was...
3 Space marine regiments of...
1000 Spacemarine grunts (PWI, Power Armour)
200 Spacemarines Heavies (LAV, Power Armour)
against...
3 Garrison Regiments of..
3000 light Infantry (PWL, Light Armour)
60 Fortifications (HCAP, Heavy Armour, Static)
The cost of both are pretty much the same, the space marines could be a bit cheaper if they used PW instead of PWI but that does not seem likely in most cases to arm them like that so I did not.
After about 2 months of fighting..
Marine Grunts in each regiment are roughly 580, morale is 91
Marine Heavies in each regiment are roughly 43, morale is 70
Light infantry in each regiment 1700, morale is 91
Fortification in each regiment are roughly 45, morale is 90
Losses are now roughly about 1.5:1 so Space Marine looses 10 every 8 hour cycle and the other side about 15 light infantry and very rarely a fortification unit.
The Space Marine side still burn about 2970 GSP while the light infantry side burns 2338 GSP. From the start the Space Marine used up 7350 GSP and the Light Infantry side 3870 GSP.
I presume the fight will go on for a long while and if both side had been max fortification from the start then things would have taken way longer but that was not the test.
Why do I compare like this... because you have to do it this way... there is no point in having one side attack and the other defend... this test is about who is more resilient in defence and that is what we are testing. There are a few key reason why light infantry combine very well with static units which have to do with distribution of size and morale and allot of HP distributed on many difficult to hit units. Another thing is big difference in armour and damage distribution capabilities making the enemy waste as much AP and Damage as possible which cost resources and supplies.
Artillery is also something interesting to discuss... if you build artillery for defence there is almost no reason to put any armour on it as you are always better of with just more of it. But if you are going to assault a planet you should put as much armour on it as possible because that means it will survive better for the space it takes up on the ship. This is important when you look at counter battery fire.
If we are talking about invasions then there is no point in comparing costs as that is not what matters as much as the capacity to cram as much firepower and defensive capability into as tiny a space as possible, that means very costly units in terms of resources. If you instead would compare the marines with the light infantry and static with space on a drop ship things will look very different. You also most often can disregard supplies as you don't need to drop formations with lots of supplies. You can bring most of the supplies with regular troopships and unload it as you need it, more or less, so you are much less restricted in space for support forces.
The three space marine regiments above are about 7500t while the light infantry is over 10.000t worth of troops so not very space efficient, static units are not very good at attacking either so you would need to replace them with a vehicle type instead.
Another important thing to note is that technology difference also play a VERY big role on the importance of armour or numbers. But if all things are equal then numbers wins over quality. If your armour technology is better than their weapon technology then heavily armoured infantry will likely be more effective.
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Why don't you just do the math instead of using gut feeling which it seems like you are doing. Power armour is NOT better than pure infantry as a bullet sponge and I can prove that with math if you wish from a pure cost perspective.
If you're going to call on me to do the math, why follow that with paragraph on paragraph of never doing any math?
I don't know what math you've decided to do, since you didn't show any. My math says that heavy power armor compared to light armor is twice the armor for twice the cost. Twice the armor means four times less likely to die when hit. Provided said hit doesn't have more AP than the light armor does.
At equal weapon and armor tech, that provision holds for CAP, but not for HCAP. Against HCAP the armor value is only 4/3s of the AP (disregarding any rounding artifacts), making it a little less than twice as survivable as lighter armor. Against HCAP (or medium bombardment) that makes the armor a dubious investment...unless you care more about tonnage than cost, which you might for offensive infantry. Or if you are worried about a big soft infantry formation being a source of breakthroughs.
So if you're designing infantry to defend against an enemy with all heavy weapons - HCAP, antivehicle weapons, medium+ autocannons, medium+ bombardment, that sort, you quite possibly want to not bother with protection. If you're going up against an enemy heavy on personal weapons, CAP, light bombardment, and light autocannons, heavy powered armor will pay its way in survivability. I note that an enemy who believes that infantry should be a massed soft meat shield is inherently going to wind up heavy on personal weapons and thus giving an advantage to the higher-end options.
And then of course the infantry genetic enhancement options are effective against a slightly smaller but different slice of weapons, moving HCAP to the loser list but light bombardment and autocannon to the winner side of things.
...The balance on your experiment is kinda weird.
On the marine side, you've got PWI, which are clearly lousy in this situation and I tend to view doubtfully in general - they are better for their weight/cost than PW against targets with more than light armor. But they're still extremely weak against non-infantry targets. And you've given zero CAP/HCAP against an enemy with a human wave doctrine. That's pretty bad. I think the LAV is a decent pick for what it does though.
On the other side, you've got PWL troops, which...well, they're virtually unarmed. Two of them offers half the offensive effectiveness of one regular PW trooper. They're only a reasonable choice for two things: police work, and flooding the zone with chaff targets. Living sandbags to pit against the marines lack of automatic weapons. And then there's the one jewel in the whole setup - you gave the 'garrison' side HCAP fortifications, which completely negate the armor you chose for the 'marine' side. And in terms of effectiveness they make up an overwhelming majority of the 'garrison' firepower - with their shots each being 36 times as effective as the light infantry spitwads, they wind up constituting better than 80% of the damage going out. Good way to make the power armor look bad, that!
Very tangentially, it's interesting to look at how well LAV stacks up against actual heavy armor. LAV vs. heavy vehicle armor is 1 in 36 chance to kill on a hit. (1/9 to penetrate, 1/4 lethal.) A heavy streetsweeper tank that goes completely all-in on CAP looks like it should do a little better than its cost in light armor LAV troops in a no-fortification head-to-head or at full self-fortification. It falls behind on the way to maximum built-up fortification naturally. If the tank goes more expensive and less effective for the matchup with any non-CAP weapons that will make a hard swing in favor of the infantry of course.
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ulz
the quadruple durability is only situational, for weapons with pen <= the less-armored units armor value. in the case of infantry (in the generic uniform tech on both sides) that is PW, PWL, and CAP only. CAP is obviously an important weapon, but HCAP is too and going from 1 to 2 armor less than doubles your durability there.
the alternative* is to double your body count, which doubles your durability against HCAP or anything else in the universe, and doubles your firepower to boot.
if your arty and armor have so much firepower that you can dismiss your infantry's offense as meaningless, *and* you can be confident that a very high proportion of what's coming at you is CAP or lighter, then increasing the armor of your units is cost effective. if not, not.
*this is assuming the ability to lead the extra soldiers effectively is either available or meaningless, which is reasonable under the conditions that are already necessary for armor to be good. it also ignores the cost of transportation, which doesn't seem entirely honest, for invading armies.
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Why don't you just do the math instead of using gut feeling which it seems like you are doing. Power armour is NOT better than pure infantry as a bullet sponge and I can prove that with math if you wish from a pure cost perspective.
If you're going to call on me to do the math, why follow that with paragraph on paragraph of never doing any math?
I don't know what math you've decided to do, since you didn't show any. My math says that heavy power armor compared to light armor is twice the armor for twice the cost. Twice the armor means four times less likely to die when hit. Provided said hit doesn't have more AP than the light armor does.
At equal weapon and armor tech, that provision holds for CAP, but not for HCAP. Against HCAP the armor value is only 4/3s of the AP (disregarding any rounding artifacts), making it a little less than twice as survivable as lighter armor. Against HCAP (or medium bombardment) that makes the armor a dubious investment...unless you care more about tonnage than cost, which you might for offensive infantry. Or if you are worried about a big soft infantry formation being a source of breakthroughs.
So if you're designing infantry to defend against an enemy with all heavy weapons - HCAP, antivehicle weapons, medium+ autocannons, medium+ bombardment, that sort, you quite possibly want to not bother with protection. If you're going up against an enemy heavy on personal weapons, CAP, light bombardment, and light autocannons, heavy powered armor will pay its way in survivability. I note that an enemy who believes that infantry should be a massed soft meat shield is inherently going to wind up heavy on personal weapons and thus giving an advantage to the higher-end options.
And then of course the infantry genetic enhancement options are effective against a slightly smaller but different slice of weapons, moving HCAP to the loser list but light bombardment and autocannon to the winner side of things.
...The balance on your experiment is kinda weird.
On the marine side, you've got PWI, which are clearly lousy in this situation and I tend to view doubtfully in general - they are better for their weight/cost than PW against targets with more than light armor. But they're still extremely weak against non-infantry targets. And you've given zero CAP/HCAP against an enemy with a human wave doctrine. That's pretty bad. I think the LAV is a decent pick for what it does though.
On the other side, you've got PWL troops, which...well, they're virtually unarmed. Two of them offers half the offensive effectiveness of one regular PW trooper. They're only a reasonable choice for two things: police work, and flooding the zone with chaff targets. Living sandbags to pit against the marines lack of automatic weapons. And then there's the one jewel in the whole setup - you gave the 'garrison' side HCAP fortifications, which completely negate the armor you chose for the 'marine' side. And in terms of effectiveness they make up an overwhelming majority of the 'garrison' firepower - with their shots each being 36 times as effective as the light infantry spitwads, they wind up constituting better than 80% of the damage going out. Good way to make the power armor look bad, that!
Very tangentially, it's interesting to look at how well LAV stacks up against actual heavy armor. LAV vs. heavy vehicle armor is 1 in 36 chance to kill on a hit. (1/9 to penetrate, 1/4 lethal.) A heavy streetsweeper tank that goes completely all-in on CAP looks like it should do a little better than its cost in light armor LAV troops in a no-fortification head-to-head or at full self-fortification. It falls behind on the way to maximum built-up fortification naturally. If the tank goes more expensive and less effective for the matchup with any non-CAP weapons that will make a hard swing in favor of the infantry of course.
Ok... let's do this VERY simple...
Firs of I chose the PWI as that uis what I believe you would give them and it would NOT change the result, neither would using CAP weapons either as you would only increase the damage not the resiliance that way. This was a test yto show how a combined force of light infantry and static will outclass a similar force to take them out in heavy armour. It would have made little to no difference if you thrown in some CAP weapons on the marines as that would just have make the LAV marines targeted even more by the Static which was the point I was showing all the time.
Let's look at the power armour versus light armour...
you pay 0.06 for a single PWL trooper who has 10/10 armour/HP and you pay 0.15 and get 15/10. As we are only interested in soaking damage here that is what we compare.
So... you will get 2.5 PWL troops or 1 marine... it will take 2.5 hits from a 10/10 weapon to kill all the PWL troopers but it only take 2.27 hits to take out the marine. So PWL troops will soak more damage for their cost... BUT almost every army will have allot of weapons that do much more damage and who instead of having a 44% to take out the power armoured marine take them out in one shot ALL of these shots also only take out ONE light infantry trooper. This is why they are so efficient.
When you then COMBINE them with something that actually DO damage... such as Static on the defence they will protect the static units (not do any real damage but they don't have to). The point is to protect the sources that do allot of damage and that was what I showed you in my example. The reason I used PWI weapons was because that is probably how you would arm your power infantry if you often find yourself fighting other powered infantry enemies, the cost and size increase are negligible for a considerable increase in AP on enemy powered infantry.
I hope that you understand what I was trying to achieve with that test... it had nothing to do with how good a marine is to take out other infantry because they are good at that but a static until is even better at that when protected by some PWL so as not to be sniped by some LAV armed marines.
Using genetic enginering on PWL troops actually can be quite beneficial, even just the first level as you don't want them to become too expensive, this has to do with how the AP/Damage profile look on other weapons.
The whole point with PWL infantry is to have allot of single bodies with a relatively LARGE mass to block incoming damage so your real effective killing units do the damage. This is why you don't care that the PWL do very little damage.
If you just take 25 light infantry against 10 marines they will loose... that is mathematically a certainty. But if you add 2 HCAP fortifications and 8 LAV Marines on the other side the power now shift to the light troopers favour for the reason that the 25 light infantry does a much better job at "protecting" the fortifications then the marines do protecting the LAV marines. If the marines can't protect the LAV marines they will have little to no hope against the fortifications.
25 light infantry have a weight of 75t
2 fortifications a weight of 64t
10 marine grunts have a weight of 50t
8 LAV marines have a weight of 128t
You also can look at your tank scenario as well...
Heavy tank with CAP, HAV and heavy armour
You could then field say...
15 LAV RPG-teams protected by 115 PWL militia.
Each RPG team has a 1/36 chance to kill so the chance to kill the tank each round is around 33%... they will likely have many rounds to try...
Even if you are make an infantry killing tank like 2xCAP you still get like 10 LAV and 70 militia so the tank is not as tough as it think it is. Although using Medium Bombardment in support position is actually better than RPG armed militia.
Again I have showed how the soaking of cheap infantry of enemy fire is the main point of having them for defensive (or even offensive) purposes. You can see this as specialising a ship. Light infantry are specialised for defending other units while Statics are specialised to do damage against other units.
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*this is assuming the ability to lead the extra soldiers effectively is either available or meaningless, which is reasonable under the conditions that are already necessary for armor to be good. it also ignores the cost of transportation, which doesn't seem entirely honest, for invading armies.
And I also think that I tried to explain this as well. When you create an army who's role is to invade a planet the cost is basically an "almost" none factor as space on the ship really will matter more. Drop capable ships are not really cheap to build in large numbers. They will cost you about 8-12.000 BP for 100.000t carry capacity depending on engine tech and how much defences you want on them, so not really cheap.
Size for garrison forces certainly IS a none issue, more or less, as you can move the troops over a much longer time period using less ships and much less expensive ones.
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Ok... let's do this VERY simple...
Firs of I chose the PWI as that uis what I believe you would give them and it would NOT change the result, neither would using CAP weapons either as you would only increase the damage not the resiliance that way. This was a test yto show how a combined force of light infantry and static will outclass a similar force to take them out in heavy armour. It would have made little to no difference if you thrown in some CAP weapons on the marines as that would just have make the LAV marines targeted even more by the Static which was the point I was showing all the time.
Let's look at the power armour versus light armour...
you pay 0.06 for a single PWL trooper who has 10/10 armour/HP and you pay 0.15 and get 15/10. As we are only interested in soaking damage here that is what we compare.
What? No. That's not what we compare.
If you're only interested in soaking damage, and that's the only thing you're grading on? You don't get to hamper the armored units with heavier PW. If the test is of who is the best sandbag, it's blatantly unfair to hamper one side with heavier weapons. There's no reason you can't make PWL heavy power armor. I probably wouldn't, because I don't build troops as pure bullet-sponges, but if it's an infantry bullet-sponge contest you want PWL is the obligatory choice.
Basic powered armor costs 1.5 times as much as light armor and gives 1.5x the armor. It takes 2.25 hits at 1x AP to kill the one power armor troop, and 1.5 to kill the 1.5 light armor troops. For absorptiveness against small arms, armor is cost effective.
There's two drawbacks of using armor here. One is that armor makes your bullet-sponges more expensive per ton, so if you're working to a cost budget you have less tonnage of them and they draw less fire away from the units they're supposed to meat-shield for. The other is that armor is partly or entirely wasted against higher-AP weapons. (In general, there's also drawback 1.5 that you put out less firepower per unit cost. But we're not caring about firepower here, right?)
Again, the test was stacked against the 'marines' to a remarkable degree. They're using armor that's totally unfit for the situation and giving up half their potential numbers to carry weapons that are irrelevant to the purported purpose of the test.
I also question the interpretation. So about 75% of the LAV troops got killed, while only 1/4th of the static guns did. Sure enough. But is that really because the marines are bad at meat-shielding (which they are), or are there other more important factors in play?
The meat-shield casualties are actually even - the marines had lost 42%, and the militia had lost 43%. So the marines aren't falling behind because they're dying off faster, despite their mostly useless armor and three-fold inferior numbers. (Of course, the reason they're not dying off faster than the militia is that they are killing the militia with their personal weapons. More than 80% of militia casualties would be from the grunts shooting them.)
So why are the LAV troops dropping like flies? Well for one thing, as an element they're more than twice as big a target as the bunkers, with a meat-shield that is 1/3 smaller by tonnage. So they're drawing a three times larger share of the incoming fire. Or they were before they got massacred down to size.
And then there's the composition of that incoming fire, which is dominated by 360 HCAP shots with guaranteed lethality. For comparison, what was coming at the bunkers? There's 200 shots with a 4/9ths chance to kill from the LAV troops. And a thousand PWI shots with less than 2% chance to kill. That's approximately 108 kills inbound.
So for the high-value units, you've got the marines drawing three times as big a share of the danger, and the danger is more than three times as much (actually with the PWL fire it's more than 4 times as much). And as it turned out they suffered about 10 times as many losses. That fits together pretty well, doesn't it?
You know what that is? It's a monument the the utility of having high hit points and armor. Which the militia composition obviously recognizes. A heavy armor static HCAP costs 6 times as much as a light armor infantry HCAP would. (Infantry can use HCAP, right?). But those would die 12 times easier against the marine force composition (even more if the marines weren't lugging LAV). And would draw three times more fire because you'd have that much more tonnage for the same cost.
Heavy tank with CAP, HAV and heavy armour
Oh, and you can stop right there. I already said that if the tank doesn't have double CAP it loses. Heavy armor heavy vehicle with CAP + HAV is definitely outmatched by its cost in unarmored LAV infantry, regardless of any benefit of PWL meat-shields. That said, yes, trading some LAV for PWI bodies at the 1 for 5-and-1/3 exchange rate is advantageous.
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Ok... you seem to just blatantly picking out allot of my point out of context to be honest... I DID throw in the double anti-infantry CAP armour for example which you did not even comment on and focused on the heavy with HAV and CAP... that is a bit dishonest in my opinion. The reason I showed the first was because that is probably a common way to build them. The best anti-infantry tank probably is a medium tank with dual CAP and light armour (from a cost perspective).
You did touch on some of the points that IS important though which is the distribution of tonnage. This is also why using power armour on the light infantry is not something you want... you want cheap troops to shield the more valuable troops.
If you look at my real example, the test I did you see how this clearly worked in favour of the light troops, they could mow down the marine LAV troops and the marines mainly killed light infantry.
The other important point is when you look at a real army, you will not just have CAP and infantry weapons in it, the light infantry are THE BEST way to tank everything in that context because they are so cheap. They even tank CAP better than regular marines in power armour and roughly the same as anyone in heavy power armour.
1 light infantry PWL 0.06 cost
1 marine HPA 1.5 cost
1 marine HPA 2.0 cost
for 6 BP you get to tank regular personal weapons shots of...
light infantry 10 shots
Marine with PA 9.1 shots
marine with HPA 12 shots
So HPA will tank a bit better per shot but will be lousy at actually protecting other troops which is why the PWL troops is a better mathematically choice for tanking damage. The PWL troops have a weight of 30 tons, the PA marines 16 tons and the HPA marines only 12 tons.
THIS is why PWL troops is the better troops for defending and combining them with fortification IS more effective as I just shown in my example.
Please show me an example where marines are better for the cost of protecting other troops?!?
I'm willing to set up some test that meet your criteria of fairness!!
The heavy armour on the fortification was actually sub optimal in my test as using three times as many with light armour would have provided an even more devastating result even if more HCAP static would get destroyed.
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I have prepared a role-play oriented invasion army of some Star Wars themed imperial invaders racial tech is approximately around Ion age technology, weapons and armour is strength 10.
Invasion force
Total Formations: 4
Total Transport Size: 66,796 tons
Total Cost: 4,994 BP
2,500x Stormtrooper (PWI,PA)
500x Stormtrooper (blaster cannon) (LVA,PA)
500x Stormtrooper (multi-blaster) (CAP,PA)
100x Heavy Support Balster Cannons (Static, Medium Armour, MBL)
100x Heavy Support Tank (Heavy Vehicle, Heavy Armour, 2xMAC)
50x Logistics (trucks)
50x AT-AT walker (Super-heavy Vehicle,Super-heavy Armour, 2xMAV,1xHCAP)
50x AT-ST walker (Medium Vehicle, Light Armour, LAV, HCAP)
25x Forward Fire Direction operators
6x Stormtrooper Batallion HQ
2x Stormtrooper Regiment HQ
In orbit they also have...
Five Hammer class Assault Carriers
Hammer class Assault Carrier 31,246 tons 1,040 Crew 3,056.7 BP TCS 625 TH 1,250 EM 0
2000 km/s Armour 7-88 Shields 0-0 HTK 225 Sensors 11/11/0/0 DCR 32 PPV 245
Maint Life 2.77 Years MSP 2,093 AFR 651% IFR 9.0% 1YR 394 5YR 5,915 Max Repair 312.5 MSP
Hangar Deck Capacity 2,000 tons Magazine 325
Captain Control Rating 3 BRG AUX CIC
Intended Deployment Time: 18 months Flight Crew Berths 40 Morale Check Required
Girodyne Tier-58 Ion Turbine Stardrive (2) Power 1250 Fuel Use 52.41% Signature 625 Explosion 12%
Fuel Capacity 2,400,000 Litres Range 26.4 billion km (152 days at full power)
PB-R35 Heavy Planetary Bombardment Laser (5x4) Range 80,000km TS: 4,000 km/s Power 27-1 RM 10,000 km ROF 135
PB-R20 Medium Planetary Bombardment Laser (15x4) Range 40,000km TS: 4,000 km/s Power 12-1 RM 10,000 km ROF 60
PB-R10 Light Planetary Bombardment Laser (30x4) Range 10,000km TS: 4,000 km/s Power 3-1 RM 10,000 km ROF 15
Faust Industries PD Blaster System (5x8) Range 1000 km TS: 16,000 km/s ROF 5
Indigo Ground-support Fire-control System (3) Max Range: 80,000 km TS: 1,500 km/s 33 28 23 19 14 9 5 0 0 0
Stellarator Fusion Reactor R53-PB60 (1) Total Power Output 53.2 Exp 30%
Pax Hustana XN-03 Suite High Resolution Sensor (1) GPS 2240 Range 42.7m km Resolution 80
Pax Hustana XN-03 Suite Torpedo Detection Sensor (1) GPS 28 Range 9.9m km MCR 891.1k km Resolution 1
Pax Hustana XN-03 Suite EM Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 26.2m km
Pax Hustana XN-03 Suite Thermal Sensor (1) Sensitivity 11 Detect Sig Strength 1000: 26.2m km
ECM 20
Strike Group
16x TIE/b Bomber Speed: 6189 km/s Size: 2.42
Total of 80 TIE bomber for support..
TIE/b class Bomber 122 tons 6 Crew 44.5 BP TCS 2 TH 15 EM 0
6189 km/s Armour 2-2 Shields 0-0 HTK 2 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 0 PPV 0.6
Maint Life 0 Years MSP 0 AFR 24% IFR 0.3% 1YR 2 5YR 29 Max Repair 20 MSP
Magazine 12
Lieutenant Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 3 days Morale Check Required
Sienar Fleer Systems STD-P54 Twin Ion Drives (1) Power 15 Fuel Use 4676.54% Signature 15 Explosion 30%
Fuel Capacity 1,000 Litres Range 0 billion km (1 hours at full power)
Size 12 Fighter Pod Bay (1) Pod Size: 12 Hangar Reload 173 minutes MF Reload 28 hours
TIE/b bomber pod (1) Armour Penetration: 17 Damage: 20 Shots: 3
The combat will be done on a barren moon so there will be no terrain influencing the combat and no officers will be assigned on either side as well. The defensive side will enjoy full fortifications.
The defensive side will get a total of 1900-2000BP to build their garrison and will know the composition of the enemy forces. The combat will go on for three month and then I will get a good result of the outcome and what was the best defence to stall or even beat the invading force. All defence forces also need to have enough supplies to last combat for three month also included in the cost.
I will present two possible defence forces...we can run a few more if anyone want to try something else to see how they do.
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Two possible garrison forces to test the armoured versus less armoured type of defence from the Warhammer universe this time... ;)
Space Marine Garrison Force
Total Formations: 4
Total Transport Size: 41,386 tons
Total Cost: 1,949BP
2,400x Space Marine (Bolter) (PWI, PA)
240x Space Marine (Heavy Bolters) (HCAP, PA)
240x Space Marine (Bazooka) (LVA, PA)
120x Logistics (truck)
75x Heavily Fortified Lascannon bunkers (Static, Heavy Armour, MAV)
60x Automated AA installations (Static, Light Armour, LAA)
45x Heavily Fortified H.Lascannon bunkers (Static, Heavy Armour, HAV)
25x Fortified Artillery Emplacement (Static, Medium Armour, MBL)
10x Fortified MAA installations (Static, Medium Armour, MAA)
5x Batallion HQ-12k (fortified)
2x Regiment HQ-45k (fortified)
Militia Garrison Force
Total Formations: 4
Total Transport Size: 80,919 tons
Total Cost: 1,944 BP
11,400x Militia Infantry (PWL, LA)
345x Heavy Bolter Emplacement (Static, Light Armour, HCAP)
345x RPG Infantry
180x Lascannon Emplacement (Static, Light Armour, MAV)
180x Logistics (truck)
90x Heavy Lascannon Emplacement (Static, Light Armour, HAV)
60x Automated AA installations (Static, Light Armour, LAV)
35x Fortified Artillery Emplacements (Static, Medium Armour, MBL)
10x Fortified MAA installations (Static, Medium Armour, MAA)
5x Static HQ-23k
2x Static HQ-85k
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Ok... you seem to just blatantly picking out allot of my point out of context to be honest... I DID throw in the double anti-infantry CAP armour for example which you did not even comment on and focused on the heavy with HAV and CAP... that is a bit dishonest in my opinion. The reason I showed the first was because that is probably a common way to build them. The best anti-infantry tank probably is a medium tank with dual CAP and light armour (from a cost perspective).
I admit, I missed that line since you started the vehicle bit out with what looked like a complete strawman, knocking over a vehicle I'd already pointed out as non-viable.
What's your rationale for double-CAP medium vehicle without armor? It does give the best CAP/ton (aside from infantry) and per cost (aside from infantry and light static) but if you went down to light vehicles you'd get 1.75 times as many hulls. They'd have less HP each, making them easier to kill with LAV, but the numbers put the light vehicles a hair ahead on survivability per ton or cost. Plus, as you like to emphasize, they're much better at tolerating the casualties if the enemy has some MAV+ or MB+ weapons.
You did touch on some of the points that IS important though which is the distribution of tonnage. This is also why using power armour on the light infantry is not something you want... you want cheap troops to shield the more valuable troops.
A shield of unarmored troops is a big soft shield - it gives a lot of coverage but is whittled away fast. A shield of armored troops is a small hard shield - it gives less coverage, but it endures.
Provided, that is, that the threat profile is such that the armor is useful. PA shielding troops are inexcusable if the enemy's significant firepower is dominated by high-AP weapons rather than PW/L and CAP.
If you look at my real example, the test I did you see how this clearly worked in favour of the light troops, they could mow down the marine LAV troops and the marines mainly killed light infantry.
I think I pretty solidly demonstrated that the flaws of marine grunts as meat-shields had almost nothing to do with that outcome. It was caused by the LAV troops being bulky soft targets while the static fortifications were dense hard targets...and the HCAP bunker being much better at killing the LAV troops than the other way around.
The other important point is when you look at a real army, you will not just have CAP and infantry weapons in it, the light infantry are THE BEST way to tank everything in that context because they are so cheap.
They even tank CAP better than regular marines in power armour and roughly the same as anyone in heavy power armour.
They absolutely do not do that. That's ridiculous. See below...
1 light infantry PWL 0.06 cost
1 marine HPA 1.5 cost
1 marine HPA 2.0 cost
for 6 BP you get to tank regular personal weapons shots of...
light infantry 10 shots
Marine with PA 9.1 shots
marine with HPA 12 shots
So HPA will tank a bit better per shot but will be lousy at actually protecting other troops which is why the PWL troops is a better mathematically choice for tanking damage. The PWL troops have a weight of 30 tons, the PA marines 16 tons and the HPA marines only 12 tons.
THIS is why PWL troops is the better troops for defending and combining them with fortification IS more effective as I just shown in my example.
Please show me an example where marines are better for the cost of protecting other troops?!?
I'm willing to set up some test that meet your criteria of fairness!!
You're doing the thing again where you declare you're rating by meatshield performance only and then force the armored troops to carry heavier weapons. Stop doing that. If we're talking about infantry meat shield performance only, it is absolutely correct that PWL wins. There is no rule that you can't combine PA or HPA with PWL. If you're going to actually look at the merits of armored infantry for damage soaking you have to stop pretending there is such a rule.
If you do the exact same calculation you just did, but recognize that PA costs 0.9 and HPA costs 1.2, you'll see the start of the example you asked for, because they are in fact much better at tanking CAP/PW shots. Now, for them to be better for the cost at protecting other units is harder, since you do indeed get a smaller shield. You need a situation where the meat shield is dying faster than the units they're trying to protect, and with the meat shield being 3 tons per figure and 'high value' being at least 12 and often a lot more, that's demanding. Of course, your experiment from the militia side shows that situation looks like - highly protected, relatively compact high-value units opposed by a force with a lot of firepower that isn't good at killing the high value units. Consider how fast the militia would have gone down if instead of 1000 grunts the marines had 500 CAP. (I'm not saying 500 CAP/200 LAV is a good force composition. I'm saying that what it would do to the militia would be helpful to demonstrate the downside of unarmored infantry.)
The heavy armour on the fortification was actually sub optimal in my test as using three times as many with light armour would have provided an even more devastating result even if more HCAP static would get destroyed.
It might have been a more devastating result, but it would have looked a lot worse in terms of the protective value of the militia meatshields. Which is what you've claimed the experiment was about.
EDIT: CORRECTION, I mixed up LAV stats here.
Light armored HCAP static would have three times the units, but losing the armor would mean they have roughly three times the incoming danger. (Because the 1000 PWI go from under 2% to 1/9th chance to kill and LAV becomes a guaranteed kill.) And being three times as many units would nearly double the fraction of hits that landed on them. So they'd proportionately take 6 times as many unit losses, or twice the element fraction loss. That might tail off as the heavier firepower knocked down the marines' ability to do damage, though.
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Ok... you seem to just blatantly picking out allot of my point out of context to be honest... I DID throw in the double anti-infantry CAP armour for example which you did not even comment on and focused on the heavy with HAV and CAP... that is a bit dishonest in my opinion. The reason I showed the first was because that is probably a common way to build them. The best anti-infantry tank probably is a medium tank with dual CAP and light armour (from a cost perspective).
I admit, I missed that line since you started the vehicle bit out with what looked like a complete strawman, knocking over a vehicle I'd already pointed out as non-viable.
What's your rationale for double-CAP medium vehicle without armor? It does give the best CAP/ton (aside from infantry) and per cost (aside from infantry and light static) but if you went down to light vehicles you'd get 1.75 times as many hulls. They'd have less HP each, making them easier to kill with LAV, but the numbers put the light vehicles a hair ahead on survivability per ton or cost. Plus, as you like to emphasize, they're much better at tolerating the casualties if the enemy has some MAV+ or MB+ weapons.
You did touch on some of the points that IS important though which is the distribution of tonnage. This is also why using power armour on the light infantry is not something you want... you want cheap troops to shield the more valuable troops.
A shield of unarmored troops is a big soft shield - it gives a lot of coverage but is whittled away fast. A shield of armored troops is a small hard shield - it gives less coverage, but it endures.
Provided, that is, that the threat profile is such that the armor is useful. PA shielding troops are inexcusable if the enemy's significant firepower is dominated by high-AP weapons rather than PW/L and CAP.
If you look at my real example, the test I did you see how this clearly worked in favour of the light troops, they could mow down the marine LAV troops and the marines mainly killed light infantry.
I think I pretty solidly demonstrated that the flaws of marine grunts as meat-shields had almost nothing to do with that outcome. It was caused by the LAV troops being bulky soft targets while the static fortifications were dense hard targets...and the HCAP bunker being much better at killing the LAV troops than the other way around.
The other important point is when you look at a real army, you will not just have CAP and infantry weapons in it, the light infantry are THE BEST way to tank everything in that context because they are so cheap.
They even tank CAP better than regular marines in power armour and roughly the same as anyone in heavy power armour.
They absolutely do not do that. That's ridiculous. See below...
1 light infantry PWL 0.06 cost
1 marine HPA 1.5 cost
1 marine HPA 2.0 cost
for 6 BP you get to tank regular personal weapons shots of...
light infantry 10 shots
Marine with PA 9.1 shots
marine with HPA 12 shots
So HPA will tank a bit better per shot but will be lousy at actually protecting other troops which is why the PWL troops is a better mathematically choice for tanking damage. The PWL troops have a weight of 30 tons, the PA marines 16 tons and the HPA marines only 12 tons.
THIS is why PWL troops is the better troops for defending and combining them with fortification IS more effective as I just shown in my example.
Please show me an example where marines are better for the cost of protecting other troops?!?
I'm willing to set up some test that meet your criteria of fairness!!
You're doing the thing again where you declare you're rating by meatshield performance only and then force the armored troops to carry heavier weapons. Stop doing that. If we're talking about infantry meat shield performance only, it is absolutely correct that PWL wins. There is no rule that you can't combine PA or HPA with PWL. If you're going to actually look at the merits of armored infantry for damage soaking you have to stop pretending there is such a rule.
If you do the exact same calculation you just did, but recognize that PA costs 0.9 and HPA costs 1.2, you'll see the start of the example you asked for, because they are in fact much better at tanking CAP/PW shots. Now, for them to be better for the cost at protecting other units is harder, since you do indeed get a smaller shield. You need a situation where the meat shield is dying faster than the units they're trying to protect, and with the meat shield being 3 tons per figure and 'high value' being at least 12 and often a lot more, that's demanding. Of course, your experiment from the militia side shows that situation looks like - highly protected, relatively compact high-value units opposed by a force with a lot of firepower that isn't good at killing the high value units. Consider how fast the militia would have gone down if instead of 1000 grunts the marines had 500 CAP. (I'm not saying 500 CAP/200 LAV is a good force composition. I'm saying that what it would do to the militia would be helpful to demonstrate the downside of unarmored infantry.)
The heavy armour on the fortification was actually sub optimal in my test as using three times as many with light armour would have provided an even more devastating result even if more HCAP static would get destroyed.
It might have been a more devastating result, but it would have looked a lot worse in terms of the protective value of the militia meatshields. Which is what you've claimed the experiment was about.
EDIT: CORRECTION, I mixed up LAV stats here.
Light armored HCAP static would have three times the units, but losing the armor would mean they have roughly three times the incoming danger. (Because the 1000 PWI go from under 2% to 1/9th chance to kill and LAV becomes a guaranteed kill.) And being three times as many units would nearly double the fraction of hits that landed on them. So they'd proportionately take 6 times as many unit losses, or twice the element fraction loss. That might tail off as the heavier firepower knocked down the marines' ability to do damage, though.
I just make a brief response here...
lightly armed infantry make a far better meat-shield because they have allot of bodies AND are bulky at the same time... it is a combination effect, that is why they protect better and also why using power armour on them will not make them better rather worse at it.
Example...
10 PWL in light armour can tank 10 regular shots and weighs 30 tons
5 PWL can tank 20 regular shots and weight 15 tons
the problem is two fold... the first one is that the latter will allow allot more damage to go against your high valued targets from day one and the second is that they still die to heavier weapons as easy as the first one and if one of the latter die to such a weapon they loose allot more resilience in the process.
You want to get your heavy weapons to shoot as much at he enemy expensive units as possible... when the expensive units have been reduced to none threatening levels then the infantry will die quickly enough and will never be able to stand up to your heavy units anyway.
Please run a test and build an assaulting army that use a mix of weapons that are reasonable then build a defensive garrison around heavy power armour PWL and one with Light Armour. The one with light armour will be more efficient at allowing your other troops to concentrate on the high value targets which in turn reduce the incoming damage more than the resilience of the heavy power armour armour infantry can tank.
You have to understand that "removing" enemy units also make your units more resilient in the process.
I will add a third test garrison to the above test and replace the light armour PWL with heavy power armour PWL instead and show what I mean.
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I just make a brief response here...
lightly armed infantry make a far better meat-shield because they have allot of bodies AND are bulky at the same time... it is a combination effect, that is why they protect better and also why using power armour on them will not make them better rather worse at it.
Example...
10 PWL in light armour can tank 10 regular shots and weighs 30 tons
5 PWL can tank 20 regular shots and weight 15 tons
the problem is two fold... the first one is that the latter will allow allot more damage to go against your high valued targets from day one and the second is that they still die to heavier weapons as easy as the first one and if one of the latter die to such a weapon they loose allot more resilience in the process.
I literally stated this in the post.
You want to get your heavy weapons to shoot as much at he enemy expensive units as possible... when the expensive units have been reduced to none threatening levels then the infantry will die quickly enough and will never be able to stand up to your heavy units anyway.
Please run a test and build an assaulting army that use a mix of weapons that are reasonable then build a defensive garrison around heavy power armour PWL and one with Light Armour. The one with light armour will be more efficient at allowing your other troops to concentrate on the high value targets which in turn reduce the incoming damage more than the resilience of the heavy power armour armour infantry can tank.
You say you want to get your high value units to concentrate on the enemy high value units.
There is literally only one thing you can do that will help your high-value units concentrate on the enemy high-value units, and that's killing the other enemy units. That is, the exact thing that you are trying to say doesn't matter. Nothing else will increase the fraction of 'high value' shots finding 'high value' targets.
(For further confusion, killing the enemy chaff is something light PWL troops are in fact better at than armored ones. They're still garbage at it because PWL are terrible weapons, but it's a point in their favor.)
The model of chaff that doesn't kill much of anything plus high value units that kill each other and then casually win is also obviously very incomplete. Look back at that marines and militia experiment again! The marine grunts are supposed to be (bad) chaff, but they're actually something else - they're (bad) medium-value units that score the most kills of any element in the experiment. The marine heavies are 'high value' units that are just as vulnerable as the marine grunts but specialized in taking out hard targets, while the fortifications are 'high value' units that are extremely hard to kill and specialized in crowd control.
Consider what happens to the experiment if you give the militia the marines' guns. You're down to only 1500 of them - but that's 1500 shots that are 70% as effective as the 360 HCAP shots. More than triples the militia force's firepower. They'd lose infantry nearly twice as fast and the fortifications would become more exposed as the infantry died, but they'd lose enemies of both types three times as fast.
Set that alongside what happens if you swap the marine PWI for CAP - Again half as many figures to lose...and again around triple the outgoing damage. There would be a lot less militia to block for the fortifications by the time they died, though certainly pitted against the overwhelming power of the fortifications they and the heavies would die.
I'm not saying chaff isn't a valid role. I think there's no better counter to a superheavy firing a SHAV shot than a light PWL infantry unit absorbing that shot. But if chaff is useful, that makes removing chaff useful, so that next time that SHAV has a better chance to hit something worthwhile. And heavily protected units with low fire rates are vulnerable to softer units with more numerous anti-heavy weapons...which may in turn be vulnerable to anti-chaff weapons or intermediate weapons like autocannon or bombardment depending on how light the light units are.
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Ok... some test data.. I have one more fight to do with the power armoured PWL troops...
Test 1
Space Marines vs The Empire
I stopped recording this after one week as the result was given and in week 2 The Empire started to do several "break through" attacks as well.
After 1 week of fighting
Starting Strength / Current Strength (Morale)
Space Marine
SM (bolters) 2400 / 1368 (87)
SM (h.bolters) 240 / 32 (67)
SM (bazooka) 240 / 56 (75)
LAA guns 60 / 17 (76)
MAV forts 75 / 26 (79)
HAV forts 45 / 12 (74)
Artillery 25 / 5 (70)
MAA 10 / 7 (92)
Total Army Moral : 86
The Empire
ST (blasters) 2500 / 1789 (85)
ST (m.blasters) 500 / 281 (76)
ST (Blast.Can) 500 / 211 (66)
Sup. Tank 100 / 83 (91)
AT-ST 50 / 38 (87)
AT-AT 50 / 48 (98)
Artillery 100 / 78 (90)
FFD 25 / 21 (92)
Total Army Moral: 91
The result was a given after this as the Space Marine had practically no heavy equipment left after a few more days and about 20% of the Marine grunts.
Test 2
Imperial Guard
Starting Strengt / Week1(moral) / Week2(etc...
Guardsmen 11400 / 10108(97) / 9632(96) / 9010(95)
RPG guard 345 / 181(86) / 130(79) / 89(72)
H.Bolter Empl. 345 / 215(89) /158(83) / 95(73)
Lasc. Empl. 180 / 85(84) / 62(78) / 33(67)
H.Lasc. Empl. 90 / 39(83) / 27(75) 13(64)
LAA Empl. 60 / 36(89) / 32(86) / 27(83)
Artillery 35 / 26(93) / 20(88) / 15(78)
MAA 10 / 10(100) / 9(98) / 9(98)
Total Army Morale 94 / 93 / 91
The Empire
ST (blasters) 2500 / 1853(86) / 1541(79) / 1217(70)
ST (m.blasters) 500 / 212(67) / 193(63) / 116(49)
ST (Blast.Can) 500 / 286(76) / 138(56) / 83(44)
Sup. Tank 100 / 66(82) / 55(73) / 49(71)
AT-ST 50 / 39(70) / 28(75) / 20(64)
AT-AT 50 / 49(99) / 48(98) / 46(96)
Artillery 100 / 68(91) / 36(78) / 33(77)
FFD 25 / 24(98) / 23(95 / 22(94)
Army Moral : 91 / 81 / 78
With these configuration the Imperial Guard garrison managed to stop the assault in its track while the Space Marines got overrun... the main reason for this is the distribution of forces as the Guards managed to keep their heavy guns for being attacked better than the marines despite the marines using heavy armour on their gun to protect them and making them overall smaller for their ability to survive.
I will do another test tomorrow with heavy powered PWL troops as well and see if they do as well... I doubt it as the militia did not really loose that many troops to begin with in this fight and their importance in this battle was covering the other parts of the army not surviving, they do that with numbers alone enough as it is.
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46 out of 50 AT-ATs fully operational when you've lost a large majority of your anti-vehicle assets is 'stopped in its tracks'?
Though I assume that the oddity of the marines annihilating the AT-AT force is down to extremely capricious luck, Or possibly a reporting error considering you've got that last AT-AT as remarkably unshaken by the catastrophe that befell their element? If you listed kills rather than survivors there, then certainly the troops you wanted to do better did do better...
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46 out of 50 AT-ATs fully operational when you've lost a large majority of your anti-vehicle assets is 'stopped in its tracks'?
Though I assume that the oddity of the marines annihilating the AT-AT force is down to extremely capricious luck, Or possibly a reporting error considering you've got that last AT-AT as remarkably unshaken by the catastrophe that befell their element? If you listed kills rather than survivors there, then certainly the troops you wanted to do better did do better...
Ehh... no... the Marines killed 2 AT-AT... that was a mistake from my side... I have updated it... You could see this as the Moral numbers was correct at 98. If an AT-AT is killed or not have more to do with if they are engaged or not. The way the units is set up there is a big randomness to if they draw fire or not. I would see this in the AT-ST losses as they usually come in big chunks as they are in the same formation as the AT-AT walkers.
The Guards still killed about 1 AT-AT per week... the less other stuff the more they concentrate on the AT-AT and the more of them dies. Although the heavy equipment will deplete faster than the AT-AT.
The Space Marines in this test was really terrible even though the forces were roughly equal in distribution in types of units.
I could take the Guards garrison and just replace the Guardsmen with Space Marine and they would still loose, just not as badly because they have more fire-power at the start which reduce incoming fire-power down the line as well. I'm torn about using regular infantry or militia (light infantry) though. Because regular infantry take up the same space and do more decent damage to the enemy infantry at the same time. Instead of 11400 militia I would get 6840 regular infantry that cover the same amount of troops from day one, but they leave a bigger hole as they die. Question is of their higher fire-power can make up for it.
I will run that test as well and see how it goes.
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Regular Infantry did better than the PWL troops because they eliminated the enemy Storm Trooper much faster and managed to retain most of their heavy equipment far longer.
They still don't have enough heavy equipment to defeat the AT-AT and support tanks effectively though so still rely on being rescued by a relief force at some point... but they will survive for a looong time. They were down to about 50 infantry dying per day after a about four or five week with most of the heavy stuff depleted. At that point there still were about 4000 infantry left. So they could hold the moon for another 80 days or so.
The PWL troops would have survived even longer though so would give you a longer time for a relief force to arrive.
They just have to hope a friendly fleet show up and take care of the problem.
My take is that regular infantry in this scenario would be the best if you wanted to defeat the invaders as they will make sure that your heavy weapons can deal the most damage. But light infantry will make you survive longer if that is important and are decently good at protecting heavy equipment as well, depend on the enemy force composition and how much light forces they have.
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I did a new test with the latest Guardsmen and tried a new tactic... I did switch the lascannon and heavy lascannon emplacement around so they did have more heavy than medium anti-vehicle guns. But that was not what made this test so different, just made it more interesting.
I decided to hold all the medium and heavy guns in rear echelon for roughly 10 days and then I put all of them forward (including the medium AA guns). This had a huge positive impact on this battle. The infantry and anti-infantry managed to defeat most of the enemy infantry and this reduced that later incoming damage against the heavy guns... not long thereafter the heavy guns had depleted the heavy support tanks to less than 10 and the AT-AT walkers were down to about 30... now it was the orbital bombardment and fighters that did most of the damage.
There certainly is a real point in trying to understand the composition of the enemy and even withholding some assets until you know if they are going to be effective or not. Obviously the enemy can do the same if possible, it might be more difficult for an attacker as they still usually want as much killing power on the front lines as possible.
In my opinion the balance between quality and numbers or static versus mobility are pretty good as is the difference between heavy and light armour. As long as space is not an issue then you will find that lightly armoured stuff is more cost effective, but as you want to pick them up and go and attack something then suddenly the size become a real issue you have to deal with.
The invading army above was about 70.000t with logistics for many weeks of fighting the defending Guards army was closer to 90.000t and it was full entrenched on this moon. This army would do very little use for attacking something and would be very inefficient at that.
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I'm replying allot on myself here... but after some thought the main balance issue that I see is that light troops perhaps is too effective in comparison with more quality. I also have an issue with how a larger or more powerful force can VERY quickly overpower a smaller less powerful force. I would like to see some way to mitigate these things. I do not want to make high quality better than low quality just reduce the gap somewhat and I also want to increase the damage done to a superior force in general.
The absolutely easiest way to do this is to give both armies a modification in the to-hit based on the armies total size. You then can include things like officer ability off command and the hierarchy structures with that.
Let's say that 10.000t would be a modifier of 1 and anything above would give a rising penalty using the square root of the force in comparison. So perhaps the base chance to hit are 50% rather than 20% so combat between small forces will be very fast a brutal while combat between armies of milions of tons less brutal but as the armies dwindle in size they will become more brutal as time pass.
So... a force of 10.000t would hit another unit at 50% base rate and not 20% so would be 60% more lethal. A formation of 100.000t would only hit on a base rate of 15.8% while an army of 1.000.000t have a base hi rate of 5%. A small elite unit at 1000t attacking a moon would have base hit rate of 150% so pretty darn good at hitting a fortified unit.
This would also to some degree mitigate the huge advantage of using low grade troops over high quality troops. Low grade troops will still be better for many defensive things and slightly more effective but the difference will become much less obvious.
The bonus and penalties could then also be effected by other things such as infrastructure of planets or the size of planets. Really small moons might be very difficult to wield huge armies. Infrastructure will also tend to make large armies harder to manoeuvre as you will likely fight within the cities and that will be more difficult for a large army. You then can have commander traits to mitigate these penalties such as engineer and construction engineers could also help armies and lower their to hit penalties on largely populated worlds. The rate at which a world is populated to its max capacity should impact the way you can manoeuvre large armies on them.
Another positive change with such an effect would be orbital bombardment would get more end more effective as armies scale up, currently orbital bombardment can quickly become very inefficient as armies scale in size which is odd. The more troops on the ground the more effective both orbital bombardment and fighters should be. Anti-Air should also be subject to these penalties.
Supplies might also need to be adjusted with the same penalties, so troops that draw supplies should have a similar chance to not use supplies or simply the supply cost is reduced with the same penalty would be easier or perhaps half the penalty is more suitable. The penalty rather symbolise inactivity or problem with coordination so they should require more supplies but not that much more supplies.
At least that is my thought at the moment...
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Any notion why the emplacements suffered lower losses in the second week than in the third? That one puzzles me.
Also wanted to check, were the defenders really maximally fortified, or only maximally self-fortified?
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These tests are far from conclusive as they still are pretty small sample... the reason you would see relatively large differences running the same tests several times is pure random. As I only had three frontline formations then one formation might get allot more attention one week than some else. This can lead to that it targets one formation that already are depleted of emplacements one week, In the next week it targets another formations more that has more emplacements and less infantry.
All units on the defenders side used maximum fortifications, but the fight was on a barren moon so no other modifiers.
If I had used smaller formations, say companies, I would probably have gotten a better distribution on the hits.
I have run every test a few times and the end results are pretty much the same every time with some variation in losses on both sides.
I also tried a variation of putting all infantry in one formation and then all the support in the other two... while you think it should have the same effect it made randomness more prevalent. If you were lucky then the infantry got most of the hit in the first few days while the support ripped into the enemy vehicles... but of course you could also get a reverse result and have your emplacements totally decimated. The first few days was really crucial in such a setup. In order to reduce chance to play a big role you should always include padding to glass cannon units, such as static with no armour and heavy weapons for example.
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This has turned into a rather interesting discussion, for me at least. Let me see if I can summarize a few of the key points:
1. Static units can't attack (obviously) and since evasion is only checked against units set to attack field positions, evasion has no effect on static units with regard to incoming fire. However, static units can fortify up to level 6, which is among, if not the, highest level of fortification available. So despite suffering from having effectively 0 evasion, they get high fortification and if used defensively are at least equivalent to say, a light vehicle which is attacking it.
2. Formations with large numbers of small/light/cheap units mixed with a few heavy/high damage/expensive units allow for the heavy units to survive much longer in combat, either offensively or defensively, than if all of the heavy units were placed together in similarly sized formation. This is due to the statistics involved in target selection. For example, if a formation of 90 PWL and 10 CAP attacks a formation of, say 100 PW, it is most likely that the attacker will lose many more PWL than CAP units. Instead, if a formation of 50 PWL and 50 CAP attacks a formation 100 PW, it is much more likely that the attacker will suffer many more CAP casualties than in the first example. Additionally, the first example attackers' CAPs will fire 10x6 = 60 times, and hit about 6 targets, and kill about 6 targets per combat round. The second example attacker's CAPs will fire 50x6 = 300 times, and hit and kill about 30 targets per combat round. So there is a balancing point somewhere between those two examples where reduction in combat duration will result in improved survivability for all attacking troops involve as the defender will have fewer chances to fire at the attacker at all. I don't claim to know this balancing point and I expect that it is highly situational and must be balanced against the cost of the attacking troops, which will be limited by the amount of resources the applicable empire can provide.
3. Considering the following two observations, mixing a few static units in with something like an infantry formation MIGHT be a sensible approach, particularly if the infantry are on the defensive side and the static units provide a capability that infantry otherwise lack. This gives the infantry a good amount of heavy firepower which would otherwise be unavailable (e.g. MAV/HAV/SHAV field guns) at a reduced cost compared to an equivalent vehicle with the same capability.
I'm going to mess around with some ground unit formations and test some different scenarios. I'll post results when able.
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1. Static units can't attack (obviously) and since evasion is only checked against units set to attack field positions, evasion has no effect on static units with regard to incoming fire. However, static units can fortify up to level 6, which is among, if not the, highest level of fortification available. So despite suffering from having effectively 0 evasion, they get high fortification and if used defensively are at least equivalent to say, a light vehicle which is attacking it.
To the best of my knowledge static units can attack. They're not good at it - they can't contribute to breakthrough value and don't have a favorable chance to hit modifier. But I'm fairly sure it's legal to put formations with static elements in the Front Line Attack position.
Static units have the same fortification limits as infantry, 3 self/6 maximum. That is the best possible. Vehicles below superheavy have 2 self/3 maximum. So fully fortified a static unit is twice as hard to hit as a regular-size vehicle. They also have the same HP as a light vehicle and can have more armor than a light vehicle, though less than a medium or heavy vehicle...or can have less armor than a light vehicle, making them less expensive. And they can mount heavier weapons than a light vehicle if desired, though for reasons I'm not clear on they don't get autocannons.
2. Formations with large numbers of small/light/cheap units mixed with a few heavy/high damage/expensive units allow for the heavy units to survive much longer in combat, either offensively or defensively, than if all of the heavy units were placed together in similarly sized formation. This is due to the statistics involved in target selection. For example, if a formation of 90 PWL and 10 CAP attacks a formation of, say 100 PW, it is most likely that the attacker will lose many more PWL than CAP units. Instead, if a formation of 50 PWL and 50 CAP attacks a formation 100 PW, it is much more likely that the attacker will suffer many more CAP casualties than in the first example. Additionally, the first example attackers' CAPs will fire 10x6 = 60 times, and hit about 6 targets, and kill about 6 targets per combat round. The second example attacker's CAPs will fire 50x6 = 300 times, and hit and kill about 30 targets per combat round. So there is a balancing point somewhere between those two examples where reduction in combat duration will result in improved survivability for all attacking troops involve as the defender will have fewer chances to fire at the attacker at all. I don't claim to know this balancing point and I expect that it is highly situational and must be balanced against the cost of the attacking troops, which will be limited by the amount of resources the applicable empire can provide.
You had a big twist from the first two sentences to the rest, and are saying completely different things. The first sentence is largely wrong. Over sufficiently large numbers it should not matter whether your units are evenly distributed among all your formations, or split into one formation for each unit type. (Excluding things like HQ, logistics, and AA that have direct dependencies on where they are in the hierarchy.) However, using mixed-composition formations is likely to make the results more smoothly distributed, while homogeneous formations would cause your losses for each unit type to come in large random spikes.
After the second sentence you're basically on target.
3. Considering the following two observations, mixing a few static units in with something like an infantry formation MIGHT be a sensible approach, particularly if the infantry are on the defensive side and the static units provide a capability that infantry otherwise lack. This gives the infantry a good amount of heavy firepower which would otherwise be unavailable (e.g. MAV/HAV/SHAV field guns) at a reduced cost compared to an equivalent vehicle with the same capability.
I'm going to mess around with some ground unit formations and test some different scenarios. I'll post results when able.
I'd say that if you're not worried about portability and will be fortified, static heavy weapon positions will tend to be better than vehicles. (The anti-vehicle static units in Jorgen_CAB's last experiment didn't do great, but I think they were heavily overmatched and short on top-end weapons suitable for hitting the bigger attack vehicles.)
In some cases putting strong infantry weapons like CAP or LAV on a static platform might be preferable to putting them on an infantry platform. While the added tonnage is significant, you get a lot of extra HP and can have more armor if desired. On the other hand, such units can't use infantry-only capabilities, can't be used in boarding combat, and are bad at attacking, so I would handle that option cautiously.
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Ok, first test will establish a control scenario with easy to understand formations and statistics.
Game settings: New game, conventional start, 2 identical player races on Earth (Red Team and Blue Team), no NPRs, no starting units, nothing researched. Red and Blue are each given 10x Sentry Companies as shown below and all formations are set to front line attack with active sensors on and both Red and Blue set each other to hostile. No formations have HQ's and no commanders are assigned.
Sentry Brigade
Transport Size: 3,000 tons
Build Cost: 60 BP
1000x Sentry
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Sentry
Transport Size (tons) 3 Cost 0.06 Armour 1 Hit Points 1
Annual Maintenance Cost 0.0075 Resupply Cost 0.25
Light Personal Weapons: Shots 1 Penetration 2 Damage 2
Vendarite 0.06
Development Cost 3
No supply units are present on either side (intentionally) and both run out of supplies after 80 hours (10x combat rounds). After 1 month of continuous fighting, each side has been reduced to 3200 - 3600 units remaining. Initially, each side was inflicting about 130 - 160 casualties per combat round and after 1 month each side is inflicting only 15 - 30 casualties per round.
After 2 months, Blue Team has approximately 1000 units remaining and inflicts about 10 casualties per round. Red Team has about 2400 units remaining and inflicts about 25 casualties per round. I believe the reason for this discrepancy in combat statistics between Red and Blue is due to differences in unit morale. RNGsus was kind to Red Team early on and Red Team sustained slightly fewer casualties than Blue Team during the first month of combat, and sustained higher morale (and therefore combat effectiveness) as a result. This effect snowballed in the second month of combat and Blue Team probably won't survive a third month. I consider it equivalently likely that Blue Team would have succeeded if the RNG had been skewed slightly in their favor instead.
After 2 more weeks of combat, Red Team formations began making breakthrough attacks and by the 3rd week Blue Team had been defeated. Red Team had about 2300 surviving units. As previously stated the victor could just as easily have been Blue Team instead of Red Team if the RNG had panned out differently, but my objective here was to determine how long it would take 2 opposing PWL armies to defeat one another when both are on front line attack like mindless savages. The answer is about 2 - 3 months, with the victor sustaining about 75% casualties.
Next test will be a control test to determine the effectiveness of the front line defense field position relative to the test in this post.
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2. Formations with large numbers of small/light/cheap units mixed with a few heavy/high damage/expensive units allow for the heavy units to survive much longer in combat, either offensively or defensively, than if all of the heavy units were placed together in similarly sized formation. This is due to the statistics involved in target selection. For example, if a formation of 90 PWL and 10 CAP attacks a formation of, say 100 PW, it is most likely that the attacker will lose many more PWL than CAP units. Instead, if a formation of 50 PWL and 50 CAP attacks a formation 100 PW, it is much more likely that the attacker will suffer many more CAP casualties than in the first example. Additionally, the first example attackers' CAPs will fire 10x6 = 60 times, and hit about 6 targets, and kill about 6 targets per combat round. The second example attacker's CAPs will fire 50x6 = 300 times, and hit and kill about 30 targets per combat round. So there is a balancing point somewhere between those two examples where reduction in combat duration will result in improved survivability for all attacking troops involve as the defender will have fewer chances to fire at the attacker at all. I don't claim to know this balancing point and I expect that it is highly situational and must be balanced against the cost of the attacking troops, which will be limited by the amount of resources the applicable empire can provide.
You had a big twist from the first two sentences to the rest, and are saying completely different things. The first sentence is largely wrong. Over sufficiently large numbers it should not matter whether your units are evenly distributed among all your formations, or split into one formation for each unit type. (Excluding things like HQ, logistics, and AA that have direct dependencies on where they are in the hierarchy.) However, using mixed-composition formations is likely to make the results more smoothly distributed, while homogeneous formations would cause your losses for each unit type to come in large random spikes.
After the second sentence you're basically on target.
I think I am in general agreement with you. I realized after posting that small formations each with only a couple of unit types would be essentially the same as a single large formation with all of the same units piled into it (artillery and supply notwithstanding, as they generally would be set to a different field position than front line units). With smaller formations you might reap a benefit from having embedded HQ units with command bonuses but I am not attempting to test that here.
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For the second control test, I started a new game with the same Red and Blue sentry formations as before, except this time I set Red to front line attack and Blue to front line defense and allowed the game to run for 1 month before initiating hostilities. After initiating hostilities, the result was that after 1 month, Red Team was completely routed (zero units remaining) and Blue Team had about 7900 units remaining. So the effects of fortification are extremely significant and should not be neglected.
Additionally, Blue Team was consistently inflicting about 130 - 160 casualties on Red Team each combat round, while Red Team at most inflicted about 80 casualties on Blue, dropping off dramatically after the first 2 weeks of fighting.
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Yes... I think you got the general gist of how it works.
As you said... there is a balance of defending and bringing more lethal power to bear against the enemy. Killing the enemy can actually be more effective than tanking their hits with good armour for example. In my tests above fir example using infantry with regular weapons was far more effective then using troops with PWL weapons as they managed to kill the enemy faster then my heavy weapons could inflict damage in the enemy heavy units, this managed to save the heavy weapons more effectively as I had both a great meat shield and decent killing power against the enemy infantry.
The main difference between PWL and PW infantry is that PWL will make you last longer but you might not be able to defeat the enemy, especially if they bring lots of heavy vehicles. But at the same time heavy vehicles will be highly inefficient at killing the militia. In these instances your role have to be to act as a delaying action rather than directly beating the enemy. The heavy weapon emplacement is there to slow down the attrition not really to stop it. It is now up to you to muster a counter attack with sending a relief army and the job of the garrison to hold out for as long as possible. If you hold out long enough the enemy might run out of supplies too.
Infantry with PW or PWL weapons will have the same weight for the same cost but regular infantry will take less effort to remove by a superior force. This is the raw strength of lightly armed infantry. As soon as you start to put armour on them they will cost allot more and you will need to pay more to cover the same weight, but this should be less of a concern in an invasion army as you are now relegated to a certain size so making the infantry as resilient as possible for the weight they occupy become efficient to do. You can imagine the scenario that one of your colonies are invaded and you have a sizeable garrison there but not enough to defeat the enemy but you might be able to hold them off for three to four weeks. If you have 500.000t of troop transports available within that distance you want to bring as much firepower and resilience as you can, there is no time to build a new ship or bring those on the other side of the empire along as time will not allow it.
How much infantry versus other weapons is I think up for debate... but I usually go with a few doctrines in my own game.
For pure defence such as populated colonies I want roughly my front-line to be 2/3 infantry and 1/3 other formations from a size perspective. This will usually give you a rather high durability and a decent amount of heavy weapons to at least slow down an aggressor. From my recent tests that is infantry with PW in LA.
For pure delaying garrisons I would use more like 3/4 infantry to heavy equipment, these would be important mining operations or military outposts and be mainly PWL with LA. Heavy weapons would mainly be static with CAP and LAV weapons and nothing else.
For any large and important population I would build a more complex army with the ability to actually counterstroke anyone who try to invade with the purpose to be able to defeat an invasion and last very long. The army should probably be 3/4 defensive but if there is momentum I want some medium and heavy vehicles to attack with. These armies probably could be like somewhere between 50-60% infantry. These armies can also be used as reactionary forces to be moved into hot spots as they should be highly capable for their cost.
Any attacking army probably need much less infantry but I would probably not go lower than 30%, I'm likely to land somewhere between 30-50% for an offensive army with my infantry being pretty well armed and armoured as I will be dropping them into enemy planets. The downside with these armies are their cost... they will be extremely expensive for how effective they really are so I would never build my entire civilisations army on them but rather they would be more like special ops armies build for specific purposes.
For boarding purposes there is almost no reason not to bring the most expensive infantry you can build as the combat space is allot more restricted, as are the weapons that you can bring.
In terms of static versus vehicle then the ability to fortify a static unit to level 6 is allot more effective than the 0.6 evasion of a light vehicle. 0.6 evasion is equivalent of fortification of 2.5. A light vehicle actually can only self fortify to 2 so are more efficient on the attack if they can't fortify more than that. The fortification level also assume that you fight more or less on a barren or similar planet. You can get allot better fortification levels on some other planets.
A simple CAP emplacement (Static, Light armour, CAP) weighs and cost twice that of a similar infantry but have 30HP instead of 10HP. You have to view these as more or less infantry that is simply harder for other infantry to kill. There are usually not enough LAV or other heavy weapons in enough numbers to make up for the difference and if there are then infantry weapons might not be of much use anyway. LAV weapons will also be an expensive option to take them out to, you need about three LAV infantry for a same level fire-power against each other so they are both bigger and more expensive option as a single LAV infantry cost 0.32 (0.48 of CAP emplacement) and have a wight if 16 (24 for the CAP emplacement) and you need three of them.
For pure defensive purposes then these small pillboxes will be a problem for other infantry and they will not be expensive, roughly the same cost as five regular soldiers. A normal infantry will only have a 10% chance to destroy the CAP emplacement. If you bring allot of CAP emplacement on a defensive world I might be inclined to take some of their weight allotment from the infantry part, at least half of it.
Armour on statics is an oddity in my opinion as armour on them is rarely useful. Armour are mostly for when you have some form of space constriction... so that would only be for assault armies artillery as they will rarely bring static in any front line duties.
Anti-vehicle weapons used in defensive armies should be brought with no armour. Start with placing them in the rear echelon and only bring them forward once you see the enemy force composition and you have used enough attrition on their infantry, then bring them forward in full force and they will have a much higher chance to target a vehicle before they are themselves killed. There is no reason to have your artillery killed by enemy infantry while they mostly snipe infantry themselves, that is highly wasteful. I learned this in my recent testing... ;) ...I could turn a loss into a win this way.
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Is there any reason to have non-static support weapons like artillery or anti-air? It seems the best way to get the most bang for your buck is to put large static AA and arty into their own support unit, which is a shame because I like to RP as having a highly mobile and flexible force where using static guns would be unheard of.
Also, where is the evasion stat? I can't seem to find it when making units. Does it increase with new engine tech?
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I'd say that if you're not worried about portability and will be fortified, static heavy weapon positions will tend to be better than vehicles. (The anti-vehicle static units in Jorgen_CAB's last experiment didn't do great, but I think they were heavily overmatched and short on top-end weapons suitable for hitting the bigger attack vehicles.)
In my defence here the test was not directly designed to make it optimal for the defender to take out the attacker. When I reversed the medium and heavy emplacement numbers and put all medium and heavy emplacement in rear echelon for about 10 days before moving them to defensive line they were so effective that they actually could defeat the Stormtrooper army and even stop the AT-AT. This was when I was using regular infantry with (PW, LA).
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Is there any reason to have non-static support weapons like artillery or anti-air? It seems the best way to get the most bang for your buck is to put large static AA and arty into their own support unit.
Also, where is the evasion stat? I can't seem to find it when making units. Does it increase with new engine tech?
The evasion stat is called "Hit Mod".
The reason to put artillery into heavier vehicles is mainly for assaulting armies as that makes them less susceptible to counter battery fire. Other than this there is very little reason as having more is pretty almost always better. So... stick them in light armoured static units... you get three artillery shells down the line instead of one in a heavy static unit. Front loading damage also means less damage done to you in return.
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Medium vehicles with dual bombardment weapons have slightly lower tonnage per gun than statics.
For a tonnage-bloated defensive force, the inflated cost from having at least armor 2x more is more than enough to disincentivize that build, and the inferior fortification stat hurts too. And the fact that two guns can die in one hit might be a problem depending on what types of weapon will be hitting.
For an invasion force, on the other hand, medium vehicles with medium armor are probably a very reasonable platform for your artillery.
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Medium vehicles with dual bombardment weapons have slightly lower tonnage per gun than statics.
For a tonnage-bloated defensive force, the inflated cost from having at least armor 2x more is more than enough to disincentivize that build, and the inferior fortification stat hurts too. And the fact that two guns can die in one hit might be a problem depending on what types of weapon will be hitting.
For an invasion force, on the other hand, medium vehicles with medium armor are probably a very reasonable platform for your artillery.
Two medium bombardment artillery in one medium chassi might be a bit of a gamble... I might actually take the slight hit to size and put it into a heavy chassi with medium armour and reduce the kill from a hit due to counter bombardment from a medium artillery piece from 14% to 6%. Losses from counter bombardment to artillery are usually quite substantial. If cost is not concern then just pick heavy armour too.
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Two medium bombardment artillery in one medium chassi might be a bit of a gamble... I might actually take the slight hit to size and put it into a heavy chassi with medium armour and reduce the kill from a hit due to counter bombardment from a medium artillery piece from 14% to 6%. Losses from counter bombardment to artillery are usually quite substantial. If cost is not concern then just pick heavy armour too.
You can do that, but then you're spending more tonnage than if you'd gone for a pair of static artillery. I doubt I'd go heavy for the hit points, considering that bombardment weapons have very high damage values, If you're going to shell out for the heavy armor then it makes more sense.
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But you know what are the absolutely most likely weapon to hit them is, other medium or long range medium artillery as those are the most common type of artillery. When you fight losses to artillery is like almost 90% from counter bombardment.
In this particular case I might consider resilience versus space efficiency more important. We know that the weapons that is most likely to strike them have AP15,D40 profile so the medium chassis have a 14% chance to blow up and the heavy 6% chance to blow up. I think that reducing the chance to be killed from counter bombardment to less than half is worth the 15% increase in size for MBL and most likely also MB at 18%. Even if you fire less shells from the start that will soon change after a few days of fighting.
I would likely upgrade the armour as well to heavy as I don't think cost is much of a concern at this stage anyway... but not entirely necessary as cost can still be an issue at some point.
In a quick test how this work I had three regiments of infantry supported by three regiments of artillery.
Side A start with 100 MBL medium chassis artillery in each regiment and Side B start with 85 MBL heavy chassis (medium armour). So a total of 300 on side A and 255 on side B.
After 5 days of fighting...
Side A have 180 artillery left
Side B have 215 artillery left
Survival ability is important too, especially for artillery in terms of being constricted by space. I'm not saying it have to be in every case as it depends on the enemies capabilities as well of course.
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But you know what are the absolutely most likely weapon to hit them is, other medium or long range medium artillery as those are the most common type of artillery. When you fight losses to artillery is like almost 90% from counter bombardment.
In this particular case I might consider resilience versus space efficiency more important. We know that the weapons that is most likely to strike them have AP15,D40 profile so the medium chassis have a 14% chance to blow up and the heavy 6% chance to blow up. I think that reducing the chance to be killed from counter bombardment to less than half is worth the 15% increase in size for MBL and most likely also MB at 18%. Even if you fire less shells from the start that will soon change after a few days of fighting.
I would likely upgrade the armour as well to heavy as I don't think cost is much of a concern at this stage anyway... but not entirely necessary as cost can still be an issue at some point.
In a quick test how this work I had three regiments of infantry supported by three regiments of artillery.
Side A start with 100 MBL medium chassis artillery in each regiment and Side B start with 85 MBL heavy chassis (medium armour). So a total of 300 on side A and 255 on side B.
After 5 days of fighting...
Side A have 180 artillery left
Side B have 215 artillery left
Survival ability is important too, especially for artillery in terms of being constricted by space. I'm not saying it have to be in every case as it depends on the enemies capabilities as well of course.
So long-range mobile artillery with heavy armor would be the best arty in your opinion?
What about anti-air? For me it would have to be heavy AA since I want to to cover other formations. Or maybe its better for every formation to have its own native AA ability.
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So long-range mobile artillery with heavy armor would be the best arty in your opinion?
What about anti-air? For me it would have to be heavy AA since I want to to cover other formations. Or maybe its better for every formation to have its own native AA ability.
I have to state though that neither side was fortified in this fight so losses was very high on both sides... but during an attack you are not likely to have any fortification to start with anyway. For each Heavy Vehicle, heavy armour with dual MBL a defending garrison could afford 9 artillery pieces in simple light armoured emplacement with a minimum of 6 fortification. So having your artillery survive that onslaught can be quite important.
For AA you can go with both light, medium and heavy in formations. I generally put some light AA in all formations medium in support and then heavy in rear formations if I have heavy AA researched. light AA will give some defensive capability to support formations if they are attacked and soak some damage and they protect to some degree against air attacks. If there are no enemy air you can always move most of the AA to the front-line units after a while... I tend to do that with medium AA as well but rarely with heavy AA as they are to expensive to risk at the front unless I'm outmatched and need every gun I have on the front line.
I have a typical mobile infantry brigade that is 30.000t in size which have 15 HAA, 30MAA, 45LAA in total. I probably could have run with more LAA guns and often do, but this formation was restricted to be carried in a 30.000t fast response assault ship for rapid and light deployment. This is not a heavy assault formation but more of a rapid response force for defending colonies that is being attacked as quickly as possible. So, it is mainly infantry and light vehicles.
This particular formation is a Brigade with the HQ holding 15 HAA. It has three combat battalions, one cavalry company and three fire support companies. Every formation have 5 LAA each and the fire support companies 10 MAA each.
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I'd probably choose between MAA and HAA based on the damage profile - I figure in general the force hierarchy will be arranged as a flat tree, with one central rear-echelon formation that can hold all the logistics trucks and AA, and then all the other formations directly attached to that.
If the command hierarchy actually worked the way I thought it was supposed to, with the parent formations needing to have command capacity for their subordinates and passing down bonuses, there might be more pressure to be able to use HAA so you can have the AA as an independent subsidiary formation instead, and a deeper hierarchy. But those aren't the rules, at least in the current version.
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I'd probably choose between MAA and HAA based on the damage profile - I figure in general the force hierarchy will be arranged as a flat tree, with one central rear-echelon formation that can hold all the logistics trucks and AA, and then all the other formations directly attached to that.
If the command hierarchy actually worked the way I thought it was supposed to, with the parent formations needing to have command capacity for their subordinates and passing down bonuses, there might be more pressure to be able to use HAA so you can have the AA as an independent subsidiary formation instead, and a deeper hierarchy. But those aren't the rules, at least in the current version.
How does it work... is there some bug that I have missed in regard to the hierarchy?
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Yes... I think I figured that one out... commanders on higher levels don't seem to provide any bonuses to troops below them. That is obviously a bug... have anyone reported that?!?
I would personally still make the hierarchy as it was intended until the bug is fixed... that is not working as intended. I don't game the game as such. ;)
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I thought for sure that it would have been reported but it hasn't been or at least I couldn't find a report. Please make one or point me to the existing report if you know of one and I'll flag it up for Steve.
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The function number - N/A
The complete error text - N/A
The window affected - Ground forces
What you were doing at the time - Doing some ground combat testing
Conventional or TN start - TN
Random or Real Stars - Real
Is your decimal separator a comma? - No
Is the bug is easy to reproduce, intermittent or a one-off? - Easily reproduced
If this is a long campaign - say 75 years or longer - let me know the length of the campaign as well - Any time.
Please confirm if the following behavior is intended:
Commanders in a formation above another do not give the children formations any bonuses.
The HQ only needs to be as large as the formation NOT as large as the formation and it's children.
Ground combat Command score is the same, only needs to be as large as the formation not including it's children.
Not investigated - would be great if a bugmod with more ground force experience could look at it
Gyrfalcon - 2/7/20 - This is a known bug with a known cause. Not yet resolved. I believe the knock on effect explains the other two - negative malus from not having enough formation size for the subformations are not passed on either.
Not this one?
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Yeah that's the one.