Ship Boarding Squad Design

[liveware (OP)]

So, let's see if I can do some maths and figure out a good estimate for how many combat rounds the previously posted platoon can last before running out of GSP.

Each combat round, I assume 64 GSP total are consumed  per platoon based on my unit stats. I have 3x 100 GSP units in a platoon. So, first round I have a 64% chance that 1x 100 GSP unit is consumed. If I get through two rounds without having any 100 GSP units consumed, 1x 100 GSP will be consumed and I have a 28% chance that a 2nd 100 GSP unit will be consumed. After 3 rounds of not having any 100 GSP units consumed, 1x 100 GSP will be consumed and I have a 92% chance of a 2nd. After 4 rounds, 2x 100 GSP are consumed and I have a 56% chance of a 3rd. After 5 rounds, all 3x 100 GSP will be consumed.

So, at 60 seconds per combat round, I'm at 5 minutes of game time to deplete a platoon's GSP completely.

In each round of combat, I could shoot 20 + 30 + 6 = 56 times. Assuming 10% accuracy and that each shot that hits is fatal, that's 5 or 6 kills each round on average. After 5 rounds, that's 25 - 30* kills.

Ok, so I'm pretty sure I made a math error in my original post regarding how many kills per round my original platoon could achieve. Having spent some time now digging into this, I think the numbers I just came up with are much more reasonable. It seems that I could expect my new platoon to defeat at most a crew of 25 - 30* before running out of ammo. So I might be able to take out a fighter or a FAC, but a larger ship will require multiple boarding platoons.

That actually makes a lot of sense since my existing boarding ship is a FAC with a single 250 ton boarding module so I would expect it to be effective against something it's own size or smaller. So I think my estimates above are probably accurate.

*Edit: I did my math a little wrong

[Migi]

Your units don't stop shooting when they run out of supply, 25% keep shooting.
Also your units have inherent supply for 10 rounds of combat.
I don't know how being forced out of front line attack would affect boarding combat, but given you can shoot back from front line defence I imagine you still fight until someone wins.

Each Ground Unit has sufficient inherent supply points to fight ten rounds of combat (currently one round takes place every eight hours). After that point, only one quarter of units in a formation element that is out of supply will fire in each round. In addition, a formation with out of supply elements cannot use a field position of 'Front Line Attack' (more on this when I publish the full ground combat rules). However, if units with logistics modules are available, ground units can draw supply to both fight the current combat round and replenish supplies used in previous combat rounds.

[liveware (OP)]

Your units don't stop shooting when they run out of supply, 25% keep shooting.
Also your units have inherent supply for 10 rounds of combat.
I don't know how being forced out of front line attack would affect boarding combat, but given you can shoot back from front line defence I imagine you still fight until someone wins.

Each Ground Unit has sufficient inherent supply points to fight ten rounds of combat (currently one round takes place every eight hours). After that point, only one quarter of units in a formation element that is out of supply will fire in each round. In addition, a formation with out of supply elements cannot use a field position of 'Front Line Attack' (more on this when I publish the full ground combat rules). However, if units with logistics modules are available, ground units can draw supply to both fight the current combat round and replenish supplies used in previous combat rounds.

I was intentionally trying to make a conservative 'worst-case' estimate, so I used some pessimistic estimation methods. I've heard reports that the 10 rounds of GSP thing doesn't actually work, you really only get one, so I was planning for worst-case here. I also assumed that if my platoon runs out of GSP, they will be overwhelmed and defeated quickly in most situations. If am wrong about either of these, then my troops will perform better than my calculations would suggest, and they will defeat the enemy more rapidly. If I had assumed otherwise, my troops would suffer.

As for the front line thing, my understanding is that in boarding combat, there is no distinction between front line defense or front line attack because there are no lines (or effectively, there is only one line and everyone on the ship is on that line). Any attacking unit can theoretically attack any of the defending crew units, and vice-versa.

[liveware (OP)]

A thought occurred to me while tweaking these platoon templates.

If I board a ship which is transporting a hostile armor formation, will the armored units engage my forces? If so, there is a use-case for anti-tank boarding troops. If this is not possible, AT boarding troops are pointless.

[Iceranger]

A thought occurred to me while tweaking these platoon templates.

If I board a ship which is transporting a hostile armor formation, will the armored units engage my forces? If so, there is a use-case for anti-tank boarding troops. If this is not possible, AT boarding troops are pointless.

Only formations that consist entirely of infantry can take part in a boarding attempt

I guess that holds for both sides?

Another factor I found out to be considered is the size of the marine formation needs to be transported by a drop shuttle, ideally a really fast one. The smallest troop bay has a 100ton capacity, so 250 ton is not ideal to use all those space (2 is too small but 3 is too large). Pushing 300 ton worth of drop capable troop bay (330 ton in total) to fast speed probably needs a shuttle around 1k ton.

[liveware (OP)]

A thought occurred to me while tweaking these platoon templates.

If I board a ship which is transporting a hostile armor formation, will the armored units engage my forces? If so, there is a use-case for anti-tank boarding troops. If this is not possible, AT boarding troops are pointless.

Only formations that consist entirely of infantry can take part in a boarding attempt

I guess that holds for both sides?

Another factor I found out to be considered is the size of the marine formation needs to be transported by a drop shuttle, ideally a really fast one. The smallest troop bay has a 100ton capacity, so 250 ton is not ideal to use all those space (2 is too small but 3 is too large). Pushing 300 ton worth of drop capable troop bay (330 ton in total) to fast speed probably needs a shuttle around 1k ton.

I'm not sure it does hold for both sides... I assumed it was for the attacker only.

I haven't fully settled on a particular troop transport design yet, which is one of the variables I am attempting to hammer out in my current design process. I've been trying to optimize my boarding platoons around 250 tons because that is what I have in my existing troop transport design. However, I am planning on revising that design soon. My goal for my boarding troop transport is to have a small (my current design is 1000ish tons) and fast (current design is 10k km/s) ship capable of capturing a ship of it's own size or smaller. My boarding transports are part of a much larger fleet of more conventional combat ships, and are intended to be launched at enemy ships while many other ships are also engaging those same ships.

It is also worth noting that I plan on designing larger landing ships for planetary invasions which will probably utilize formations larger than platoons. However, based on what you said above, it might be worth revisiting the smaller boarding transport modules now that I have more capable infantry to load into them. At my current tech level, it seems I can build transport size 100 boarding modules, which are little less than 1/2 of what I'm currently using.

[vorpal+5]

Is there anyway to see how many rounds are left in a given unit?

I hope this won't derail the discussion too much, but CAP type of unit seems to be the best bang for buck in 95% of the cases, why not having only that? Sure, they can be killed as easily as another infantry, but they fire thrice when an IPW equipped infantry fires once ...

[liveware (OP)]

Is there anyway to see how many rounds are left in a given unit?

I hope this won't derail the discussion too much, but CAP type of unit seems to be the best bang for buck in 95% of the cases, why not having only that? Sure, they can be killed as easily as another infantry, but they fire thrice when an IPW equipped infantry fires once ...

I am playing around with this balance currently. Below are 3 different 250 ton formations that I have been tweaking with that concept in mind:

Code: [Select]

Light Boarding Platoon
Transport Size: 250 tons
Build Cost: 1,146.9 BP
2x Light Platoon Command Mech
2x Light Supply Mech
19x Light Automatic Rifle Mech
8x Light Pulse Rifle Mech

#############################
Medium Boarding Platoon
Transport Size: 250 tons
Build Cost: 1,147 BP
2x Light Platoon Command Mech
3x Light Supply Mech
10x Light Automatic Rifle Mech
10x Light Pulse Rifle Mech
1x Light Pulse Cannon Mech

#############################
Heavy Boarding Platoon
Transport Size: 250 tons
Build Cost: 1,191.4 BP
1x Light Platoon Command Mech
3x Light Supply Mech
15x Light Automatic Rifle Mech
6x Light Pulse Cannon Mech

Unit designs are in accordance with whatever unit designs I posted last.

With this round of formation designs, I was looking carefully at the balance between a couple of things. First, I was looking at how many 'kills per round', as I described a few posts back, each platoon was able to achieve. Next, I was looking at how much GSP they each consumed per round. It seems that there is a trade off with CAP vs PWI where CAP consumes much more GSP per round, and thus requires more GSP supply units than an equivalently sized PWI unit requires.

Throughout all of this discussion, I have also been considering the effect of enemy targeting behavior on my own units. If there are, say, 50 enemy units, and I have 50 units in a formation, the enemy attacks will be spread out amongst my 50 units. If I only have 5 units in a formation, it is much more likely that any one of those individual units will be targets in any single round of combat than in a 50 unit formation. So I think there is at least some advantage to having larger formations due to this. I am currently experimenting with this concept by varying the amount of Automatic Rifle Mechs vs Light Pulse Rifle Mechs in my formations as the Light Pulse Rifle Mechs can do more damage per round of combat but by including more Automatic Rifle Mechs I reduce the chance that ANY of my individual mechs will be hit at all.

In the formations above, the Light Boarding Platoon kills about 6.1 targets per round (which I mentally round to '5 to 6' targets per round), the Medium Boarding Platoon kills about 7.6 targets per round (which I round to '6 to 8' targets per round), and the Heavy Boarding Platoon kills about 5.1 targets per round (which I round to '4 to 5' targets per round).

Also, to my knowledge there is no way to know definitively in advance how long a particular formation or unit will last in combat. Targeting of weapons is somewhat random and 'ammunition' is abstracted by the GSP concept which is also somewhat random. With this in mind my design philosophy for my boarding troops and their transports has been as conservative as is consistent with my understanding of boarding combat mechanics in order to maximize my own troops survival rate and also to maximize my chances of successfully capturing enemy ships. For these reasons I developed the methodology I described a few posts back where I made some limiting pessimistic assumptions about how GSP is consumed and damage is dealt.

Some other worthwhile considerations that I have been considering are:

1. I DO plan on using multiple boarding platoons per target ship. This allows me to mix and match the above formations without having to reassign units (though I could reassign if I wanted). It also presents more targets to any hostile point defense I might encounter and might allow at least one boarding team to actually breach the target ship's hull.

2. The Light/Medium/Heavy variants of each squad have somewhat different design optimizations that I have been considering in addition to what I have already discussed. The Light platoon has only 2 Light Support Mechs compared to the 3 in the other two platoon designs, has the most Light Automatic Rifle Mechs of any of the squadrons, and should have the longest combat endurance in terms of GSP efficiency of any of these three platoons. The Medium platoon has the most Light Pulse Rifle Mechs, deals the most killing shots on average out of the 3 platoon designs, and should be the most efficient platoon at defeating lightly armored targets, like hostile crew. The Heavy platoon has the best armor penetration per shot, and MAY be useful in situations involving shipboard combat with hostile armored units and/or hostile infantry equipped with powered armor. If I were to use a Halo analogy, Light platoons are similar to UNSC Marine detachments, Medium platoons are similar to Covenant Elite detachments, and Heavy platoons are similar to Covenant Hunter detachments.

3. I read somewhere that boarding craft which have a speed advantage over their target gain a substantial improvement to the success rate of the boarding action. With this in mind, a smaller, faster boarding craft is probably superior to a larger one unless the larger boarding craft has a speed advantage over the smaller one. My suspicion is that this one of those 'it depends' type of situations so I am going to design a second, smaller boarding craft than my current design and see how the speed problem balances out.*

*Edit: I was able to develop a smaller boarding craft with 100 ton boarding capacity and about 150% better speed than my previous boarding craft, so I will attempt some smaller 100 ton formations next.

[Ulzgoroth]

3. I read somewhere that boarding craft which have a speed advantage over their target gain a substantial improvement to the success rate of the boarding action. With this in mind, a smaller, faster boarding craft is probably superior to a larger one unless the larger boarding craft has a speed advantage over the smaller one. My suspicion is that this one of those 'it depends' type of situations so I am going to design a second, smaller boarding craft than my current design and see how the speed problem balances out.

Check out the boarding section here. If your boarding ship isn't much faster than the target, you could easily lose a majority of your boarding force before the shooting starts.

Boarding against a high-performance military ship that hasn't lost at least some of its engines is likely to be incredibly difficult, and call for assault craft that fly like missiles. Or a very high tolerance for troop losses.

(In most cases, I'd expect the result is that you only board ships that have suffered debilitating damage or just aren't very mobile in the first place. But I'm sure somebody is going to instead opt for fast destroyers that attack by flinging 2000 tons of light infantry at the enemy and losing 70% of them before a shot is fired, and somebody will try to build 25000 km/s boarding shuttles...)

[liveware (OP)]

Hah, I will read through that thread, thanks.

I did in fact just design a 15000 ton destroyer with a small hanger bay capable of launching 15k km/s boarding craft. The boarding craft should have a 2:1 speed advantage against their intended target. That seems significant to me and also significantly better than my previous boarding craft which had a 3:2 speed advantage. Both designs were intended to lag somewhat behind the destroyers and engage their targets after the destroyers had fired their opening beam salvos.

I guess I am an awful person.

[liveware (OP)]

Boarding combat in C# Aurora is similar in principle to VB6 Aurora with some adjustments for the new ground combat mechanics.
The boarding attempt process is as follows:
1. Only a ship with a boarding-equipped troop transport bay can be ordered to make a boarding attempt
2. Only formations that consist entirely of infantry can take part in a boarding attempt
3. Boarding attempts cannot be made against ships that are faster than the ship making the boarding attempt
4. A fleet given the 'Attempt Boarding Action' (for a specified formation) or 'Attempt Boarding Action All Formations' will attempt to end its movement in the same location as the target ship. If that happens, a boarding attempt will be made.
5. The percentage chance of each individual unit (soldier) conducting a successful boarding attempt is equal to 10% x (Boarding Ship Speed / Target Ship Speed). So if the boarding ship is 10x faster than the target ship, success is automatic.
6. Any unit with a 'Boarding Combat' capability has double the normal chance of success. In this case, if the boarding ship is 5x faster than the target ship, success is automatic.
7. Any units that do not make the successful attempt are killed. If an HQ unit is lost, there is a chance the formation commander is killed based on (1/Number of HQ units), which is an automatic kill result if only one HQ exists
Once on the target ships, the surviving attackers will move inside if there is a hole in the armour. If there is no hole, the boarders will use a breaching charge to destroy one armour at the weakest point every thirty seconds until they gain access.
Once inside the target ship, a boarding combat round is conducted every five minutes. This is very similar in principle to ground combat, albeit without support artillery, aircraft, etc. and with no concept of front-live vs rear. There is no 'fortification' in the ground combat sense, but the defenders are given a fortification level of 2 to simulate the advantages of defence within the ship. Each formation on each side randomly selects a target formation on the opposing side, using a weighted random selection based on size. Each unit in each formation selects a random formation element in the opposing formation, again using a weighted random selection based on size, and conducts an attack using the normal ground combat procedure:
The commanders of each formation provide a bonus to hit with their Ground Combat Offence bonus and provide a bonus to fortification (base fortification is 1 on attack and 2 on defence) with their Ground Combat Defence bonus. Any units on either side with 'Boarding Combat' capability have double the normal chance to hit.
For the purposes of boarding combat, the crew is a temporary formation with a single element composed of 'crew' ground units. A crew member is equipped with light personal weapons and has 'armour' equal to half the lowest racial armour for infantry. Casualties in this temporary formation translate into crew losses. Given that the crew is not well equipped for a fight of this type, it would advisable for ships to carry a small marine detachment if there is a chance they may face boarding attacks.
If the target ship is a carrier, formations based on parasite ships will fight to protect the mothership.
If all the defending units are killed, the ship is transferred to the new owners (I may also add some surrender rules so you don't need to kill all the crew).
To simulate the difficulties in making use of a captured ship, especially as the defenders have no doubt locked out the controls and sabotaged whatever they can, the captured ship is treated as if it just abandoned an overhaul and is given an overhaul factor of 0.01.
If a ship is captured, the associated Alien Class is updated with complete information.
Collateral damage can occur during boarding combat using the same rules as for ground-based collateral damage. All the damage is applied to the ship as a single internal hit. Because of the relatively small-scale of shipboard combat, any fractional points of collateral damage have a percentage chance of becoming full points equal to (fractional damage / 1). Damage to transport bays due to collateral damage will not kill defending troops (as they are fighting on the ship and not located in the bay).

Some of this information, at least, is deprecated. According to the C# v1.00 changes thread, in the C# version boarding combat rounds are 60 seconds long. I have NOT tested this yet but I am hoping to test many of my designs soon... it's taken quite a bit of design revision to get to the point of fielding capable designs.

Edit: Or maybe my information from the v1.00 changes thread is deprecated (more likely). Anyways I need to do some actual in-game testing to confirm some things.

Edit 2: This particular nit-pick of mine doesn't change much of what I previously stated about the utility of the most recent platoons I designed because the calculations were based primarily on the number of combat rounds, not the amount of game time that had elapsed. Game time elapsed was a secondary calculation that didn't really impact the 'kills per round' or 'GSP per round' statistics.

[liveware (OP)]

Alright, I have developed new, smaller 100 ton boarding formations for my new faster and smaller boarding transport craft.

Unit designs are as previously posted, except for one new addition:

Code: [Select]

Light Rocket Mech
Transport Size (tons) 16     Cost 79.1     Armour 20     Hit Points 16.0
Annual Maintenance Cost 9.9     Resupply Cost 6
Light Anti-Vehicle:      Shots 1      Penetration 24      Damage 36

Basic Genetic Enhancement
Boarding Combat
Desert Warfare
Extreme Pressure Combat
Extreme Temperature Combat
High Gravity Combat
Improved Genetic Enhancement
Jungle Warfare
Low Gravity Combat
Mountain Warfare
Rift Valley Warfare

Vendarite  0.64   
Development Cost  3,955

The new formations are squadron sized, led by a Corporal:

Code: [Select]

Light Boarding Squadron
Transport Size: 100 tons
Build Cost: 400.4 BP
2x Light Squadron Command Mech
2x Light Supply Mech
8x Light Automatic Rifle Mech
1x Light Pulse Rifle Mech

############################
Medium Boarding Squadron
Transport Size: 100 tons
Build Cost: 400.5 BP
2x Light Squadron Command Mech
2x Light Supply Mech
2x Light Automatic Rifle Mech
4x Light Pulse Rifle Mech

############################
Heavy Boarding Squadron
Transport Size: 100 tons
Build Cost: 400.5 BP
2x Light Squadron Command Mech
2x Light Supply Mech
2x Light Pulse Rifle Mech
1x Light Pulse Cannon Mech
1x Light Rocket Mech

Some of my notes about these squadron formations are:

1. The Light squadron features only a single Pulse Rifle Mech armed with a CAP and several Automatic Rifle Mechs armed with IPWs. This provides the maximum possible distribution of targets utilizing 2x Light Command Mechs and 2x Light Supply Mechs, which I consider to be an absolute minimum for a combat squadron for redundancy and combat longevity purposes. The Light squadrons fire 14 shots per combat round and kill approximately 1.4 of their targets, resulting in typically 1 and sometimes 2 kills per round of combat, using my typical pessimistic estimation methods. I will not discuss GSP further until I have combat tested these units.

2. The Medium squadron features as many Pulse Rifle Mechs armed with CAPs as I considered reasonable, with the remaining transport size dedicated to Automatic Rifle Mechs armed with IPWs. I may revise this based on combat performance and increase the number of Automatic Rifle Mechs to reduce Pulse Rifle Mech attrition. I'm not sure what is best here yet. The Medium squadrons fire 26 shots per combat round and kill on average 2.6 targets, resulting typically 3 and sometimes 2 kills per round of combat.

3. The Heavy squadron features a Light Pulse Cannon Mech as well as a Light Rocket Mech in order to neutralize heavily armored targets, such as hostile infantry equipped with powered armor and the possible armored unit in transport in a transport bay. The Heavy squadrons fire 19 shots per combat round and kill on average 1.9 targets, resulting 2 and sometimes 1 kills per round of combat.

These I think are interesting combat statistics. The Light squadron has the worst performance in terms of kill efficiency, but (unconfirmed) has the best GSP efficiency. The Medium squadron has the best kill efficiency, but (unconfirmed) the worst GSP efficiency. The Heavy squadron has intermediate kill and GSP efficiency compared to the Light and Medium squadrons, and has the advantage of improved lethality against armored targets.

With the most recent boarding transport I have designed, 3 of the above squadrons can be deployed simultaneously using 3 separate boarding transports which are in turn deployed form a single carrier. As previously stated, these transports are intended to approach the target hostile ship/fleet following the initial round of bombardment from my destroyers, which are slower than my boarding transports but have considerably greater range and firepower.

[serger]

Having 20% of formation tonnage to HQ seems questionable even for surface combat, where commanders seems to outlive their HQ units frequently, and, in addition, they and their reserved HQ units are indispensable to transfer superior commander's bonuses.

For boarding combat with such small one-level forces it's questionable twofold, because boading drop HQ casualty will be fatal for commander, if it was the unit where unlucky commader was deployed, so absolutely no advantage in doubling full-sized HQ units to increase commander's survivability during drop, and, in the same time, there will be no surerior-level commander bonuses transfer, because there is no superior level HQ in your boarding OOB.

I think there will be at all very small percent of juniur commaders, worth their 20%-tons load in boarding squads; they are to have more than 20% of relevant bonuses (Training, Offence and, with ~twice lesser efficiency, Defence and Logistics bonuses are relevant during boarding combat; Training must be used long time before combat to raise squad's moral at max to be truly efficient).

[serger]

On the other side, in boarding combat your HQ units are placed at front line attack during first combat phases, and therefore are very vulnerable to enemy hits compared to rear echelon small-sized dug-in detached HQ superior formations, I have tested to verify HQ redundancy efficiency. So, if you will raise boarding troops size to company level - I think it can be noticably effective to have 2-3 HQ units per company, to give commander an ability to proceed with applying their bonuses after surviving their HQ unit destruction. There will be only 2-3% of formation's tonnage, and there will be more able-and-trained officers in this higher rank, so more commander's efficiency to save.

[liveware (OP)]

I have also been questioning the utility of having 20% of each boarding pod dedicated to HQ tonnage. I had included 2 HQ units based on my understanding of the boarding action phase, where if a HQ unit is destroyed, the commander still has a 50% chance of surviving if another HQ unit is present. Additionally, the HQ units will be on the front line once the boarding troops breach the target ship, and some redundancy would seem useful in this situation as well. Larger formations would also reduce the relative amount of tonnage dedicated to HQ's per formation.

I think today I will attempt some company sized formations and boarding transports and see if I can find a better balance there.