Static vs Mobile Ground Units

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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...

[Ulzgoroth]

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?

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[liveware (OP)]

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.

[Ulzgoroth]

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.

[liveware (OP)]

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.

Code: [Select]

Sentry Brigade
Transport Size: 3,000 tons
Build Cost: 60 BP
1000x Sentry

################
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.

[liveware (OP)]

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.

[liveware (OP)]

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.

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.

[Borealis4x]

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?

[Jorgen_CAB]

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).

[Jorgen_CAB]

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.