Look, I don't think the problem is pods, the problem is automatic weapons in general and armed small craft (be they fighters or apn or pn2) plus the stupid smallcraft ramming rules where it turns out you can obliterate a major fleet with a minor investment in ramming shuttles.
Removing fighters from the game is highly unlikely (ignoring any question of canonicity), given that I strongly suspect that most people like them and expect fighters in sci-fi games such as this one. As for smallcraft ramming, I'm already on record as saying that I think that aside from the presence of anti-matter in the mix, small craft hitting a starship's DF should be like a bug hitting a windshield.
A major problem is that Marvin simplified things so his 50 turn games would play easier without wondering if there is a knock on effect. Removing the fighter training school is like not having crew grade they both "simplify" the game but in the one case it means you can spam infinite amounts of fighters (only limited by your income) and in the latter it allows you to mothball a huge fleet and invalidate the massive investment the other player has put into maintaining his active fleet.
What's this "remove"? There is no fighter training school in ISF. IIRC, fighter training schools are a Galactic/Ultra/Solar thing.
As for crew grade, I'm on record as saying that I think that it's a massive headache that's not worth the benefit, and I stand by that.
As for the lack of crew grade invalidating a massive investment in maintaining an active fleet, I don't entirely agree, though I see where you're coming from. However, if the player with the active fleet attacks the player with the fleet mostly in mothballs, the defending player had better be able to hold off the attacking player long enough to get his reserve fleet activated, otherwise his reserve fleet may still be in the shipyards getting reactivated when the invader comes to visit his home system. Regardless, I still believe that crew grade is such an massive headache that no justification for its use outweighs the paperwork headache it creates (and I do mean
PAPERwork, not spreadsheet work). There is no reasonable benefit that is sufficiently good that could offset the utterly ridiculousness of having to track each and every freaking ship in an empire's fleet for its crew grade!!! Sorry, but I feel very, VERY strongly about this.
This isn't to say that there might not be some value to (non-accumulating) crew grade for certain NPR types as has been suggested in the past. I can see where certain NPR types might be better than average and other might be worse than average.
I am going to be as clear as I can be. SBMHAWKS do not unjam warp point assaults in general. They do so if and only if only the attacking side has them and in this case the defender has virtually no options unlike with CM or fighters. Once both sides have them or if the defender is the one with them they make a warp point assault all but impossible for the attacker since 3-6 rounds after the assault starts their ships on both sides of the warp point are likely to be hit by a bombardment of sbmhawks. The attacker will loose ships to AW (mines, IDEW and pods) the defender will loose nothing but some AW. Worse, this defence requires nothing more than the CFN to raise. So if you say they are in the game to make a warp point assaultable again, I say they fail and fail big time. A defender gains the most from having pods as they know where the attacker will be. The attacker trades maintenance paying assets for ones without. This is assuming the defender gives them nothing but the CSP, and AW to engage near the WP and makes their mine belt in such a way that even after the attackers pods wear it down it will still contain the attacker for long enough for his ships to send in their pods. The attacker can have only limited numbers of ships (excluding simultaneous transit) on the warp point and all other ships must be in the immediate vicinity of the warp point in the other system. It is the ideal situation for maximizing the effectiveness of the defenders pods. Worse once the attack starts you just need clear out the attackers transisted ships then you are faced with a limited number of ships with degraded performance (no ECM, no datalink, degraded point defence) so killing each transiting wave becomes fairly simple. If the defender is the one with the pod monopoly they could also have a standard warp point array or else have their fleet in closer to complicate the attackers situation even more.
I don't disagree with some of what you're saying here. However, SBMHAWKs were never meant to be a long term WP defense weapon. To the best of my recollection, I don't recall the Alliance ever using SBMHAWKs as a static defensive weapon, except perhaps in circumstances when they ran thru a WP with the Bugs hot on their heels, and dumped out their missile pods into space because they knew that the Bugs would hit the WP within minutes. I don't recall SBMHAWKs being used defensively at the Battle of Centauri, the "Black Hole of Centauri" battle at the end of
In Death Ground, which would have seemed to be the perfect time to use them, given the desperation of the situation.
AW favor the defence is basically the best way to sum it up.
With the caveat that I don't believe that SBMHAWK pods were ever meant to be allowed for use in long term static WP defenses, I agree with this statement. Particularly since, if you remove missile pods from the mix, what's left? Immobile AW's. And immobile AW's are defensive weapons.
The only fly in the pod ointment is ECM3 deception mode and cloaking. Bases with ECM3 operating in deception mode can survive near to the warp point, cloaked bases can survive...but even so I think this is relatively limited as sooner or later you have to drop the cloak and I'd think that the attacker can eventually program the pods to engage you no matter what you do...may cost more pods to send them through but it works. But cloaked bases/ships likely can be used to control IDEW. Once you have this system then things get exciting to put it mildly.
Yeah, as nice a cloaking can be, as currently envisioned, it's not a system that's meant to be functioning all the time. And that's where the ship or base would have a problem with cloak in a WP defense. Of course, it also depends on what iteration of the readiness rules one's using ... pure 3E, 3rdR, or Ultra/Solar. In pure 3E, you could have a portion of your fleet always being fully active, (say 1/3), so you could have the active third cloaked, and the rest of the fleet pulled well back from the WP at a lower readiness state, with cloak turned off. (Bases are tricky here, since you could only pull them back if you supported them with a force of tugs to move the active ones into position and the normal state ones back out of range. Otherwise, the normal state bases are dead meat.) But in 3rdR and Ultra/Solar, you can't have any ships being fully activated, so there may be no ships or bases under cloak.
The other thing about pods that is very different from any other revolutionary weapon (but not different than IDEW and minefields) is that it is something that one turn you don't have and the next turn you have lots of. It takes a long time to refit your fleet to Rc armed, it takes an even longer time to build up a fighter force that is of any real value. Also consider that IDEW are expensive, they are a weapon system that fires 1 time per battle (given their recharge rate), has a relatively poor chance to hit, and does fairly poor damge 65 MCr for an IDEW-P is more than the cost of SBMHAWK5, while the cheapest, the IDEW-L, is 45 MCr and is more than a SBMHAWK2 pod. The SBMHAWK5 is capable of doing 72 pts of damage, while the IDEW-P can do 1 (admittedly through any level of shields and armour) and the IDEW-L can do 2 compared to 6 for LT1 armed SBMHAWK missiles. Their price per hitpoint is very low, while IDEW have a high cost per point of damage (18 MCr/damage point for IDEW-F, 12 MCr/damage point for IDEW-Fa)...(2 MCr/damage point for anti-matter armed pod1s, and less than 1 MCr per damage point for the more advanced pods)...mines the most cost effective AW out there at 0.25 MCr/damage point, but given you need to cover 6 hexes...that is really 1.5 MCr/damge point. So of all the AW pods really are exceptionally cost efficient.
IDEW's seem to be either overpriced for their existing performance, or underperforming for their price. IDEW's really only get to fire once per battle. And if you lose the battle, you lose the IDEW's and never get to use them again. If you win the battle and repel the invader, you
might get to reuse the IDEW, IF it survived the battle.
As for mines, unless we're talking about closed WP's, the cost per damage point can be a questionable value, given that mines usually seem more about preventing an attacker from entered the mined hex than in being a weapon that gets used. Still, they are valuable, if only for penning up the attacker on the WP for a while and that's a value that can't be calculated in MC/dp.
I don't see where "changing tactics" comes in. If a system invalidates things it should only do so if it adds something of value back to the game. You want to invalidate warp point assaults what do you add back to the game? A warp point fight is fun to play out and it can be damned exciting for both sides. Also that a warp point defence cannot be broken by a conventional assault does not come because of the bases on the warp point, it comes because the minefields and IDEW are so thick that the attacker can't break out of the death zone near the WP itself. Fundamentally it is due to a prolliferation of AW.
Of course the proliferation of automated weapons is the fundamental reason for WP stagnation. That's not exactly an epiphany.
But I don't see any rational justification for not including automated weapons in the game
in some form. But "in some form" doesn't have to mean "in their current form".
As for WP battles being fun, I'm not sure that everyone would agree with you. When I did a survey a while back, one of the complaints was that there were too many WP battles. Personally, I thought that that observation was a bit ignorant in a way, due to the nature of WP's as the perfect natural chokepoint. Of course, many, many battles will be at WP's. Where else would a defender want to fight, given a choice? About the only reason for a defender to prefer a deep space engagement instead, would be if he felt that there was an advantage to be gained. The Battle of Zapata in Insurrection would be a prime example of this.
My feeling is that something that pays no maintenance should not be very effective in killing things that do pay maintenance. Because the "opportunity cost" of building a warp point defence is huge, not giving the player value for that strikes me as wrong. It takes a great deal of planning, logistics effort and what have you to build up a warp point defence that causes the attacker to whimper like a two year old child, invalidating that with a system that take no more effort then stealing candy from a sleeping baby is wrong. That it isn't even a solution to the problem well that is just icing on the cake.
Not buying it. I suspect that history is replete with examples where a great new advance in technology completely invalidated years or decades of investment. Take battleship fleets during WW2 being made obsolete practically overnight (well, at least for the battleship admirals who didn't believe that fighters could sink BB's).
As for AMBAMing the pods, nothing should stop that working but if it works on pods it would be just as effective at killing fighters, small craft and so on. But that is TL15+ tech then well there are a lot of tech levels to go through and for a TL8 race trying to stop the pods it is of zero value. Also the rules for the suicide rider make it pathetically useless at killing IDEW...it only takes out 1-2 of them so I'm not sure why the AMBAM thing would be more effective. The counter pod minefield at TL14 works but at 9 submunitions to max out your kills of pods and you get only 25 per pattern I can see that it takes a lot of them to kill a pod wave. They also require a ship or base with a sensor that can pick up the pods...that base or ship had better be cloaked.
I agree that the TL8 race trying to stop pods isn't going to get any value from a TL15+ solution. But frankly, I'm not going to really have much sympathy for the TL8 race in that situation. They're supposed to get squashed in that situation, though a TL8 (!) race could try building up a really large force of fighters or assault shuttles to attack the pods as they enter the system. That's probably the best direct counter to SBMHAWKs they'd have.
BTW, Paul, even though it's clear that we disagree about a fair amount of stuff (and agree on a lot of other stuff), I appreciate you taking the time to comment here.