Re: Galaxy: fleet construction

From: gl8f@fermi.clas.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)

Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 00:00:00 +0000

In article <3n71lb$bal@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
KarenH1026 <karenh1026@aol.com> wrote:

>Can anyone out there give advice to a newbie concerning fleet construction
>in Galaxy?  What have people traditionally built?  Large fighter
>squadrons, big 5000 production unit ships?

There's a nice article about Galaxy ship construction by Howard
Bampton in the PBEM fanzine a while back. You can get it from the WWW
or FTP site, but here's a copy:

PBEM v94 n04 (17Jul94)

======================================================================
Ship Design in Galaxy and Blind Galaxy                  Howard Bampton
======================================================================

This article is intended for the beginning to semi-experienced Galaxy
player. Experienced Galaxy players have no doubt already thought about
all the details that this article mentions, and have made their
decisions on the subject. Since in many cases there are no "correct"
answers, I have generally refrained from doing anything besides
pointing out the pros and cons of both sides of the issues.

There are 4 general duties that a ship is typically expected to
perform: Cargo runs, picket duty, commerce raiding, and offensive
duty. Although a single ship design can be used for several of these
duties, a multi-duty flexible single design does a worse job at each task
than a ship specialized for just one job.

Cargo ships

There are several schools of though on cargo ships: "single cargo
space and drive", "large cargo space and drive", and "armed
freighters".

Single cargo space and drive cargo ships are typically (1 0 0 0 1), or
sometimes (x 0 0 0 1) (with x=2, 3, or 4). The general concept is: we
want something fast and cheap. With all drive and cargo, we aren't
wasting production building shields or weapons that we don't want them
to use in the first place, and we aren't slowing our ship down by
carrying them around. An additional advantages is that they are
inexpensive, and so we tend to have hundreds of them. Furthermore, we
can afford to send them unescorted (or lightly escorted) to systems
that we'd like to claim, but where they could run into resistance. In
a last ditch defense, they make OK cannon-fodder, albeit expensive to
lose. Since there are lots of them, we have great flexibility in
moving cargo around: if we have 5 CAP here, 3 COL there, and some MAT
somewhere else, we can move it all.

The downside to this kind of cargo ship is that if we are attacked, a
large part of out merchant marine can be knocked out by a single small
enemy warship. These ships also don't have the bulk carrying capacity
that larger cargo ships do.

Large cargo ships (say mass 20+, with 10+ spaces for cargo) also have
their pluses and minuses. On the plus side, they can carry a lot of
cargo, and do it cheaper than a horde of smaller ships. On the minus
side, it is often difficult to keep them full. When loaded, they tend
to be very slow, unless we have high drive tech, invest in cargo tech,
or have sizable engines on them. They are large enough that putting a
weapon on them isn't a total waste of time, but shielding them is not
easy, especially when loaded. Remember that shield strength is a
function of the ship's mass, which includes cargo. Losing a large
freighter is very expensive, so they tend to be sent only to
well-defended systems.

In order to keep their cargo ship losses down, many players build
armed freighters. They typically have minimal cargo space (1 or 2),
light weapons (1 or 2 as well), reasonable drives (4+) and some
shielding. Some players will further tweak the shields so that the
cargo ship is immune to strength 1 attacks (i.e. the effective shield
strength when loaded is at least 4).

Picket duty

Picket duty consists of guarding an empire's borders. Designing
picketing forces is one of the most difficult tasks in Galaxy. Too
weak a force, and we are asking for invasion. If we have too much of
our economy invested in picketing forces, we cannot field an effective
offensive fleet, which will cause us to lose.

There are 3 or 4 types of picketing forces: orbital forces; slow,
heavily armed and shielded warships; obsolete warships that have not
or will not be upgraded; and normal warships.

Orbital forces (all shields and weapons) have the best bang for the
buck (no drive or cargo mass to lower shield strength), but can't
move. Furthermore, they allow the enemy to make some educated guesses
about the size of the system: a 100 mass orbital fort is a dead
giveaway that it is a homeworld. We can do some things to confuse the
issue, such as building some forts with mat stockpiles handy, or
upgrading some ships at the system at the same time.

To overcome the problems of orbital forts, a few players build
slow-moving warships (typically < 25% drive). They have drives, so we
can move them from system to system as needed, but they still pack a
sizable punch.

It is common to use old, obsolete warships as pickets. These ships
could be awaiting upgrades, or could be too expensive to upgrade.  The
most common picket forces, however, are warships that we have not yet
deployed for offensive duty.

Commerce raiding

A commerce raider's goal is to get cheap kills of the enemy's cargo
ships and systems.  We want to bomb unguarded systems, and prevent
(re)colonization of others. Depending on our enemy's tactics, commerce
raiders doing the later job can end up being attacked by his bigger
commerce raiders engaging in the same activity.

There are 3 varieties of commerce raiders that are typically found in
Galaxy games. The most common is a small, normal warship, which is
often called a fighter. The second variety is a fast, lightly armed,
unshielded warship. Typically, we want to catch systems that the enemy
has lightly defended (single fighter, or no armed warships), or
prevent him from sending unarmed freighters to a system. The third and
most devious variety is a medium-sized (or larger) fast, lightly
armed, and heavily shielded ship. This raider is less concerned with
taking out the opposition's ships, and more concerned with bombing
systems. This third design philosophy exploits two of Galaxy's
documented quirks, namely that combat ends when neither side can
damage the other (so the enemy raider could destroy all our unarmed
cargo ships, leaving our picketing force largely untouched), and
that bombing occurs if a hostile force has a ship in orbit after
combat, even if we also have ships left. Don't be surprised by these
quirks.

Offensive operations

Given that Galaxy is a wargame, we might think that offensive ship
design would have been worked out to the last detail and everyone
would be running around with the same ships as everyone else. Well,
we are out of luck: it is still an art. Some general conclusions have
been reached concerning what we should and should not do:

Our offensive ships should move roughly the same speed. Fleets remove
the dangers of having half our forces arrive this turn and half next
turn, but it is better to have all our ships moving about the same
speed so we aren't wasting production making extra drive when we could
be making heavier shields or weapons.

What speed should our fleet move? Alternately, we could ask what
percentage of the ship's mass should be drive? This question is
something that has not been decided, either. It is safe to say that
going below 30% drive, or above 50% drive, will have a major effect on
our tech research: going for low drive mass tends to encourage high
drive techs, whereas high drive mass tends to encourage shield and
weapons development. This isn't to say that going outside those
extremes is never done: I was one of the co-winners in a Galaxy game
where my fleet design was 25% drive, roughly 25% weapons, and 50%
shields. Good luck with diplomacy, and, in the later game, some very
nasty flack that the opposition had a hard time killing, probably are
why I got away with it.

Before I go further, I should mention a few definitions of ship
types. A "drone" is the smallest & fastest possible scout, (1 0 0 0 0).
A "gun" is the smallest warship, (1 1 1 0 0). "Flack" is a ship
designed to soak up enemy firepower and make his large weapons waste
their time destroying small ships, while our large weapons destroy
his large ships

Mixed forces are good. A mixed force is a fleet (not necessarily in
the game sense) of groups of different types of ships. A fleet with
all large ships is vulnerable to a fleet of equal mass which has heavy
flack cover and a few large ships. Similarly, a force with no large
weapons can be defeated by a single ship with heavy shields. This
leads players to build fleets with a few large ships (which can have
big weapons, or can have lots of small ones, sometimes called
"shotguns"), lots of small (mass less than 10) cannon fodder (or
flack), and a smattering of ships of sizes in between.

There has been considerable debate in some circles about what
constitutes a good flack design. The obvious (1 1 1 1 0) "fighter"
suffers because it has a poor chance of hitting unarmed enemy flack,
and it has a good chance of dying when shot at by enemy guns.
Similarly, drones (1 0 0 0 0) die a horrible death against an opposing
fleet that has many small guns. Using unarmed flack (say, 1 0 0 2 0)
means that we need to either have lots of medium sized ships with
guns, or build shotguns in order to have enough guns to take out enemy
flack.

Should we build any medium sized ships, bigger than flack, but smaller
than 50? Unsurprisingly, there are two sides to this debate. On the
plus side, these ships are cheap enough we can have more than a
handful in a fleet. The down side is that these ships are vulnerable
to a lucky hit from the enemy's anti-flack guns (or even their flack's
guns), and they almost certainly will die when hit by the big guns.

Are very large ships (mass 150+) worth it? Again, there is no
consensus. If we consider the relatively small number of players that
use them, we can say "probably not." Large ships are very good for
spooking other players and can sometimes attack an enemy fleet on
their own and win. On the down side, upgrading them is horribly
expensive, and not upgrading them means that 15 turns later, after
everyone has developed better technology, they can be knocked out by
an embarrassingly small ship. Then there is the spoiler factor: some
players have been attacked simply because someone else saw them
building a 3+ turn-to-complete ship. This factor has something to do
with a temptation of making the enemy waste several thousand industry
for nothing.

General construction policies

If all our systems were the same size, ship designs would be easy:
we'd be able to interchange production quite easily from world to
world. In Galaxy, and even more so in Blind Galaxy, we seldom have
this chance after the first few turns.

So what are we to do? Should we have hundreds of designs tweaked for
the production abilities of each world, or have a smaller number of
ships types and not worry about production lost due to round off?
Certainly both sides have merit. Production capacity varies
considerably, depending on the resources of a system and MAT
availability. For the beginning player, I would recommend settling on
roughly 10 warship designs. Have 2 or 3 large ships customized for
being built at your homeworld. Have your non-flack designs tweaked for
other worlds where you intend to produce them, and don't worry too
much about production round off error for your flack (which you
produce at the other systems).  Once you have become comfortable with
this strategy, you may experiment with having dozens of warship classes.

For reference, in the game I mentioned above with the 25% drive design
scheme, I had a total of 33 ship designs. Of them, 8 of them were
orbital forts (6 mass 99/100, 2 flack-types), 3 were cargo ships, the
obligatory drone type, and 21 warship designs. In the warship designs,
I had 1 "Miscalculated its mass, oops!" type, 1 prototype commerce
raider, 4 designs that were intended for picket duty, 2 types of flack
(1 of which I stopped making after turn 40 or so, and reassigned to
picket duty), and 14 heavy warship designs (7 which were actively
being produced at the end of the game, including 1 mass 300 ship, and
two mass 198 designs).

Conclusion

I hope that this article has pointed out most of the issues that come
up regarding ship construction, at least as far as the ship's
mission(s) are concerned. I welcome comments, either directly, through
rec.games.pbm, or one of the Galaxy mailing lists.

References

Galaxy: fleet construction
karenh1026@aol.com (KarenH1026)
Thu, 20 Apr 1995 00:00:00 +0000