Our defense after marines

[asleepathewheel]

sounds like something else to coordinate with GoW. It might be beneficial for us to give lego 2 turns warning, that way their east coast might be less defended for a GoW landing...

[DeepO]

Erhmmm... might be better to ask for 2 turns warning from GoW as well, so we all warn them at the same time, and attack at the same time. I fully understand your point, sleepy, but we don't want to advantage GoW over our own, do we? If there were any possibility that they take the hit, and we take the land, I would welcome it

DeepO

[asleepathewheel]

Uh, yeah, that's why I should think before I post....

[Theseus]

OK, here's what I'm hoping for in terms of a military planning process:

* I'm going to take ownership of defensive planning, both land and sea. I'm starting with sea, and have manually determined the boundary of tiles representing 6 move access to any of our tiles, as well as 5 turn access to two or more cities (super danger zones, but also good bombing ranges). Give me a few days to post an image showing all this. From there, I've tweaked sleepy's original naval defense conception... see the preliminary unit requirements at the end of this post. Next I'll be working on land unit requirements.

* Next, we need to flesh out the attack plan. Hopefully Vel will step up on this, building on the thoughts and commentary thus far (I honestly haven;t put much thought into it yet). This will further give DeepO and the team an early indication of unit requirements.

*Next, we mesh the defensive and offensive plans for efficiency and mobile access.

* Next, MASSIVE crtitiquing of the overall war plan, and adjustments accordingly.

Preview of naval defensive unit requirements:
Battleships - 4
Transports - 9
Subs - 12
Destroyers - I am currently thinking of 6 fleets, wiht Destroyers as their backbone... how many per? 3? 4?
Carriers - 6
Bombers - 18, of which at least 6 should also be available for offensive tasking. Also, I'm guessing an additional 8 land-based Bombers, if not more.
Fighters - 6

I know it's a lot... but don;t we all have the sense that a killer defensive naval posture is critical?

And just to stress the system further, I haven;t fully thought it out yet, but in terms of land-based defenses, I am (very preliminarily) predicting:
Infantry - 50
Arty - 25
Tanks - 15-20

Am I insane?

[asleepathewheel]

I think once we see what lego's line consists of we will know more about the navy. Hopefully it will be weak and a sub or two each can take them out. OTOH, carriers w/ bombers can redline just about anything out there, so we can use weak mop up weapons.

How many of what do you see in each theater, T? I think we can get by with stacking ~50% of our home units in Eli, if we have many ships guarding the south and central Stormia-Bob ocean.

[Theseus]

It''ll be more effective to show what I am thinking when I can post the entire plan visually. I should be able to do so over the weekend, or Monday at the latest.

The fundamental problem that I have? Just as our attack plan will in all likelihood include a feint and then a sledgehammer of overwhelming force... then so must we assume Lego's would be as well.

F*ck.

[asleepathewheel]

well, the good news is, that until we ship off, we will have quite a few defenders around, just in case...The concern of course, is the ole double cross by GoW.


One thing we might consider doing is building a settler and putting him on a transport somewhere near the poles. That way our game won't be over immediately if we are double crossed, and our navy will be able to do some damage to the enemy.

[Theseus]

In addition to our offense, our defense, and our economy, we need a special sub-unit devoted to "what legendary actions can we take if all is lost"!!

Maybe we should recruit some of the wackier members of 'poly?

"have a nice day..."

[Theseus]

sleepy, wait'll you seem my re-design of the naval defense plan... I think you'll dig it.

[asleepathewheel]

[Arrian]

Subs - 12

Seems high to me. I admit I don't use them in SP at all, but my recollection is that they suck. I could see us having a specific use for 1 or 2 of them, but 12? Wouldn't we rather have more destroyers?

-Arrian

[asleepathewheel]

Originally posted by Arrian


Seems high to me. I admit I don't use them in SP at all, but my recollection is that they suck. I could see us having a specific use for 1 or 2 of them, but 12? Wouldn't we rather have more destroyers?

-Arrian

We don't want other teams to know we are watching them, do we? Further, we could use subs to scout for pickets closer to legoland.

In SP, yes they suck. I thinkk the stealth in mp will come in handy.

[Arrian]

But 12 of them? I agree they have their uses for scouting (though they aren't foolproof, are they? If Lego tries to sail a ship into a tile with one of our subs, won't they "see" it, sort of?). I just think 12 might be excessive, and our finite resources may be better directed to better combat units.

-Arrian

[vulture]

I also think 12 might be too many. Subs don't get stealth attacks in PtW, remember. Lego will assume we have some, and won't leave ships unstacked, which means that subs have little combat value, but just provide some advance scouting, as long as they don't get run over.

12 subs = 10 destroyers = 6 battleships. For combat value, I'd take the destroyers over the subs.

12 subs is also equal to two fully loaded carriers, with change left over. I'd suggest that two carriers with 8 fighters / bombers provide reasonable advanced recon, combined with combat ability (although more vulnerability to mass loss).

I suspect the idea with subs is that an invading fleet will try to take out any ships it comes across across the board to try and create confusion about the approach route. Subs don't get caught in this (hopefully) and can hang around to see where the main thrust is coming from, so we know where to mass our naval defenses. A destroyer (or transport) screen in the same role would be much easier to wipe out en masse, giving us no useful info. Hunting down every member of a sub screen is much, much harder.

I'm just not sure that this gives us a significant advantage over, say, identifying the areas that allow Lego to threaten the most no. of cities, and massing the 10 extra destroyers in that area. The effectiveness of that tactic depends on where the threat areas are, and how large they are - i.e. can they reasonably be covered by a single stack of 10 destroyers. That way any fleet in such an area faces a greater chance of losing a significant number of troops (hopefully marines) in the boats, thus offsetting the value of threatening a wider range of targets. If they shy away from the threat zone, then there are (by definition) fewer cities to defend, so we can stack them high with infantry.

[vulture]

Map of our 'threat zones' below.

Different coloured dots indicate a tile from which a Lego transport (magellan enhanced) could lanuch a marine attack against different numbers cities.

Red: 6 cities
Magenta (Purple): 5 cities
Green: 4 cities
Blue: 3 cities
no dots for 2 or 1 cities - they're the low threat areas anyway. Only GS cities are considered - RP look after their own defence (we can't spread our infantry into their cities anyway).

EDIT: ignore the top left patch of green dots next to RP territory - that is from when I was including RP cities, which I eventually decided against, but I couldn't easily get rid of the dots afterwards.



As you can see, our biggest danger zone is not too accessible to Lego (although ND and GoW can still pose a threat there even with slower transports - but there is no 6-city threat zone). There are 3 small isolated danger areas on our east coast - but our defences along that coast can be parked in those zones (or the approaches to them). The big danger area that Lego can reach is along our South-West coastline - either coming around the bottom of Stormia, or the long way around beneath ND.