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Thursday, October 02, 2008

Developing Ground Combat in the Star Fleet Universe

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Ground combat in Star Fleet Battles is very abstract, and going outside abstract is always going to be a problem. This is because of transporters. In current times if you are advancing and run into an obstacle you generally have to overcome it. Whether that means making the enemy force blocking you "go away" (destroy it or make it leave), or building a bridge over the river, or clearing the fallen trees from the road, or what have you. Yes, today we do have some "vertical envelopment" (whether by helicopter or by parachute). But these are subject to interdiction and the forces they deliver are relatively immobile. (Yes, the helicopters could be sent to pick the men up again, but this is time consuming.)

With transporters this all changes.

If you are advancing and hit an insurmountable barrier between you and your objective, you can use transporters to drop a force of nearly any size on the other side of the obstacle. You do not have to worry about keeping the force supplied, because you can transport down rations and replacement powerpacks for their weapons, and transport up any wounded for treatment (yes, it is not quite that simple in execution). If the defending transporter network has been destroyed (relatively easy for an attacking force to destroy any transporter capable installations from space) he will be reliant on shuttles, which are fairly easy to interdict and shoot down (when you are in control of space). Even better, this means most of his troops will simply be in large self-sustaining self-guarding prison camps (a battalion in a ground combat location on the other side of a continent can do nothing to help a battalion on the other side of that continent) until the attacker decides it is time to deal with them.

The upshot is that a defense pretty much has to be based on putting as much combat power as you can to fight for the few points the attacker must have (like the Dilithium Crystal mine), and pretty much ignore the rest of the planet.

This leaves little room for "maneuver" in the classic sense, relegating ground combat to little more than the defense, or seizure, of strongpoints, essentially a return to a siege mentality.