WC Fleet Engagements

Greetings peoples this is my first topic in this thread.

I want to raise the subject of large scale fleet engagements in all WC eras.
Before I start, yes I know the game engine was incapable of properly showing things like this so I will refer to ship stats and other on paper style details.

In WC1 Confed had access to a Carrier (Battle Carrier?), a Destroyer and a Corvette (only time Confed uses a Corvette!). Going by real world fleet information a battle group would consist of something like 1-2 Carriers and like a dozen Destroyers and Corvettes.
The Kilrathi had only a Destroyer and a Cruiser to work with.

In theory that would mean Confed would be capable of depolying much larger numbers of Fighters and could potentially execute hit and run or fast moving attacks with its Destroyers and Corvettes... How come Confed always seemed to get really beaten up by the Kilrathi? Was it bad tactics or were the Kilrathi just more experienced? In theory Confed should have secured an early victory.

Feel free to throw in arguements for all WC games!
 
Those were the only ships we encountered in WC 1 but of course the Kilrathi did have carriers: they appear in WCATV, the WCM and in the novels.
There more types of ships in this era than Claw marks shows.

And I think the McAuliffe ambush did heavily damage Confed's fleet (even though it was mostly battleships).
 
I should have expected someone to say that

On paper most of the time Confed vessels seem marginally better then their Kilrathi counterparts.

In the WC movie it shows a very submarine style of fighting between capships. But in the games it seems more like the start of StarWarsIII, with ships turing into broadside positions and just slugging it out. Just like battleships in WWI and WWII. As mentioned in another topic the armaments of ships tend to vary a lot but going back to my real world references large battleships have many many weapons systems and some (like the old Missouri) had a combination of old technology and new things like Tomahawk missles.

I believe in WC the Capships would be far more effective at destroying other Capships... I know I will probably regret saying this but what is a fighter or bomber compared to a destroyer or cruiser at killing capships??
 
You should read Action Stations, the novel pretty effectively displays why fighters are so important during the war. Basically, before the Kilrathi War, standard battles consisted of exactly what you are saying, battleships slugging it out. They were the only ships that had the weapons to knock out other ships's shields. At the outbreak of the war the Kilrathi developed torpedoes that would actually bypass shields all together. It would only take 3-4 hits from these torpedoes to take down a capship as well. So a squadron of 16 bombers could, on a very good day, take out 4 caphips without having to return to ship. Bomber squadrons became much more potent weapons than entire battleships.
 
That bomber squadrons have been more potent than battleships is not cool. Bothers me because it reduces capships to speedbumps and demands an answer to the question, why would a faction build anything except carriers and, i guess, transports? Seriously, why use a single scrap of metal elsewhere when you could be stamping a fighter out of it? (Planetary bombardment isn't a very satisfying answer here, IMO) I am particularly disappointed that they did not do anything to address this balance issue in Prophecy. They had this giant 3D capships that were very impressive looking, yet still failed to impress because you knew they weren't ever really going to do anything.

Basically, I think the way they handled the introduction of torpedoes (among other technologies) in WC2 was seriously flawed. Stop putting these things on every damn fighter out there! I kept waiting to see a Cessna on the flight deck being fitted with a torpedo hardpoint. Torpedoes should have been for bombers, period.

Then WC3 comes along with its "phase penetrating technology" and ever since then we've been able to scrape turrets off of the ships with our guns. This seems most silly in Prophecy, where, if you shoot the capship's hull, you get a shield effect, but if you shoot somethign worthwhile like a turret, it blows up.


and though the whole bombing element of the game has been tweaked in each game since WC2, IMO the games to date still haven't come up with a satisfying way to make capships more than just goofy giants, but still leave a role for bomber squadrons.

Indulge my imagination for a second... Suppose the phaseshield idea were brought back: Most or all fighterbased guns will not be able to penetrate the shields. Then, imagine that light torpedoes have a "dumbfire mode," ie, if you fire without a lock, the thing goes straight ahead like a dumbfire, penetrates the shields and is therefore useful for knocking out gun mounts, missile racks, whatever, and you could also lock it on if you wanted to. heavy torpedoes could require a lock and deal lots of damage (many times more than the LTs). The damag that the big torps does could be balanced with the damage that, say, a destroyer does so that the rate at which an enemy capship takes damage from a destroyer is significantly higher than vis-a-vis a bomber wing. I could go on with these details, but the point is, we need a paradigm that affords both bomber squadrons and destroyers/cruisers/ships of the line a real role and not just a chance to brag about the size of the models in the game.
 
Primate said:
But lots of them?

Thousands.

TheVipersFang said:
In WC1 Confed had access to a Carrier (Battle Carrier?), a Destroyer and a Corvette (only time Confed uses a Corvette!).

Corvettes are also featured in the WC Movie, End Run & Fleet Action novels and Prophecy documentation.

DeFrancoj said:
That bomber squadrons have been more potent than battleships is not cool. Bothers me because it reduces capships to speedbumps and demands an answer to the question, why would a faction build anything except carriers and, i guess, transports? Seriously, why use a single scrap of metal elsewhere when you could be stamping a fighter out of it? (Planetary bombardment isn't a very satisfying answer here, IMO) I am particularly disappointed that they did not do anything to address this balance issue in Prophecy. They had this giant 3D capships that were very impressive looking, yet still failed to impress because you knew they weren't ever really going to do anything.

I think the basic premise here is a bit off right from the start. You talk about WC2 screwing everything up with the torpedoes, but WC2 also had amazing capship combat. Escorting a Gilgamesh out somewhere to take down a Ralatha or watching the Concordia bust out eight AMG bursts at a Fralthra was incredible. The games are obviously centered around the fighter pilots, so that's why we always see situations where they come out on top, but this is clearly not the only thing that happens in-universe. Capital ships patrol the frontiers, maintain picket lines and hold out in space for years against the Kilrathi. They have a different role than fighters, but they're important to have in the Wing Commander context. I think the Secret Ops capships were some of the most impressive ever. The big guns on something like the Cerberus or Tereshkova saw quite a bit of action.
 
The gameplay of WC is of course made in a way that fighters are the most amazing weapon. It's also modelled after WW2, and it's a given fact that ordinary battleships were less important in warfare than carriers. That being said, it's also critical to notice that not only carriers carry fighters, but most other ships classes, including destroyers. Besides, destroyers are much, much cheaper to build than carriers, and you can know that by the disproportion on their numbers.

But a lot of the impression is caused by gameplay. WC2 is the best example of capship combat. The weapons are very effective. WC4 also gives us some good combat, but apparently it's made just by turrents. WCSO has great capships, but during the game the weapons are basically useless, again, because of the way the game is presented. Since specific components must be hit in order to destroy an enemy capships, the guns are not all that useful. In-universe it's probably a whole different deal.
 
Making reference to WWII again...

In WWII the Carrier and its dive bombers and torpedo bombers revolutionised naval warfare... suddenly a squadron of fighters and bombers (Fighter Bombers too) were a real serious threat to ANY ship. But it ofter took an entire compliment of aircraft to attack and destroy just a single ship, and many more to damage a fleet. That said escorting fighters often shredded bombers before they got any where new their targets.

Ok how does this translate into WC you ask?

I do agree that WC is Fighter oriented, thats the idea of the game. BUT torpedoes became far too powerful with many cases of a single bomber killing 1 or 2 CapShips all too easily as well as polishing off the fighter escorts. That was overkill I guess. Has anyone played Freespace or Freespace 2? That captured the best features of in game CapShip VS Capship combat with fighters and bombers being just that: capable of destroying smaller CapShips in large numbers. CapShip defenses were nasty to say the least especially on higher difficulty settings. When it came to 2 or more CapShips going at it a fighter of any kind was well advised to stay the hell out of the way especially when a CapShip exploded with a huge blast radius.

WE NEED A NEW WC GAME... HEAR OUT PLEA GAME DEVELOPERS AND MOD MAKERS!!!! WE BEG YOU!!!
 
The games are obviously centered around the fighter pilots, so that's why we always see situations where they come out on top, but this is clearly not the only thing that happens in-universe.
First, I admit to a total lack of knowledge about events that happen in-universe but out-game. I'm certainly not suggesting that WC would have been better off if it were more like Homeworld or something, where an individual fighter is just some gnat swarming around getting a load of the pretty colors coming out of the battleships. However, I still think it would be/would've been possible to leave a role for ships of the line and a role for bomber squadrons, particularly by the time Prophecy came out. To say that capships do all these wonderful things in-universe but not in-game doesn't explain how it happens. I quote Sarty, who appears to be more familiar with the universe as supplied by the novels:
...read Action Stations...before the Kilrathi War, standard battles consisted of...battleships slugging it out. At the outbreak of the war the Kilrathi developed torpedoes...it would only take 3-4 hits from these torpedoes to take down a capship as well. So a squadron of 16 bombers could, on a very good day, take out 4 caphips without having to return to ship. Bomber squadrons became much more potent weapons than entire battleships.
This demands an answer to the question, why would any faction continue to build giant cruisers, dreadnaughts, "destroyers" that look a little too big for the name (Ralari, Orca), et cetera?
Delance said:
It's also modelled after WW2, and it's a given fact that ordinary battleships were less important in warfare than carriers
Granted. But again, why are all the factions building these less-important classes of ships--these monumentally huge/expensive less-important classes of ships? One answer, by the time WC3 comes around is, it's technically feasable and visually pleasing from a game-design standpoint. Which just brings me back to my main point: With a little imagination and current technological standards (let me again declare my ignorance: I know nothing technical about game design), we could have a WC game that leaves an important role for bomber sqaudrons while making these huge ships something more than speedbumps.

Capital ships patrol the frontiers, maintain picket lines and hold out in space for years against the Kilrathi.
We (I) just haven't been given a reason to think that they can do any of these things better than fighters can, unless by capital ships, you simply mean, ships that carry fighters. Somebody pointed out that we see almost every class of ship carrying fighters at one point or another; I claim that this only reinforces my point.

I make two more related points to show that the way WC2 handles capships and bombing causes the logical problems I've been talking about and demands a better system, one that leaves a role for both ships of the line and bomber squadrons:
You talk about WC2 screwing everything up with the torpedoes
Yes, because they opened up this can of worms where just about every ship in the fleet can carry the damn things. I don't like this. The idea of a specialized fighter class that accepts significant drawbacks in order to deliver a potent weapon is really cool and exciting, but putting the things on half a dozen different classes of fighter is not cool, IMO. I just thought of something else... don't we see capships firing *torpedoes* at each other in WC2? Isn't this kind of like launching a stinger missile out of a howitzer (when you could just fire it from your shoulder)?
Escorting a Gilgamesh out somewhere to take down a Ralatha...was incredible
Yes, when it worked out it was satisfying, but perhaps not as satisfying as it could be. The player (especially if that player is me :cool: ) still finds himself wondering why the fleet would risk that kind of hardware and personnel on a job that two epees can do without too much trouble.
So, there may have been some cool capship combat in WC2, but it doesn't "fit," logically.
 
Carriers are very expensive. Destroyers are cheap. That's why.

From a gameplay POV, destroyers are good targets for strike missions. They just stand there with some escort for the player to blow up. They are also good objectives for escort missions.
 
In other words, a destroyer force sufficient for killing a carrier is cheaper than sending a whole carrier after it.

For example, let us say that the Concordia is operating in Kilrathi space on its own with no destroyer escort. The Kilrathi can either divert a fleet carrier to engage it with bombers (and risk their own carrier), or they can send a squadron of destroyers after it (or a Fralthi/Fralatha with a destroyer escort). Carriers are fantastically expensive--I believe that Fleet Action said that the Concordia cost fifty billion credits to build (i.e. at least ten times as much as its fighter complement). So it turns out that it is cheaper for the Kilrathi to send the destroyers after the Concordia.
 
Cost, yes. Also you have the minor detail that a fighter wing takes a huge amount of maintenance, and you can make a non-carrier compact and durable without impacting any fighter wing. The crew of a capship is also able to patch their ship up much more effectively than a fighter's pilot, allowing long times on station (I believe this is a common theme for stories involving corvette crews?). Besides, if it comes down to fleet action the destroyers provide a crunchy hard shell to chew through before you get to the sweet chewy carrier core.
 
Delance's glib response doesn't really address the issue.
If we're talking about destroyers qua destroyers, then two epees and a pair of torpedoes have got to be cheaper. If we're talking about destroyers in their capacity to deploy fighters from a small hangar, then the word "destroyer" effectively refers to a little carrier. In either case, there still isn't a compelling reason to build a "destroyer" class vessel with the intention of actually serving as a destroyer.

From a gameplay POV, destroyers are good targets for strike missions. They just stand there with some escort for the player to blow up.
This is my point exactly. In the combat paradigm used pretty much throughout the WC games, ships of the line are just speed bumps, and it's hard to justify their existence apart from their capacity, if any, to carry a fighter compliment.

(And if you justify the existence of, say, a Kilrathi cruiser by pointing out that it has a fighter compliment, then you have to further justify its design. The problem is still there: why would anybody waste materiel on anything but fighters and the means to extend their range (and of course transports/freighters)?

ljuin's response doesn't really affect the argument either... bombers have a pretty fantastic range, even being able to jump out-system and back to engage a target. They can also be refueled in-flight, and launched from planets, starbases, carriers, and a variety of other classes of capital ship.

So even if carriers are very very expensive, there's still no way to justify the existence/design of capships qua ships-of-the-line--why we see kilrathi or nephilim or confed cruisers/destroyers/dreadnaughts out there.

Chernikov said:
you can make a non-carrier compact and durable without impacting any fighter wing.
What exactly is durable? Destroyers go down with one or two torpedoes in WC2.

Simply saying "cost" doesn't really solve this problem. I again quote Sarty:
Bomber squadrons became much more potent weapons than entire battleships.
A bomber squadron has got to be cheaper than a battleship, or even a cruiser or destroyer.
 
There are a small handfull of carriers, due not only to the costs of the ship construction, but training costs to crew the carriers and their flight decks (which was a part of the decline of the IJN's carrier force in the latter part of WW2, many of the trained pilots with experience from the start of the war were downed, leaving cannon fodder scraped from their flight schools to throw at qualitatively and quantitatively superior US forces). There are hundreds of systems to cover.

That the focus of the games is on carrier combat doesn't mean that's all that there is, we're only one small (if well-known, later in the war) cog in a huge war machine spread across hundreds of light years. Not seeing something doesn't mean it doesn't happen (hell, we never see a toilet or mention of one in the WC universe... does that mean everyone has infinite bladders? :p )
 
DeFrancoj said:
Delance's glib response doesn't really address the issue.
If we're talking about destroyers qua destroyers, then two epees and a pair of torpedoes have got to be cheaper. . .


ljuin's response doesn't really affect the argument either... bombers have a pretty fantastic range, even being able to jump out-system and back to engage a target. They can also be refueled in-flight, and launched from planets, starbases, carriers, and a variety of other classes of capital ship. . .

So even if carriers are very very expensive, there's still no way to justify the existence/design of capships qua ships-of-the-line--why we see kilrathi or nephilim or confed cruisers/destroyers/dreadnaughts out there. . .

Simply saying "cost" doesn't really solve this problem. I again quote Sarty:
A bomber squadron has got to be cheaper than a battleship, or even a cruiser or destroyer.

Every time you commit a carrier to an action, you are risking the carrier, not just its fighter complement. Bombers seem to be capable of at most one jump in each direction without refueling, so you can not simply keep them at a stationary base--you need the carrier if you are thinking of going into enemy-held territory. This means that you have to add your carrier onto the "cost" side of the equation as well as the fighters and bombers that it carries, since if your carrier gets close enough to the enemy that you can send your bombers after them, then THEY are close enough to send their bombers after YOU.

However, the number of destroyers necessary to destroy a carrier have a collective price tag lower than that of the carrier plus its complement. For example, say that destroyers cost ten billion each, and the carrier plus its complement costs sixty billion. If it destroying the carrier results on average in the destruction of five or less destroyers, then the monetary cost is in favor of using destroyers.
 
I'm not trying to repudiate canon; I'm not trying to insist that the whole WC universe makes no sense and is just stupid and silly. What I'm doing is making the virtually unassailable point that the way combat is presented in the games creates logical problems with the fleet compositions observed in the storyline. I'm further suggesting that the way fighters relate to capships in combat is not very satisfying from a gameplay standpoint, at least not that satisfying to me: I would get a larger thrill out of taking out these titanic warships if I were afraid they would actually serve some role in the game other than pincushion for my torpedoes. Lastly, I'm trying to invite a discussion of how we would like Prophecy or some future game to address this problem in such a way that it leaves a role both for bomber squadrons and for ships of the line.

In WC2, IIRC, we see a Sabre (a single fighter!) armed with no less than six torpedoes. That's conceivably enough firepower to wipe out...six destroyers. This Obviously calls in to question the logic behind building and deploying large numbers of destroyers (particularly, as in your example, deploying them against carriers!) when the resources committed thereto could be used to make things like fighters and carriers. Furthermore, both of you seem to have this idea that a carrier will cost more than a ship of similar size that is intended for some other role. That seems unwarranted, considering that a carrier is/could be just a big crate that houses fighters.

Rowboats are very cheap, but they simply do not have a role in a modern navy. For all I know, modern battleships are cheaper than aircraft carriers and their aircraft. They still don't have a role in light of weapons balance in modern warfare so, they are not deployed!. Analogously, in WC ships of the line don't really have a role in light of the weapons balance presented in-game.

I think that that could be/could have been addressed.

It seems to me that you are basically trying to stick up for/justify the universe's storyline, and taking an indefensible position to do it, when I'm not really attacking it. What I'm really interested in is, what would an in-game weapons balance that didn't present these problems to the logic of the universe look like? What would be a tenable relationship between fighters and capships that would leave a role for bomber squadrons without completely obliterating any role for capital ships (apart from being able to carry fighters)?

Read my second post in this thread again, and consider that simply saying "cost" doesn't quite resolve the issue. (nor does another glib observation such as "Just because we haven't seen it...")
 
~~~, i agree with DeFrancoj, but the answer has nothing to do with practicality, it has more to do with giving players more interesting things to destroy in-game (e.g. a destroyer sprite vs. a transport sprite). I know that a majority (or at least a vocal minority) of this community hates freespace and everything about it, but I still submit that the role of capships in-game is something freespace did better then WC. WC had, by far, better dogfights and pilot on pilot interaction, but most Capships in WC are really just speedbumps.

I would love to see major Capships have multitiered self-defense systems. By multitiered, I don't mean just fighters and flak guns, I mean long range missile systems, AMG's, flak guns, point defense laser turrets, short range missile launchers, torpedo tubes, etc. The point would be to make capships not only something to be feared, but to make it so a diverse (read: not just a single fighter) taskforce would be required to defeat them.

The only problem, as I see it, is a gameplay balancing problem, in that if Capships are that strong, you, as the player, live during the initial strike virtually only by chance, or by sitting back and letting half your squadron mates get wiped out in the first strike. XWing v. Tie Fighter addressed this shortcoming by letting you "spawn" into other ships in your squadron, so you could participate in the entire engagement, but that particular model doesn't work in the WC universe, as you are assumed to be a single character. Any thoughts on how to address such an issue?
 
The capships are supposed to do more stuff than we actually get to see in the games. The games are made for a fighter's POV. For example, the capship weapons on WCP are mostly useless. The big guns on WCSO can fire all day on an enemy capships without destroying it. That's probably not supposed to work that way, but the gameplay is made to be played from a fighter's perspective. If someone decided to may "Destroyer Commander", a couple of fighters with torps probably wouldn't be able to blow up one, because of the game balance.

One some other thread, LOAF was noticing the game doesn't even model all the weapons on the capships. When the Intrepid fights with a Confed cruiser on WCIV, they use turrets, even tought both ships probably have anti-capship weapons.
 
well.. it seems to me that people are bringing up at least one good point, that point being that WC is a game. If you actually made WWII in space, it would not exactly be the same kind of flying experience, now would it?

Think about it. WWII a war where over your entire career as a pilot you could expect to get maybe 2-3 aircraft kills, an ace got 5 and the best aces of the war got no more than 30.

Sure ships were hard to take down in WWII, but they weren't exactly using advanced weaponry, they were using tempermental torpedos (slow to 140 knots, get down to 40 meters from the water line, level out, drop and hope it isn't a dud)and sivar forbid we might actually add a gun to a torpedo bomber that didn't fire out of its tail.

We as wing commander players are accustomed to high adrenaline, high octane fighter duels with dozens of targets. I, myself, usually am an "ace" within about 4 minutes of turning on my computer and playing WC.

How far do you think you would get in WC if you lost 4 squadrons of fighters every time you wanted to take on a carrier. The game makes capital ships feel like speedbumps sometimes, but remember, you are supposed to be playing one of the best pilots who has ever lived, a pilot with decades of combat experience. I doubt that every pilot in the confed has 10k fighter kills over his career, otherwise it would be a very short war.

As for Capital ships, I see over and over again that they are useless in WC, that is just not true. Sure they are limited in capability during space engagements, but really how effective was a solitary destroyer in WWII? Where a destroyer shined was in its high speed, submarine hunting, scouting and torpedo craft functions. (yes destroyers have torpedos, they used them quite often) Even those wooden PT boats of old had two torpedo launchers.

The Capital ships of wing commander are often more powerful than the game depicts according to their weapon loadouts from the materials available. Even the enemy fighters often have ordnance that they just don't use against you because the missions would be impossible to beat.

I see capital ships in WC being used as they were in world war II. First and foremost, a capital ship was a way to assert dominance over a piece of real estate, they are much longer range than fighters or bombers, second, they could be given duties such as patroling a sea/space zone, thirdly they were used to assert dominance over landing zones, in space this would mean space stations and planets. A stationary target is a dead target. Shore bombardment was much more effective in WWII than even aerial bombardment when you needed to pound a concentrated area with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of explosives. Often, the battle was over before the landing even began.

I have always gotten the feeling that the carrier war we get to see in WC is really Tolwyn's rogue war, no carrier battle groups, just a single carrier, its fighter compliment and whatever aid it can drag out of nearby systems making dangerous recon campaigns deep into enemy territory. I don't think that is the norm of the war, I think it is a strategy born of desperation (eisen says as much a few times in WCIII)

I think the "speedbumps" have a much larger role in the war than is realized.
 
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