[Barnacle Bill]

Well, the Germans didn't stay and get wiped out at Jutland, either. Their fleet overall was smaller, but they initiated the operation in hope of catching a significant portion of the British fleet alone before the British could concentrate. When they realized that the British had assembled a superior fleet on the spot, they retreated toward their home port. The British broke off pursuit because they feared the short-ranged German torpedo boats that would be near the German base.

If we had the retreat rules I have proposed in SE4, the SE4 Version of Jutland would play out like this. The Germans on their move attacked an inferior British fleet with their main force. The British retreated from that combat into an adjacent sector where they had another fleet, so that their combined total outnumbered the German fleet. Seeing that, he German's then headed for their nearby heavily defended colony with their remaining MP for the turn. On their following turn, the British attacked the Germans with their superior fleet, but the Germans retreated until they got into the same sector as their colony. The British then declined to pursue into the sector containing the colony, because they didn’t want to face the German fleet and colony defenses together.

However, I would be OK with simply removing the borders, or making the tactical map so big they didn’t matter (which might be easier to code). I think retreat would be better, but that would fix the biggest problems and be less complicated. Basically, you would want the opposing forces to start as far apart as they do today, but either of them should be able to run in a straight line away from the other for 30 tactical turns at top speed without hitting the wall. Although I don’t think anything in the game now can get a tactical speed above 7, I would suggest allowing for up to 10 (or more) to maintain flexibility for mods. For example, in Starfire editions 1-3 it worked like SE4 in which the “base” speed of hulls BC and below is 6, while every hull above BC loses a little more of that. In Starfire 4th edition, they have made it so that you lose maximum base speed at the hull size increases over the entire range of hull speeds. We might want to do that in SE4 as well, and would need those extra speed points.

One reason we might want to do that is the missile problem, which Starfire is wrestling with now as well. If your weapons have longer range and your speed is equal or greater, if you have room to run then your enemy can’t hurt you. You may not be able to hurt him, either, if he has a lot of PD, but that is not necessarily the problem. Since a game like this has all these options, people want them to actually be viable options so that everybody doesn’t just build the same “optimum” ship designs. Then there is the concern that you couldn’t intercept enemy fleets threatening your colonies before they got there, if the bombers/raiders we fast enough to avoid your intercepting fleet (retreat or bigger tactical map doesn’t matter). The colony issue can be addressed by changes which make it impossible to put weapons that can hurt a colony on smaller ships and making smaller ships faster than medium or large ships, which means you keep those smaller ships even in later game for exactly this purpose. It would also help if we give enough of a range advantage to fixed defenses that no ship of any size can stand off and pound them. However, to keep the other weapons viable I think you will end up having to do two more things – introduce an opportunity fire system and reduce the range at which seekers can launch. That way, missile ships have to expose themselves at least briefly to opportunity fire from other weapons in order to launch. I think all these changes together, as a package, would make it a better game.

More on the small ship thing. This would take some AI coding to make the AI use proper tactics, but I think it would be worth it. Historically, you had these small torpedo-armed ships that were hard to hit but fragile if you did, armed with short-ranged weapons that could threaten battleships. Those same weapons were virtually worthless on bigger ships because they lacked the maneuverability to employ them properly. So, you had distinct tactical roles for ships of different sizes. Big ships pound other big ships at long range. Some little ships try to get in close to the big ships with torpedoes. The other little ships and the medium ships try to keep the other side’s torpedo ships away from the big ships. I think a class of powerful short-ranged weapons could be introduced to model this (I’d give them a range of 1 and a pretty long reload time, and of course unusable against planets). There would be an ability you could assign to a hull which would be create a to hit decrement just when using this class of weapon, so you could make it increasingly difficult to use these weapons as your hull size went up. I’d also balance things so that the “to hit” protection of smaller ships would make them really hard to hit with this class of weapons. The idea would be that the new class of weapons would really be pretty useless except by small ships against big ships, but devastating if small ships armed with them can get in range of big ships. It should be set up so that a “balanced fleet” is superior to an all little ship fleet, though.