Proposed Battlegroup Change

I was talking to a few other doods and had this idea for how you guys should rework battlegroups. See its my opinion right now, that battlegroups just are all around inefficient, but sadly necessary. The question is, are they necessary because they exist, or actually necessary? Causes a lot of arguments. But I’ve an idea on how to fix it that seems to me like it would work nicely, and it would be bigger than simply battlegroups. First, remove the limitation of 4 ships in a battlegroup, now hold on and read the rest, just change it to 5 or 6, preferably 5, but even without doing that the next step is what really matters. Limit how many of those battlegrouped ships actually function, by how many crewmen are onboard the flagship. If you have a fleet of 3 cappies, for example, you will require 3 pilots onboard the flagship in order to move them all. Actual, human, pilots. 1 crew member, for each ship in the battlegroup. Furthermore, 1 crew member for each squadron (Not squadroned ship, squadron), and then alter blockade to require a minimum of 4 ships in orbit in order to function. Further alter it so that the more ships orbiting the blockaded world, the faster the support drops, and this slowly puts an end to the whole 1-3 pilots dictating the course of the entire mud, and at the same time, forcibly involves more, creates situations where people must learn something new, and last but not least, massive epic battles with 20 cappies per side…will have more than 3 people involved.

Also, change ping to not work on anything cappie size or greater. Because ping sucks.

I support the idea of making massive fleet controls more than a 1 player task. The rinse and repeat every TL of one guy in the Navy from Side A versus one guy in the Navy from Side B being the bulk of the deciding factor of things, needs to be rethought out. Yeah yeah I know that the Navy isn’t the only thing that matters, but we all know exactly how the era’s go every single time. Lets change up an outdated system.

As for ping, I’m all for it being adjusted in some manner. I’m not sure if I’m completely for removing it, since it theoretically could lead to other cool stuff happening..but as is, all it is is a warning system to let you know a fleet is incoming. There’s no such thing as a sneak attack anymore for space, unless the person being attacked is just incompetent.

I would also like to suggest that the action of checking a ship for lifeforms should take more than a split second to accomplish. I’m not sure how canon it is SW wise to be able to scan a ship from a distance and tell the lifeforms, especially since in the movies they had to capture the ship and board it to scan it. A counter to this of course would be to offer some way to hide within a ship to escape the scan. A smuggler feat maybe? I dunno. It just seems rather easy to stat a ship and go “Hey who’s the other guy on board with you?”

See while battlegroup is nice I think we should disband it. The system works for tiny navys I think we should go back to the old operator of 1 player 1 ship. If you wanna field 5 caps you need 5 pilots. Disable battlegroup out right.

I love battlegroup, it enables 1 pilot to fight 4, because as we all know, not every clan will have equal numbers of players that will be willing to do something. It also awards whomever learns how to use it better. I love me some quick spacemaths to figure out what I’m working with and how fast the other guy is burning fuel/munitions/squadrons, and how to counter to an advantage. One on one only rewards who forces more people to roll pilots, and then timelines would be decided before you bother trying.

With that same line of thought though, you can argue the other side of it…1 person (only some players of course) running a fleet, era after era, ends up becoming the biggest force.

As much as I like the days before Battlegroup became -truly- prevalent, I think battlegroup does as exactly as Quicksilver says. Sure, the fleet with more people is always going to have an edge, but at least with battlegroup that edge is mitigated to a degree. I don’t think navies are also boiled down to person A vs Person B. The admirals are the more well-known people, but they usually have support staff if available.

Thats balogny gathorn, we saw it this era. No one but the hero admiral is allowed to ever touch fleets. People are scared to make mistakes because instead of 1 ship 1 pilot loss a space battle loss can devastate a clan.

If you remove ‘only certain amount of capships in space’ rule, you’ll get over 9000 capships in space, which will pretty much blow you up if you come near. Even satellites could be brutal if you weren’t careful. People would still be scared to go out even with single capships, since only MC80 blueprint cost almost 2 million credits.

Now, with battlegroups, sure, you can lose a couple of ships. But wasn’t Quicksilver saying that not many people didn’t even want to learn? I’d be willing to teach people battlegroup ICly.

People should also not be afraid to lose ships. I don’t care if people lose ships unless they do really retarded stuff like break space rules so imms take your ships away (looking at Kelrith and company now), or destroying fleets without thinking stuff over (like when Republic went from Coruscant to Arkania in one jump, good job.). Credits and ships can be rebuilt.

Edit: Although I liked the old days too, there’s still not many people. I killed general Trax in one ship when NR was blockading Dantooine. The clan with more pilots will most likely win. We did pretty well in RA, Corsairs and mandalorian clans because we cooperated. I’m not the best pilot, but still. Like Gathorn said, BG makes easier for clans to get navy thing going somewhere.

I did some learning on Battlegroups last era. It’s not really difficult to grasp, but takes practice. Aliases help. However, as Flek pointed out, it will almost never come down to “support staff ” in Naval fights because no one wants to lose any of their ships. That attitude has killed more than one clan Navy. Yet time and again, when people find out that they have certain players in their clan like Ocerion, Oteri, Paco, etc. it will always be that way. I’m guilty of doing it too. People just hate to lose.

It’s very rarely 1 pilot vs 1 pilot. What it most often is: “We won’t move WITHOUT that 1 pilot”.

[Edit] The problem is the mentality, not battlegroup itself. Like Rakun said, with the mandalorians, most of us had no problem moving without the admiral or missing one person. Say what you will about how we only moved in groups, there was no specific person that had to be awake for it to happen. This is not the case for a majority of clans who refuse to move without their Admiral Hero being on to guide them. To say Admiral Hero of every clan are the ONLY people fighting naval fights is ignorant and false. They almost always have other pilots if they can.

I actually really liked the idea of like most SWRs making fighters basically one of the best ships around. As awesome and unique as the battlegroup thing is, I feel like it’s a little too strong compared to other things and makes clans only require a few pilots. Granted a capital ship should still definitely be able to take on ONE fighter unlike other muds, but if a squadron of piloted fighters (and a Corellian flying a modified YT-1300 to save the day) could be good and meaningful I think it could open new doors for PvP and RP. That way there can be pilot heroes without being the hero admiral that takes four planets in one night since the counter to a squadron would be a bigger squadron and more people would roll pilots and not HAVE to rely on just being in the clan with the most capital ships. Leader-pilot bonus could maybe help or factor in here too?

I’m not against toning down capital ships. I’ve been for it for awhile. It just has to wait its turn in the code-line.

Sure it may be okay for other Navies to just go ahead and do something without the Admiral, but 99% of the time, it’s “Don’t touch the fleet or die as a traitor” mentality. There isn’t really much you can do except kill the Admiral and take his place or hope he dies in disgrace.

I think we should move on from changing battlegroup, and move into making squadrons manned like battlegroups.

Okay, so we were discussing this over OOC and here’s the idea:

We give ship sizes numerical numbers:
Cruisers are 2, Battleships are 4, Spacestations (SSDs) are 6.

We toss the four ship limit on battlegroup, and instead set a numerical limit of 10 units (refer to above values). This will encourage diversity in a battlegroup, you can choose between five Cruisers (2×5=10), two battleships and a cruiser (4×2+2=10), a battleship and three cruisers (4+2×3). And so on. (Note that we were debating between 10 and 12 to being the limit, I’m open to either, really).

Right now space is just a race to whoever can develop the biggest and baddest ship, then build it the quickest. It -should- be about how well you use the ships you have. It makes sense to limit the ships this way, as commanding two battleships and a cruiser would likely be as rigorous as commanding five cruisers (just a way to validate it ICly).

Anyways, it’s just an idea, feel free to toss it around.