Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - Mass Combat battle strategy: Destroy enemy element!

Skarg · 05-18-2015, 07:36 PM

The effectiveness of targeting seems too absolute, to me.

For example, in World War II carrier battles, bombers were often tasked with attacking only the enemy carriers in a battle group, but their escorting fighters would have to engage any enemy fighters, and the bombers would sometimes fail to get any hits on the carriers, and might sometimes end up bombing other ships.

In another example, in a World War II land battle where the enemy has some tanks, you might love to take those out first, but you can't just ignore the enemy infantry, and the enemy may have they tanks be cautious enough you don't get much chance to target them.

And of course in your example where someone wants to target the enemy leaders first, or the wizards... that could often be difficult or impossible.

So realistically it would be situation-specific but in most cases somehow limited how successful it is possible to be at concentrating on certain elements. There should probably be another roll (contest of tactics?) with modifiers, to see how effective the side using this tactic is in allocating damage to the desired target, and it should rarely be absolute unless the situation allows it (e.g. spaceship combat where everything's in range and nothing has any way to hide).

05-18-2015, 07:36 PM	#2
Skarg Join Date: May 2015	Re: Mass Combat battle strategy: Destroy enemy element! The effectiveness of targeting seems too absolute, to me. For example, in World War II carrier battles, bombers were often tasked with attacking only the enemy carriers in a battle group, but their escorting fighters would have to engage any enemy fighters, and the bombers would sometimes fail to get any hits on the carriers, and might sometimes end up bombing other ships. In another example, in a World War II land battle where the enemy has some tanks, you might love to take those out first, but you can't just ignore the enemy infantry, and the enemy may have they tanks be cautious enough you don't get much chance to target them. And of course in your example where someone wants to target the enemy leaders first, or the wizards... that could often be difficult or impossible. So realistically it would be situation-specific but in most cases somehow limited how successful it is possible to be at concentrating on certain elements. There should probably be another roll (contest of tactics?) with modifiers, to see how effective the side using this tactic is in allocating damage to the desired target, and it should rarely be absolute unless the situation allows it (e.g. spaceship combat where everything's in range and nothing has any way to hide).