Cruise missiles in Ogre behave very differently from anything else in the game. Units that attack them do not use their attack values and the CRT. Instead, they use a system of 2D6 dice rolls with thresholds and modifiers. Because of this, it can be difficult to develop an intuition for just how many layers deep you have to lay out the defending units to drop the chances of a cruise missile surviving to reasonable odds, and conversely, just how many cruise missiles you need to use to have a reasonable chance of penetrating a given defense layout.
As part of my project to better understand cruise missile strategy, I have created, and am now publishing, the Cruise Missile Air Defense Calculator. This application allows you to type in a list of defenses that a cruise missile will have to get past, in order. The calculator will then draw you a graph showing, at each step, the odds of the cruise missile surviving all of the obstacles. When the app starts, the cursor is already in the text box - you can start typing immediately, and hitting enter draws the graph immediately.
You can download it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nd50t9mdx...OS_TBYfea?dl=0
Simply unzip the .exe and run it. I am happy to supply C# sourcecode upon request.
Your list can consist of any number of the following, in any order:
- I / i - an infantry squad
- O / o - an Ogre MB or SB
- M / m - an Ogre missile
- L / l - a laser turret or tower
- A# / a# - an armor unit with attack of #, where # is an integer from 1 to 9
- ## - a two digit number [10 or larger] indicating how far the missile has traveled - sets the modifier for future die rolls
You can enter the codes as upper or lower case. You can use spaces, commas, periods, or any kind of parentheses as separators, or just have them all together.
The colors of the graph bars show what the modifier is for that defender's roll: Red is +3, Dark Green is +2, Green is +1, and Lime Green is 0. [The colors and probabilities are all from the point of view of the party launching the cruise missile: red is bad, because it indicates that the enemy has better chances of destroying the CM. Grene is good, because it indicates a higher chance of the CM getting to it's target. All probabilities are probabilities of the CM strike's success.]
The white numbers at the bottom tell you the probability of the cruise missile surviving that defender, and all of the previous defenders, as read from left to right.
Here's a specific example:
Looking at the first screenshot, the list of defenders is "L 10 A3 i i m m".
That means that the first thing the cruise missile encounters is a laser tower or turret. This drops the survival percentage from 100% to 72%.
The next item is a number 10. This means the cruise missile crosses it's 10th hex of travel before encountering the next defender. You can see that this changes the colors of the bar to a darker green.
The next thing the CM encounters is a unit with an A3 attack. It's attack drops the overall survival percentage to 60%.
The cruise missile then encounters, in turn, two infantry platoons and two Ogre missiles. Each defender is represented by a bar in the graph.
We see that, evaluating the entire gauntlet of defenders, the CM has only 14% odds of survival.
In the second screenshot, you can see that as the CM passes the 10 hex threshold, then the 15, then the 25, its odds of survival decrease ever more quickly.
The third screenshot depicts a very typical Last War scenario: a cruise missile strike from offboard that encounters three laser towers (in my opinion the reasonable minimum that PE would try to build as an umbrella over any civilian cities). You can see that the 20+ hexes the CM has covered before it even hits the board cause the bars to be red (indicating a modifier to the laser's rolls of +3) right off the bat. You can also see how each laser tower dramatically decreases the odds of a CM getting anywhere. the final column shows us that the CM has only 2% odds of getting to it's target. A 3-squad infantry garrison in the town would further reduce the odds. This screenshot also shows using commas as deliminator characters rather than spaces.
Note that the graph will resize dynamically when you resize the window. This can make it easier to see very short bars at the right end of the graph.
Consider it a Christmas present. [I've just now noticed how the red and green dominant colors are season-appropriate.] Download it, give it a shot, and let me know what you think.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nd50t9mdx...OS_TBYfea?dl=0