Tactics for adversary near-future soldiers

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

In general, I think that soldiers facing supers will end up being equipped with a minimum of Powered Combat Armor and ETC Heavy Chainguns firing APEP Viper rounds. A ten-person squad would have an Armored Hovercraft for transportation and heavy weapon support, with the squad leader flying the vehicle and the assistant squad leader acting as gunner. The remaining eight soldiers would deploy in two four-person fire squads that would attempt to kill the supers as quickly as possible.

The problem with that set up though is that most supers die against that type of firepower. Since every round would deal 22d+2 (3) pi damage, a super with DR 50 and Hardened 2 would still suffer 27 points of damage per round that hit. With viper rounds, a high percentage of long distance rounds with hit their targets and, with a 1/2D range of 6,000 yards, most flying supers are dead long before they get to the soldiers. Stealthy supers are the ones who survive.

Have to agree, here. Even Spiderman wouldn't last long going mano-a-mano wth a platoon set up that way. Area effect attacks are tough to dodge, and even he can't dodge in mid-leap, unless he's got his hands on a web strand.

Four-color heroes will just die. Sneaky bastidges like the Shadow might prove effective, if they work as part of a resistance.

What are the goals of your evil aliens? That will determine the initial strategy used to "soften up" the people of the invaded world.

As a space-faring species, they won't need raw resources. Those they can mine from asteroids and moons and gas giants for a lot less effort and expense.

That means they've invaded because they're paranoid about the rise of a potential rival in their neck of the dark woods, or they want to use the planet's productive capacity.

If it's the first, they'd start with truly catastrophic bombardment -- probably just short of extinction level, and that only because they want to colonize the world, themselves.

If so, the survivors are few, far between, and hunted ruthlessly. That makes for a harsh, dark campaign of survival. Those can be fun, for awhile, but if the PCs can't start winning, it'll get tiresome.

Alternatively, if the aliens want the productive capacity, they'll also want the workers who run the machines. That would actually be the most fun, because the sessions can range from simple vandalism, to sabotage, to assassination, to pitched street battles.

Moreover, the threat that such a campaign could suddenly turn into option one should the PCs not win carefully, means some of the opposing forces will consist of quislings who fear the revolution more than the oppressors.

That makes for a political game, and for those you need a good group of mature individuals.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by tshiggins

Four-color heroes will just die. Sneaky bastidges like the Shadow might prove effective, if they work as part of a resistance.

Depends a lot on the four-color heroes. That term covers a huge range, from guys with fairly silly powers to Silver Age Superman.

This is a big problem with the framing of the OP. It says the bad guys know powers exist, but not the specifics of the heroes' powers. Do they have at least a sense of the range of abilities they're likely to encounter? The power level?

[Anthony]

GURPS high and ultra tech in general does not play well with cinematic games, because cinematic combat almost always deliberately devalues equipment (Why? Because showing two people shooting at each other is boring compared to mixing in martial arts, melee and improvised weapons, etc). It's possible to define supers at power levels that won't have trouble dealing with TL 9 military equipment, but if so they'll also be impervious to everything else normal humans can reasonably throw at them).

[newton]

i think a trick for this is to simply say "not all of this exists in my campaign" or "this organization does not have access to these things" for powerful tl9 weapons especially with damge dice/DR escalation

[AlexanderHowl]

Or you can design that supers to be subtle. The obvious supers die during the first few battles while trying to fight the aliens (even Archetypes do not do well against orbital bombardment from SM+12 battleships). The subtle supers survive to lead the resistance efforts against the aliens.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

In general, I think that soldiers facing supers will end up being equipped with a minimum of Powered Combat Armor and ETC Heavy Chainguns firing APEP Viper rounds. A ten-person squad would have an Armored Hovercraft for transportation and heavy weapon support, with the squad leader flying the vehicle and the assistant squad leader acting as gunner. The remaining eight soldiers would deploy in two four-person fire squads that would attempt to kill the supers as quickly as possible.

The commander should not be driving the APC. That's a full-time job of its own, and if he's to be managing a section of grunts as well as an AFV, he needs to not have to worry about dodging houses and cars.

I'd also not want him in the AFV myself, because commanders of infantry being detached from their men has a bad history for the grunts, though if the comms and intell gathering network requires an AFV to carry it, this may be necessary.

Oh, and hovercraft are actually a fairly bad idea as a general purpose vehicle. Supers are probably going to be engaged in urban areas, so wheels win on a ground vehicle.

EDIT: Does it seem odd to anyone else that gyrocs have to fire extremely expensive (ten times the basic rocket's cost) missiles if they're to have homing warheads, while everything else just pays a few multiples of the cost of a fairly cheap round?

[AlexanderHowl]

I am not sure about that. The armored hovercraft allows for superior mobility and firepower. Of course, a TL9 civilization could also have combat androids in the fireteams and the living soldiers in the armored hovercrafts.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I am not sure about that. The armored hovercraft allows for superior mobility and firepower. Of course, a TL9 civilization could also have combat androids in the fireteams and the living soldiers in the armored hovercrafts.

It's got terrible handling, and hovercraft deal with linear obstacles (like even low walls) very badly - worse than a large wheeled vehicle.

We don't have stats for a modern wheeled APC, or a TL9( version, but they should be able to do better.

TL9 combat androids are likely to need to be drones, as even a non-volitional AI will be only IQ8, which isn't ideal if fighting supers where it's anything like a fair fight, unless those supers are not very bright either.

[PTTG]

Yeah, this is only roughly TL9 by allowed background technology. Androids and volitional AI is not in the setting, at least not in forms smaller than a large spacecraft.

The region of space was chaotically colonized by dozens of separate human ventures. One of these colony worlds became a rigidly caste-based orthodoxy-obsessed meritocracy. This faction sees it as its moral imperitive to "rescue" other worlds from the chaos of democracy and the sting of individuality.

Their command of retroviruses has lead to them developing a sort of affliction that supposedly produces "true humans;" really, this is just a slightly unstable set of distinctive phenotypical markers and some dubious strength and intelligence boosters. They value the lives of colonists as they may be suitable for labor, for conscripts, or if nothing else, as a source of novel human genes. Equally important, they treasure colony worlds (earthlike planets, with or without infrastructure, are quite rare, here). For both reasons, they don't use anything with NBC fallout of any kind, and they don't drop rocks. They rely on their massively superior military industrial complex, and on picking targets that are disunified, undeveloped, or otherwise weak. The PC's homeworld will be the invader's eighth conquest.

That's all not to say they are at all humane; they execute anyone suspected of harboring resistance without even cursory investigation (unless it's a known quisling, or similar), and they abduct children under the age of 13 for re-education as a matter of course. Despite their claims of egalitarianism, none of the seven previous worlds they've overtaken have become true equals, only a source of cheap troops and resources. Their own citizens are given full cradle-to-grave care, though their cultural drive for excellence does not apply to art or expression, which they see as part of the decadence that lead to the current uninhabitablity of Earth.

The supers have psi-based powers, but they don't use the Psi system, just advantages. They also will eventually have a powerful special tool at their disposal: an ancient alien psi amplification center, more accurately named an "empathy telescope." It allows a number of psi agents to effectively possess targets at ranges of hundreds of light-years -- a feat that in both specifics and scale far exceeds everything psis are known to do in this setting. The space nazis aren't stupid, but if the PCs play their cards right they can turn them against one another before their infiltration is discovered.

Before that, though, the PCs will face the troops in the combat that will drive them to _find_ the Empathy Telescope. Even without it, their psi powers will give them a slight edge because the space nazis see Psi powers as a sign of corruption and non-humanity, and therefore most don't understand them well, and fear them. (Not to say they don't keep pet psis on a close leash for dealing with especially severe problems...)

[Michele]

In any case, we expect that robots or drones will replace us on the TL9 battlefield, because our civilizations, as they advance, place more value on individual life. But that is not a given.

Even ruling out NBC use, and similar things (bot swarms, nanomachines), and orbital bombardment, I think the invaders' tactical doctrine, if faced by anything that can withstand a company-sized infantry unit, will be to withdraw the infantry and obliterate the place with stand-off conventional warheads. Even right now, we have FAEs, other thermobaric warheads, MOABs and the like; not even most supers would survive if caught in those blasts. We can imagine the TL9 successors.

Naturally, unless the location is in a deserted area, there is the issue of collateral damage. These invaders might dislike losing an industrial district or a small population center in these circumstances. On the other hand, if they have conquered all of the world, losing just ten city blocks of industries, or a 10,000-inhabitants town, may seem an acceptable price to pay.
On top of that, there are the pluses the actual, real-McCoy Nazis expected and in some places reaped: the moral pressure on the resistance ("if we attack here, they'll kill the town") and the psy-war effect on the uncommitted or quisling citizenry ("it's all the rebels' fault").

If, for whatever reason, the invaders do not choose the solution above, they'll still be not overly worried about collateral damage. Therefore, even if the action takes place in a city, it won't be infantry, even in powered armor, against supers; it will be tanks and aircraft against supers. I know, there is the issue of terrain clutter. If a building gets in the way, just destroy it. If the enemies are inside, so much the better. If not, go ahead and find them.