Aside from preventing escape, it occurred to me today that surrounding an enemy ship with superior numbers is kind of a dumb move in this game.
After all, if your armada is pummeling a ship from all sides, you're spreading your damage out across all of their ship arcs, prolonging the engagement.
I can't help but think it would be better for ships to line up against one another like the British red coats and early Americans in America's war for independence. At least then you can have several ships focus firing on one arc and getting through to the hull and glitching systems even faster.
That seems a mite counter intuitive to me. What am I missing here?
So I am assuming that all ships are not moving?
I feel at this point you should just surrender. No need to carry out the attack if the ship being surrounded has no chance. Seems to be a no win situation. Or when this happens you just call the fight and say it has been destroyed.
At some point encounters become so obvious what will happen, there is no point to call it. If the goal is to completely destroy the ship then just call it at that point. If not give the ship a chance to surrender. If they do you can continue from there and if they don't then they are destroyed.
The obvious counter is to rebalance your shields on that one side, providing an incentive for them to surround you.
Yeah, except if you put all your shields into one arc, the enemy is dealing with 30% less shield points then if they tried to take on all arcs (since you must leave at least 10% in each arc regardless of how you balance them). Wouldn't that mean it is still better to focus fire one arc?
(Math is not my strong point, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
Yeah, except if you put all your shields into one arc, the enemy is dealing with 30% less shield points then if they tried to take on all arcs (since you must leave at least 10% in each arc regardless of how you balance them). Wouldn't that mean it is still better to focus fire one arc?
(Math is not my strong point, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
From a storyline point of view, surrounding seems more cinematic. It would be up to the GM then to move the story along at that point.
However, your point has merit. Yes, shields can be redistributed, but that is AFTER the current round ends. If the first shot takes out the shields, all subsequent shots that round go straight to hull. This will surely increase the changes of ending the fight sooner.
Yeah, except if you put all your shields into one arc, the enemy is dealing with 30% less shield points then if they tried to take on all arcs (since you must leave at least 10% in each arc regardless of how you balance them). Wouldn't that mean it is still better to focus fire one arc?
(Math is not my strong point, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
If you concentrate on one arc, and the defender knows that, he can raise his shields from 25% of the total to 70% of the total in that arc. You just made your job harder.
So you then have to counter by attacking a second arc that went from 25% of the total down to 10% of the total.
Attacking two arcs seems optimal. All four certainly wouldn't be.
You're not going to do 20% of the targets shields per turn, you're going to do a fixed amount of damage and allocate that to given arcs. If you focus on one arc, tempting them to shift all their shields into that arc on the next round, you should then attack a different weak arc, or threaten other arcs so that they don't shift shields too heavily into that primary arc.
This assumes infinite science officers who can do multiple rebalances and scan every turn to see the current shield layout.
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Were you to attempt to pin down a starship there are several factors to consider. The three main ones are:
1) As discussed, the shields.
2) The gunner.
3) The drift engine.
Rather than further address point 1, let us consider 2. The starship in question is likely unafraid to fire its weapons, you would not feel confident in pinning otherwise. If the gunner is a good enough shot, a broadsiding could be a possible defensive measure against pinning ships focused on a single shield arc. If you can fire at an arc, that arc can fire back.
Physically surrounding a vessel means that the defensive fire is limited to at best twice the number of gunners per firing time, as such I would recommend surrounding if only for the safety of the attacking vessels.
#3 requires that you either take out the drift engine itself, or the powercore. For this purpose I recommend having all attacking vessels that are able, have a science officer actively targeting the power core of the vessel. For this purpose, and taking #1 into consideration, I would recommend that all, or at least most possess both burrowing and EMP weapons(Mining laser and EMP). Likely turret mounted if possible.
This allows the attacking vessels to potentially deal critical damage without bringing the ships shields down. Targetting the power core decreases shield regeneration. The EMP is for added crippling should the shield on any arc be downed long enough for them to be fired.
This is only one way to approach such a problem.
Those are some really nice suggestions. :)