In a previous post, I talked about combat readiness (“CR”) as a means of tying the campaign and combat layers closer together, but also as a means of cleaning up existing mechanics. The mechanics surrounding battle are a perfect candidate, both because they need cleaning up, and because they wouldn’t work well with CR as they now stand. Changes to these aren’t just a consequence of adding CR; rather, they’re part of that process.

First, a quick recap of how things work now. When the player encounters another fleet, they can choose to attack them or leave. If either side wants to attack, the fleets engage, and each side has three options: “attack”, “defend”, and “escape”. Without going into too much detail, there’s a rock-paper-scissors mechanic there where attack beats escape beats defend beats attack. (“Escape” beating “defend” simply means a clean getaway, with “beating” in general meaning having an advantage in the battle, not automatic victory.)

Playing rock-paper-scissors vs the computer isn’t fun. The computer is either predictable or random, but in either case you don’t get the mind games that make it interesting vs a human opponent. The “escape” mechanic also doesn’t work well. The escapee has to run their ships across the map and retreat them off the enemy side, which is much more difficult than “attacking” and then retreating ships off their side of the map – which they could do without seeing a single enemy. If they do that, their ships take some automatic, random post battle damage to simulate a chase after this retreat, but that’s a problem in itself.  Either it does enough damage so that retreat from a real lost battle is disastrous, or it doesn’t do enough damage to stop “attack to retreat” being viable.

Adding in CR, the current setup is also open to being gamed. For example, a single Hound-class frigate fighting against an Onslaught-class battleship – the Hound could engage, then immediately retreat, causing a CR loss for both ships for being deployed in battle. However, the Hound both costs less CR to deploy and recovers it faster. So, it could reliably beat an Onslaught without firing a single shot but wearing down its CR.
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