I am reading Raveneye and there are some questionmarks in my head: If there are several human space ships in the paradiso system, why is there a huge ground war going on? A orbital bombardment from the humans should end the paradiso conflict in no time? If shuttles can fly in and out of combat zones, the combined army anti-air should not be enough to destroy a sufficient number of bombs? Then Raveneye itself: In the beginning I got the impression that the EI launched a suicide attack on Raveneye to deactivate the artillery and then send some special forces to get the mcguffin from the labs. But it seems that the second phase of the EI plans is to launch a war-like offensive? With no supply line? With no battleships in orbit? Why have the MO to fight on the ground? Yes, Raveneye is compromised, but what about Corregidor, or other battleships from humans (which are able to receive inforcements)? Just throw a few bombs on the combined army, as long as they have not yet reached the labs?
Not having engorged myself in the scenario too deeply, but keep in mind that bombs have never in human history managed to end a conflict or eliminate armed resistance on their own and combating a technologically superior alien force shouldn't make this any more likely to happen. There has always been a need for boots on the ground to clear up the resistance. Even 40k's deranged over the top lore only has Exterminatus able to do this, but that is also an insanely costly process that makes the entire planet unsuitable to life. AFAIK the only point where the Human Sphere used orbital bombardment as a conflict solution was when the O-12 nations tasked Yu Jing with nuking a Shasvaasti nest that the Shasvaasti were hiding from the EI, but I assume that they still sent CBRN power armour in afterwards to make sure they got everything.
Even the PanO fleet bombarding Yu Jing twin homeworld did not create massive casualties, but it added the pressure to force Yu Jing to the settlements table. In general most Human munitions are made to minimize collateral damage so I am guessing even orbital artillery will not have much yield.
If anyone feels like reading a military historian's take on the idea of air (space) superiority in this kind of fiction, I dug this article up which goes into it: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/17/fireside-friday-july-17th-2020/ Good read. Good blog, too.
If there are precious artefacts, that could be an explanation, why there is no „just burn everything“. But on the „regular battlefield“ (like when combined army attacked Strelsau), why not bombing everything within a given parameter? Then only the first troops of Morats would have reached Strelsau. The EI reinforcements would have been eliminated/slowed down/wounded. Strelsau itself has artillery, so the concept is not foreign to the human sphere. Just do it from space, with guided missile precision. I understand Paradiso in such a way, that the human sphere has a clear space superiority. Am I wrong here? in reality, you would not bomb near your troops due to fatal errors. But in this advanced technology, if a battleship scans every (larger) enemy group and fires some guided missles, then you should be able to fire at the enemy within a few hundrets meters of your own troop? Maybe I have a wrong image of the situations, but when the destiny of the human sphere is decided on paradiso/raveneye and the CA has no civilians in the unhibitated, dangerous jungles… what is hindering the „burn the dangerous jungle with enemy soldiers and no civilians“ and then send some HI to eliminate the rest, like Mahtamori suggests? i get it, that this is overthinking, but I would like to know if there are some in-universe explanations to this :) edit: have to checkout the link
I have to dive in the books for more details, but from the top of my head: About Paradiso: - The human fleet is widely spread between all the blockades with the biggest of them directly facing the wormhole, so amount of ships around the planet may not be that much. - The territory conquered by the Combined Army is huge (we are talking about parts of continents), they mostly use hidden/mobile bases in the jungle, and there is a drone coverage preventing human ships to fly over it unmolested. And I'm not talking about all the civilians trapped in this territory and the prisonners, all of them preventing a mass bombardment. - The human powers want to take back the conquered territory. If you scorch the earth, there is no gain (even if scorching Paradiso earth just allow the plants to come back stronger xD). About Concilium: - Same problem as Paradiso, the human ships are spread in the system, the biggest of them directly facing the wormhole. - CA don't really need space superiority as it possess the Shasvastii phatom shuttles that can go in and out mostly unnoticed, and they have several hidden bases in the system now. They can also brute force their way time to time like they are doing in Paradiso. - The geography of the continent is similar to Paradiso, with a lot of forests, preventing any sort of accurate pinpointing from the space that could allow you to bombard the CA forces efficiently. - Human forces may not want to bombard blindly a zone where there could be hidden labs with valuable tech in it.
The evolution of the Paradiso conflict overall seems to point to a couple of things. First, that the Combined Army has really excellent air defense systems... they clearly operate in ways you wouldn't if you were concerned about enemy air/spacecraft, and while their forces on the planet have been cut off I do think that has to at least in part reflect doctrine... certainly a vast armada might be sent when invading to establish air supremacy, but CA advanced forces have the tools and training to get started without it and not be worried. They've got mobile E/M weapons to disrupt ship systems, mobile AA missiles to fire back, a cloud of nano-drones that are able to stop a lot of surveillance and likely bombardment as well. Ships in orbit probably stay away from CA positions and advances to avoid the direct threat from these, and the CA likely incorporates them to accompany its movements... the ships above Paradiso are there to block more CA from getting to the planet, a demanding task in of itself, not to engage the CA troops already on the ground. These defenses don't seem to stop movement of all hostile shuttles and gunships, so it isnt perfect, but however the technology works it would seem to be more effective vs artillery and orbital bombardments. The second is that I think for all its internal conflicts and technologies, the Human Sphere... kinda sucks at some elements of war. Infinity the wargame is about small numbers of special ops troops doing clandestine work, so we don't see the tank divisions and artillery batteries on tabletop just due to the nature of the game, but I don't think there are advanced well-trained masses of such things waiting just off-screen. Even the really big wars fought in the Sphere's recent history don't seem to have had trench lines and massed artillery, don't seem to have had heavy orbital bombardment. Its possible that there's a view of war that puts less importance on those because wars have 'moved beyond' them, so Sphere militaries aren't developing those capabilities and instead investing training in hacking and small-unit engagements. Add to that the clearly profit-driven motives of Sphere weapons contractors, do the artillery pieces produced come with a bunch of fancy kit for dropping one shell on an exact position supplied by an orbital satellite network, rather than just lobbing it at high rate in the enemy's general direction? Do they build weapons capable of orbital bombardment into their ships, do the targeting systems on those ships support that sort of attack? Not that they don't have the capability at all, but I'd theorize it is perhaps atrophied, which may have helped the Ariadnans hold their own (in a war whose result wouldn't have prompted analysis of the tech and doctrine failures involved) and now be causing issues with the Sphere's ability to respond to the Combined Army's various beachheads.
The biggest thing is that CB isn't writing from any experience. Just accept that it's not in any way realistic, it's more like an anime. It's the same reason that a lot of the weapons just don't make sense (receivers in the wrong place compared to magazine, backwards magazines, etc), or really the whole premise of the game (covert/black ops units in deniable operations) but taking along a bunch of random civilians, space pirates, gangsters, a field reporter, standard line infantry, etc. So no, it doesn't make any sense, in the same manner that none of it makes any sense. But it's a fun game with cool models.
There is also A History of Bombing by Sven Lindquist. A History of BombingEdit The book most admired by critics in English was his 2001 A History of Bombing (first published in Swedish in 1999 under the title Nu dog du, meaning "[Bang bang] you're dead").[18][19][5][20] The book focused upon the history of strategic bombing, and was written in a "fractured structure" with 399 short chapters. Lindqvist described the book's structure as "a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit", which was intended to reflect the chaos caused by strategic bombing.[21] Each section is numbered; many sections end with an arrow pointing to another number, sometimes far ahead in the book, sometimes back, forming a hypertext-like network. The book argued that the "evils Europeans perpetrated in their colonies prefigured the violence they would commit against each other at home", including citing instances of strategic bombing in European colonies acting as a predecessor for similar tactics during the Second World War.[5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sven_Lindqvist
True. Fluff attempts to justify why the wargame is the scale it is cause more problems than solutions if you think too hard, as @AmPm nails below. This is the correct analysis of all the verisimilitude breaches in fluff and model design. Spoiler: Comparison with another game BPRE28mm is what a covert ops skirmish game looks like when written by people with access to relevant experience. The RPG fluff is never anything more than post-facto justification fanfic. Even by the low standards of rpg fiction it’s not great. If the CA invasion isn’t enough of an existential threat to cause HS to establish aerospace dominance, then…
I seem to remember that a good amount of CB's weapon designs are taken from wacky concept weapons, but other than that you're right.
The in universe explanation is sufficient, it makes sense in universe and is good enouph for most players. If you want to go to the ultra realistic viewpoint the game would have only PanO, there is no reason why they would accept O-12's reset of the board to pre neocolonial wars when they had already conquered most of Yu Jing territory and more importantly the vast resources at PanOceanias disposal makes any realistic total war with them a forgone conclusion.
I don't think that's true at all. That's running conflict as a spreadsheet, mathing out who has bigger numbers and declaring them the winner. Which is certainly a way to calculate how things should play out, but its not at all realistic. PanOceania had the big number, but they also had myriad other social, economic, political pressures which were more than just 'do we have the resources to conquer everything? yes.', and those other pressures had influence which led to a different outcome. There are a lot of different things in the Human Sphere as written which are less than realistic, but 'there are factions other than PanO' certainly isnt one of them.
Um... the whole premise of the Neo Colonial War and Pan-Oceania is kind of hand-waved and unrealistic, even if you take the fact that big empires are the winners of survivor bias and as such unrealistic. As we've seen in moderately recent history, waging an aggressive war with the following occupation for a longer period of time is a massive undertaking and I'm not too sure Pan-O actually has the numbers for it. Particularly since your military "numbers" don't add up so well in offensive undertakings as they do in defensive ones. Add to this that a vast empire will naturally develop factional and regional rivalries (particularly without sufficient external threat), be they from reality or perception of regional neglect (even in post-scarcity!), political ill will, religious friction, nationalistic spirit, etc, nearly all of which they've hand-waved away, I don't think we can have a "realistic" take on the setting. So we're left with the setting's own premises. Pan-O is one happy bunch of post-scarcity consumerism and O-12 has the economic and military might to threaten double-sucker-punch Pan-O into accepting the world order that O-12 sets. Realism does not need bother here. I think there's enough room here to even have a "realistic" read on the deal O-12 forced on Pan-O to have one where Pan-O high command went "it's not the deal we dreamed of, but it gives us the victory and we don't have to risk war support falling low enough to risk a reversal - we'll take it and pretend we're upset about it"
