The Imperial March

By FellowPT, in Star Wars: Rebellion

The thing that seems odd to me (not necessarily bad, just odd) is that a planet has a 'speed' at which it produces all units. So, it takes Planet X two turns to produce either a company of Stormtroopers (represented by one unit) or a Star Destroyer? Trying to get my head around that...

I would view it as a planet having better facilities to create one type of unit over the other. Maybe their space yards are top of the line, but their troop training facilities are less efficient, or vice versa.

The thing that seems odd to me (not necessarily bad, just odd) is that a planet has a 'speed' at which it produces all units. So, it takes Planet X two turns to produce either a company of Stormtroopers (represented by one unit) or a Star Destroyer? Trying to get my head around that...

I would view it as a planet having better facilities to create one type of unit over the other. Maybe their space yards are top of the line, but their troop training facilities are less efficient, or vice versa.

I can go with that!

The thing that seems odd to me (not necessarily bad, just odd) is that a planet has a 'speed' at which it produces all units. So, it takes Planet X two turns to produce either a company of Stormtroopers (represented by one unit) or a Star Destroyer? Trying to get my head around that...

Don't forget that one x-wing model represents an entire wing of fighters. So it isn't one turn to produce a single x-wing or an entire capital ship. It is one turn to produce sixty or a hundred X-wings or an entire capital ship.

One turn to produce a battalion of troopers (squad-platoon-company-batallion-division-army) or what ever level of abstraction we're talking about. I doubt very much it is just a company of a hundred and fifty men.

If you think about it in Clone Wars animated it isn't just troops/men. It is weapons, ordinance, landing craft, transports (jeeps/trucks/scout walkers,) food, medical supplies, and so on. Same thing with the fighters, fuel, spares, ground crew, tools, astromechs...

Edited by Frimmel

Even when a game abstracts something like this, I like to consider the realities of the situation and apply them to the game.

Speed is relative. You need to keep in mind how long a 'turn' is.

Ep4s trip from Tatooine to Alderaan probably took 2-3 days. There isn't much logistically that needs to happen to facilitate that trip.

Now consider placing a leader on a system and having to pull troops and ships from three adjacent systems to that single system. These are companies or battalions of stormtroopers that need to be ferried to the to star destroyers. Supplies need to be gathered. Troops on shore leave need to be recalled. Then they need to move through hyperspace to their location. Various ships have various hyperspace ratings which means the faster ships need to slow down.

Moving fleets and armies from 1 location to another could be a process that actually takes weeks. So you could place a timeline of 1 to 2 weeks per turn pretty easily.

Production gets a little trickier.

Producing a car, start to finish on an assembly line takes less than 20 hours. Sure, a Toyota corolla is not an X-wing, but the production facilities of both would probably be set up in much the same way. So it may take 20 hours for one to go from start to finish, but you are rolling one off the assembly line ever couple minutes.

Back in WW2, dedicated teams were producing liberty ships at an incredible rate. The record was building one of the liberty ships in under 5 days. More often it was a 1-2 week affair. Ramp that up technologically and I could conceive of something like a corvette being built in 4 weeks under war time conditions.

If you think of something like the Kuat drive yards. It wasn't building 1 Star Destroyer at a time. It was building several. The production could just be the final phase of that (get the crew on board, load supplies, test systems, fire up the generators, and launch the ship).

Same type of thinking would go for the Stormtroopers. The production isn't the drafting of soldiers and running them through basic training, stormtrooper training, etc. You have cadet teams of soldiers in training all the time. The 1 turn production may simply be their final training/testing, assigning squads, gearing them up in the armor and what not. It's not so much the entire production line, but the final logistical assignment of those resources.