Anti Runner Tactics Options

[Prime Mover]

Other threads expouseing the I-Win abilities got me thinking. How have tactics of military and security forces changed.

Obviously drones, superior sensors help win the day.

Magic every squad should have a watcher spirit on point and others ready to assist.

Counterspelling should be a must.

Team members should never be closer then 6 meters apart at all times. Avoid one shot one kill spell attacks. (Might need to be revised considering entry tactics.)

Battle Tac and competant hacker.


Other serious differences you'd expect to see in 6th world tactics?

[Cthulhudreams]

Heavy centralisation of resources/high threat response teams and high signal biomonitors, due to the comparitive rarity of key response team members.

[KarmaInferno]

For extreme enough cases, reinforced death trap that runners can be funneled into.

Enough steel and concrete in the walls to make getting out dam near impossible in under an hour, with one way doors that cannot be opened again electronically cos they're really just big blocks of reinforced material dropped from above, that it will take a beefy forklift to lift out of the way later.

Flood the death trap with your lethal devices of choice.



-karma

[HappyDaze]

Other serious differences you'd expect to see in 6th world tactics?

What types of tactics are we talking about? Something like site defense/entry denial is going to be quite different from personnel protection (employee retention).

[kzt]

Lots of mantraps with credential verification, as well as automated surveillance and fiber optic visual coverage before allowing further entrance. RF/Faraday barriers everywhere, with only approved devices allowed to work. Continuous RF scanning with shutdown of wireless if unknown devices are spotted. Lots of fiber networks. Continuous video/IR/radar surveillance of the entire building linked to computer analysis and the the RF surveillance system. Many in-building combat drones run on armored fiber.

Use of things like sticky foam filled doors and walls.

All your security people get continually monitored biomontiers on duty and need to walk through a ward to reach the door security to report.

[Dumori]

Like that door idea. Really fun.

[toturi]

Convenience, productivity and cost efficiency are what limits the security measures.

The high ranking guys do not want to be hassled with respect to security, they want to walk in through a door and not get stopped for a security check. They want their calls to be unmonitored.
Tight security will affect the productivity of your people actually doing the money-making work.
There will come a time where the cost of security is balanced by the cost of the item being protected and security is often a case of diminishing returns.

[Heath Robinson]

Obviously drones, superior sensors help win the day.

Drone with the cheapest Sensor 6 I can come up with and Clearsight 4
Buying a soldier a set of Goggles with Vision Enhancement 3, Flare Compensation, Imagelink, and Smartlink

Cost of Drone: 2 000 Base Cost + 600 Camera 6 + 2 000 Clearsight 4 = 4 600
Cost of Goggles: 200 Goggles 4 + 300 Vision Enhancement 3 + 50 Imagelink + 25 Flare Comp + 500 Smartlink = 1 075

DP of Drone: 6 Sensor + 4 Clearsight - 3 Gimp Drones = 7
DP of Goggled Metahuman (Trained): 3 Intuition + 1 Perception + 2 Visual Specialisation + 3 Visual Enhancement = 9

Efficiency of Drone: 4 600 / 7 = 657 nuyen/dice
Efficiency of Goggles: 1 075 / 9 = 119 nuyen/dice


Military and Mercenaries buy people Goggles. Can't beat that bottom line.


More importantly: SR4 rules for Sensor Perception means that Drones suck at frontline duty.

[Summerstorm]

On site you need low-maintenance drones and security personel to deter gangs, impolite visitors, or to escort troublemakers out. Highly trained and cybered/magical personel is too expensive, as are heavy drones, so you have them centralized to react to any threat within the city.

I conclude: best thing to do, when it is discovered that trained professionals infiltrated the base you have to stall them. You do not "burn" your low security for that, also you don't want the runners to proceed to vital locations (data-rooms, security systems, science-stations or heavy and expensive machinery). Best option: Use architectural defenses to slow them down:

1. Hallways need cover. Pillars, reeinforced pots for plants, sheets of kevlar/plates in seatings and couches. Whatever as long as it's not that expensive.

2. Doors. Yeah... have them. Once in security mode they can only be operated from the security desk. (No wireless crap) Of course a good electronic specialist can still open them, but it needs time.

3. All work-related comlinks use a uncommen frequency, have three point in your zone which continuously scan for different frequencies and triangulate their point of origin. (Works best with wireless-negating paint in the outer walls... and other techniques)

4. Easy heat sensors which trigger sleeping gas without question. On/Off only from security desk.

5. Instruct your on site security to defend key locations, and the exit. Nothing else. No trying to end the intruders when the first action wasn't succesful. No hunting them down. Wait for the specialists (which will get delivered to the roof or helipad at around 5-10 minutes- in a sprawl). Only open for them after they have identified themselves without fail: ID, tacnet-login AND face recognition by senior officer of the on-site-security.

The specialists: depending on worth of corporate interest; on high threats or confirmed magical activity one combat or sensor mage, maybe one or two Ki-Adepts. Prefered MO: Going in, clearing rooms, while the on-site-security follows and hold cleared rooms. Weapons: Best is Stick-N-Shock, Gas, Flashpaks. Gel-Rounds, Flashbangs ok too. Everything which isn't destroying the money (equipment, architecture) too bad. Against high-threat targets everyone has one clip APDS.

When they enter a small location they deploy a Radar and Sensordrone. The Team is spearheaded by a small sensordrone (flying). One or two large combatdrones may get deployed outside to deny escape.

Ah yes: if there is any sign of tacnet-disruption or tapping: Complete restart with a different frequency and encryption. No advancements in the time it takes.

[Traul]

Cost of Drone: 2 000 Base Cost + 600 Camera 6 + 2 000 Clearsight 4 = 4 600
Cost of Goggles: 200 Goggles 4 + 300 Vision Enhancement 3 + 50 Imagelink + 25 Flare Comp + 500 Smartlink = 1 075

Your math is biased: you count the price of the drone in, but the human works for free. As the salary is a monthly fee, it cannot be compared directly to a drone price that is paid only once. The longer the drone is kept in duty, the cheaper it becomes compared to the human.

[Mirilion]

Misinformation. An example :
Lets say the runners are hired to hit an armored van transporting a top secret shipment. Their Mr. Johnson gave them timetables and specs.
When the run goes down, and they take down the van, they find it was empty.
Now it's up to them to track down the real shipment. Of course, they can take it to Mr. Johnson, but he doesn't know anything. So they can
drop the run, and maybe suffer rep loss, or dig in and find out more for themselves, but maybe it will be too late by then.

Of course, using this too much isn't going to be much fun for teams without some strong information gathering skills. It seems to me, though,
that in the world of 2070, information is the most powerful method of combat, and the people who actually shoot and zap are more pawns than players.

[AngelisStorm]

Except drones require upkeep, parts, and the mechanics to do it. More people are mechanics than security guards, but mechanics on average make more than security guards do. (You don't get hazard pay for sitting around not being attacked.)

[HappyDaze]

The longer the drone is kept in duty, the cheaper it becomes compared to the human.

Except drones require upkeep, parts, and the mechanics to do it. More people are mechanics than security guards, but mechanics on average make more than security guards do. (You don't get hazard pay for sitting around not being attacked.)

The facility I work at IRL uses drones to replace about 30 workers. They are cargo movers that transport supplies from floor to floor within the hospital. During the employee orientation tour they note that despite the high start-up cost, the 'bots broke even within four years of use and they are still going strong almost twenty years later. That's with early 1990s tech. By 2070, such 'bots can be thrown together from parts out of an online catalog and assembled within hours after they are delivered to your door. Good luck showing that creating (when a man and a woman ...), recruiting, and training are going to come up nearly as fast in that time.

[Blade]

Great post Summerstorm!
I'd just add that the specialists should be able to fall back on a non tac-net mode in case of an important hacker/TM threat.

[Prime Mover]

What types of tactics are we talking about? Something like site defense/entry denial is going to be quite different from personnel protection (employee retention).

Original intention was to look for small unit tactics, Swat and Corporate security used against runners and other 6th world threats.

[nezumi]

A lot more use of one-way mirrors (one-way mirrors block astral attacks and add a +8 blind fire penalty to any attacks). I imagine one-way, armored mirrors are EVERYWHERE around points of entry and egress (as well as, as mentioned, in vehicles and exterior windows).

Also, keep in mind that the Geneva convention apparently no longer applies (or just not to corps, i suppose). This means you can use a lot of mean stuff normally you'd have to withhold. And with extraterritoriality, that's doubly true. Things like mantraps with gases, darts with deadly diseases, caltrops, so on and so forth make it pretty easy to disable an intruder, while not making it so you can't heal/cure/save him once he surrenders (or turns out not to be who you thought it was).

The drones vs. grunts debate I can't see a clear solution to. Police forces (like Lone Star) get paid barely more than Low lifestyle, so something like $30k a year, with limited, if any benefits. And this is one of the better companies out there. I'm sure you can hire thugs for less (Wolverine, anyone?) $20k a year, plus the cost of a doc to keep them going and install used ware, and which costs nothing to replace but time when the replacement is under the knife, versus the cost of $20k up-front for a drone that, if banged up, needs to be completely replaced.

Clearly the solution is 'how long do you expect this guard to survive before seriously wounded/destroyed'. If you expect it to last 6 months before it's destroyed, hire a person. If you expect it to last ten years without any trouble, buy a drone.

There are other points as well, of course. A drone can't sit at the front desk and tell people nicely that they have the wrong building and such. A guard (generally) can't cling to the ceiling and run on rails, or hover at 1,000 feet with a rifle.

As you scale up on your available cash, in SR3 at least, drones outpace humans (since they benefit from vehicle armor and high object resistance - I doubt a pair of even experienced Lone Star officers could take out a doberman), then humans outpace drones again, as you get to the upper-tier groups with lots of skills, tactics, intelligence, and big guns.

[kzt]

Misinformation. An example :
Lets say the runners are hired to hit an armored van transporting a top secret shipment. Their Mr. Johnson gave them timetables and specs.
When the run goes down, and they take down the van, they find it was empty.
Now it's up to them to track down the real shipment. Of course, they can take it to Mr. Johnson, but he doesn't know anything. So they can
drop the run, and maybe suffer rep loss, or dig in and find out more for themselves, but maybe it will be too late by then.

My job is done. I expect to get paid. The fact that he gave me the wrong info is HIS problem, not mine.

[Mirilion]

My job is done. I expect to get paid. The fact that he gave me the wrong info is HIS problem, not mine.

Depends on the exact contract between you two, and Mr. Johnson might not choose to see it like you.
If Mr. Johnson was a corporate mid-level exec, he would probably back off. If he were a powerful mobster, you might not even want to call him before final delivery.

Well, that was just an example. I think misinformation is the greatest tool against runners, but
it should be used sparingly for maximum effect. Otherwise the players won't find it very fun.

Another kind of information warfare against runners is rumor spreading. Trying to flush the runners out of their hiding by spreading rumors about their
weakness, lack of skills, penchant for failure, and so on. This might force the runners to track the rumors to their source, and that might lead to ambushes or
other interesting events. Of course, in the world of the 2070's, this takes a lot of effort, creating fake (or cleverly edited) data trails, trideo files, and real-life evidence such as wrecked buildings.

[TBRMInsanity]

In the old security sourcebook they go into some simple yet effective ways to counter SR activity. The biggest one I remember was extensive plant life covering the outside of the building. It looks pretty and it stops astrally projected mages from entering your complex. As with real life security, layered levels of security are the key to keeping people away from the "crown jewels", Start with biometric locked doors on the outside, have every door and window covered with at least 1 type of sensor (thermal, camera, sound, etc). The next layer would be a mixture of access control (via a combination of RFID tags and biometric security) with each security point (and choke point) under heavy surveillance. The final layer would be armed guards in front of a reinforced vault with multiple authentication methods needed to enter (example two people at the same time offer RFID, multiple biometric, and passkey passwords).

Each layer of security covers only what it needs to do. You try to make less secure areas more convenient to work in, while more secure areas, you shut down as tight as you can (make it more trouble then it is worth to break in).

[HappyDaze]

1. Hallways need cover. Pillars, reeinforced pots for plants, sheets of kevlar/plates in seatings and couches. Whatever as long as it's not that expensive.

This can work against you too. If you have cover, so too can the armed gunmen raiding your base, and the assumption is that these guys have better small unit tactics than the on-site security guys. If you plan on caging the gunmen in and having specialists sent in to clear them out - a good idea - then go without the cover in your layout. Your entry specialists can wear silly amounts of armor that the gunmen probably won't have and they can pack more firepower too. The cover is then of greater benefit to the gunmen, so get rid of it. You've already said you're not going to try to defend the majority of the site, so don't make it easy for the gunmen to do it!

[Heath Robinson]

Your math is biased: you count the price of the drone in, but the human works for free. As the salary is a monthly fee, it cannot be compared directly to a drone price that is paid only once. The longer the drone is kept in duty, the cheaper it becomes compared to the human.

You have the groundpounders anyway (no machine is as resilient as a human). We're dealing with the cost of enhancements to the groundpounders. I'm biasing towards the Drone because I'm not including the cost of the extra manpower in the supply chain keeping the Drones in working order. The goggles will already have their supply chain because they provide Flare Comp and Smartlink.

So, basically, I stacked the deck both ways.

[kzt]

This can work against you too. If you have cover, so too can the armed gunmen raiding your base, and the assumption is that these guys have better small unit tactics than the on-site security guys. If you plan on caging the gunmen in and having specialists sent in to clear them out - a good idea - then go without the cover in your layout. Your entry specialists can wear silly amounts of armor that the gunmen probably won't have and they can pack more firepower too. The cover is then of greater benefit to the gunmen, so get rid of it. You've already said you're not going to try to defend the majority of the site, so don't make it easy for the gunmen to do it!

You can buy armored glass that is only bullet resistant from one-side, so you can shoot back at the guy without your bullets being significantly slowed down. For an example see this. I'd presume you could do something similar with other armor systems.

[Draco18s]

For extreme enough cases, reinforced death trap that runners can be funneled into.

Enough steel and concrete in the walls to make getting out dam near impossible in under an hour, with one way doors that cannot be opened again electronically cos they're really just big blocks of reinforced material dropped from above, that it will take a beefy forklift to lift out of the way later.

Flood the death trap with your lethal devices of choice.



-karma

Oh my god. You just gave me an insane idea.

Based on an episode of Gargoyles (yeah, that cartoon from the 90s) where Goliath ends up trapped in the Death Trap Hotel. It had a room full of sharks for gods sake!

And an elevator that crushed itself at the top....

And stairs that turn into a slide....

Doors that open onto brick walls...

Acid pits...

Doors that open onto rooms full of water (or other liquid)...with sharks....

[toturi]

Oh my god. You just gave me an insane idea.

Based on an episode of Gargoyles (yeah, that cartoon from the 90s) where Goliath ends up trapped in the Death Trap Hotel. It had a room full of sharks for gods sake!

And an elevator that crushed itself at the top....

And stairs that turn into a slide....

Doors that open onto brick walls...

Acid pits...

Doors that open onto rooms full of water (or other liquid)...with sharks....

Is that an office or is that a fun house?

[Draco18s]

Is that an office or is that a fun house?

A deadly fun house.

Curiously I can't figure out which episode that was based on the one-line descriptions on Wikipedia. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/frown.gif)

Edit: Hooray Google. Revelations, ep 2x16.