I don't agree with Mr.Foley on all his points. Perhaps the thing to keep in
mind here is this: The models we mostly buy are FB ships. The ships used in
most games (esp tournament or convention) are FB ships. So if fighters
operating within the FB1 universe are overpowering (which they actually are),
then the FB1 ships would not have evolved. Taking from the ex cathedra
presentation of the FB, we then work backwards and say "how could this have
come to be? why do ships only have 2-3 PDS?
why isn't everyone using carriers galore? or SMR ships?" Obviously one
approach is to toss out FB1 designs, but that isn't realistic for most
people/situations. So the attempt is to try to
find a band-aid for the problem.
One interesting idea not yet discussed is the idea that fighter weapons are
perhaps not as effective against all targets. A big slow SDN is an easy target
perhaps, but a small high thrust scoutship might be quite a task to hit.
Perhaps the issue may be addressed by changing the attack resolution for
fighters so that the number of hits scored had some relation to mass or thrust
or both, thus large slow targets could meet them less effectively (but they
have armour, more PDS, and escorts) and smaller ships would not get gnawed up
so fast.
Also, letting ships engage fighters that are NOT attacking is one way to help
prevent fighter swarms from forming in the middle or rear of your
formation.....
And lastly, another thought (why I don't like the fighter group limitation):
If we're dealing with 100 or 1000km measuring units, then fighters can attack
from 600 or 6000km. Just put that in a sphere and imagine how many fighters
could attack.... the number would be pretty damn large. Yes, we can PSB this
inconvenient basic physical fact away with some handwaving, but it isn't
really that satisfying (or so says I).
And one last thought - 25 PDS wouldn't even
have slowed down the fighter swarms that came after my three Komarov mods in
the CanAm a year and a half ago. Would have helped, but wouldn't have got the
job done. And any escort in this game smaller than a CL is pretty much
mincemeat after (at most) one round of ADFC duty.
So much of how FT plays depends on which weapons you use, which rules, etc.
You can
build an SDN with 18-25 PDS, but a swarm of
SMR corvettes will really ruin your day anyway. And an enemy SDN built with no
PDS will equally ruin your day. Why? Because any situation where such insane
matchups could occur makes no accounting for evolutionary design, fleet
intelligence, etc - you don't generally have no
idea what your foe is bringing to battle. In fact, you generally have some
decent idea of the
capabilities/designs of most of his classes. You
might not know which ships will arrive (although you might have a good guess),
but you probably know most of the types of ships that could show up reasonably
and how many. But in a lot of one off games, it is an oddball
version of paper-scissors-nuclear device.
Tomb
While I don't do fighters much myself, this has raised a question:
(here I use PD meaning all Point Defense type systems.)
If the fighters are overpowering vs FB1 ships, is it because: A) FB1 ships
don't carry enough PD?
B) The fighter-vs-ship attack rolls are too good? (ie they have a
higher hit rate than the PDs.)
C) The PDs don't do enough damage to fighters/ect.?
D) Is it some combination of the above?
E) Or is it really down to player tactics/ship designs/random results?
Any educated answers?
Donald Hosford
> Thomas Barclay wrote:
> I don't agree with Mr. Foley on all his points.
G'day,
> If the fighters are overpowering vs FB1 ships, is it because:
It depends on how you like to play. If you like playing like Eric's group does
then its E, other playing styles will say its more a matter of D, though even
then it is a breakpoint issue. Even numbers of fighter groups or a few
fighters on one side (upto about 5 if I remember correctly) is fine even with
absolutely as is FB, its when you getter higher differences between the
fighter compliments (say about 10, though these numbers are hazy guesses as I
don't have my stuff with me) of the two sides that FB designs
don't seem to make good anti-fighter sense (the same can be said about
missiles in some cases, but to a lesser degree). The various optional rules
and the design your own stuff will move where these breakpoints (5/10
etc) are, and so some groups won't feel there is a problem, while others will
feel its a whopping problem.
Cheers
> If the fighters are overpowering vs FB1 ships, is it because:
If you look at it from a cost perspective, 6 fighters cost you 9 mass and 27
points for the hanger plus atleast 18 more points for the fighter themselves.
That's 45 plus points. 6 PD's and one ADFC cost you 8 mass and 26 points. So
defences are 1 mass and atleast 19 points cheaper. Note that if you sink most
of your ADFC into a few "escort" ships, the counter is to
destroy them first with long range ship fire and/or massive fighter
attacks against the "escorts".
> B) The fighter-vs-ship attack rolls are too good? (ie they have a
Nope, PD's get to fire first, so only surviving fighters get to fire...
> C) The PDs don't do enough damage to fighters/ect.?
See comments from A and B.
> D) Is it some combination of the above?
Not in my book, but there are people who will disagree.
> E) Or is it really down to player tactics/ship designs/random
This can make a big difference.
> Any educated answers?
> From me, you must be joking...
> At 2:44 AM -0400 5/3/02, Thomas Barclay wrote:
I think the best way to think of it is that the FB designs are from a snap
shot of "history" at the very beginning of the third Solar War. Just like at
the beginning of WWII, ships didn't have as many
Anti-Aircraft guns. A few years into the war they were starting to
really get built (especially where the US was concerned). By the end of the
world, the fast battle ships were bristling with Area and
point defense anti-aircraft weapons. The Anti-Aircraft gun optimized
cruisers were also a mid war design.
> Also, letting ships engage fighters that are NOT
I'd say only Area Defense systems should do this.
> And one last thought - 25 PDS wouldn't even
Well, one thing that is a WWII axiom as well as a modern Axiom is that when
using fighters or Missiles, you pretty much have a strike method that can out
weigh the defensive capability of an opponent given a comparison of two
variables (defensive fire power and offensive firepower). What is missing in
these games is the uncertainty of where your targets are in a given area of
space. That is what modern warfare is hinged upon.
The most basic is the strike group of Bear Bombers trying to find and attack
the Carrier Battle Group in the GIUK Gap. If the Carrier's AEW
and F-14's can find and execute their attacks on the Bears before
they can launch, the Carrier pretty much wins. If the Bears are able
to get their one massive strike in and get the F-14s with their pants
down, then they will win with their one massive salvo.
This was how Carrier war evolved during WWII. It is appropriate in the game
context in my opinion.
What is missing is not balance through weapon designs (play chess or some
other simple game), but a mechanism for controlling what ships are on the
board at a given time....
> So much of how FT plays depends on which
And this is correct. Its also how it should be. Instead of making radical
changes to how fighters work. Tweak the system a little bit.
Enable ADFCs (or a specialized version of it) to control Class 1's and give an
escort ship a zone space defense of a 12" radius. The PDF's would cover 6",
the Class 1's would cover 12" out. But make that a separate ADFC and restrict
its use to a 180 or 90 degree arc.
Due to the requirement for the added Class 1s and the 2 C1-ADFCs,
you'll only see it on big ships that are optimized.
This mirrors the 5"-38 DP guns that really made the US Fast Battle
ships excellent carrier escorts during WWII. It also gives your big ships that
have been optimized, an edge.
I snipped much of this... but I wanted to thank Mr.Barclay for posting his
message. I got a lot of insight into some of the intricacies and problems in
the FT system. Nothing that turns me off to the game, but it certainly makes
me want to develop some rules for running a campaign in which players are
forced to do evolutionary ship design...
Let's see... everyone starts with small, basic ships that are exactly the
same... they learn the rules with those ships (not many people here play, and
I have yet to play anyone myself)...
I'll cut myself off there and if I figure out some way to enforce evolutionary
ship design by some abtract campaign system or something, I'll put it up to
the list.
I'm thinking sometime after I've played a few games, maybe tried it, bought
and read the FB's. etc... (Don't hold your breath.)
I'd have to agree with Beth on this one. The only time I found fighters to be
a problem, was one time when I both had none of my own to counter and also
wasn't familiar with how to deal with them.
As to how the FB designs evolved, I'd say that they came out that way because
they all assume that fighters are included in a "balanced" squadron. It's only
when one player goes fighter heavy and the other takes few or none that
there's a problem.
Schoon
> On 5/3/02 12:58 AM, "Beth.Fulton@csiro.au" <Beth.Fulton@csiro.au> wrote:
> It depends on how you like to play. If you like playing like Eric's
> Thomas Barclay wrote:
> I don't agree with Mr. Foley on all his points.
Nor I with Mr.Barclay on all of his.
> Perhaps the thing to keep in mind here is this:
This point is disingenuous. Just because a model was cast to represent a
certain ship for a certain background doesn't mean it has to represent that
ship in any game, nor are you bound to using the figure solely for that
background. For my under-construction Cascadian fleet for my own
background, I'm using FSE ships from GZG, Narn and Centauri ships from AoG,
Star Wars ships, and odds & ends I've found. None of them will have stats that
intentionally resemble any of their stats in their respective games, but they
will all have fixed stats that I will (at least nominally) make
available to a limited extent to my opponents beforehand. I like the idea of
standardized designs, just not necessarily the ones found in the books.
The
> ships used in most games (esp tournament or
I can't comment to that, since I don't use canon designs. However, I'll
take it as true at least for the sake of arguement.
then the
> FB1 ships would not have evolved. Taking from
OK, let me see if I have this straight, because I don't want to misinterpret
or misqoute Tom. I read this as saying:
Since fighters in large numbers overpower FB1 designs, and FB1 designs are
supposed to be (within the Tuffleyverse) well-designed, yet do not
account for defense against large numbers of fighters, then the obvious
conclusion is that there must be some reason why large fightewr attacks don't
occur in that setting.
That makes sense. But it is also setting-dependent. While all the
suggestions for ways of restricting fihghter attacks have some merits, they
are necessary only under the above mentioned conditions. Thus I would suggest
that any application of them be optional. If you start limiting
fighter power in general, you take away options for players who want a setting
where fighters are powerful, and thus take away from the generic
nature of the game.
3B^2
> Brian Bilderback wrote:
[...]
> then the
If I may make one little point (not having my books here with me ;-),
I believe J Tuffley did state that the FB1 designs were NOT optimal. I'm
pretty sure he did say that in the FB1 book (alas, as I mentioned,
I don't have my books here to double-check). I believe he alluded to
the idea (or may have actually said it at some point, not sure) that
the designs as presented were representative of general use campaign-
type ships, not min-maxed most efficient designs for extended campaign
play (now I may have read this last bit into what he was saying, so it
could all be moot, anyway ;-)
This was just to address the interpretation that "FB1 designs
are supposed t obe ... well-designed", not most of the rest of
the post, or thread. ;-) In one-off games against other FB1
designs in the book, the ships work pretty okay. As soon as you
throw in something min-maxed or made way more efficient, the FB1
designs pale.
> Indy wrote:
> If I may make one little point (not having my books here with me ;-),
All good points, I agree. I was not espousing the idea that the designs are
optimal, I was merely assenting to it for sake of the arguement.
3B^2
> Flak Magnet wrote:
> Nothing that turns me off to the game, but
I've been contemplating the same thing for my setting. The beauty of a
setting/campaign is that if you run it like a large-scale RPG, with each
player's "Character" being a power instead of an individual, as "GM" you can
always step in arbitrarily to intervene if the rules don't cover a given
situation adequately. This should be a minimally employed tactic, but "Because
I said so" is definitely a weapon any good GM keeps in his arsenal.
3B^2
> On Fri, May 03, 2002 at 11:52:38AM -0400, Indy wrote:
> If I may make one little point (not having my books here with me ;-),
Page 2, "Designer's Notes", second para. Emphasis is on the fact that these
ships are expected to perform well against multiple types of opponent.
From: Flak Magnet flakmagnet@tabletop-battlezone.com
> Nothing that turns me off to the game, but
Try this:
a. Everyone starts with 5 ship classes and spends their money/production
points to buy these. b. The SSDs and quantity of each class are published to
all players. c. Each player may now design one variant for each class,
changing up to 10% of the mass of weapons, sensors or defense systems. Hull,
drives
and armor must remain the same. Up to 1/3 of the ships in the class may
be changed to the variant at no charge.
d. Variant SSDs are published to all players--number in service is not
published. e. Campaign starts. f. the first ship of a new design class takes 3
times as long and costs 3 times as much as succeeding ships. g. refitting new
systems to existing ships costs 200% of the system.
> At 12:24 PM -0400 5/3/02, laserlight@quixnet.net wrote:
I like I like.
How about adding in one caveat? Specifically that if a ship has unused mass,
that mass cost normal (or perhaps 150%) for refits. This illustrates the trend
with a new ships being designed with midlife improvement wiggle room.
> On Fri, 3 May 2002, Donald Hosford wrote:
> While I don't do fighters much myself, this has raised a question:
Partly the problem - some of the FB ships are under-defended wrt PDS.
Not enough Area Defence firecons, as well.
> B) The fighter-vs-ship attack rolls are too good? (ie they have a
I think this is the main problem. Fighters basically have a Beam1 w/
half the range. There's SIX of the damn things in a full fighter unit (six
fighters). Fighters kill ships faster than PDS kill fighters.
Fighters also have the **HUGE** advantage against big ships that you've got to
wait until fighters close to within THEIR effective firing range before you
can do anything about them. If you can shoot at them, they can
- and in fact are - shooting at you.
Every other system in the game can, usually, be engaged outside it's own
engagement ranges. Put a big enough Beam on a ship, and you can swat
anything before it gets within the usual B3/B2/SM ranges. Even with the
stock FB ships we're discussing, a cap ship can and will swat DDs & FGs at
ranges the little ships can't reply at. Fighters can fart around all they
want, and you can't do a damn thing about it until THEY come in on you!
Think of an FT fighter as a system for getting 6d of damage anywhere you want
on the table, while being invulnerable until you attack. See why I think stock
fighters are grossly underpriced?
The only 'cure' is more fighters on the table, and that, in my experience,
swiftly ruins any hope of actual on-table tactics. It just comes down to
ship design, specifically "How many PDS are you mounting, and how many fighter
squadrons did you bring?". You may as well use a spreadsheet to get your
results, and leave your ship miniatures in their box... Firing arcs,
maneuverability, etc all cease to matter entirely. (except that those systems
take up space that you "obviously" should have devoted to PDS & fighter
bays...)
> C) The PDs don't do enough damage to fighters/ect.?
D, then, but some of E. See my other post - you can 'correct' this
problem with custom designs (so E works) but the FB designs still stink vs
fighters as written.
> Any educated answers?
Just my opinions... and everyone else's.
See my other post on my ideas for fixes to the FT fighter system.
Brian - yh728@victoria.tc.ca -
- http://wind.prohosting.com/~warbard/games.html -
> Donald Hosford
Thanks for the responses.
So what it seems to total up to:
FB vs FB -- Seems to be ok.
Include any "really" optomized designs and everything goes out the window.
(Though player tactics can compensate some for this...)
> On Sunday, May 5, 2002, at 12:41 AM, Donald Hosford wrote:
> So what it seems to total up to:
Even in FB vs. FB (or a number of other design situations) it's more the
number of fighters that decides whether they're not balanced. OMMV, but
what I've witnessed is when the number of fighters differs greatly from the
number of PDs. If larger point values this becomes even more problematic as
the fighters can dogpile on one of few targets and sometimes succeed in
avoiding some of the PDs in the fleet because they don't have ADFC tied with
some or they are out of range of use. Thus specifically with FB designs if one
side brings all carriers and the other side may be in for a stiff battle.
I suppose that this means: "that you can never tell what a deturmined player
will do..."
However, if a player consistantly brings in fighter heavy formations, you
could do something seriously anti-fighter enough times to convince him
to change his tactics...
Donald Hosford
> Kevin Walker wrote:
> On Sunday, May 5, 2002, at 12:41 AM, Donald Hosford wrote: