From: Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@t...>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 1999 21:40:48 +0200
Subject: Re: beam class sizes - smaller is better?
> Glen Bailey wrote: > I would think having a high thrust factor would mean you want How do you get to knife-fighting range if your opponent has the same Thrust rating as you do and wants you at long range? Unless you can catch him between your ships and some fixed point - slow transports, a base or something else he has to protect, or the famous "edge of the universe" - you don't. Most games do have the "edge of the universe", however <g> > Plus one threshold check isn't going On the other hand you're almost guaranteed to lose some of the Class-1 batteries each treshold check... and it usually takes longer (or at least more DCP time) to repair two Class-1 than it does to repair one Class-4. > Can anyone with more experience give their views on big If you have the room to maneuver, the combination of long range and high thrust can be quite devastating - look at the battle between Indy and Noam where Noam used his NI stealth ships for an archived example. If OTOH the long-ranged force doesn't have enough space to maneuver in, it is in trouble. Having said this, the Class-4 is intentionally weaker than the Class-3, at least on normal-sized tables. We wanted a simple mechanic allowing players to build any size of beam battery they liked which still had a built-in size limitation. The Class-3 is slightly weaker than the Class-2 as well, but it is rather close. In order for them to balance evenly (on my table at least - 120*80 MU, which admittedly is fairly large) the base Mass of a single-arc Class-3 needs to be roughly 3.5. 3 is too little, 4 is slightly too much, but only slightly... so 4 it was. Fractional system Masses are an unnecessary evil .-/ Later,