Okay, I finally got in good enough financial shape that I picked up that
reserved copy of FB2 that the Military Corner had stuffed away for me, and I'm
sort of looking over the stuff in here. Lots of critiques here.
Phalons' plasma bolts.... anyone besides me see lots of abuse potential in a
custom game? Is this thing really intended to only be three points per
mass? With a six inch radius... the thing's essentially a higher-end
nova cannon that you can just dilute with screens and PDS.
Number cruncher note: A class 5 K-gun on Kra'Vak ships is actually more
efficient than a class 6. They both get double damage on everything but
a 6, but to get a base 30 damage you only need 66 mass in class 5 K-guns
but you'd need 70 mass in class 6's. Haven't done the math for higher class
ones yet, but I think the scale gets worse as you get higher. (Base 45 damage
of class 9's is 115 mass, but in class 5's is only 99.)
Probably says, if you're going to number-crunch it, it's not worth
getting
larger than class 5 K-guns on a Kra'Vak ship.
In just about any sort of fighter operations, Sa'Vasku are in bad shape. They
have to consume biomass to launch fighters of their own or to effect
any sort of area defense, and their fighters are all plain-vanilla on
attack. On first glance it seems like the Kra'Vak have the advantage since
their fighters can all ignore screens without having to pay through the nose
for torpedo bombers, but the Phalons probably have the ultimate advantage
because their plasma bolts would seem to make it ridiculously easy to
annihilate anyone who sets up an area defense phalanx, not to mention fighter
screens.
Question arising from that last sentence: plasma bolts are going to nuke
fighters too, aren't they? At least, they certainly would seem to under
official rules. (The house rules we play with assume that fighters can evade
nova cannons and wave guns for free.... we might use that assumption with
plasma bolts, too, especially if they get too abusive.)
Apologies if all of this came up before I joined the list...
From: <stiltman@teleport.com>
> Number cruncher note: A class 5 K-gun on Kra'Vak ships is actually
Correct. This was a deliberate design decision - that you could have
K-8s or K-15s if you wanted to, but after K-5 they're not as cost
effective.
> From: <stiltman@teleport.com>
> Correct. This was a deliberate design decision - that you could have
I suppose it makes sense... sort of like beams higher up than class 3's.
Another comment: at further glance, it seems a bit like Phalons' point
defenses are kind of weak. Their pulsers are nowhere near as efficient as PDS,
scatterguns, or Sa'Vasku variants thereof, and their plasma blasts can be shot
down by fighters (although, if the fighters goof a die roll on them it's
lights out). Granted, in the official designs nobody except the Kra'Vak has
particularly good defense against fighters... but the Phalons' defenses seem
to scale up the worst if you want to improve them. It's to a degree that,
since it takes four mass worth of pulsers to get a single
all-around
die roll of point defense, I almost wonder if they're really worth five
points. Sure, against other _ships_ they're probably worth it, but if
you just piled enough fighters and missiles on them they'd get blown away
fairly easily. It's probably I'm missing something... but are these things
really
all-around effective enough to be worth five points per mass?
Just a few screwy thoughts from the custom-gamer (who sees a lot of
number crunching, not that he does a terrible amount of it himself, but sees
enough that he keeps these things in mind)...
> On Sat, 3 Jun 2000 02:35:48 -0700 (PDT), stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> Phalons' plasma bolts.... anyone besides me see lots of abuse potential
A couple of points:
1) Fighters can take out plasma bolts, too. 2) They fire every other turn. 3)
They require a Fire Control per Plasma Bolt to fire. The firecon can be used
for pulsers (and, if you were using these things on custom designs, they could
be used to fire other weapons at other ships, I'd imagine), but you still need
a firecon per PBL.
> Number cruncher note: A class 5 K-gun on Kra'Vak ships is actually
That was intentional. There are diminishing returns at work. Think of it this
way: how many Saturn V launchers could you fit on an Aegis class
cruiser? :-)
> In just about any sort of fighter operations, Sa'Vasku are in bad
Sa'vasku play a bit differently from almost any other force. The allocation
system allows hideous amounts of thrust available to their ships. They are a
shoot and scoot design, in many ways. Fighters just won't keep up. They also
benefit from a regeneration system. I haven't done much with them, but I think
they could be THE most interesting fleet to play.
> Question arising from that last sentence: plasma bolts are going to
No need to make it a house rule. It's implied by the turn sequence, but should
probably be stated more forcefully. Fighters can evade PBLs. However, if they
want to try and shoot them down, they have to stay with in the area effect.
It's a nasty little decision, but fighters can scoot if they wish.
G'day,
A lot of your queries have been covered already, but here's a couple more
things.
> Phalons' plasma bolts.... anyone besides me see lots of abuse
They have been fairly intensively scrutinised, shoved, pushed and pulled, but
we may have missed something, so if you think there's something wrong don't
feel shy of pointing it out so we can all figure out whether it is a problem
or not thanks.
> In just about any sort of fighter operations, Sa'Vasku are in bad
They do appear that way at first glance, but as with most things Savasku
its a bit more subtle than that. First up their wombs cost less, but you
build the extra biomass into their hulls so they can take launching the
fighters, second they have the mini drone launchers which are their ADFC.
Beyond that it comes down to judicious use, they're not necessarily as
forgiving to mistakes, and there's a steep learning curve, but once you've got
them sorted they're as deadly as anyone. For instance, don't 'suicide' your
fighters as much as you might as a human, because when the going gets really
tough you can call them home to sure up your hull a bit more again;)
Cheers
Beth
If you get really subtle, you transfer the fighters from your carrier to the
SDN after it's made a close range pass...
Neath Southern Skies -http://home.pacific.net.au/~southernskies/
[mkw] Admiral Peter Rollins; Task Force Zulu
[DitD] Captain Puppilier
> -----Original Message-----
> forgiving to mistakes, and there's a steep learning curve, but once
G'day,
> If you get really subtle, you transfer the fighters from your carrier
Yep, so long as its got a 'womb'....
Cheers
Beth
> G'day,
> A lot of your queries have been covered already, but here's a couple
Yeah...
> >Phalons' plasma bolts.... anyone besides me see lots of abuse
> They have been fairly intensively scrutinised, shoved, pushed and
No prob. I might not have been around the on-line scene long enough
that I've gotten my name in the special acknowledgments... *notes the honor
afforded you and gives a respectful bow*...but I've been playing the game for
quite a while.:)
The thing that worries me is if you've got a custom game, and you just keep a
ship or two in reserve with plasma cannons to the tune of twenty or thirty
dice, and then put enough fighters behind them that enemy fighters are not
going to be a serious factor. The tactic I'd fear is that if you loaded up on
plasma cannon and fighter bays, piled on enough fighters that you could assure
either fighter superiority or dilute their fighter numbers enough that they
couldn't reasonably expect to defend themselves on point defense, then crank
off enough huge plasma bolts that you don't really care if you can only fire
every other turn... because most conventional sized ships aren't likely to
survive more than one or two hits, and with the radius on the bolts you're not
likely to miss a terrible lot. If you piled on enough plasma firepower
overwhelming even a pretty stiff area defense phalanx wouldn't necessarily be
that tough, and being an escort in such a phalanx would become quite a
liability.
If you tried to outrun it, you'd probably give up the fighter superiority in
the first place, so the fighters themselves would annihilate you. Even the
fastest of ships can only run away from fourty-odd fighter groups for so
long.
This is, mind you, thought out from the standpoint of my 5000-point
all-custom,
no-warning-on-enemy-composition-other-than-supership task force battles.
If
we opened the door to mixing alien tech in here, my worry is that the plasma
bolts could pretty quickly make a mess of things.
> >In just about any sort of fighter operations, Sa'Vasku are in bad
> They do appear that way at first glance, but as with most things
> forgiving to mistakes, and there's a steep learning curve, but once
The main mess that I see is, if you can't establish fighter superiority, it's
usually not worth it to bother with fighters at all. That's been my experience
in our custom games: _most_ of the time when fighters are involved at
all, they get no shots at enemy ships at all until they've had a huge fight
with the other side's fighters first. We've simply never seen a strategic
purpose in letting fighters have a free go at the ships. If you've got fewer
fighters, it's considered best to dilute that advantage on the enemy's part as
much as possible, and if you've got more, you want to make sure you have free
rein to attack their ships. A good sized Chinese wall of fighters just can't
feasibly be gotten around if the other side has superiority and they don't
want to let anything through.
Now, it _is_ true that Sa'Vasku could pile on the biomass and
conceivably establish about as much fighter superiority as they want... except
that in their case, it literally comes out of their hides, such that their
ships become far more fragile when they do so. They might get more ships
because they don't have to spend the side budget for fighters that other
fleets do, but if the enemy just piles on the fighters enough and keeps enough
ship-to-
ship weapons in reserve, they essentially can damage their enemies quite well
even if their fighters just do a kamikaze run in the inevitable dogpile if
they're outnumbered and then pick off the crippled enemies once they've
diluted their hulls so badly.
Will have to see how it goes. I haven't had a real chance to playtest this as
much, and I've had the fleet book for a short enough time that I don't know if
much of what I'm saying works the way I think it does.
G'day again,
> No prob. I might not have been around the on-line scene long enough
I think Jon was telling me its about time I went and actually did all that
housework I'd been putting off;)
> ...but I've been playing the game for quite a while. :)
Don't doubt it!
> The thing that worries me is if you've got a custom game, and you just
I know its not the same thing exactly, but I'm curious as to whether you
ever saw this happen with SMs?
> And with the radius on the bolts you're not likely to miss a terrible
True, though I have seen descent escort phalanxs blow away plasma bolt dumps
completely, the area effect isn't an all one way bonus. Plasma bolts can be a
bit of a two edged sword, this is even more the case if you miss judge your
placement and end up in the middle of your own bolts. In the case you propose
I'd probably actually run towards the enemy and put my self right in amongst
them (and dogfight all fighters were possible), they can bolt to their hearts
content then.... OK may sound to kamikaze for most, but it puts the sweats on
the plasma bolt player if he has to choose
between letting you mix it up with him beam-wise or risking his own
ships/fighters in a plasma bolt drop. Others will probably think of
better options than this, I'm not know for my tactical subtlety;)
> This is, mind you, thought out from the standpoint of my 5000-point
When you say supership what are we actually talking, SDN (250 - 300
mass) or bigger?
> If we opened the door to mixing alien tech in here, my worry is that
It could, Oerjan and others put many hours in to costing the various weapons
so as mixing shouldn't be a problem, but it wasn't actually ever
tested on the table, thus the cautionary note Jon included in FB2. At face
value I don't have a problem with trying mixed tech, if it really doesn't work
then you can hammer out some design caveats at that point. I'd suck it and see
first.
> The main mess that I see is, if you can't establish fighter
True, in that sense you do treat Sa'Vasku like human fleets, you either bring
'carriers' or you don't to those kind of match ups.
> Now, it _is_ true that Sa'Vasku could pile on the biomass and
Not necessarily anymore so than any human carrier, you've literally got to
build their fighters into their hides before hand. It may look disconcerting
to see all those little boxes crossed off for fighters, but just go and draw
the equivalent number if extra hull boxes, to cover all
the fighters in the bays, on a human carrier and see what you lose
there...
maybe it'll make you feel sorrier for all those fighter jocks you dispatch;)
> but if the enemy just piles on the fighters enough and keeps enough
Isn't this true vs humans too (thinking of how weak my fighter platforms
can be)? I still think its partly a visual illusion, you're physically
crossing off the boxes so the cost springs into your face, obviously its
only partly an illusion because if you then decide to send off more groups
then you pre-built in you are eating into your 'dedicated hull' (then it
really hurts). In the long run maybe the Sa'Vasku will turn out not to be a
fighter intensive race (we haven't had any large fighter brawls involving them
yet to be honest), they can ping from such long distance and are so
fast they can conceivably out run fighters for long enough to knock their
endurance way down (we use fighter morale rules) so maybe they don't need to
get lots of fighters out to counter Chinese walls and such (just a thought
haven't really tried that one much yet).
> Will have to see how it goes. I haven't had a real chance to playtest
Well I hope you have fun and I'm keen to hear how it goes.
Cheers
Beth
Point 3 is in question.
I read the rules as PBLs only require ONE active FCS during the Ordinance Fire
Phase, but the FCS may be used later for Pulsars. I.e. using the same
mechanic as SML/SMRs. PSB: selecting a location in space is alot less
exacting than trying to keep beams on a moving target (or on a specific
location ON that moving target) thousands of km away.
FT2 p.36 "Note tha an operational fire-control system is required in
order
for a Phalon ship to launch a plasma bolt, but the same fire-control may
also be used for anti-ship pulser fire in the main fire phase."
-----
Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
http://members.xoom.com/rlyehable/ft/
-----
> -----Original Message-----
[snip]
> G'day again,
G'day yourself. Much rambling involved in this letter, I digressed a few
times.:)
> No prob. I might not have been around the on-line scene long enough
Heh...
> >...but I've been playing the game for quite a while. :)
> Don't doubt it!
> >The thing that worries me is if you've got a custom game, and you
> I know its not the same thing exactly, but I'm curious as to whether
Yes. Salvo missiles, when piled up, can also be horrifically ugly. However,
even though they'll do damage a lot faster than plasma bolts, there's a limit
on ordnance and each salvo is only going to hit one ship, and the nearest ship
to where the salvo lands at that. You can either screen with fighters well
enough to dilute their effectiveness, you can cloak to evade them and make
your opposition waste them altogether, you can put up enough
chaff-decoys
to make them hit unimportant ships and waste their shots, and you can simply
fly your ships with fast enough thrust that they just plain don't hit much
such that the ordnance gets wasted and, if they've piled on with the missiles
too much, you then have an overwhelming gunnery advantage over the ships
firing them.
[near-digression warning]
My primary infamy among my Full Thrust circles is for my carrier forces.
My
brother-in-law has tried area-defense phalanxes, battleships,
out-carriering
me, it all never seems to work. My tactics with these take on a few levels
more subtlety than it looks like on the surface. The first element is simple,
brute-force fighter superiority. I throw fighter groups numbering well
into the fourties at them, with the intent that I'm going to overwhelm
whatever fighter resistance they put up, then take their ships apart one or
two at a time. The second element is where it gets more subtle, and that's the
ship-to-
ship equipment designed to deal with either especially stiff area defense
phalanxes or fast enough warships to slip through the fighter cover before
they're annihilated. This can be anything from fast needle cruisers to take
out a few ADFC's and thereby cripple a phalanx, nova cannons to discourage
people from taking a phalanx formation in the first place, a line
multi-purpose
SDNs up front to engage enemy carriers at close range in case they actually
try to out-fighter me, or if I'm really feeling twisted cloaking devices
to leave the carriers basically invulnerable while the fighters do their dirty
work.
However, no one just goes and stacks up the PDS too grossly against me,
because
my _other_ infamous tactic keeps them honest. This is the Warbird-style
cloaking mega-battleships (complete with escorts of their own to fill
the holes much like the carriers' do). They're big, they're horribly
beweaponed with torpedo armament, they've got cloaking devices to make sure
that the battle happens at a time of their choosing, they've got enough point
defense that you pretty well have to overwhelm them for it to be worth using
missiles or fighters at all, and their escorts usually involve either cloaking
nova cannons or cloaking needle beams. PDS is completely useless against them,
missiles are fairly difficult to use effectively (because if they cloak on a
turn you use missiles, you just wasted them), and fighters have troubles
pinning them down before they're in position to pulverize the motherships.
Every now and then, I bring these guys off the back burner and, when my
opposition thinks too much for fighters, these guys present a candid argument
for keeping their tactics honest.
Now, then, the point I'm getting at in all this. The last time I played with
my brother-in-law, he had an area-defense phalanx equipped reasaonably
well with needle beams, torpedoes, a smattering of missiles, all with the plan
that he's going to have a decent shot at being able to take on either of my
two more infamous tactics. Unfortunately for him, I do what I'm sometimes
known to do and went to something completely different: I threw a pair of
gigantic "dreadstars" at him that were, between them, armed with enough salvo
launchers to induce nuclear winter in a single broadside. His area defense
phalanx was simply not anticipating such punishment; about a third of his
force was destroyed and the rest seriously crippled on the first barrage and,
realizing that phalanxes are not well suited for immediate FTL departure, he
struck his colors on all ships before I even launched the second.
So yeah... salvo missiles can make a very fast mess, too, if you don't see
them coming. However, if you _do_ anticipate them halfway well, there
are
a few things you can do without over-specializing here. Like I said, I
haven't played with them as much yet, so it could be I'm
under-estimating
them, but just about any ship with either speed or a cloaking device could
probably not have to worry much about missiles, and I'd probably put my
money on carriers over missiles in most cases (and in _all_ cases where
the carriers themselves can cloak).
> >And with the radius on the bolts you're not likely to miss a
> True, though I have seen descent escort phalanxs blow away plasma bolt
> dumps completely, the area effect isn't an all one way bonus.
Yes, but the nightmare lies in something like this:
I'm envisioning a giant "Death Star" like varmint to neatly fill out the full
5000 points of one of my custom games. The present version from
FB1-only
tech is at mass 1200 and fills out a nasty fighter complement. As I was
driving to work in the morning I was pondering how plasma bolts might make it
even nastier, and arrived at something like this:
1200 mass Structure: 360 (Avg) Thrust: 1 FTL
FireCons (13) Armor (30 or so)
Plasma Bolts (8 x 4 dice each) Fighter Bays (41 or so, all normal fighters)
Class 3 batteries (10 x 3 arcs) Needle beams (15) PDS (about 30)
I'd have to do some more exacting math based on my older version on paper, but
the final numbers I came up with in my head were about like that.
Now then... what you'll have coming at you is 32 dice of plasma bolts and 41
fighter groups. The ways I see this going are about like this:
1. If you try to take it head-on with an area defense phalanx, it won't
be terribly tricky to space out fighters and plasma to be able to attack you
with both at the same time. Put the fighters a short distance behind you, the
plasma a short distance ahead of you, make sure their radii overlap enough
that I can hit all at once, and you have to take a choice between letting the
fighters have a free shot every other turn or letting the plasma annihilate
large portions of your force all at once. You're going to need 192 PDS just to
play the odds against the plasma alone; I've never seen even half that many
ever used in a game for fear that torpedo battleships will take you apart for
trying it if you guess wrong. The plasma and the fighters together... really
bad. Even if a few stragglers get through the hellstorm, the thing still has a
decent beam armament of its own and will probably be firing its needles at
fire controls. With 15 needle beams, that can disable even a conventional
capital ship in a turn or two of fire.
2. If you try to out-fighter the thing, its fighters will dilute yours
badly enough that you won't likely have enough left to take the thing down
before the plasma bolts annihilate your carriers. It's slow, but it's not
_that_
slow, and the only feasible way to throw enough fighters at it to shut that
down is with ships that don't have much drive space to outmaneuver the plasma.
Even so, who are we kidding? With that much plasma, how hard is it to cover
pretty much the entire fighting field in overlapping saturation and make it
prohibitively unlikely that anything's going to avoid getting hit?
3. If you go salvo-overload, its fighters attack you while you're still
out of range, softening your firepower badly, and then scoot back to screen
the mothership from your missiles once you are in range and its plasma and
beams
return fire. A bit less one-sided, but still probably advantage to the
big critter.
It wouldn't necessarily be invincible... but off the top of my head right now,
_I_ sure can't think of too many (broadly sound) tactics that would stop
it.
> Plasma bolts
> most, but it puts the sweats on the plasma bolt player if he has to
Heh... it could work. This is the usual tactic one has to use against carrier
forces in any case... whether it works tends to depend on what you bring to
the table and what the carriers bring for help.
> This is, mind you, thought out from the standpoint of my 5000-point
> When you say supership what are we actually talking, SDN (250 - 300
Back in FT2, it was a pretty easy cut-off: if it was a "supership" as
defined in MT, you had to warn the other side about the approximate size of
what you're flying. The tactics for fighting superships effectively get pretty
specialized, and if you didn't use them you usually got your head handed to
you, which is why we established this courtesy rule. The PSB for it is that
ships the size of small moons are going to be very easy
to pick up on long-range scanners if they don't have cloaking devices
(and no one ever put them on ships that size from sheer expense), with the
shifting gravitational forces and the sheer amount of energy that the things
give off when you move them at FTL speeds.
In the fleet books, we haven't really arrived at a real cut-off yet and,
other than the dreadstars mentioned above we haven't actually played with
superships much yet. I would say for the sake of discussion that anything much
larger than 300 mass would probably give a warning, anything below that,
probably not.
> If we opened the door to mixing alien tech in here, my worry is that
> It could, Oerjan and others put many hours in to costing the various
Yeah. In the original FT2 rules we pretty quickly saw that Kra'Vak tech was
going to utterly throw the game for a loop so we didn't ever allow it in our
custom games. Depending on how badly it gets abused, we might eventually
arrive at that same point on FB2.
> The main mess that I see is, if you can't establish fighter
> True, in that sense you do treat Sa'Vasku like human fleets, you
Yup. It never seems to much pay to go half-way... dreadnoughts
_sometimes_
can do all right against carriers, but not often.
> >Now, it _is_ true that Sa'Vasku could pile on the biomass and
> Not necessarily anymore so than any human carrier, you've literally
[rambling coming up]
Heh. We've actually had various running jokes that the most cruel punishment
for any sort of misdeed committed with a task force is to be assigned as an
interceptor pilot. Some of our various "custom races" in our games are known
to lobotomize some of their crewmen and wire them into the interceptors so
that they'll have no more sentience than is needed to pilot their craft
(i.e.
they won't care about the futility of self-preservation), and others
just plain consider it an ethical breach to use living pilots in their
interceptors in the first place, since the survival rate on the things is
usually downwards of 15% in our games.:)
In fact, I think the highest survival rate I've ever seen for interceptors
was when we were at a convention. My experience with convention-goers
tends to be that the ones we play against there usually aren't as good as we
are.
To be fair, neither my brother-in-law nor myself are the dumbest guys in
the world, and we've been playing this game for years and constantly adjusting
our tactics against one another, so in that dynamic we've probably acquired
quite an insight for the game that other folks might not catch on. At any rate
(tm), this was a convention about two years ago, and we were playing a game
where we were provided custom ships to fight a single enemy supership.
We were given a pretty substantial point advantage, but he gave himself a
fighter advantage to the tune of 12-8. Seeing we were going to be
outfightered I exchanged a nod with my brother-in-law and other
co-players
and immediately asked for interceptors, reasoning that if he played his
fighter advantage well we'd be best off diluting it as much as possible.
However, he _didn't_ play it very well; he took twice as many torpedo
bombers as heavy fighters for his mix, even though he knew we were going to
fly all interceptors, and I don't think even the heavy fighters bothered
taking a single shot at our interceptors in the whole game. He flew in at a
speed of
about 16 on a 2-thrust supership (bad move) and the moment he overshot
us
we took a set of thrust-8 torpedo cruisers, latched them onto his rear
end, and stayed there tenaciously enough that he realized he wasn't going to
shake them and tried to FTL. We didn't mind trading the itty bitty cruiser for
a supership dumping core.;)
> >but if the enemy just piles on the fighters enough and keeps enough
> Isn't this true vs humans too (thinking of how weak my fighter
> crossing off the boxes so the cost springs into your face, obviously
Yeah. Sa'Vasku might be able to get away with fighters after all if they just
piled on the extra hull... will have to do some tinkering and see how well
this works. Could be that they might wind up being one of the better
fighter-intensive sides in there... and it could be that they'll suck,
too. The mess I see is that, the more spare hull you reserve for fighters, the
slower your ships are going to be and the more expensive everything else will
get to move the things. So in the end, it might cost you more for the Sa'Vasku
than it would for the others.
Will have to study this closer.
> >Will have to see how it goes. I haven't had a real chance to
> Well I hope you have fun and I'm keen to hear how it goes.
I'll keep ya posted.;)
G'day,
> Yes. Salvo missiles, when piled up, can also be horrifically
You've pretty much pointed out all the downsides to SMs here, but it probably
took you a while to figure them all out right? I'd guess there's going to be
the same kind of learning curve with plasma bolts.
> [near-digression warning]....
At this point Beth start's to think maybe she's out of her experience pool
ship-wise... how big are these ships...mmmm?
> Yes, but the nightmare lies in something like this:
Yep can safely say I've never flown and never played something that large! Its
probably a credit to the FB design system and FT as a whole that you
can stretch it that far and it don't break!;) I'm not saying there's not a way
to counter your argument Oerjan and Alan have probably spotted it right away,
unfortunately I'm not that fast and
I've actually got to get my head around flying/opposing such a giant in
the first place! As a first go.....
> 1. If you try to take it head-on with an area defense phalanx, it
OK I am particularly muddle headed this morning explain this one to
me....
are you saying that you hit the ships not covered by plasma bolts with
fighters?? What if you just peppered your entire force with extra PDS so
there were no/few dedicated PDS ships, but as a whole they have a
whopping amount (maybe not 192 though)...this is assuming they don't also pick
a supership (maybe 1200 mass and all PDS and class 1s) and do it back to you;)
> With 15 needle beams, that can disable even a conventional
You obviously don't roll as many 1s as I do;)
> With that much plasma, how hard is it to cover
If I was facing it I'd accept I was going to be hit and try and minimise
the impact, so PDS (to reduce number of hits) and then level 2 screens or
even shrouds would be something you saw on my ships - dropping off those
5s and 6s can make the damage a lot less painful. I know your opponent is
going to know for sure you're bringing the killer to the table today, but they
may as well try and guess;)
> Back in FT2, it was a pretty easy cut-off: if it was a "supership"
Must admit I've never played FT2, Derek has but he didn't convince me to
join in until FB came out (I'm more of a hysterical's player by nature).
> In the fleet books, we haven't really arrived at a real cut-off yet
So I haven't even played a supership yet, maybe I'll have to go and work
out a scenario with one just to see how it goes. We have played a couple of
games with starbases in, but they've been more along the lines of defending
the line than being vs a supership.
> Heh. We've actually had various running jokes that the most cruel
Sounds like a pretty good background idea actually.
> The mess I see is that, the more spare hull you reserve for fighters,
Can't seeing it cost that much, if any, more than human groups where you've
got to have the extra hull to put the fighter bays in in the first
place...
that optical illusion again;)
> I'll keep ya posted. ;)
Cool.
Beth
On Mon, 5 Jun 2000 07:01:19 -0400 , "Bell, Brian K"
<Brian_Bell@dscc.dla.mil>
wrote:
> FT2 p.36 "Note tha an operational fire-control system is required in
This is apparently the proper interpretation. However, there is some question,
then, if it's worth buying one big PBL instead of a bunch of small PBLs. A
bunch of small PBLs have the advantage of being able to spread out, are harder
to eliminate with one bad threshold check, and are much more flexible in terms
of targeting and firing in alternate turns. The disadvantage is that they can
be degraded much more easily through threshold checks, and it takes more
repair rolls to get them back online.
The question is: do the advantages equal or exceed the disadvantages? It's
possible that they might. On the playtest list there was a small amount of
discussion that the wording of that one paragraph you quote could mean you DO
need a separate Firecon per PBL (even if that Firecon is used for other
purposes). This makes small PBLs less efficient and might just balance the
large PBLs versus the small PBLs better.
Right! The paragraph is ambiguous. My reading was that it was just like the
use of FCS for Salvo Missiles. Your reading was that they were needed 1 per
Plasma Bolt.
If used in the same manner as SML/SMR, having multiple small PBLs is
actually more effective than having a large PBL. This is due to the fact
that rerolls have no additional effect on Class-1 PBs, but do on Class-2
and larger.
If used as you stated, then Large PBLs are the way to go. Using this method,
even 2 PBLs aimed at the exact same point would require 2 FCS' to fire them.
This, however, leaves them weaker as all ships within 6tu of the BP may direct
PDS fire at it. This makes them rather usless unless you happen to catch a
small ship out by itself with a large PBL. Example: You have a
Class-5 PBL (rather large). You fire it at where you think a group of
light cruisers will be. You guess right 3 CLs end up within 6tu of your PB
marker.
Each CL has 2 PDS (we will ignore the Class-1s for the moment). Each PDS
will reduce the PB by an average of .66 (not counting re-rolls [4 damage
out of 6 rolls]). So on average the PB will do no damage. Now add in the
effects
of ADFCs and Class-1 Beams, Screens and the fact that it can only fire
every other turn. And this weapon has a mass of 25?!?
At first glance, I was glad to see an official area effect weapon. However, on
looking at it closer, the advantage of being an area effect weapon is negated
(IMHO) by the fact that multiple ships can degrade the weapon.
The best comparison would be to the SML: Class 5 PBL vs SML with 12 Std Salvos
PBL advanteges over SML: Potential for more shots (takes 26 turns) Less
Threshold check loss (1 symbol to check instead of 2) No roll for lockon
Potential to effect more than one ship Bonzai Jammes ineffective (unless carry
PDS)
PBL disadvantages to SML: Can be targeted by multiple PDS without ADFC Can
fire only every other turn Less overall damage potential per shot (1:6) Must
have 1 FCS per BPL? Bonzai Jammers more effective (if carry PDS) Effeced by
Screens
Or perhaps the best comparison would be to the same mass in SMR(ER)s:
Class-5 vs 5x SMR(ER)
PBL advanteges over 5x SMR(ER)s: Potential for more shots (takes 12 turns)
Less Threshold check loss (1 symbol to check instead of 5) No roll for lockon
Potential to effect more than one ship Bonzai Jammers not effective (unless
they carry PDS)
PBL disadvantages to 5x SMR(ER)s: Can be targeted by multiple PDS without ADFC
Can fire only every other turn Bonzai Jammers more effective (if they carry
PDS) Must have 1 FCS per BPL? Less potential damage per shot (5:6) Less range.
May not discharge all damage in one turn. Effected by screens
-----
Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
http://members.xoom.com/rlyehable/ft/
-----
> -----Original Message-----
It's
> possible that they might. On the playtest list there was a small
> On Tue, 6 Jun 2000 09:35:38 -0400 , "Bell, Brian K" writes:
Wait a sec. PDS only decrease plasma bolts ona roll of a six, not on a beam
die bases. So the 6 PDS's on the 3 CLs only gets (on average) a single hit,
and each cl takes ~14 points of damage. Not pretty at all.
Your right, my mind is dead. Sorry for wasting space on the list.
Instructions to self: Reread the book AGAIN! (Repeat)
-----
Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
-----
> -----Original Message-----
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> Okay, I finally got in good enough financial shape that I picked up
It's quite interesting to see how you "critique" just about everything that
forces you to use different tactics when flying/fighting the alien
races
than you use when flying/fighting human ships... Sounds a bit odd from
someone who claims to be used to coming up with counter-tactics to
extreme designs <shrug>
> Phalons' plasma bolts.... anyone besides me see lots of abuse
A higher-end nova cannon which is easier to aim and doesn't inflict the
"can't do anything else this turn" penalties, but which has only half the
range (and covers about one-fifth the area, since the PB template
doesn't move) and is quite easy to degrade with point defence. Screens give
better protection against PBs than they do against standard beams, BTW.
The important comparison is with Salvo Missiles however. You listed quite a
few ways to counter SMs; there are at least as many ways to counter PBLs. The
most important difference between SMs and PBs is that the SMs have a high rate
of fire and tend to hit a few ships hard, while the PBs have a low rate of
fire and tend to inflict
light-to-moderate damage on numerous ships.
> Number cruncher note: A class 5 K-gun on Kra'Vak ships is actually
That's intentional. Just like the K3 is intentionally designed to be more
efficient than the K4, and the K4 more efficient than the K5...
against targets with at most single-layer armour (eg. humans or
Sa'Vasku). If you go up against Phalon capitals however, the bigger K guns are
better since they waste a smaller proportion of their damage on the multiple
shell layers.
> In just about any sort of fighter operations, Sa'Vasku are in bad
The Sa'Vasku are able to shred just about any incoming enemy fighter strike
before it gets a shot off. Given enough time to grow drones, a Vas'Sa'Teth
Elder Broodship can launch 13 drone groups, and immediately
afterwards run away at thrust-9 or hit you with the equivalent of 4
Class-4 batteries... and it costs less than a Fragile-hulled Thrust-1
human carrier with 13 fighter squadrons embarked but *no* other armament or
defences.
> On first glance it seems like the Kra'Vak have the advantage since
KV fighters never get any damage re-rolls, so they inflict considerably
less damage than human fighters against unscreened targets (including all
fighter types) and are only marginally better against targets with
level-1 screens. Their tendency to go Ro'Kah evens things out somewhat,
but it is *very* annoying to have an exhausted "victorious" KV fighter
group wiped out by a crippled enemy fighter squadron :-/
> but the Phalons probably have the ultimate advantage because
Plasma bolts aren't very good at killing enemy fighters, since the fighters
can almost always use secondary movement to move away (or they can attempt to
shoot the plasma bolts down, but that's a lot more risky).
Firing plasma bolts at an ADFC phalanx means that 1) your own fighters can't
easily attack said phalanx without getting fried themselves and 2) you
maximize the number of PDS or equivalent systems available to shoot the plasma
bolts down.
> Question arising from that last sentence: plasma bolts are going to
Yes - unless the fighters (or someone else) shoots the plasma bolts
down before they explode, or the fighters use a secondary move to get away.
Read the FB2 errata on the FT FAQ.
> Another comment: at further glance, it seems a bit like Phalons'
Um... First you complain that the Phalon PBLs are extremely effective for
killing fighters (they aren't, but they *are* very good for killing missiles),
and now you complain that their point defences are too
*weak*...?
> Their pulsers are nowhere near as efficient as PDS, scatterguns, or
Compare the amount of PD dice a Phalon ship can fire with the number of PDS
systems on comparable human ships (particularly from FB1), and you'll usually
find that the Phalons have more PD dice available than the humans. OK, each
individual Phalon ship won't have as much PD firepower as an extreme human
escort design with nothing but PDS and ADFCs, but very few human fleets
consist exclusively of escort designs
:-/ The Phalons don't use dedicated escort designs as such; instead
they simply slap an ADFC or two on their normal warships (eg. the
Klashh-Huulth, Keraph or Voth/E classes described in FB2).
> and their plasma blasts can be shot down by fighters (although, if the
Any fighter squadron attacking the plasma bolts is not attacking the Phalon
ships. How many squadrons will you allocate to each strength point of PB
before you decide to bug out with the rest? <g>
> Granted, in the official designs nobody except the Kra'Vak
During the half-year of Phalon playtest battles I fought, I never saw
enemy fighters inflict serious amounts of damage on the Phalon ships. Only one
SM salvo did more than 5 points of damage, and that was after I rolled 5 '1's
for Pulser PD fire... In my experience, the main effect of fighters or
missiles against Phalons is to draw enough Pulser firepower away that the
enemy combat ships don't get shredded. OK,
these battles were only 1500 points so there obviously weren't 40+
enemy squadrons, but OTOH there weren't 5000 points of Phalons to shoot them
down either <shrug>
> It's to a degree that, since it takes four mass worth of pulsers to
What you do here is to compare a Phalon ship with a dedicated human escort
design with no offensive weapons at all. Not a very meaningful comparison IMO
<shrug>
> Sure, against other _ships_ they're probably worth it, but if you
Missiles can't dodge, so they die *very* easily to plasma bolts -
unless
you're prepared to let your fighters (or PDS-armed ships) risk suicide
to shoot the plasma bolts down first. It is quite difficult to use massed
missiles effectively against a well-handled Phalon force.
Massed fighters work somewhat better than massed missiles, but again you need
*lots* of fighters if you want them to do the actually killing
- enough that you won't have any supporting combat ships to speak of.
> It's probably I'm missing something...
You don't seem to have actually played the Phalons yet, so you may
missing reality :-/
> but are these things really all-around effective enough to be worth
Pulsers may be a bit underpriced if you use them in Long-range
configuration, but costing them at 6xMass would be too much.
> Just a few screwy thoughts from the custom-gamer (who sees a lot of
It shows that you haven't done a terrible amount of number-crunching
yourself on the FB2 weapons, yes :-/
> The thing that worries me is if you've got a custom game, and you
...and here you're back to worrying that Phalon anti-fighter weapons
are too *strong* rather than too *weak*.
But what exactly do you mean with "just keep a ship or two..."?
20-30 dice worth of plasma bolts is 100-150 Mass of PBLs, or 1-2
superdreadnoughts with no secondary weapons. 20-30 PDS dice worth of
Pulsers is 60-120 Mass depending on how many arcs you want for each
(you don't want single-arc pulsers for area defence, but 3-arc ones
work OK); that's 2-3 battleships or 1 superdreadnought instead. Add in
a fleet carrier or two to get "enough fighters" to back them up, and
you're talking about roughly half of your 5000-point fleet.
But yes, if the enemy is as fighter-heavy as your carrier fleets, the
tactics you describe above works quite well.
> My primary infamy among my Full Thrust circles is for my carrier
<chuckle> Now I suddenly understand why you seem to dislike FB2 so
intensely :-/
> I'm envisioning a giant "Death Star" like varmint to neatly fill out
Rounds out at Mass 1232, 5109 points including fighters.
> Now then... what you'll have coming at you is 32 dice of plasma bolts
The Dreadstar is virtually immobile, so assuming a reasonably large gaming
table the only weapons able to reach the enemy are its fighters
- unless the enemy either screws up, or allows you to shoot him for
some reason. You can play on a small table with fixed edges in Vector, of
course; that'll make your above design quite effective.
[snip]
> Even so, who are we kidding? With that much plasma,
It's only eight bolts. Are you seriously suggesting that your entire
playing table is only 8-10 square feet in size? And do you really want
to fire all those eight bolts at your dreadstar to chase the enemy fighters
off?
> It wouldn't necessarily be invincible... but off the top of my head
On a fixed-edge table, the easiest options are to take a Kra'Vak fleet
(kiss your fighters goodbye and watch your PBs miss <g>), or a Phalon
fleet with decent Interceptor support (8-12 squadrons is enough to
break up your squadrons enough for the Pulsers and PBLs to deal with the rest)
and all Pulsers set to C configuration.
On a floating-edge table, any ship with a single Class-4 or bigger beam
and a thrust rating of 2 or more will eventually pick the dreadplanet
apart once your fighters have been swatted - unless it hypers out first
of course, but in that case it has conceded defeat anyway.
> If we opened the door to mixing alien tech in here, my worry is
To tell the truth I'm a lot more worried about the Sa'Vasku than about the
Phalons or Kra'Vak. Plasma Bolts are no harder to counter than Salvo
Missiles - different counter-tactics, certainly, but I doubt it'll take
any longer to figure out than the couple of months the SMs were thought to
be invincible after FB1 was published :-/
> The main mess that I see is, if you can't establish fighter
When you use the fighter morale rules, a smattering of Interceptors is quite
useful for breaking up enemy fighter squadrons (or for intercepting missiles).
Killing half the fighters in a squadron reduces
its combat effectiveness to less than a quarter :-/
[On Sa'Vasku]
> but if the enemy just piles on the fighters enough and keeps
The main problem with using fighters against the Sa'Vasku is that the enemy
fighters need to get past both SV Drones, Interceptor Pods and Spicule fire,
*and* hurt the Sa'Vasku enough that they can neither run
away nor outrange the enemy fleet's non-fighter weapons.
Remember, the Vas'Sa'Teth Elder Broodship can churn out 13 Drone
groups, and *then* go on to run at thrust-9 - or to hit you with the
equivalent of 5 all-arc Class-4 beam batteries (or 2 all-arc Class-5
batteries or 1 all-arc Class-6 battery). Can your combat ships match
that speed or range?
> The mess I see is that, the more spare hull you reserve for fighters,
Thrust 9 with 13 squadron-equivalents and some serious long-range
firepower isn't fast enough for you...?
Regards,
> G'day,
> >Yes. Salvo missiles, when piled up, can also be horrifically
> You've pretty much pointed out all the downsides to SMs here, but it
Not really... I saw that the salvoes would probably be something of a mess
straight off and drew up the designs for the ships I used against my
bro-in-law
that I mentioned in my last message pretty early... I just didn't happen to
use them in a game until recently. (My brother-in-law lives a three
hour drive away now so we don't get as many chances to play as we used to.)
> >[near-digression warning]....
> At this point Beth start's to think maybe she's out of her experience
The typical carriers I'm throwing are usually somewhere in the 200-300
range. The Warbirds mentioned are 320.
> > Yes, but the nightmare lies in something like this:
> >I'm envisioning a giant "Death Star" like varmint...1200 mass
> Yep can safely say I've never flown and never played something that
Well... it doesn't break in the sense that you can design something about as
big as you want. Whether or not it breaks the gameplay... well, I leave that
as an exercise for the individual player. Battleships that size can be
_extremely_ vulnerable to just an escort or two quickly zipping over and
needling out their drives.
> >1. If you try to take it head-on with an area defense phalanx, it
> OK I am particularly muddle headed this morning explain this one to
> fighters??
More likely both, if I can manage to do it. Keep the 6 MU radii of the
fighters and plasma bolts overlapping without the fighters actually being in
danger, and you can hit with both at once.
> What if you just peppered your entire force with extra PDS so
Well, all PDS and class 1's on a supership that size probably would not be
done in these games simply because you'd be betting your life that I'm
throwing the carrier plan at you. If I throw just about anything else, you're
toast. Which is why I added the parenthetical comment that there weren't very
many "broadly sound" tactics that would work against the carrier.:)
And even an ultra-battleship that doesn't go all class 1's is still not
the
best plan. If your opponent knows you're flying an ultra-battleship
(and,
when you give them a pre-warning of the thing's mass, they will...
anything
much over 1200 mass is going to _scream_ "I'm a battleship") there are a
great many tricks that can be pulled to beat it, far more than for
ultra-carriers. The two that come most easily to mind would be (a) any
form of carrier force (cloaking or otherwise) that, knowing that they won't
have to worry about enemy fighters, "cheat" on their fighter complements and
go
for fourty-odd torpedo bombers, and (b) just about any fleet that has
either cloaking escorts or stiff, fast cruisers equipped with enough needle
beams to make sure that your drives are prohibitively unlikely to survive the
first pass.
These are options that work against an ultra-battleship that don't work
against
an ultra-carrier. (Although, to be fair, if you just keep the
ultra-battleship
at 1200 mass and give it escorts so that people won't necessarily know what it
is, that's another story...)
> >With 15 needle beams, that can disable even a conventional
> You obviously don't roll as many 1s as I do ;)
Perhaps not. But with 15 needle beams, that's two and a half hits per turn.
Point that at a conventional capital ship and their fire controls probably
will not survive more than two or three turns of sustained fire.
> >With that much plasma, how hard is it to cover
> If I was facing it I'd accept I was going to be hit and try and
> going to know for sure you're bringing the killer to the table today,
Yeah, but if they throw K-gunned fighters _and_ the plasma bolts at you,
the screens and PDS will only do so much good.
I'm personally not as sold on screens as I was in FT2. In FT2, it was
practically a given that any custom ship that was expected to be anywhere near
a battle line had level 3 screens, because you could basically have them for
free. Now, having to take 10% of your ship mass just to get level
2's makes it expensive enough (and with torpedoes, missiles, and K-guns
able to go right through it anyway) that I don't know if it's usually a sound
trade-off.
> >Back in FT2, it was a pretty easy cut-off: if it was a "supership"
> Must admit I've never played FT2, Derek has but he didn't convince me
Heh...
> >In the fleet books, we haven't really arrived at a real cut-off yet
> So I haven't even played a supership yet, maybe I'll have to go and
Immobile, orbital starbases, you mean? Yeah, those can potentially give a
rough idea of what a giant supership might be like. (The official designation
for those giant ships that I use is "mobile starbase"...:)
> >Heh. We've actually had various running jokes that the most cruel
> downwards
> Sounds like a pretty good background idea actually.
I've actually got quite a bit of background material for my various custom
races. They all (at the moment) use FB1 tech, so it's not like I'm making new
weapons for them or anything, but each one has a different ship design
philosophy (that's far more variant than the various human sides in the
official Full Thrust background) and their own range of tactics. One of these
days I'll have to get around to putting all this on a web site and paste the
URL here.
> >The mess I see is that, the more spare hull you reserve for
> Can't seeing it cost that much, if any, more than human groups where
Yeah. It could be that Sa'Vasku carriers with enough pod launchers and wombs
could theoretically get themselves fighter superiority for free, actually...
stack up the expendable biomass, crank out enough interceptor pods to decimate
enemy fighters, and once you've brought enough of them down start cranking out
your own fighters. The pods would be an efficient way of taking down enemy
fighters (costs less biomass) and then once you'd dealt with them you could
just crank out as many of your own as you wanted.
I need to get my usual victims together and try some of this stuff out.
:)
Reminds me of Star Control 2 with all the possible variants that could come
out of the woodwork, though.:)
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> >Okay, I finally got in good enough financial shape that I picked up
> It's quite interesting to see how you "critique" just about everything
Hey, hey... that letter was a collection of initial thoughts, nothing more.
> >Phalons' plasma bolts.... anyone besides me see lots of abuse
> >three points per mass? With a six inch radius... the thing's
> A higher-end nova cannon which is easier to aim and doesn't inflict
Yes, noticed that.
> The important comparison is with Salvo Missiles however. You listed
That's basically my worry about them. They won't make an entire mess by
themselves, I'm sure, but if you combined them with good backup...
> >Number cruncher note: A class 5 K-gun on Kra'Vak ships is actually
> That's intentional. Just like the K3 is intentionally designed to be
Yes...
> >In just about any sort of fighter operations, Sa'Vasku are in bad
> The Sa'Vasku are able to shred just about any incoming enemy fighter
Point. Yeah, I was already coming around in this general direction... the
Sa'Vasku might be a bit overpowered, yes.
> >On first glance it seems like the Kra'Vak have the advantage since
> KV fighters never get any damage re-rolls, so they inflict
Yes, but the trade-off you get for being able to ignore screens is a lot
less than the advantage.
> Their tendency to go Ro'Kah evens things out somewhat,
We don't use fighter morale in general (or involuntary striking of colors,
etc)...
> Firing plasma bolts at an ADFC phalanx means that 1) your own fighters
Positioning fighters together with plasma bolts so that both can attack
shouldn't be that hard. Position the fighters on one side of where you expect
them to be, position the plasma on the other.
> >Another comment: at further glance, it seems a bit like Phalons'
> Um... First you complain that the Phalon PBLs are extremely effective
Their _point_ defenses seem a bit weak. The plasma, perhaps not.
And don't take _anything_ that I'm saying here as "complaining",
please... I'm giving initial thoughts, nothing more.
> >Their pulsers are nowhere near as efficient as PDS, scatterguns, or
> Compare the amount of PD dice a Phalon ship can fire with the number
Yes, with the designs in FB1... however, IMHO, the designs in FB1 are very
poorly equipped in the PDS category. It's extremely rare, for instance,
that any given front-line dreadnought/battleship in our games does _not_
have somewhere between three and five times as many PDS as the FB1 designs.
> >Granted, in the official designs nobody except the Kra'Vak
> During the half-year of Phalon playtest battles I fought, I never saw
Well, 40+ fighter squadrons would annihilate the Phalon designs in the
book. They just don't have the pulser firepower in there to shoot down the
fighters fast enough. I don't have the FB2 in front of me, but IIRC the
largest Phalon warships had about 12 pulsers and you could get about five of
them for 5000 points. Extreme examples probably are not going to put up too
many more pulsers than that... and just 60 dice, even in a phalanx, is nowhere
near enough point defense to protect yourself from 40+ fighters.
> >Sure, against other _ships_ they're probably worth it, but if you
> Missiles can't dodge, so they die *very* easily to plasma bolts -
Okay, take aside the missiles remark.:)
> Massed fighters work somewhat better than massed missiles, but again
Yes... and if I'm flying that many fighters, the only supporting ships I'm
going to worry about is the needle-armed craft to take out ADFC.
> >It's probably I'm missing something...
> You don't seem to have actually played the Phalons yet, so you may
Hey there... what say we switch our game from Full Thrust to "let's pretend
this is an impersonal discussion", okay?
> >My primary infamy among my Full Thrust circles is for my carrier
> <chuckle> Now I suddenly understand why you seem to dislike FB2 so
If I didn't say it, I didn't say it.
> >I'm envisioning a giant "Death Star" like varmint to neatly fill out
> >something like this:
> >1200 mass
> > FireCons (13)
> >Plasma Bolts (8 x 4 dice each)
> Rounds out at Mass 1232, 5109 points including fighters.
Here's the actual math I did when I sat down to do it... if you don't have
a fixed-width font on your mailer this may come out looking funny...
Mass Pts
---- ----
1200 mass 1200
Structure: 360 360 720 Thrust: 1 60 120 FTL 120 240
FireCons (13) 13 52 Armor (11) 11 22
Plasma bolts (32 dice total) 160 480 Fighter bays (41) 369 1107 Fighters (41)
738 Class 3's (10 x 3 arcs) 60 180 Needle beams (15) 30 90 PDS (17) 17 51
---- ----
1200 5000
> >Now then... what you'll have coming at you is 32 dice of plasma bolts
> The Dreadstar is virtually immobile, so assuming a reasonably large
We play cinematic on a table where about 70MU usually seperates the two
sides at the start and about 15-20MU behind each side is the boundary.
> >It wouldn't necessarily be invincible... but off the top of my head
> On a fixed-edge table, the easiest options are to take a Kra'Vak fleet
Not convinced of that at all. To take down that many fighters, you're going to
need about 80 scatterguns. If I hold back the fighters until the plasma has
burned away either your fleet or your scatterguns, then pile on at will, this
isn't a foregone conclusion in the Kra'Vak's favor at all. Once you're
down to less than about 20-30 scatterguns the fighters can quite
cheerfully
dogpile your ships at will. The plasma bolts won't miss _all_ day, and
if you're zigzagging that badly (or dividing your fleet up to keep them from
hitting everything at once) I can either not worry about their main armament
or let the fighters pick off individual ships at a time without caring about
scatterguns much.
I'd make a battle of it.;)
> or a Phalon
8-12 squadrons of interceptors would get annihilated by 41 squadrons of
regular fighters... and with only about 60 dice of point defense, the
remaining fighters and plasma together probably wouldn't be terribly worried
there, either.
> On a floating-edge table, any ship with a single Class-4 or bigger
This is more feasible if you have large enough space (we don't usually, we
play on a floor with inch-scale and if you go off the board, you're
gone) and if you know what I'm doing in advance (which, again, we don't).
> >>>If we opened the door to mixing alien tech in here, my worry is
> >>It could, Oerjan and others put many hours in to costing the
> To tell the truth I'm a lot more worried about the Sa'Vasku than about
Heh... I don't doubt that plasma bolts will have a counter, and that people
will be able to deal with them in some way or another.
And I agree with you... the longer I think about the Sa'Vasku the more
imbalanced they potentially seem.
> >>>The main mess that I see is, if you can't establish fighter
> When you use the fighter morale rules, a smattering of Interceptors is
We don't use them, and we also allow recombining of wounded groups into larger
wholes even if we did. When there's 240+ fighters out there with you,
losing three of your buddies doesn't seem like a reason to panic to us.:)
> [On Sa'Vasku]
Most of this is granted. My initial thoughts on this subject appear to have
been completely wrong.:)
On 6-Jun-00 at 14:39, stiltman@teleport.com (stiltman@teleport.com)
wrote:
> And I agree with you... the longer I think about the Sa'Vasku the more
<ping> too weak <ping> too strong
<ping> ...
> We don't use them, and we also allow recombining of wounded groups
This one has been discussed to death on the list. There seem to be too
conflicting opinions.
Those who don't use morale rules and say they are too strong.
Those who use morale rules and don't have a problem.
Using your extreme example.
If I have to take out 41x6=246 fighters with a 5K fleet I am in trouble. If I
have to take out 41x3=123 fighters with a 5K fleet I can handle that.
> On 6-Jun-00 at 14:39, stiltman@teleport.com (stiltman@teleport.com)
wrote:
> > And I agree with you... the longer I think about the Sa'Vasku the
> <ping> too weak
Heh... yeah, it's hard to say. But Oerjan's comment about a ship being able
to throw 13 drone groups and _then_ go at thrust 9 or throw some very
powerful beam fire at you, and costing less than a human carrier with thrust
1, fragile
hull, and 13 fighter bays w/ fighters... ouch. Hadn't done the math on
the Sa'Vasku examples yet, but that's something of a sobering thought.
> > We don't use them, and we also allow recombining of wounded groups
> This one has been discussed to death on the list. There seem to be
> Those who don't use morale rules and say they are too strong.
> Those who use morale rules and don't have a problem.
> Using your extreme example.
> If I have to take out 41x6=246 fighters with a 5K fleet I am in
I can sort of see your implication... OTOH, the people I play with don't use
them and don't see fighters as too strong anyway. I've had fighter superiority
and won; I've given up fighter superiority and won. I don't agree with the
logic behind morale rules (as I said, if you've got over 200 fighters with you
in a given battle, losing most of a particular five doesn't strike me as
something that's going to put the fear of the cosmic gods into you) and I
don't terribly worry about fighters being invincible either way. Even though
we have house rules that are fairly friendly to fighters (e.g. no morale, and
functional immunity to mass destruction weapons on the assumption that their
ability to outmaneuver the likes of the Yamato and the Death Star are givens)
we don't consider them unbeatable. If someone throws a phalanx with three
digits' worth of PDS and the carrier guy on the other side hasn't brought
needle or mass destruction help, the latter is probably in for a long day even
by our house rules.
> I can sort of see your implication... OTOH, the people I play
and
> I don't terribly worry about fighters being invincible either
If a fighter pilot has his wingman and half of his squadron explode in front
of him, I believe there would be some second thoughts on attacking. There may
be a lot of other fighters around but those he bunks with and is closest to
are gone.
Also the type of game you are playing skews the results. One-off,
massive point games have their place but are very different than scenarios and
linked campaign games. With your 15% survival rate on fighters, replacing
170+ fighters after each battle will eat up lots of production and the
massive ships have a tough time defending several systems at one time.
G'day,
> going to be the same kind of learning curve with plasma bolts.
OK maybe not for you, but for everybody else;P;)
> The typical carriers I'm throwing are usually somewhere in the 200-300
Nope OK then I should be able to handle them... guess I'd just have to think
about it a bit more.
> Well... it doesn't break in the sense that you can design something
Yep that's one of the nicest facets of FT every weapon/idea has its
swings and roundabouts.
> More likely both, if I can manage to do it. Keep the 6 MU radii of
I have a sneaking suspicion you should only be able to do that a few times
before your opponent figures a way to outfly that particular tactic.
> And even an ultra-battleship that doesn't go all class 1's is still
anything
> much over 1200 mass is going to _scream_ "I'm a battleship") there are
While I believe that you know what you're talking about, why does saying
I'm 1200 mass automatically make you a battleship???? Can you also please
explain again exactly how you figure out what's coming (sorry I seem to be
getting a little muddled here)... you present ship masses and then go off and
say what's on them? Or did you mean you figured out your fleets and then
present masses and then you think OK he's got blah so with my stuff I can do
such and such?
> The two that come most easily to mind would be (a) any form
have to
> worry about enemy fighters, "cheat" on their fighter complements and
First up I'm still amazed at the assumption regarding 'there will be no
fighters' and two its interesting that you like torpedo bombers this much, we
don't use them much at all (guess its the difference between using or
not using morale rules)
> and (b) just about any fleet that has either
OK I really only put the 1200 mass with PDS/class 1s as a rather extreme
(though probably not very useful, come to think of it) example, but for
arguments sake lets stick with it. Now I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass
here (and now I promptly proceed to be just that sorry), but if I'm all class
1s what have my drives got to do with anything? If I've guessed awful wrong
and you've got all little escorts and I've got the beam behemoth from hell
then you're going to be so much faster than me in the first place there's no
point chasing you so I can't see any tremendous impact in taking out my
engines as I've got 360 deg arcs.
> (Although, to be fair, if you just keep the ultra-battleship
what it
> is, that's another story...)
Which is what I'd be inclined to do as there's this little voice in my head
saying... "didn't someone who knew what they were talking about say never send
big ships out by themselves...";)
> Perhaps not. But with 15 needle beams, that's two and a half hits per
Mmmm definitely not in our camp Indy, he actually thinks we'd hit at all
with 15 needle beams;)
> Yeah, but if they throw K-gunned fighters _and_ the plasma bolts at
True, but that so much may be just enough to tip the balance and let my
primary weaponry come round. I've found a lot of FT to come down to not trying
to take any damage, but rather making sure you only take damage you can cope
with or at a speed that doesn't see your plans fall to pieces.
> Now, having to take 10% of your ship mass just to get level
They have their places, does come down to who you're playing against...
against beams and PBs double screens can be particularly frustrating for
your attacker to encounter... imagine Laserlight or our man Teske trying to PB
a double screen fleet to death....;)
> Immobile, orbital starbases, you mean? Yeah, those can potentially
Thanks, I'll give it a go.
> I've actually got quite a bit of background material for my various
There's actually a communal GZG site you can stick them up at, don't have to
be fancy just plain old text files will do, Tom Anderson (I think) set it all
up. If the instructions on how to use the joint haven't changed then the
following should work:
"that would be a job for...
the unofficial unofficial GZG-L Web Repository!
http://members.xoom.com/gzg_l/
which is writable by FTP:
ftp://ftp.xoom.com
user: gzg_l
password: nacesu so just make a new directory with some appropriate name and
slam your file in it. then post the link. the only drawback is that it's on
Xoom, which is a bit slow and unreliable."
> Yeah. It could be that Sa'Vasku carriers with enough pod launchers
Not exactly free, don't swing that illusion too far back the other way
;)
> stack up the expendable biomass, crank out enough interceptor pods to
Yep, though I have a feeling that once again it may not be quite as simple a
thing to pull off as stated;)
> I need to get my usual victims together and try some of this stuff
Like I said we'd be keen to hear how it all goes.
Have fun
Beth
> While I believe that you know what you're talking about, why
It doesn't, though, it makes you an UberDreadnought. Or an UberCarrier.
> > and (b) just about any fleet that has either
> OK I really only put the 1200 mass with PDS/class 1s as a
You'd probably get a hit, in two or three turns, Beth.
> They have their places, does come down to who you're playing
GZG Eact V:
G'day,
> You'd probably get a hit, in two or three turns, Beth.
Maybe 4;) Point taken.
> GZG Eact V:
I'll pay that one!;););)
Beth
> On 6-Jun-00 at 21:10, Beth Fulton (beth.fulton@marine.csiro.au) wrote:
> First up I'm still amazed at the assumption regarding 'there will be
Not that we have used Torpedo fighters much, but it looks like morale rules
would favor Torp fighters. If they only get 1 shot and break morale that is
fine.
Morale rules come in when the Torp Fighters have to face screening fighters
and PDS before being able to attempt a strike at thier target.
Example: 3 flights of TorpFighters takes 3 turns to get to the target. On the
2nd round flight 1 is hit by enemy fighters and looses 4 fighters. It in
return does kills 1 fighter. Enemy Fighters: 5 Flight 1: 2 Flight 2: 6 Flight
3: 6 On round 3, the enemy fighter group rolls for Morale. It gets a 4, so
attacks flight 2 and kills 4 fighters. Flight 2 is diverted from the target
and kills 1 enemy fighter. PDS kills 3 fighters in Flight 3. Flight 1 rolls
for Morale and gets a 3. He only has 2 fighters, so fails. Flight 3 rolls for
Morale and gets a 4. He only has 3 fighters, so fails. No fighters are able to
attack this turn. Enemy Fighters: 4 Flight 1: 2 Flight 2: 2 Flight 3: 3 On
round 4, the enemy fighters roll for Morale and get a 3 The enemy fighters
attack Flight 3 and kills 2 fighters. Flight 3 tries to ignore the enemy
fighters to strike the ship. It rolls higher than a 1, so is unable to attack
the ship. PDS kills 1 fighter in flight 1 and 1 fighter in flight 2. Flights 1
& 2 roll for Morale, but roll higher than a 1, so fail. Enemy Fighters: 4
Flight 1: 1 Flight 2: 1 Flight 3: 1 At this point they have used 3 rounds of
endurance and need to roll a 1 on a d6 in order to attack. Chances are that
the enemy fighters and PDS will take out 2 of these groups if they press the
attack.
Now, granted that this is a strawman and that Flight 3 on round 3 had an
50/50 chance to make the attack. However, the Torpedo fighters
outnumbered the enemy fighters by 3:1. [Number of kills were based on average
rolls
without re-rolls and rounding up on each side].
-----
Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
http://members.xoom.com/rlyehable/ft/
-----
> -----Original Message-----
wrote:
> > First up I'm still amazed at the assumption regarding 'there will be
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> We don't use fighter morale in general (or involuntary striking of
and
> We don't use them, and we also allow recombining of wounded
OK, this explains a lot. The fighter morale rule is *the* major balancing
mechanism for human/Phalon fighters; removing it roughly doubles their
firepower. ("Balance" as in "don't need to pick exactly the right
super-specialized gimmick fleet to have a chance against my enemy's
super-specialized gimmick fleet, but have a fighting chance with a
fairly wide selection of fleet styles".)
Both of the Fleet Books were written and their mechanics balanced assuming
that the fighter morale rules are in use, so it's no big wonder that you find
fighters so effective. Whether or not Jon was aware that he'd assumed this I
don't know, but I for one certainly did
:-/
Without the fighter morale rules human/Phalon fighters should have a
base cost of 8 points each (48 per squadron, rather than the current
18). All costs for heavy/attack/ long-range/torpedo fighters rise in
proportion (+2 pts/fighter for Attack or Long-Range, +5 pts/fighter for
Heavy, +7 for Torpedo).
Re-organising depleted squadrons on the fly (rather than aboard the
carrier) is almost as good as not using the fighter morale rules at
all. Knock 1 point off the base cost (to 7 pts/fighter), but the extra
costs for
non-standard fighters remain as above.
> KV fighters never get any damage re-rolls, so they inflict
The big gain is their Ro'Kah ability, and that's a rather two-edged
sword. They effectively treat all targets, screened or not, as having
level-1 screens (or level-0.95).
> Firing plasma bolts at an ADFC phalanx means that 1) your own
And where exactly do you expect a high-thrust (or Kra'Vak/Sa'Vasku)
ship starting at speed ~24 to be? <g>
> Compare the amount of PD dice a Phalon ship can fire with the
Not really. The main difference between the FB1 ships and the currently ~800
player designs from all over the planet I've collected over the years since
FB1 was published is that the custom fleets tend to have more units with ADFC,
but the overall number of PDSs is rather similar. However, most or all of
those designs were created for use with the fighter morale rules just like the
FBx ships were; I'd be quite interested in adding your designs to the archive
as examples of ships designed for other types of games.
[On Phalons vs. fighters]
> Well, 40+ fighter squadrons would annihilate the Phalon designs in
Without the fighter morale rules, certainly. With them and the standard
reorganisation rules it'd be a quite interesting battle - and I
wouldn't put all my money on the fighters.
> 1200 mass
11 armour and 17 PDS instead of the ~30 of each suggested above. Looks OK.
> ...with 15 needle beams, that's two and a half hits per turn.
With 15 needle beams on a thrust-1 ship in Cinematic, you're lucky if
you get to fire three needle beams per turn. If all of your needle beams are
in the same fire arc you'll get to fire them at best once during the battle.
Not very "sustained" fire IMO, but YMMV.
> Now then... what you'll have coming at you is 32 dice of plasma
About the same size of table as I have, though I use floating table edges as
well.
> It wouldn't necessarily be invincible... but off the top of my
Since you don't use fighter morale rules, maybe. Even an FB2 Kra'Vak
force composed to counter a fighter-heavy force can have more
scatterguns than that though, plus a bunch of back-up K1s for
anti-fighter work; a custom Kra'Vak force in a battle without fighter
morale rules would of course have more scatterguns
> If I hold back the fighters until the plasma has burned away either
If you hold back your fighters that long, there's a very real risk that you
don't have any dreadstar left when the fighters finally commit.
Assuming a half-competent Kra'Vak player your PBs won't hit them until
they make their first serious attack run, and by then it's a bit too late.
> or a Phalon fleet with decent Interceptor support (8-12 squadrons is
I assumed that you used the fighter morale rules and the standard
re-organisation rules. With them the 8-12 Interceptor squadrons will
certainly be annihilated, but they'll cripple enough of your fighter squadrons
to give them problems with their morale checks. Without the fighter morale
rules, dump all Phalon interceptors and bore straight in. You need to kill the
entire Phalon fleet in approx. 2 turns, or lose the dreadstar. Without the
dreadstar, the fighters will die eventually <shrug>
> On a floating-edge table, any ship with a single Class-4 or bigger
On a floating-edge table you have unlimited space, which is the very
reason why I specified a floating-edge table for this tactic...
> and if you know what I'm doing in advance (which, again, we don't).
<g>
> [On Sa'Vasku]
Easy to do with the Sa'Vasku. I'm afraid we underestimated them too
during the playtests :-(
> <ping> too weak
It is indeed. There are some mitigating facts - eg., it'll take the
Vas'Sa'Teth at least four turns to launch its full brood, it can only
move at thrust-4A during the first three of these and it has 12
carapace and 2 biomass boxes left afterwards, so if someone manages to close
with it while it is growing drones may find itself in deep trouble... but that
assumes that it keeps growing drones instead of
re-absorbing some of them and turning itself into a battle-dreadnought
instead :-/
Regards,
> The typical carriers I'm throwing are usually somewhere in the 200-300
> Nope OK then I should be able to handle them... guess I'd just have to
> think about it a bit more.
General schematic for them, off the top of my head, is mass 320, avg hull,
thrust 1, FTL, no armor, level 2 screens, about 5 firecons, cloaking device,
14 pulse torps (mixture of 1-arc and 3-arc in proportions I don't recall
off the top of my head), about 15 Class 1's and 20 PDS.
> >More likely both, if I can manage to do it. Keep the 6 MU radii of
> I have a sneaking suspicion you should only be able to do that a few
Yeah... but if you space it out you can either aim for the overlap or you can
aim to simply cover a two foot wide area with either plasma or fighters.
There's a number of options for it.
> >And even an ultra-battleship that doesn't go all class 1's is still
anything
> >much over 1200 mass is going to _scream_ "I'm a battleship") there
> While I believe that you know what you're talking about, why does
Economics. Under FB1 tech (and FT2 was the same way, the cutoff there was
about half that mass), carriers are going to have less ship mass per point
cost than battleships. That's because the carriers not only have to pay for
the ship itself, it also has to pay for the fighters. If you're playing a 5000
points game (which we usually do) you can thus determine, if you're
pre-warned of a ship mass (and nothing more) what you're probably up
against.
1200 mass is about as large as you can get for a carrier-oriented ship
while still being able to put together upwards of 40 fighters (and all normal
fighters or interceptors at that) for 5000 total points. If you use more mass
for a warship than that, I know that you can't possibly have the budget to fit
as many fighters on the ship as I am, and if you're flying a warship that's
over 1400 mass, it's a fair bet that you have no fighters at all.
Of course, all the bets are off if you're crazy enough to throw a 1400+
mass cargo ship at me in hopes of baiting me into "cheating" on fighters. But
that's a _huge_ gamble... and I've been quiet enough about this little
subtlety of ship design economics in my own circles that it hasn't occurred to
anyone to try it yet.;)
> Can you also please explain again exactly how you figure out what's
> masses and then go off and say what's on them? Or did you mean you
The way we do this goes about like this:
1. We're both allowed 5000 points. We'll usually consider it a courtesy to ask
on little fudges like going a few points over or under.
2. The battles are considered to vaguely be confrontations in the context of a
larger war between two entrenched powers, a Hierarchy of rather warlike
xenophobes and their collaborating near-slaves (mine) up against an
Alliance
of free starfaring peoples resisting them (my brother-in-law). The
Hierarchy
part is vaguely inspired by the Ur-Quan of the Star Control series,
although the actual ship designs are closer to Star Wars for the core fleet of
the group; I don't know where he gets his ideas.
3. In the campaign spirit, it's generally suggested that fleets withdraw if
they lose half their ships, but a bit of flexibility is generally allowed if
the long-term outlook of the battle seems positive. (i.e. if you's
sacrificed half your ships to cripple but not destroy anything, but over the
long term you're going to annihilate the entire enemy force, we let it slide.)
4. Also in the campaign spirit, there are considered to be long-range
sensors that are able to detect FTL signatures. For conventional sized ships,
these sensors are considered to not be sophisticated enough to determine
numbers or size, merely that they're out there. For superships, however, the
sheer magnitude of energy expended for their FTL travel is sufficient that the
long-range sensors are able to give early warning of an approximate mass
unless the supership in question is equipped with a cloaking device. (In real
game terms, this means that if you're going to fly a supership into the
battle, your enemy is permitted to know that approximate mass in advance and
adjust their own fleet knowing that you're going to have it there. Side note:
to date, no one has actually used the cloaking device exception to the
early-
supership-warning rule.)
5. All ships that are not equipped with cloaking devices must be on the board
to start the action, and in general they are expected to be in some sort of
cohesive formation at opposite sides of the floor. Ships may be cloaked at the
start of the game, but all their move orders must be written out in advance,
and at least one ship (even if they're all
cloak-capable)
must be visible in order to get bearings for its comrades.
> >The two that come most easily to mind would be (a) any form
> First up I'm still amazed at the assumption regarding 'there will be
Torpedo bombers are slightly less powerful overall than they were in FT2,
because (a) fighters in general got a bit more expensive than they used to be,
and (b) EVERYONE had level 3 screens in FT2 so torpedo bombers were the best
way to do any serious damage with fighters.
They're still arguably the best offensive fighter weapon in the game, because
they can still do the most damage for the least exposure to enemy point
defenses. However, there's a risk in flying them in a large scale fighter
action because their effectiveness is severely limited if you don't have
fighter superiority, and with the greater cost of screens, the complete
elimination of level 3 screens altogether, and the greater fighter endurance
in FB1, torpedo bombers are not always going to be as cost-effective as
they were before. Against unscreened ships they're actually going to do
_less_ damage than three attacks by normal fighters, and unscreened
ships aren't necessarily as rare as they used to be (in FT2, screens were
practically free for the benefit they gave)... but the tradeoff that torpedo
bombers get is that they can do all their damage and expose themselves to
point defense fire only once in order to do it.
> > and (b) just about any fleet that has either
> OK I really only put the 1200 mass with PDS/class 1s as a rather
No prob. You're not bugging me at all here, and if you start doing so, I'll
let you know in a gentle fashion.;)
> but if I'm all
> there's no point chasing you so I can't see any tremendous impact in
I won't need too many little escorts, and they won't necessarily even be
little. They'll either be little and capable of cloaking, or cruiser to
battlecruiser sized and fast and stout. The cloakers will just decloak
(hopefully in position to fire immediately or within one turn) and needle
away, the larger versions will flank at medium to long range so that they can
survive the long range spray and then cut in to put their needle beams into
firing position with a single sharp turn at very high speed.
And if it works, and you have just class 1's, it won't be arcs that kill you,
it'll be range. If you take off (some of) the class 1's and use some more
broadly effective weapons, it might be a bit of both.
> >(Although, to be fair, if you just keep the ultra-battleship
> Which is what I'd be inclined to do as there's this little voice in my
Yeah... I don't. If I'm going to send a really huge ship out, it'll at least
be a carrier so that its fighters will work as escorts of sorts.
> >Perhaps not. But with 15 needle beams, that's two and a half hits
> Mmmm definitely not in our camp Indy, he actually thinks we'd hit at
Well, with a ship like this, you're in best shape if you get in close and stay
there. The needle beams are there to make that a bit painful to do.:)
> >Yeah, but if they throw K-gunned fighters _and_ the plasma bolts at
> True, but that so much may be just enough to tip the balance and let
I agree. I'm going to be playtesting a game with my wife this evening where
I'm going to give her Kra'Vak battleships equipped with a total of something
to the tune of 95 scatterguns and throw it against the dreadplanet I
illustrated a couple of posts back. Partially it's to playtest Oerjan's
comment that Kra'Vak should have an easy time of it and partially it's just to
have some fun.:)
> >Now, having to take 10% of your ship mass just to get level
> They have their places, does come down to who you're playing
Yeah. But they're more of a tradeoff now, whereas in FT2 they were essentially
a freebie way to cut all your beam damage by three quarters; level 3 screens
were a flat 9 mass (regardless of total ship mass) and you got one point of
damage on a straight 6 and that was IT. No rerolls, nothing. You had
torpedoes, torpedo bombers, needle beams, or a very long day.
> >I've actually got quite a bit of background material for my various
One of
> >these days I'll have to get around to putting all this on a web site
> There's actually a communal GZG site you can stick them up at, don't
set
> it all up. If the instructions on how to use the joint haven't changed
Heh...
> >Yeah. It could be that Sa'Vasku carriers with enough pod launchers
> Not exactly free, don't swing that illusion too far back the other way
Yeah... it'll take some work. Oerjan's comment that they could put up 13
fighter groups and then go at thrust 9 to run away scared me a bit because I
hadn't studied Sa'Vasku much at all (I still plead a certain ignorance on
them). Then I took a look at the elder broodship design and noticed that if
they _did_ put that many fighters out the odd hit with a single pulse
torp could bring them down.
However, I think that custom designs could make this even more gross than it
already is. On first glance it seemed like the ships in FB2 are considerably
meaner than the ones in FB1, but I don't doubt that a bit of number crunching
could squeeze as much more effectiveness out of the tech in there as they
could in FB1.
Cheers...
On 7-Jun-00 at 13:14, stiltman@teleport.com (stiltman@teleport.com)
wrote:
> I won't need too many little escorts, and they won't necessarily even
Just out of curiousity, what cloaking rules are you using? I've always
considered cloaking useless versus high thrust ships as plotting orders to get
you ship in the right place assumes you know where your opponents will be in X
turns. It's often difficult to tell where your opponents are going to be after
this turns movement if they are "fast".
> On 7-Jun-00 at 13:14, stiltman@teleport.com (stiltman@teleport.com)
wrote:
> > I won't need too many little escorts, and they won't necessarily
> Just out of curiousity, what cloaking rules are you using? I've
That's quite true. We just don't have a terrible number of fast ships for
various reasons. Fast ships have to trade off enough in either armament or
resilience, and spinning takes away so much of the advantage of
maneuverability, that we don't tend to put very powerful drives on the bulk of
our ships. Those ships that have strong drives are usually intended
as quick-strike weapons that we don't expect to keep.
On 7-Jun-00 at 13:32, stiltman@teleport.com (stiltman@teleport.com)
wrote:
> > On 7-Jun-00 at 13:14, stiltman@teleport.com (stiltman@teleport.com)
So what is your ruling on what fighters do after their escorts go away?
You know, I think an equal cost FSE fleet with minor mods (in the PDS and ADFC
category) could take your supership with 40 Fighter squadrons.
How?
1. High speed. High speed can negate fighters. At 30 fighters just can't keep
up, and in order to guess where the ship will be you have to spread them out
so the point defenses are leveraged.
2. SMs. You are thrust 1 so targetting is easy. If you stop I don't even have
to worry about any small ships getting in the way. If you can put out 40
Fighters I'll be able to put out what? 80
SMs? :)
Spread Plasmas are pretty useless, that means my area defenses allow me to
ignore them, kind of like spread fighters or spread Salvos.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
[Fighter morale]
> >We don't use them, and we also allow recombining of wounded
> OK, this explains a lot. The fighter morale rule is *the* major
Oh, that's _much_ too harsh a description of the situation, we simply
haven't found that to be the case at all. I regularly fly large numbers of
fighters
and my brother-in-law regularly does not, and the battles are by no
means
one-sided. While it is true that I usually win the battles, I have not
observed that the fighters themselves are the reason -- I usually win
the battles with him regardless of whether I'm using fighters as my primary
weapon, and I often win much more decisively when I don't.
The adjustment that's been made to facilitate this is that ths bulk of our
fleets that don't carry large numbers of fighters have their individual
ships -- all of them, not merely the escorts -- designed as cogs for an
area defense phalanx. Each large battleship is built with a good 10-20
PDS and an ADFC. They fly in tight formations such that each of them may cover
all of their fellows. They're essentially invulnerable to all but the most
overwhelming missile attack and they'll eventually wear down fighters about
as fast as they get worn down themselves -- their job is to get to the
carriers and pulverize them before that much wear-down takes place.
If I'm playing carriers and I win these battles, it's because I bring enough
needle help to take down enough ADFC's or enough mass destruction help to
prevent them from flying in a tight formation like that that the fighters are
allowed to work. It's been a long time since fighters alone were enough in our
games.
> Without the fighter morale rules human/Phalon fighters should have a
That's not balance. That's neutering them. They're _already_ one of
the most expensive weapons in the game. The equivalent mass of point defense
already costs about half as much as the fighters do, and they get half again
the firepower for it.
If you don't want to worry about fighters, build a phalanx with about 100 PDS.
If your opposition doesn't pile the fighters well into the fourties they're
not even going to significantly touch you. Even if they do, they're going to
need to bring backup help to last more than about three turns.
> >>KV fighters never get any damage re-rolls, so they inflict
> >>against targets with level-1 screens.
> >Yes, but the trade-off you get for being able to ignore screens is a
> The big gain is their Ro'Kah ability, and that's a rather two-edged
Well, beam fighters do 4 26/36 points of damage per six dice to
unscreened
ships, 3 26/36 points to level 1, and 2 26/36 points to level 2. K-gun
fighters do 4 points to everything. The damage drop to unscreened ships is,
IMO, well worth being able to combine the extra attack power against screened
ships with no sacrifice at all in fighter-to-fighter attacks (where the
K-gun
fighters are identical to everything else).
> >>Firing plasma bolts at an ADFC phalanx means that 1) your own
> >Positioning fighters together with plasma bolts so that both can
> And where exactly do you expect a high-thrust (or Kra'Vak/Sa'Vasku)
If you're flying that fast, I won't care about predicting. Your guns have one
arc. All I'd worry about in that case is making sure that arc isn't pointed at
me without it either hurting you or forcing you to burn scatterguns. If you
were flying that fast, I'd probably halve my plasma output per turn and fire
half my guns alternating every other turn so that I can keep 16 dice of plasma
going out every single turn, to keep you dancing.
The plan: give you a choice between zigzagging away from plasma all day
and letting my normal beams nickel-and-dime you to death, or burning
your scatterguns in order to survive the plasma enough that my fighters can
dogpile you once you've got few enough left that they're no longer worried
about them. If you divide your force enough that I can't hit the bulk of them
at once with a single barrage, I'll aim to discourage the larger part of it
from coming in on me while the fighters dogpile the stragglers.
However... on that note, I'm going to set up a game with my wife to try this
out. I'm going to probably do a nice fleet math design and give her
five 1000 point off-Kra'Vak megabattleships with a total of around 95
scatterguns (which is about twice what normal Kra'Vak ships in the FB2 book
will sport for 5k points). That will give her enough scattershot to annihilate
half again the monster's total fighter complement. We'll see if she can keep
the things away from plasma well enough to take out the mothership before I
can dilute her scattershot enough to let the fighters shred her. That'll be a
tough fight.
> >>Compare the amount of PD dice a Phalon ship can fire with the
> >Yes, with the designs in FB1... however, IMHO, the designs in FB1
> Not really. The main difference between the FB1 ships and the
I've got a good sized notebook full of both my own designs and a few of
my brother-in-law's. I can probably put up some sort of sampling of
them.
> [On Phalons vs. fighters]
> >Well, 40+ fighter squadrons would annihilate the Phalon designs in
> Without the fighter morale rules, certainly. With them and the
That's a possibility.
> >...with 15 needle beams, that's two and a half hits per turn.
> With 15 needle beams on a thrust-1 ship in Cinematic, you're lucky if
Ah... here's where the subtlety comes in.:)
As I mentioned in response to Roger, those needles aren't there with the
expectation that they'll be fired every turn or even every game. They're
there to give you a reason _not_ to park any ships you can get past the
fighter cover at point blank range and try to trade shots with the thing's
ship-to-ship armament. They'll be aiming for fire controls. If you
park your ship anywhere near it, I'll park and spin on you. If you keep beyond
its range, it's done its main job without having to fire a shot.
> >We play cinematic on a table where about 70MU usually seperates
> About the same size of table as I have, though I use floating table
We don't use floating edges.
> >>On a fixed-edge table, the easiest options are to take a Kra'Vak
> >Not convinced of that at all. To take down that many fighters,
> Since you don't use fighter morale rules, maybe. Even an FB2 Kra'Vak
Yes... thus, the playtest mentioned above.
[Phalons]
> >8-12 squadrons of interceptors would get annihilated by 41
> >defense, the remaining fighters and plasma together probably
> I assumed that you used the fighter morale rules and the standard
If the fighters pile up on the Phalons, their pulsers will need to concentrate
on them or they most likely _will_ die in approx. 2 turns, probably
before they've had a chance to fire a shot. And if their pulsers concentrate
on the fighters, the monster can can handle what's left of their
ship-to-ship
weaponry with its own.
> >>[On Sa'Vasku]
> >Most of this is granted. My initial thoughts on this subject appear
> Easy to do with the Sa'Vasku. I'm afraid we underestimated them too
I'll have to tinker with them a bit. It's possible that we may be coming up
with a few house rules either limiting the number of drones that can be
launched from a single womb or mandating that any drones will die if their
broodship is destroyed, thus giving either a hard or strategic-soundness
limit to piling out too many of them.
Campaign? Interesting, from your previous comments, I would not have thought
so.
I would suggest starting a mini campaign and see how tactics change.
Local Star Group: 100 systems in a 10x10 grid. Each player owns 5 systems in
one quadrant (NE,SE, NW, SW) of 4x4 systems. To own a system, you must have
a ship of mass 100+ in it. Factories and freigters do not count toward
owning a system.
Jumps: A ship can jump 1/2 its MD rating on the grid. You may not jump
diagonally. The grid does not represent real space, but jump lines. If you
jump 2 spaces, you do NOT travel through the interveining space.
Time: Each Campaign turn is 1 month.
Economics: Each side starts the game with 30,000 points. Each month, you get
100 points per system you control. However, these resource points must be
taken to a factory to be useful. Each resource point takes up 1 mass. Only
freighters may carry resource points. Resource points may not be saved.
Resource points may be stockpiled, but only 2 months worth.
Factories: A Factory must be purchased with the initial points. Its must have
been able to build the largest ship in your fleet. Size: A factory can build a
ship equal to its mass. Cost: Factories cost 10 points per mass. Loss: If a
player looses the system that has the factory, the opponent
gains 1/2 of the factory (the other half is lost to damage, sabotage,
etc.).
Upgrade: Factories may be upgraded to a larger size, but it takes resource
points to do so. A factory may not generate ships on the same turn it is being
upgraded. Repair: Factories may repair ships 1 resource point repairs 1 point
of cost. Destruction: Factories may be destroyed. Building Ships and
Expendables: It takes 1 month per 100 mass to build a ship or expendables
regardless of the size of the factory (bigger factories are able to build
bigger ships, but the time remains the same). If the
factory is lost before the ship/expendable is completed, the
ship/expendable
is lost. Expendables must be either loaded on to warships immediatly, loaded
on freighters to be taken to a warship, or stockpiled. The maximum amount of
stockpiled expendables is 1/4 the size of the factory. Expendables are
fighters, missiles, submunition packs, etc. Building Factories: Factories may
be built in any system you own. It takes 1 month per 100 mass to build a
factory.
Freighters: You must purchase or build freighters to move resource points.
Freighters may have Class-1 beams, PDS, FCS, and Level 1 screens. All
other mass must be devoted to Hull, Cargo Bays and Engines.
Play: Each side writes orders for Campaign movement (jumps). Each side writes
orders for building (provided they have resource points at the factory). Both
players move acording to thier orders. If two fleets meet, play it out using
Full Thrust rules. If a player had ships that did not move, he may choose
table set up; other play may choose max starting speed. If both players moved
ships into the system, roll randomly for clock points and speed.
Set a time limit in game months (24-36?). The player who controls the
most systems at the end is the winner.
-----
Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
http://members.xoom.com/rlyehable/ft/
-----
> -----Original Message-----
[snip]
> The way we do this goes about like this:
(In
> real game terms, this means that if you're going to fly a supership
Side
> note:
[snip]
> Cheers...
> So what is your ruling on what fighters do after their escorts go
Has never really come up. I can't think of a single instance in our battles
where the fighters have outlasted the carriers on the field unless the
carriers went into full FTL retreat.
However, we've generally allowed fighters to land on any available carrier
that has an empty fighter bay.
> You know, I think an equal cost FSE fleet with minor mods (in the PDS
Eh heh... eh heh... I think most any fleet with [wink wink nudge nudge] "minor
mods" in the PDS and ADFC category could probably take that critter...
> How?
> 1. High speed. High speed can negate fighters. At 30 fighters just
At 30, that's borderline out-of-control. There's no way you're going to
both meaningfully keep your weapons trained on me and stay out of the way of
my fighters. I wouldn't bother guessing or spreading them... I'd pile
them all up in a position where, if you _ever_ turn in to put your full
firepower on the main ship, you're going to get dogpiled. I don't have to
cover a full space of 30 -- I can just go their usual 24 and, since I'm
cutting an inside track nearer my ship than you are trying to stay out of
their reach, I don't _need_ to go as far in linear distance to keep you
out. Some of the fighters will probably be outright screening in numbers
proportionate to your SM capacity.
Then I'll divide up my plasma into half-and-half hunks and put up a
continuous and _focused_ barrage to hit you at the longer ranges.
If you cut a path to the ship, the fighters kill you. If you dance at long
range, sooner or later I'll outguess you, and my plasma's going to hurt a lot
more than your weapons will at that range.
> 2. SMs. You are thrust 1 so targetting is easy. If you stop I
Not on an FSE fleet with only "minor mods", you won't. An FSE fleet is likely
to have no more than about ten. If that. I've got the fighters to burn on
screens against that without seriously denting their comrades' ability to
annihilate large portions of your force in a turn or two.
Now, then... let's say we take out the "FSE" part and assume we're talking
about a bunch of fast missile guys. First off, our house rules _do_
decree that these battles are all part of a larger campaign, and a fleet that
was
armed with little more than eighty salvo _racks_ (which is about the
only way you'll get that many missiles to speak of) is not going to be very
effective at all at holding a battle line regardless of how well supplied they
think
they are. A salvo _launcher_ with typical ammo is just as much mass as
a fighter bay, so you're not going to have significantly more missiles than I
will fighters. In fact, if you're flying a fast force, you probably won't
even have _as_ many missiles as I will fighters. Which leaves me quite
happy to have the fighters hang back and screen the main ship while it just
spins and keeps its plasma and beams coming back at you. I'll
_probably_
last the three turns unless you're a lot luckier than me... and then nothing's
stopping the fighters from cutting down your ships one after the next.
Either way, speed's only going to do so much good whether you pile on the
missiles or not. Sooner or later, if you put up the kind of speed it'll take
to keep the fighters from zoning you off and taking you apart, you're going to
suffer in resilience, firepower, or both; FSE ships are simply outgunned
by this monster by a solid two-to-one margin, which means that unless
they were given a really big table or a floating edged one, they'd get
pulverized by this thing.
If they've got a floating edge, then it's a different story... this thing
wasn't designed for a game with one.
G'day Roger,
> Not that we have used Torpedo fighters much, but it looks like morale
Problem being that in my experience they've taken PDS fire coming in and so
have to do a morale check to continue the attack and then do their own torpedo
fighter attack roll to see if that comes off and then you finally allocate
damage... all too often they never made it in so heavy and attack fighters
just seemed the way to go offensive fighter wise.
But that may be just us (as usual);)
Beth
That's been my experience as well; although I use attack fighters as they
actually average more damage over the lifespan of the squadron if they have
some interceptor support.
Neath Southern Skies -http://home.pacific.net.au/~southernskies/
[mkw] Admiral Peter Rollins; Task Force Zulu
[DitD] Captain Puppilier
> -----Original Message-----
> torpedo fighter attack roll to see if that comes off and then you
G'day,
> Yeah... but if you space it out you can either aim for the overlap or
Two foot area? You'd be spreading yourself pretty thin wouldn't you?
> Economics...... Of course, all the bets are off if you're crazy
Funnily enough that was one of the things I'd thought of.... I've done
something similar down here a couple of times, though not quite on such a
grand scale;)
> real game terms, this means that if you're going to fly a supership
I'm guessing they can only make minor adjustments and suddenly can't reorg
everything and produce a supership themself??
> I won't need too many little escorts, and they won't necessarily even
And that'd be why I'd have my own escorts out there befuddling them, its
not like my big guy would be working in a vacuum;)
> and partially it's just to have some fun. :)
Shouldn't that read and "primarily it's just to have some fun"?;)
> Yeah... it'll take some work. Oerjan's comment that they could put up
As with all the fleets I think it'll take a bit of pulling and pushing by
everyone to see if we got it right or not, for me right now I'm not sure I
agree with Oerjan's call on them, but we'll see. I don't doubt that the
creativity out there will think of using the stuff in FB2 in ways that just
never occurred to me, but I think there's equally as much inventiveness to
counter each new stretch that comes up. A good measure of it also comes down
to the different ways we all play, for instance our games (in vector
with most/all the optional rules on) wouldn't usually last long enough
for Vas'Sa'Teth's to get the 13 fighter groups out and even if it did I often
have hovering FFs/DDs waiting in the wings to go and clean up just such
weakened escapees so to me it doesn't seem so scary. This probably is not
the case for people who play games that regularly last 10+ turns and use
cinematic with most/all the optional rules turned off.
Have fun
Beth
The Stilt Man wrote
> If they've got a floating edge, then it's a different story... this
Yea! What is the point cost/mass for a Teske Field? I would like to
install
one! :-)
-----
Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
-----
> -----Original Message-----
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
[...]
> > How?
Sad that I have less and less time these days. If I had the time, I'd be
damned tempted to run a PBeM game for y'all (stiltman, oerjan, books, et al:)
so you could actually pit these various ideas up against each other.
Alas... :-/
Mk
I could probably run something for Stiltman, Noam, Oerjan and Books.
> "Tom.McCarthy" wrote:
Masochist. ;-) If so, I at the very least wanna lurk.
Ha! I was tempted to volunteer myself to run the game. A sanity check was
made. D10 was rolled and failed.
:-)
> I could probably run something for Stiltman, Noam, Oerjan and Books.
Thanks for the gesture... but I'd have to respectfully decline. I'm not
here to find other players, just to discuss things and exchange ideas.
:)
In less general terms, I've got a full-time job, wife, and toddler...
trying to get me on line for any sort of real time game is really not easy,
and I don't typically find a great deal of interest in slower PBEM games. I
like this game because it takes a couple hours to play a good fleet action...
if you extend it to several weeks with PBEM, it's going to get a bit less fun
for me.:)
Thanks anyway...
This got a bit long, since I'm replying to two posts at once.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> OK, this explains a lot. The fighter morale rule is *the* major
Not at all. It is a somewhat toned-down version of how I read your
previous descriptions of your situation, and it is my own experience against
"immoral" human fighters.
> The adjustment that's been made to facilitate this is that ths bulk of
> cogs for an area defense phalanx. Each large battleship is built with
According to your own previous post, your opponents usually "don't do
that because of your _other_" [infamous design, don't remember your
exact words here], ie. the one with neither missiles nor fighters but
level-2 screens and lots of P-torps. IOW, you force them to guess which
gimmick fleet you'll use in order to pick the correct counter-gimmick
fleet to have a chance to win. They, of course, try to do the same to you.
This is exactly what I referred to as a "pick exactly the right
super-specialized gimmick fleet" and what Mikko calls "counter-move
designs" or "GW gaming". OK, maybe not "super-specialized", only "very
heavily specialized", but it's still a very good example of what I meant.
> Without the fighter morale rules human/Phalon fighters should have
It is not balance in *your* games - because, as you have described
previously, you're already into countermove designing. It is, however,
quite well balanced against the FB-style ships in my archive in the
absence of the MT fighter morale rules.
> They're _already_ one of the most expensive weapons in the game.
Sure. And they're also one of the most powerful, particularly if they are used
en masse the way you do and they aren't limited by the morale rules. Powerful
weapons tend to be expensive.
> If you don't want to worry about fighters, build a phalanx with about
And if my opposition doesn't bring offensive fighters or missiles but loads
up on direct-fire weapons instead - ie., I guess wrong about which
gimmick fleet to use this time - I lose the battle before it has even
started. Not particularly interesting IMO, but YMMV.
[On KV fighters]
> The big gain is their Ro'Kah ability, and that's a rather two-edged
Unless you have modified the re-roll rules (to not re-rolling re-rolls
that
come up with a "6"), the correct values are 4 4/5, 3 4/5 and 2 4/5.
> K-gun fighters do 4 points to everything. The damage drop to
Beam fighters get to re-roll 6s in dogfights, so inflict 4 4/5 hits per
6
dice vs non-Heavy fighters and either 3 4/5 or 3 3/5 vs Heavies
depending on how you interpret the rule. Interceptors (which are a
sub-set of beam fighters) inflict 7 1/5 hits per 6 dice vs non-Heavies
and either 6 1/30 or 6 damage vs Heavies. Kra'Vak fighters inflict a
flat 4 per 6 dice against all targets. "Identical"?
> Positioning fighters together with plasma bolts so that both can
<sarcasm>
That was news to me, actually. I was quite unaware that any Sa'Vasku
ships only had one-arc weapons, and I also didn't know that the
high-thrust (6+) human and Phalon ships were so restricted. Must've
done something seriously wrong the past six or so years...
</sarcasm>
My gaming table is slightly larger (in measuring units, not in physical
size) than your floor, and at speed 20-24 I can maneuver thrust-4 human
or Phalon ships comfortably without having to float the table. Thrust-6
ships are comfortable at speeds around 30. On your slightly smaller
gaming area I may need to slow down the thrust-4 ships to on average
speed ~20 and the thrust-6 ones to on average speed ~24, but I'll still
be up to around 30 during the attack runs.
> All I'd worry about in that case is making sure that arc isn't
You would have to. You would also have to sit absolutely still and not
move at all in order to keep all your one- and three-arc guns trained
at me, or you'll very soon have my entire fleet in your blind arc; however, if
you don't move at all it is trivial for me to execute my attack run at the
time and from the direction of my choosing. More comments on this further
below.
> However... on that note, I'm going to set up a game with my wife to
Curious about your maths here. The average number of scatterguns in a
5000-point vanilla FB2 KV fleet is in the 60-65 range, and last time I
checked 95 was only about 50% more than that..?
By choosing your ships carefully you can get about 90 scatterguns for 5000
points of unmodified FB2 KV designs, though it'll be a bit light
in big-K strength.
> That will give her enough scattershot to annihilate half again the
That's assuming rather lucky die rolls, unless you regroup the fighters
the very instant they take losses. With no carry-over of excess damage,
2 scatterguns per squadron (82 in total) give an average kill rate of "only"
of 91% since overkills against each squadron is wasted, and she'll want some
scatterguns against your PBs as well.
> We'll see if she can keep the things away from plasma well enough to
Depends on how good she is at maneuvering. I'm quite certain I can do
it - if I can do this to a squadron of Voth-class Phalon heavies, a
ship with only half the maneuverability and firepower shouldn't be *that* much
harder <g> - but if she hasn't flown Kra'Vak before it might take her a
couple of battles to learn how to handle them well. At least that was the
general experience during the FB2 playtests.
> Not really. The main difference between the FB1 ships and the
...and three of the four "official" FB1 fleets also have more ADFC units than
are shown on the SSDs; some of these are explicitly mentioned in the
background blurbs, and others are hinted at.
> However, most or all of those designs were created for use with the
Please do :-)
> [On Phalons vs. fighters]
It is also where maneuverability comes in...
> As I mentioned in response to Roger,
Commented below
> those needles aren't there with
> with the thing's ship-to-ship armament. They'll be aiming for fire
This is a quite different idea from your suggested "two and a half hits per
turn" above. It is also based on a very false assumption about Roger's or my
tactics.
I won't "park" near you and give you an opportunity to spin to face (and
since Roger is a fairly recent convert to the Ohlson high-speed school
of flying I strongly doubt he will do so either). Instead I'll do a
series of high-speed attack runs - start outside the dreadstar's
effective weapon range (preferrably beyond range 36), end up in the close
range band, fire, and get out on the next turn.
At the close-range point, my fleet can be in any of about 4 of your 6
fire arcs, and you'll have to guess which one if you want to spin to face. If
you've concentrated all your needles in one arc you have about 25%
chance of being able to fire them; if you don't, you'll get to fire 2-3
of them during each attack run. Half a hit per attack run isn't nearly
enough to discourage me :-/
Of course, since you play with fixed table edges you can always sit your ship
in a corner and use the "edge of the universe" to protect your flanks and
rear. You won't even have to spin to face since you know exactly where I'm
coming from, so in this case I'll be in trouble.
> [Phalons]
> I assumed that you used the fighter morale rules and the standard
2 >>turns, or lose the dreadstar. Without the dreadstar, the fighters will
>>die eventually <shrug>
> If the fighters pile up on the Phalons, their pulsers will need to
> probably before they've had a chance to fire a shot. And if their
It'd be quite interesting to see it handle 30-40 strength points of
plasma bolts with only 17 PDSs <g> And, well... if the Phalons are
desperate/ sneaky enough, you'll need to devote at least some fighter
squadrons to shoot down the plasma bolts which cover the Phalon ships so you
don't lose all your fighters before they've fired a shot. If your own plasma
bolts hit true you'll need quite a lot of fighters to
clear the way for the others. It's an interesting trade-off :-)
> [On Sa'Vasku]
That's already limited by the amount of bio-mass on the ship. The big
problem is in Cinematic battles on large or unlimited tables where they
can run indefinitely and nibble the opposition to death from range 60+;
in Vector or in Cinematic on fixed tables they don't seem to be too
unbalanced. Unfortunately virtually all my social battles are fought on
unlimited tables in Cinematic :-/
stiltman@teleport.com also replied to Roger's post:
> How?
Simply not true. See above.
> 2. SMs. You are thrust 1 so targetting is easy. If you stop I
A 5000-point FSE fleet which replaces some beams with ADFC and/or PDS
but doesn't change engines or missile armaments can be all thrust-6 and
have about 30-35 launchers, 50-80 salvoes in the magazines, a bit over
100 PDS systems, ADFC on all ships and enough back-up beams to outgun
the dreadstar by some 60% up close and very nearly match its beams in
the 12-24mu range band.
YMMV of course, but IMO 30-35 is a bit more than "about ten. If that."
:-/
> A salvo _launcher_ with typical ammo is just as much mass as a
He won't have significantly more missile salvoes *per turn* than you have
fighter squadrons. He'll most likely have about twice as many missile salvoes
*in total*, though. You can't afford to let him launch more than one full
salvo unless you keep your fighters as point defence exclusively.
> Which leaves me quite happy to have the fighters hang back and
If you use all your fighters for point defence, you'll probably last three
turns without losing more than 50-75% of your hull boxes. On average
you'll be somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd thresholds when the enemy
magazines have run dry in this case. The big question then is whether or not
your fighters can damage the FSE ships enough that their
secondary beam batteries don't finish the dreadstar off :-/
> and then nothing's stopping the fighters from cutting down your
Modified FSE ships with extra PDS and ADFCs, remember? You were the one
who claimed that ~100 PDS + good ADFC support could take on the
fighters <shrug>
> to suffer in resilience, firepower, or both; FSE ships are simply
Why are you counting the fighters and PBLs into the monster's firepower but
*not* counting the missiles and PDSs (which seriously reduce the power of the
fighters and PBLs) into the modified FSE fleet's firepower?
> which means that unless they were given a really big table or a
"This thing" won't be able to train more than half of its weapons (apart from
the fighters) at the FSE unless it sits still and spins in place, and if it
sits still it won't be in range of the FSE ships unless they want it to be.
I'll
do this battle during the week-end, along with the Kra'Vak-vs-dreadstar
one :-)
BTW, which fire arcs do you suggest for the various 1- and 3-arc
weapons on the dreadstar, and how fast would you fly it?
Regards,
From: stiltman@teleport.com
[From Tom)
> I could probably run something for Stiltman, Noam, Oerjan and Books.
> Thanks for the gesture... but I'd have to respectfully decline.
You should try it some time. With standard model full time job, deluxe wife,
and beta test toddler and 2 month old, PBeM is basically all I _can_
play. Plus, going over battle plans and turns in your head before bed can give
you some way cool dreams. Plus it makes the few FTF (Face to Face) games I get
to play give me whiplash (in a good way).
> Yea! What is the point cost/mass for a Teske Field? I would
> This got a bit long, since I'm replying to two posts at once.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> >Oh, that's _much_ too harsh a description of the situation,
> Not at all. It is a somewhat toned-down version of how I read your
Well, perhaps I should have stated my situation more clearly.
We do not, in any stretch of the imagination, have a paper-rock-scissors
situation in our own games. We've hit about a "balance point" where our
warships that don't expect to have fighter support typically are able to
throw a mix of PDS and Class 1's to the tune of about 60-120 total of
both. If one throws much more than that, you gain a little against carriers
but typically lose a lot more against other battleships, whereas if you throw
much less than that, you gain a little against battleships but lose a lot more
against carriers. A battle between two battleship forces where
one's sacked 30 or so PDS for more ship-to-ship guns is not a foregone
conclusion... a battle between that battleship force that's sacked the PDS's
and a decent carrier force is. Thus, no one risks it.
> >The adjustment that's been made to facilitate this is that ths bulk
> According to your own previous post, your opponents usually "don't do
That's probably what I get for posting a general description of the alternate
tactic in question. The Warbirds themselves typically fly in a phalanx of
three, each has an ADFC, and carry 20 PDS and about 15-17 Class 1's
apiece.
They are effective at keeping people honest on PDS, yes. But they are
themselves VERY stiffly protected from fighter attack as well. The sort of
thing I'm describing them beating as "keeping people honest" is more along the
lines of someone piling on a good 150 PDS or more.
Plus the Warbirds themselves are fun as all heck to play.:)
> [On KV fighters]
> >Well, beam fighters do 4 26/36 points of damage per six dice to
> Unless you have modified the re-roll rules (to not re-rolling re-rolls
4 2/3, 3 2/3, and 2 2/3 then, isn't it? 4 out of 6 on the rerolls?
> >K-gun fighters do 4 points to everything. The damage drop to
> Beam fighters get to re-roll 6s in dogfights, so inflict 4 4/5 hits
No, re-read the book. It says that Kra'Vak fighters reroll against
other fighters anyway, just not against ships.
> >>>Positioning fighters together with plasma bolts so that both can
> >If you're flying that fast, I won't care about predicting. Your guns
> <sarcasm>
> That was news to me, actually. I was quite unaware that any Sa'Vasku
Um, I think it's _probably_ obvious that I was referring to the Kra'Vak
in that case, since that was the original context we were discussing at the
time.
> My gaming table is slightly larger (in measuring units, not in
Thrust-6
> ships are comfortable at speeds around 30. On your slightly smaller
We haven't found that to be a serious problem against slower moving
ships...
parking and spinning typically allows slow ships to deal with fast ones fairly
well, enough that the extra guns and passive defenses they carry will make the
difference.
> >However... on that note, I'm going to set up a game with my wife to
...
> By choosing your ships carefully you can get about 90 scatterguns for
We threw 5 battleships, mass 250 each, 90 total scatterguns and 30 total
K-5's.
> >That will give her enough scattershot to annihilate half again the
> That's assuming rather lucky die rolls, unless you regroup the
Oh... perhaps I should clarify a point here then. Not only do we allow
fighters to recombine at will and don't use morale rules, we _also_
allow just about anything shooting at fighters to carry over excess losses.
With
40-odd groups and 90-odd things shooting at them on the board we don't
like to do a lot of individual group math. Just roll your dice, total it up,
we take off as many groups' worth as you killed. When it's all one monolithic
group attacking a phalanx anyway, I find the group divisions rather artificial
in more ways than just fighter morale and recombining groups. Perhaps that
dilutes their advantage a bit.
> >We'll see if she can keep the things away from plasma well enough to
> Depends on how good she is at maneuvering. I'm quite certain I can do
She didn't do a terrible amount of maneuvering... she didn't think she could
keep her guns pointed at me better than I could guess where to put the plasma,
so she just took a dead man's charge. Given that it only takes one full blast
of plasma to reduce the scattergun count to an amount that the fighters can
just dogpile the things, she decided not to try dancing around. She did just
fine until she ran out of scatterguns.
> >>However, most or all of those designs were created for use with the
> >I've got a good sized notebook full of both my own designs and a few
> Please do :-)
Heh... all right, I'll get to you by email off the list.
> BTW, which fire arcs do you suggest for the various 1- and 3-arc
L = forward/port
M = forward
R = forward/starboard
The (currently still somewhat experimental) version I've got has the 8
4-die
plasma bolts at 2L/4M/2R, the 10 class 3's are at either 2L/6M/2R or
3L/4M/3R,
the needles are all M. The beams and plasma are designed more for coverage
while being able to nose-on rather than concentration; the needles are
expected to be all fired at a single target at a time. (With the plasma bolts
around, I'm considering yanking the needles in later versions...
the FB1-only design had a nova cannon, 45 fighters, and about 25 Class
1's.
I might yank the needles and put the Class 1's back on before I'm through with
this thing.)
It's designed based on a fixed-edge, cinematic background.
I'd probably keep the thing flying pretty slowly so that it pretty easily park
and spin. I was able to put all the plasma on my wife in our game last night
without a terrible amount of trouble. If you're flying faster I'll
either pile all the plasma at once if you're going with hit-and-run or
I'll
go half-and-half if you're staying within range from turn to turn. Once
the plasma's burned down your scatterguns, the fighters will start dogpiling.
> At 15:48 2000-06-08 -0700, you wrote:
Actually the odds are slightly highter.
4 out of 6 + (1 reroll gets 4 out 6 + (1 reroll gets 4 out of 6...))
but close enough. Theoreticaly, any beam weapon has infinite damage potential
(if it keeps rolling 6's). I have managed to do over 6 points of damage from a
beam at long range (I think it was just before I failed that Life
Support systems check and rolled a 1 for turns to fix it, and failed).
---
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> Well, beam fighters do 4 26/36 points of damage per six dice to
Yes, true. I don't see where you get the 26/36s from... stop after two
re-rolls, or something?
Since the re-rolls aren't affected by screens, the average cumulative
effect of the rerolls is 0.1333... (2/15) per die. Each die thus
inflicts 0.8, 0.6333333... (19/30) and 0.46666666..... (14/30) against
level-0, -1 and -2 screens respectively; 6x that is 4.8, 3.8 and 2.8
(or, to use fractions, 4 4/5, 3 4/5 and 2 4/5).
> >>K-gun fighters do 4 points to everything. The damage drop to
> > >attack power against screened ships with no sacrifice at all in
Ah, you're right. Makes them kill 4.8 enemy fighters per 6 shots, not
4. I was looking at the pre-publishing drafts.
> And where exactly do you expect a high-thrust (or
Since I had, in the very sentence you replied to, explicitly referred
to "high-thrust ships (or Kra'Vak/Sa'Vasku)", I was very clearly NOT
discussing Kra'Vak only here.
> We haven't found that to be a serious problem against slower moving
As long as you guess right, it can work. It's all those other times when guess
wrong you get fried <shrug>
[On killing fighters]
> Oh... perhaps I should clarify a point here then. Not only do we
Against Scatterguns/Interceptor Pods, it dilutes them a fair bit
(increases average fighter losses by about 22%). Against PDSs the
effect is negligible against full-strength squadrons; it only matters
if the individual squadrons are depleted (which they never are in your
battles).
> She didn't do a terrible amount of maneuvering... she didn't think she
With the emphasis on "dead", yes.In short, she didn't use her maneuvering
advantag at all, allowing you to concentrate all the plasma in one blast. Too
bad for her, particularly if you had the PBLs spread out in the way you
describe below.
> BTW, which fire arcs do you suggest for the various 1- and 3-arc
OK, good.
> It's designed based on a fixed-edge, cinematic background.
I've always found the concept of "fixed edges in space"...
"fascinating" is probably the nicest word I can think of :-/ (And no,
the game - particularly the Cinematic game - isn't "obviously designed"
for fixed-edge tables as you claim in your reply to Noam; at least not
the FBxs...) Does this mean that you do sit it in a corner so it can't be
outflanked, or do you risk advancing it out into the middle of the table?
> I'd probably keep the thing flying pretty slowly so that it pretty
OK. This means a maximum speed of 1, 'cause otherwise the Kra'Vak will be able
to outflank it.
> I was able to put all the plasma on my wife in our game last
Once
> the plasma's burned down your scatterguns, the fighters will start
<chuckle> Once the plasma's burned down my scatterguns, you are most
likely out of dreadstar - and you're definitely out of fighters. At the
very least it should be down to its last few hull boxes <g> We'll see how I
fare tomorrow.
Regards,
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> >>Unless you have modified the re-roll rules (to not re-rolling
> >4 2/3, 3 2/3, and 2 2/3 then, isn't it? 4 out of 6 on the rerolls?
> Yes, true. I don't see where you get the 26/36s from... stop after two
No, it probably was a misnomer that I put that there... it's
_approximately_
26/36... not sure how the infinite series of the reroll probabilities
works
out... :)
If the infinite series resolves to 4/5, okay, it's 4/5. :)
> >We haven't found that to be a serious problem against slower moving
> As long as you guess right, it can work. It's all those other times
Well, if you're cutting in on a turn, there aren't _that_ many arcs in
cinematic that you can follow. You take half your turn at the beginning, the
other half in the middle. If you're going a given direction, all I've got to
do is eyeball a path you can take to me and, if you cut in, I've got all my
guns pointed against all of your guns. If you don't, my guns will probably
still be pointed in the right general direction, you might
have yours spread out a bad way. It's not _that_ hard to spin to keep
your guns pointed at someone else, no matter how fast they're going.
> [On killing fighters]
Actually, I think it would matter a fair amount, because lucky dice in one set
of point defense rolls won't get wasted, either. Sure, on average, I guess it
wouldn't matter that much.
> >She didn't do a terrible amount of maneuvering... she didn't think
> With the emphasis on "dead", yes.In short, she didn't use her
*shrugs* I don't see that the spread is that bad. It can put 32 dice of
them in its forward arc, 24 in each side-forward arc, 16 in each
side-rear
arc. If I spun, it wouldn't be that hard to keep these focused in the right
general direction either.
> >>BTW, which fire arcs do you suggest for the various 1- and 3-arc
> >L = forward/port
> >The (currently still somewhat experimental) version I've got has the
> OK, good.
Am debating a few tweaks... maybe upgrade it to thrust 2, maybe drop the
needles for some class 4 beams (maybe go to a 3xCL4, 9xCL3 config and drop the
needles) or class 1's, maybe add some more PDS, maybe take off a few plasma
bolts for more of some other form of weapons (such as downgrading
it from 32 to 30 dice)... the FB1-only version looked about like this:
Mass 1200
Hull/Thrust/FTL: Same
Armor (85) FireCons (13), ADFC
Nova Cannon Fighter Bays (45) Class 3 beams (10) Class 1 beams (25) Needle
beams (15) PDS (~20)
The newer one dropped some armor, the ADFC (how often is it going to get used?
:), some of the fighters, the class 1's, and some of the PDS to support the
replacement of the nova cannon with the plasma bolts. I'm not sure I like the
result I've got; the backup beam armament might have taken a little
too much of a hit there, although the plasma bolts _are_ undisputably
more powerful than the 25 class 1's... though I'm not sure that the armor
didn't
also suffer a little too much and its ship-to-ship range is now a bit
less with the plasma in place of the nova cannon. Yanking the needles in favor
of class 4's would rectify that to a fair degree and help it zone off the
board a bit better.
> >It's designed based on a fixed-edge, cinematic background.
> I've always found the concept of "fixed edges in space"...
Well, the commentary that the higher beam classes are less
cost-efficient
seems to imply it to me. They might not be if you just crammed on scads of
engines and high class beams. Although if you could catch the ships in
question, I suppose they still are... I don't know.
I guess we've just always done it that way and never had it occur to us to do
it any other. It's worked. *shrugs*
> Does this mean that you do sit it in a corner so it can't
We tend to start our games with the ships about 12 MU in from either end of
our playing area, flying directly at one another at a modest cruising speed of
our choice. I just usually choose a fairly slow cruising speed to keep the
battle at long range (i.e. where the fighters are more effective
than ship-to-ship weapons) as long as possible. In truth, I actually
have not flown this thing in a game other than the playtest last night with
the wife (in either version) since the fleet books came out, although its
predecessor in FT2 generally ruled the battlefield on the various occasions
when I brought it out.
> >I'd probably keep the thing flying pretty slowly so that it pretty
> OK. This means a maximum speed of 1, 'cause otherwise the Kra'Vak will
I started at 2 last night.
> <chuckle> Once the plasma's burned down my scatterguns, you are most
I wouldn't put the fighters into action until I'd gotten at least one hit with
the plasma. It's only going to take one to reduce the scatterguns to a low
enough level that the fighters can shred you. Either that, or you won't
survive the plasma hit itself.
> At the
Hard to say. I tend to be pretty good at flying my styles of ships... if your
guys are used to speed freakishness they might not do as good a job. (I
probably ought to try playing your style with a few ships, though... once we
exchange a few designs I can adjust yours so they'll survive a fighter assault
in my games and try 'em out a bit...)
Ok, now I'm not exactly sure I've followed all this, but...
IIRC you said that the ship in question has a thrust of 1 and parks and spins.
What happens if your opponent uses needle beams to take out your drive? You're
stuck and your opponent can maneuver to your weak side and pound you.
Just an observation.
Bill (Who suddenly feels his own designs are much less unreasonable)
stiltman@teleport.c
om To:
gzg-l@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
Sent by: cc:
owner-gzg-l@CSUA.Be Subject: Re: FB2...
hmmmm...
rkeley.EDU
06/08/00 05:48 PM
Please respond to
gzg-l
I'd probably keep the thing flying pretty slowly so that it pretty easily park
and spin. I was able to put all the plasma on my wife in our game last night
without a terrible amount of trouble. If you're flying faster I'll
either pile all the plasma at once if you're going with hit-and-run or
I'll
go half-and-half if you're staying within range from turn to turn. Once
the plasma's burned down your scatterguns, the fighters will start dogpiling.
> "Izenberg, Noam" wrote:
Say, Noam, speaking of FTF games, when's our next one gonna be? ;-)
> From: "Davis, Jonathan E (CRD)" <davisje@crd.ge.com>
Jon: Does that mean you are running a game and we should start signing up?
> From: "Davis, Jonathan E (CRD)" <davisje@crd.ge.com>
Jon: Does that mean you are running a game and we should start signing up?
John W. Fox
> Ha! I was tempted to volunteer myself to run the game.
Ohhh. We thought that you failed your sanity check and were therefore GOING
TO run another PBEM game. ;-)
-----
Brian Bell bkb@beol.net
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> -----Original Message-----