From: Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@t...>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 20:47:06 +0200
Subject: Re: Fighters/PDS
> Alan Brain wrote: > Possible solutions to the Bubble Carrier: Er... well. Depends on your definition of "not much", I guess - if you restrict the battle to the same 6 fighter squadrons throughout the fight it'll take "morale-less" standard fighters on average 4 turns to destroy the VF for the loss of 11 fighters, whereas morale-using fighters take 6 turns to destroy the VF for the loss of 16 fighters. OK, this is considerably better than a massed wave of 114 fighters (19 squadrons, ie. the strike groups from soap-bubble carriers worth roughly the same as 2 VFs) which take the VF out in one single turn for the loss of only 4 fighters, since with the restricted-number-of-fighters-per-target concept the VF at least has the chance of fleeing into hyperspace before the fighters can destroy it. (I haven't counted the VF's own fighters, since the enemy has overwhelming fighter superiority anyway - the soap-bubble force will have at least 6 intact enemy squadrons available to engage the VF once its fighters have been destroyed.) > Plan 2 You have to adjust it all the way down to 5 (PHC Draath), though the NAC carriers aren't much better (6.7 and 7 respectively). As Roger noted, this makes this suggestion rather toothless. Even if you include both hull and armour in the "hull" requirement you can't go higher than 8 damage boxes per fighter bay. > Plan 3 I see three immediate problems with this: * This is very similar to how old-style (pre-3rdR) Starfire advanced point defences worked. Having to continously re-assign new targets to PDSs slows the game down by a factor lots. * "a different target" includes missiles as well as fighters. Are you really sure that you never want more than one PDS to shoot at any specific missile salvo..? * The formulation means that ADFC suddenly has its value increased by a couple orders of magnitude or so, since that's the only way your idea allows multiple shots against a single target. This makes the FB ships look even more under-PDSed than they are now, given their general lack of ADFC. > Result: PDS do less damage against small numbers of fighter groups - The PDSs do more damage against large numbers of fighter groups... but they still don't do anywhere near *enough* more damage to give the FB1 ships a fighting chance against a fighter swarm. > The basic problem with most solutions to the Soap Bubble Carrier Except the "reduced-effect PDS fires against all" one :-/ That one has problems of its own, of course > c) Adopt the "principle of minimum change". Under no circumstances c) is mutually exclusive to itself. Given the magnitude of the fighter and big-ship imbalances, you can't avoid changing the PVs unless you're prepared to make pretty significant changes in the game mechanics - because under the current game mechanics, the PVs are quite simply wrong for massed fighters vs anything else, and for large ships vs small ones. (As Laserlight noted, small numbers of fighters don't need to be useful for attacking *SDNs* - as long as there are other tasks for them to carry out. However, if the enemy has nothing *but* SDNs - and given the current big-ship advantage, that's fairly likely - attacking SDNs is the only task available for them... so the big-ship advantage needs to be trimmed down as well. Which in turn means either to introduce new mechanics, or to change the PVs.) Regards,