From: Charles N. Choukalos <chuckc@b...>
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 1999 15:10:56 -0500
Subject: [FT] Minatures......
I've recently decided to look into painting some minatures for my Full Thrust
games.... The little lego space ships didn't go over as well as the
micromachines star trek ships I had. Unfortunately, I need some more cool
ships to play with. What I'm wondering is if there are any fleet packs that
offer a selection of minitures at a discounted price. Is
there such a beast? After all at $6.50 / heavy cruiser for a gzg ship
its pretty pricy, especially if you're not known for your artistic ability.
Also are their any good sources that are drastically cheaper then just buying
them from the local game store. I found one site offering 35% off price, but
$7 minium shipping charge. Too make it worth while, I'd have to order about 50
bucks to see any possible savings, and
then the shipping and handling eat that to just about nothing. Any
suggestions?
...............And on another topic......
Large Ships ( in FTFB) aka > mass 400). I've been playing around with
designing various ships that are roughly on par with a small fleet in the
number of points that they cost. Has anyone else played around with this idea.
I've done some play testing. I believe that I posted a "day of the
juggernaught" scenerio a while ago with a mass 400 ship that was
worth around 1300-1400 pts or so with fighter complement. I'm curious
to see what people have seen in their duels regarding these monstrosities.
I've noticed a couple of trends in some of our games....
1. Pack on the PDS otherwise you're fighter/sml fodder
2. If you're slow up the %space to defenses... you'll need lots o'pds +
armor
+ screens.
3. Screens seem to be much more effective for the mass then armor given
all of the damage points that the ships hull is able to stop. 4. You need
redundant firecontrolls.... its a real pain not to be able to split fire over
several small ships (big multi swatting capabilities
needed) 5. (We don't play with core rules... but if you do... does this seem
to
really devalue these large ships effectiveness...?) 6. When the big ships
start to take threshold damage, luck seems to be a big factor in weither
they're still combat effective or not.... bad die rolls have seen some of the
ships unable to return fire or defend themselves properly after only the 1st
threshold check.... a lot to lose because of bad rolls. 7. With out fighters,
the big ships don't have any flank protection... Also against other fighters
task forces and SML fleets having a reasonable amount of fighters helps
immensly in protecting your huge ship. 8. Usually you can destroy quite a
number of enemy vessels and still flee the system to (Strategically thinking)
be patched up to 100% strenght and do it again. (Aka big ship survivability)
The above comes from some mucking around with the mass 400 juggernaught ship
in several battles:
1. Scenerio posted earlier.... Juggernaught won, took out a lot of enemy ships
2. Vs Free Cal-Tex Kenedy Cruisers
4 Kenedy missle cruisers ( 4 sml's/each + 2 rounds / launcher ) + 2
beam armed heavy frigates ( NAC -> escourt variant ).
-> Juggernaught Lost, but just barely
Seems the fighters had bad luck and basically used up 4 squads to protect
against missles... the other 2 squades unfortunately got wasted on their
attack run (Bad move there...) Then the slow
speed bad thrust of the juggernaught and high missle die rolls ment
that about 10 sml's landed the 1st wave, then 4 the 2nd wave.... can we say
dead juggernaught. However the juggernaught anihlated the 2 escourt frigates,
1 kenedy class, and crippled another keneedy class before being missled into
submission. The juggernaughts slow speed and low maneverability were a problem
here. 3. NSL cruiser force ( 3 CH's, 2 DD's, 2 CL's[Escourt Variants]) Here
the NSL's sturdiness keept them in the game for quite a while, however the
juggernaught made short work of one of the CL's and then even with 1 cl still
pulling escourt duty, the fighters mauled both DD's and crippled one of the
Ch's before all being destroyed. The juggernaught rolled well and took out the
rest of the ships after just taking its 2nd threshold check. She was able to
repair most systems lost to the 1st threshold check quite rapidly because
of the large number of DCP on board.
4. Mixed beam/torp fleet with lots of overlapping adaf coverage ( 2
DN's,
2 CH's). Again the juggernaught did well, but this game came fairly close. the
adaf on every ship coupled with a tight formation and a fair
number of pds + class-1 beams pretty much eliminated most of
the fighter threat. I think I was only able to do maybe a dozen points worth
of fighter damage the entire game ( 6 squads go by
by...
)
The ensuing fight was rather tough... 1 Ch was crippled, but managed to evade
destruction. 1 Ch exploded from some serious overkill. 1 DN crippled but still
combat worthy. 2nd DN just about dead
( 3 hits left, but almost all of its main armament left). The juggernaught was
on its last row of damage boxes and was looking to get out of dodge. It had
been striped of most of its firepower
and really only had 2 class-3's, 1 torp, 1 firecontrol, and
about 8 pds left for what its worth.... FTL'd out. This was one of
the closest battles fought. It lasted 13 rounds before the juggernaught
withdrew. If a little more firepower had survived the thresholds, then the
juggernaught should have been able to destroy another vessel or two before
escaping and would have vindicated the big ship bully idea.
Anyway, that's my synopsis. I'm seting up an attack on a starbase scenerio in
a week or two. I've got the starbase pegged at mass 800 with some support
ships. The attacking force I set at around 3500 points ( 1:1 point ratio).
Does this seem fair. I suggested the players take SML boats since the station
is a sitting duck.... I would think that would be a realistic attack route...
after all a beam armed fleet would take quite a while to kill it. Should I up
the ratio since the station
has no flt + no thrust that's worth at least 20% mass advantage to the
defenders, even though the station is a sitting duck for sml fire?
Thanks, chuck