From: Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@t...>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 19:49:11 +0200
Subject: Re: [FullThrust] There r nu rules being Playtested to compute CombatValue
> On the FullThrust YahooGroup, Steven Gilchrist wrote:
> As most FullThrust players know, in a battle of larger ships versus
Glad you like it - and if you (or anyone else) have more detailed
comments to it I'd be grateful to see them too; this concept is still very
much a
work in progress.
To which Fred Schmidt replied:
> I've been using this system while designing ships lately, and it seems
Glad to hear it :-)
> I originally got the idea from the Weapon/Archive
Yes; it wasn't my idea originally (IIRC it was Jeremy Seeley who first thought
of squaring the TMF cost), but I'm doing most of the development of
it. I'm a lot better at fine-tuning other peoples' ideas than coming up
with entirely new ones of my own :-/
> and it suggested to not adjust
Fighter bays, cargo holds and similar make the the system up look a bit
messier... :-(
FWIW the version on the WDA was posted over two years ago though, so the
bits about carriers etc. are rather dated nowadays. Since there has been
questions and comments about this new points system on several mailing lists
recently, here's the latest version, including developer's notes:
This points system is called the "CPV" (Combat Points System), as opposed to
the "NPV" (New (sic!) Points System) used in the Fleet Books. The CPV
system is NOT intended to represent any economical (procurement, operating
etc.) costs for the units, or *campaign* utility, or anything like that; it
*only* attempts to measure their tactical combat power on the gaming table.
(In other words, the "Procurement Costs" given in the Fleet Books don't need
to change just because the *points values* change from NPV to CPV!)
The basic idea is that ships get exponentially more powerful as their Mass
goes up, so the linear basic hull cost used in the Fleet Books doesn't work
very well - thus the CPV system uses a basic hull cost proportional to
the TMF squared instead.
Fighter groups however act and take damage separately from their carrier, with
each fighter group being roughly equivalent to a heavy
frigate/light
destroyer in combat power - so the cost of a fighter group (including
its compulsory fighter bay) shouldn't depend much on the size of its carrier.
It does depend a *little* on the size of the carrier, since a larger carrier
is usually more likely to have at least some bays intact if the
fighter group needs to rearm and/or reorganize (using the FB2 rule) -
but just a little.
('Course, with the FB fighter rules the true value of each fighter group
depends on how many fighter groups the *fleet* as a whole has - but it
doesn't matter if they're all based aboard a single huge carrier or spread out
over the entire fleet, so this can't be handled by the points
costs...
which is why there's a set of beta-test fighter rules too.)
Similarly things like cargo holds, passenger quarters etc. don't contribute to
the ship's combat performance *at all*, so ideally they shouldn't cost
anything at all either. With the system below they still do have an indirect
cost since they cause the engines to grow bigger and you still have to pay for
the engines, but that's the price I pay for avoiding having
to re-calculate the points value of the entire ship as if the cargo
holds
etc. weren't there at all :-/ It works better for warships with small to
moderate cargo holds than it does for completely unarmed freighters though.
Because of all this, hangar bays and anything that costs 0 pts (eg. cargo
holds) are removed from the ship's Mass when you calculate the hull cost, ie.:
CPV Basic Hull Cost = (TMF - (Non-Combat Mass))^2/100 (round to nearest
integer, but minimum is 1 pt no matter how small the ship is)
"Non-Combat Mass" = Mass used for Hangar Bays and for anything that
costs 0 pts, eg. Cargo Holds, Passenger Quarters etc.
****
Related to this (and somewhat related to the above-mentioned beta-test
fighter rules), we're also shuffling most of the cost of fighter groups from
the carrier (which in the Fleet Book design rules has to pay a lot of points
for the fighter bays) onto the fighters themselves. Although this
isn't really necessary for game balance as such, it recognizes that it is
the fighters themselves - not their fighter bays - that do the actual
fighting; and since quite a few players use "points value destroyed" to
determine victory these "shuffled" points costs give a fairer idea of who
got beat up the most :-/ So:
Fighter *Bays* drop to a cost of 1xMass (in addition to not counting towards
the ship's Mass in the hull cost calculation)
The base cost of a (Standard) fighter *group* increases to 48 pts (8
pts/fighter). The cost modifiers for the various other fighter types
remain
the same (eg., an Attack group still costs an extra +6 pts per group).
Ie., instead of paying 18 pts for a Standard fighter group plus 27 pts for
the 9-Mass hangar bay plus 9 pts for the basic hull structure holding
the bay for a total of 54 pts, you now pay 48 pts for the fighter group, 9 pts
for the hangar bay and 0 pts for the basic hull structure holding the bay for
a total of 57 pts. The 3 extra points are there for two reasons: mainly
to make sure that the smallest possible FTL-capable carrier (12 Mass, 1
hull box, 1 fighter bay) doesn't get even cheaper than it already is, but also
to make the points cost of each fighter a round 8 pts instead of 7.5 pts for
reasons that will hopefully become clear sometime in the future
:-/
****
Design examples:
Bulk Freighter
Item: Mass Cost(NPV) Cost(CPV)
TMF 200 - 200 36
Hull Integrity 20 20 40 40 Thrust Rating 2 20 40 40 FTL drive 20 40 40 140
cargo space 140 0 0
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
Total 200 320 156
In the Fleet Book design rules (aka the NPV system), the basic hull cost
for this ship is 1xTMF = 200 giving a total NPV of 320 pts. That's about
the same as a light battlecruiser, eg. the ESU Manchuria (NPV 312).
In this revised system (CPV, for "Combat Points Value") we note that the
ship has 140 Mass of non-combat systems (ie., the cargo holds), so the
basic hull cost is only (200-140)^2/100 = 60^2/100 = 3600/100 = 36 pts;
so the total CPV of this ship is 156 pts. This is still rather high for a
completely unarmed ship (more than most light cruisers), since all you really
pay for is how long it'll take for the enemy to catch and destroy
the ship (ie., the manoeuvrability and hull boxes)... but at least it is
*better* than it used to be.
Fleet Carrier:
Item: Mass Cost(NPV) Cost(CPV)
TMF 200 - 200 213
Hull Integrity 60 60 120 120 Thrust Rating 4 40 80 80 FTL drive 20 40 40
Level-1 screens 10 30 30
2 Fire Control Systems 2 8 8 4 PDSs 4 12 12
2 Class-1 Batteries 2 6 6
4 Class-2 Batteries 8 24 24
6 Fighter Bays 54 162 54
6 Std Fighter Groups - 108 288
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Total 200 682+108 587+288
("Unshuffled" fighter pts: 749+108)
Again the NPV basic hull cost is equal to the TMF (ie. 200), but the CPV
hull cost is (200 - 6*9)^2/100 = 146^2/100 = 213.16, rounded down to 213
pts. The total cost for fighters+carrier has increased, and at first
sight
it looks as if it is the increased fighter costs which cause this - but
this is only because the fighters have "taken over" most of the cost of their
fighter bays; if you shuffle the bay costs back again you'll see that most of
it is due to the carrier itself growning more expensive. (The last
18 pts are those 3 "rounding error" points/fighter group mentioned
above.)
****
Note that this is not necessarily the final version of the CPV system.
Eg.,
quite a few players have asked about using "Battle Rider"-style forces
(ie., sublight combat ships carried on FTL-capable tugs), so one CPV
variant I've been looking at recently is to make FTL drives "non-combat
systems" just like hangar bays or cargo holds - possibly even dropping
the cost of the FTL drives to 0xMass. At the moment it looks as if the
sublight
ships/BattleRiders would have to pay for their FTL tug though - with the
FTL tug drive also counting as "non-combat mass" it'd be very cheap, but
not quite cheap enough to be negligible :-/
My main worry with turning FTL drives into "non-combat mass" is that it
might throw the points values of existing weapons, hull integrities etc.
askew. I haven't had time to look very carefully at this yet, so try this
option at your own peril (and please let me know how it goes if you do try
it!) <g>
Later,