[GZG] FT Fighter/Advanced Screen balance (Cross Dimensions)

Okay, me again. I've had a few plays just to sort of tinker around with the
Cross Dimensions systems, and a few other thoughts on general game balance.

I completely rescind all comments I had previously on advanced screens about
their not being worth it. They're pretty much completely worth it, and while
they're expensive a ship that has them usually seems to have a significant
advantage over ships that don't. This ultimately has led me into a pondering
of some of the other major balance things that come up in the games.

One big one is the hull integrities. Over time, I've found myself thinking
more and more that there really isn't a whole lot of reason for a ship to put
a whole lot of its mass into hull integrity in this game system. It's been
known for years that carriers are pretty much more effective the less they
bother with hull strength in favor of amassed
fighters, and even for ship-to-ship styles the scale of weapons goes up
a lot faster than the scale of resilience. As a test fight just to sanity
check my theory last week I threw what I took as something like
an optimal high-tech "Defense Star" design I've been toying with that
employed pulse torpedoes, advanced screen 2s, advanced drive 3s, two layer
armor, pulse torpedoes, pulsers, and scatterguns with a pretty weak hull
underneath all the defenses up against a pair of Von Tegethoff class SDNs from
the book. The Defense Star had three swing
interceptor/attack fighters, the SDNs got to have heavy fighters.  The
battle wasn't ev en close; the Defense Star pretty much completely controlled
the spacing and angle of attack on the SDNs, and while it did have fighter
superiority (which was significant), it was decided far more by the fact that
it could completely control all phases of the maneuvering and
fight, while the SDNs pretty much were all brute force slug-it-out
designs. While it's possible that if one took a strong hull with advanced
screens the result might be different, such a ship strikes me
as likely being so under-weaponed that it wouldn't be that effective.  I
don't know, I may tinker with this as a future test.

The other big one is the old elephant in the room: fighters. I've found myself
thinking that fighter balance has taken a big backward step from the old FT
2.0 to the two fleet books. The only remotely effective
point defenses are scatterguns and ADFC-equipped phalanxes, and both of
these systems basically force fighters into an all-or-nothing approach.
(The Defense Star in the previous paragraph broke my old cardinal rule of not
bothering with fighters except in overwhelming numbers because it
was built for a scenario-driven storyline; in a custom game I'd probably
have to either give it more fighters, give it carrier support from other
vessels, or just get rid of the fighters altogether.) This is at a huge
contrast to the FT 2.0, where there were both far weaker point defense as well
as a lot more limits on what ships were allowed to carry fighters in the first
place. The "soap bubble carrier" in the fleet book system isn't possible under
2.0 for a couple of reasons: only capital ships were allowed to carry
fighters, and every warship
had the same amount of mass devoted to weapons, so min-maxing the hull
integrity out for extra fighter capacity wasn't an option.

I find myself thinking that both sides of this equation kind of got out of
whack in the Fleet Books, and probably needs fixing. I think that Cross
Dimensions' rule of "only fighters from the same carrier can
attack a single opposing ship" is kind of a well-intentioned start, but
it needs a little more, I think. The evil Sopi need only get around it by
gathering their fighter strength into giant basestars and doing away with all
the tiny bubble podships, and doesn't really resolve the situation where
against amassed fighter defenses you either need amassed fighters or needn't
bother with them at all.

The flip side of this was, I thought that the pre-FB area defense, where
you only got one dice of area defense fire for a more massive system, was
somewhat useless and thus made ships fend for themselves. I think
that a modern Full Thrust system should include a concept like this --
i.e. you either have a devoted area defense suite or point defense only
-- but it should be more powerful than what preceded the area defense
fire control. So here's my thought: an area defense system (ADS) should be
around mass 5 or 6, but it's as powerful as a scattergun, and with an
ammunition limit of three shots before it either has to spend some significant
time reloading or be out of service altogether. However, the flip side is, the
current area defense fire control and scattergun go away completely, and the
rule where fighters can only
mass-attack a ship alongside other fighters from their own carrier
either becomes non-optional or evolves into a rule where multi-carrier
attacks incur some kind of penalty. (e.g. each additional carrier's fighters
that
try to attack the same target after the first takes a -1 to all their
shots, cumulative.)

I like enough of what I'm suggesting here that I may test it a bit here; I'd
like to hear the list's thoughts on it all though.

E/Stilt Man