I'm updating Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions to revision 1.1 and am asking for
feedback.
On my list are some new rules and systems, some my idea, some from others.
I'll post these in the next few weeks, but I want to start with a bunch of
smaller changes. Mostly these are aimed at making FT:XD closer to the "2.5"
version (FT 2, modified by Fleet Books 1 & 2) which I assume is the mostly
widely played.
First, if you know of any misspellings, bad grammar, wrongly used apostrophes,
etc; please let me know.
* Turns in cinematic: half drive rounded UP or DOWN? In FT 2, it was rounded
up so a ship with drive 3 could turn 2 points. In 2.5, it was rounded down so
drive 3 could only turn 1. In FT Lite, it's back to rounding up which I copied
for FT:XD. So, do you play round down or up?
* Point defence In FT:XD I allowed ships with ADFCs to fire at fighter groups
loitering nearby and not actually attacking. In 1.1 I'm planning to take this
out. Will anyone notice?
Scatterguns in FT:XD roll 3 PDS dice instead of 1D6 casualties as in FB 2.5.
(This gives a wider range of results and in particular allows them to miss
completely.) For 1.1 I'm planning to increase this to
4D6, as 3D6 reduce the average effect too much for a one-shot weapon.
I'm also thinking about restoring point defence fire (both PDS and
scatterguns) against ships, but I'd like to see screens and armour having some
effect. It could be 5,6 = 1 hit against unprotected (no
re-rolls), 6 = 1 hit against screen or armour. Or 6 = 1 hit only if
the target currently has neither screens nor armour. Or just go back to the
original 6 = 1 hit?
* Multi-stage missiles
Doubling the mass for one extra stage seems right, but keeping on doubling
makes it really difficult to carry lots of long range missiles Honor
Harrington style. So I'm planning to make the first extra stage double the
mass, each extra stage beyond that just doubles the points cost.
* Fighters Planning to drop the rule about fighters only moving half distance
on the launch turn. It's an unnecessary complication.
Planning to add that fighters with a higher move can break off from dogfights
without opponents getting a free shot. This is mostly to provide a reason for
using the fast fighter type.
* Ship fire phase: before or after fighters/missiles?
This is another that keeps changing. In FT 2 ships fired before missile and
fighter attacks, after in 2.5, before in the beta fighter rules (copied for
FT:XD), and FT Lite doesn't say.
I'm thinking about going back to the 2.5 order.
There are people who've played alpha versions of FT 3. Without having to
reveal how FT 3 actually works, would anyone with such knowledge
be able to say whether changing the order back to fighters/missiles
before ship fire would be A) good preparation for FT 3, B) a backwards step,
or possibly C) doesn't matter?
If you haven't played FT 3, do you prefer the 2.5 order?
* Graser-2 mass reduced to 8
This one is tricky. I think the graser-2 is slightly overpriced at
mass 9. (Regardless of whether grasers re-roll or not - that's
another discussion.) But I've tried to keep FT:XD "compatible" with FT 2.5 so
people can mix and match as they please. Changing the G2 mass means actual
changes to SSDs, not just "we don't play that rule."
FT:XD grasers are already not completely compatible with some of the beta
fleets around, so perhaps it's not worth worrying about.
Possible rules for switching: if you take mass 8 G2s into a UNSC beta rules
battle, your opponent gets to cross off one hull box, armour
box, PDS, or Beam-1 for each G2 on the ship. If you bring mass 9 G2s
into an FT:XD battle, you get a free armour box for each G2.
Comment away!
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I'm updating Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions to revision 1.1 and am asking for
feedback.
* Turns in cinematic: half drive rounded UP or DOWN? In FT 2, it was rounded
up so a ship with drive 3 could turn 2 points. In 2.5, it was rounded down so
drive 3 could only turn 1. In FT Lite, it's back to rounding up which I copied
for FT:XD. So, do you play round down or up?
We play here, with Round up, and I have a small Battle group forming
* Point defence In FT:XD I allowed ships with ADFCs to fire at fighter groups
loitering nearby and not actually attacking. In 1.1 I'm planning to take this
out. Will anyone notice?
We started doing that before you did the rule, because we found it odd that
PDS couldnât target any enemy squadron that flew within it range.
* Multi-stage missiles
Doubling the mass for one extra stage seems right, but keeping on doubling
makes it really difficult to carry lots of long range missiles Honor
Harrington style. So I'm planning to make the first extra stage double the
mass, each extra stage beyond that just doubles the points cost.
Need to go look this up, as I missed it. Could U send these rules
to the list so more can look at it. But I think U need to keep the
mass as well.
* Fighters Planning to add that fighters with a higher move can break off from
dogfights without opponents getting a free shot. This is mostly to provide a
reason for using the fast fighter type.
Speed should give some advantage
* Ship fire phase: before or after fighters/missiles?
This is another that keeps changing. In FT 2 ships fired before missile and
fighter attacks, after in 2.5, before in the beta fighter rules (copied for
FT:XD), and FT Lite doesn't say.
I'm thinking about going back to the 2.5 order.
I like Fighters and Missiles hitting before Ship Fire, but I have not worked
on FT3
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> From: Hugh Fisher <laranzu@ozemail.com.au>
> * Turns in cinematic: half drive rounded UP or DOWN?
Always have played round-down (with thrust 1 being the sole exception).
I've never been a fan of going the other way, it's just way too easy of
a min-max to take the extra thrust point and get the extra
maneuverability.
> * Point defence
I don't know. On some level it does actually kind of bother me that fighters
can just loiter indefinitely once they've achieved control over enemy
fighters. Particularly if you've got a situation where you've got only bombers
left, the carriers should at least have a vague prayer of being able to shoot
down the fighters so that their bombers won't get slaughtered as soon as they
launch.
> Scatterguns in FT:XD roll 3 PDS dice instead of 1D6 casualties as in
I was the one who suggested it, although I also like d6 with a natural 1 being
a clean miss too... but 4 PDS dice scales better against heavy fighters.
> I'm also thinking about restoring point defence fire (both PDS and
6 for 1 hit is better, IMO. If they've got screens, maybe require a
re-roll to get a beam die to hit.
> * Multi-stage missiles
I'm better with just leaving it at one extra stage as a hard limit. I'm
not a big fan of ultra-long range weapons and prefer keeping a few hard
limits on them.
> * Fighters
Is this in XD or is it in 2.5?
> Planning to add that fighters with a higher move can break off from
Obviously I suppose this one, but I also like having an actual cost effect for
fast and slow fighters with compounding advantages for faster ones against
slower ones. But yeah, at the very least I think that fast fighters should
have a reason for being in there.
> * Ship fire phase: before or after fighters/missiles?
Should be after.
> * Graser-2 mass reduced to 8
> This one is tricky. I think the graser-2 is slightly overpriced at
Larger grasers might be a little oversized, yeah.
E
Doc <docagren@aol.com> wrote on 04/26/2010 04:28:19 PM:
> From: Hugh Fisher <laranzu@ozemail.com.au>
> I'm updating Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions to revision 1.1 and am
I give response with real trepidation; differences from original rules have
already started showing some resistance in other places to your rule set. Is
any of this actual results of suggestions from the playtest group?
"Thanks. I just don't want to get shifting my thinking to these if they will
change again. I don't enjoy reading rules as much as I used to."
On the other hand, if this gets FTIII on the way a bit faster, that'll be a
GOOD thing. ;->=
And, we're delighted Remixed remains available.
> * Turns in cinematic: half drive rounded UP or DOWN?
I never noticed it went to round down in 2.5; dopey moi. First reaction is
round up, old man does not do change well, but I think I'd prefer down. Go
figure.
Probably a bit of Eric's logic...
I'm more interested in the whole how do you break up the distance between
halves. I think that's been nailed down in XD as round up for the first half.
If this is in the original books, could someone point this out, i.e. give page
number(s), to me? In all the text, in all the examples, either it's vague or
using even numbers for velocity, at least as far as I can find. We've always
been happy with 'you can't do half a turn point, but you can do half an MU...'
Of course, I play inches instead of CM's. Could get finicky... ;->=
I'll go back again, but I've never found a clear statement or example in the
books.
> * Point defence
Close in weapon systems being modelled depended on throwing massive lead at
oncoming fighters/attack craft who couldn't jink much coming in, right?
Made sense at one point. However, the little boys flying through dense enemy
formations without ANY danger is a bit weird.
Of course, SOMEONE will bring up stand-off capabilities; bit of a tail
chaser. This ends up being a multi-stage missile with high AI. Oh,
speaking
of multi-stage...
> * Multi-stage missiles
Original probably better models how chem rockets work; each stage has to push
the remaining stages AND the payload, ergo, be a factor bigger. I think they
should still add some mass, and perhaps start slower. Or, be called special
'Honor Harrington' missiles.
> * Fighters
The reason for fast fighters is to get there firstest with the mostest. Do you
think they are overpriced for that capability?
> * Ship fire phase: before or after fighters/missiles?
Is mixing these attacks into the ship initiative driven fire too painful for
words?
> From: Doug Evans <devans@nebraska.edu>
> I'm updating Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions to revision 1.1 and am
> I give response with real trepidation; differences from original rules
Some of it was suggestions from me from my own playtesting; the "official"
playtest group doesn't seem to release its results publicly very often, so for
all I know I'm going to absolutely despise whatever FT3 comes up with
(especially if their beta fighter rules are any indication).
> * Turns in cinematic: half drive rounded UP or DOWN?
> We play here, with Round up, and I have a small Battle group
> I never noticed it went to round down in 2.5; dopey moi. First reaction
Go
> figure.
I thought it was always round down.
> If this is in the original books, could someone point this out, i.e.
give
> page number(s), to me? In all the text, in all the examples, either
I'm pretty sure it was in Full Thrust (2) and/or FB1.
> * Fighters
> Speed should give some advantage
> The reason for fast fighters is to get there firstest with the mostest.
Do
> you think they are overpriced for that capability?
I do. The only advantage I've seen, and this is dubious, is that maybe you
might be able to make sure that a dogfight happens further away from your own
ships. It doesn't get you to enemy ships without having to engage enemy
fighters along the way, it gives you no advantages in
dogfights, and there's no mechanic for hit-and-run shooting or
maneuvering with the extra speed that gives the faster fighter an advantage.
It's basically wasted points as it is in FT 2.5.
The rules I use go about like this:
- Fast fighters are +1 NPV per fighter, at 36 MU speed.
- Regular fighters are costed normally, at 24 MU speed.
- Slow fighters are -1 NPV per fighter, at 18 MU speed.
- Any faster grade fighter can evade dogfights with slower grade ones
without giving up a free shot. Conversely, the slower grade fighter may not
evade the dogfight at all.
- A fighter that is two grades slower not only can't evade dogfights,
but the fast fighters get to shoot first and the slows only may return fire
afterwards with the survivors. (i.e. slow vs fast is a pretty catastrophic
disadvantage in dogfights.)
I realize this won't work for everybody, but I kind of like it.:P
E
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http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn Tue, Apr 27,
> 2010 at 3:27 PM, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com> wrote:
> >From: Doug Evans <devans@nebraska.edu>
Speaking on behalf of the "official" playtest group, we are still waiting for
Jon T to give us feedback on stuff we've been working on the past few years.
> >> * Turns in cinematic: half drive rounded UP or DOWN?
In
> >> FT Lite, it's back to rounding up which I copied for FT:XD. So, do
give
> >page number(s), to me? In all the text, in all the examples, either
Hi All,
> I thought it was always round down.
give
> page number(s), to me? In all the text, in all the examples, either
I thought I'd take a look for this...
FT Page 6: MAKING COURSE CHANGES "To simulate this when moving the ship model,
HALF of the Course change is made at the START of the ship's movement and the
remaining
half at the MID-POINT of the move. If the Course change is an ODD
number, then round DOWN the initial part of the change and round UP
the mid-move part."
Based on this and the examples, if a ship has a Thrust rating of 1 and wishes
to make a single course change, it would round the value (1 is
an ODD number) down as the start to 0 and up at the mid-point to 1.
There is nothing about this in MT.
FB-1, on page 5 states:
ODD-NUMBERED THRUST FACTORS
"... such drives operate just as as for even-numbered ones, except
that to determine the thrust available for course changes the thrust rating is
halved (as normal) but is rounded DOWN, so that a ship with
Thrust-5 is only capable of 2 points of course change. Note however,
that ships which (through design or through drive damage) have a Thrust factor
of 1 may always change course by 1 point per turn, but may not accelerate or
decelerate at all while doing so."
Same as per FT, but with the addition that you, essentially, don't
half thrust for Thrust-1 ships, but instead apply that mighty single
thrust point to make your course change and do not apply 0.5 to course change
and 0.5 to accel.
Nothing in FB-2 for cinematic.
There. Page numbers and text found.:)
> Hugh Fisher wrote:
Oh, yes. One gripe I have with FT of whatever version is that the ADFC is the
only way for "escorts" to engage fighters attacking something like a convoy,
but they can only do it if the fighters come in for a run
on their targets, so picket boats and like defensive strategies can't work.
There are some genres and universes where that is a severe
limitation, so the idea of a properly-equipped ship being able to engage
fighters in range regardless of what they're doing is very attractive. Keep
it.
Phil
> Doc wrote:
Well, space is big and there's the third dimension we normally ignore. I'm
reasonably happy with saying that loitering fighters are staying well out of
PDS range.
And you can shoot loitering ships with ship to ship weapons, not as
individually effective as PDS, but much better range.
> * Multi-stage missiles
A multi stage missile goes 16 - 24 MU on the first turn, full 180
degree arc. Subsequent turn(s) it only has 60 deg arc. Each extra stage
doubled the mass, so 3 stage loads are 8 each. I wanted to err on the
excessive side, but it seems a bit much. Nothing under a superdreadnaught ends
up being able to carry more than one or two loads.
> I like Fighters and Missiles hitting before Ship Fire, but I
I don't think either order matters too much. I changed it to after in FT:XD
for compatibility with the beta fighter rules, but it does seem that more
people are happy with the 2.5 turn sequence.
Thanks for replying.
cheers,
> Doug Evans wrote:
I've noticed. That's the reason most of the changes are "go back to how 2.5
works."
> Is any of this actual results of suggestions from the playtest group?
No. Since I don't know who the playtest group are, maybe some of them have
commented, but as individuals.
> I'm more interested in the whole how do you break up the distance
give
> page number(s), to me? In all the text, in all the examples, either
> I'll go back again, but I've never found a clear statement or example
To make it clear, Doug is referring to the distance moved in each half of a
cinematic turn, not the amount turned at each half.
In XD I "nailed it down" as being half the total distance rounded DOWN for the
first bit half, UP for the second. Same rule as for halving the turn.
And I did so because I never found a clear statement or example in the books
either. So I picked how I thought it ought to work and wrote that in (and
changed an example to match.) Figure 5, page 11 of FT:XD.
> Original probably better models how chem rockets work; each stage has
That's more for chem rockets escaping a gravity well though. It should cost
more to have really long range missiles, but I think I overdid it a bit with
doubling.
> The reason for fast fighters is to get there firstest with the mostest.
Do
> you think they are overpriced for that capability?
At the moment, they don't have that capability - any other kind
of fighter can intercept them on the way in. Yes, fighters in space aren't
really going to work like fighters in atmosphere, but that's the "cinematic"
convention we use. The aim is to give the faster fighters more control over
when to fight or not.
> Is mixing these attacks into the ship initiative driven fire too
I don't know about too painful, but complicated.
We could alternate fighter/missile attacks with regular ship fire
in one extensive "combat" phase instead of having separate phases.
Problem is, how do you divide up fighters/missiles? The FT ship
rule is that one ship fires at separate targets at a time. OK, but suppose you
have salvos launched from two ships, or fighters from two different carriers,
attacking one target? Do you evaluate
them separately - which requires some record keeping as to which
PDS were used in which attack. Or do we change ship fire so that you evaluate
all weapons fire at a single target at a time?
I think this would, once worked through, be a genuine improvement, and I'd be
happy to discuss possible ways of achieving a unified combat phase. But it
would be too much of a change for this 1.1 revision.
Thanks for replying.
cheers,
> Phillip Atcliffe wrote:
Well, the ship fire against fighters option means that all the picket boats
can fire against loitering fighters, not just the ADFC equipped ones. And at
much greater ranges too.
cheers,
1. Long range missiles have to be expensive. Otherwise you can build a high
thrust ship with several of these and, on any floating board, it becomes
untouchable. It can engage, maintain separation, and the enemy can do very
little about it. There is a reason the game doesn't provide too many weapons
with > 36" range and those are massive and expensive.
2. I think you underprice your fighter gradations. If you are able to
avoid dogfights without a roll, then I think +/- 1 NPV is too weak of
a pricing change.
3. Movement: If we were moving odd numbers, we always just moved half
the distance. Not sure why measuring 1/2" or 5mm is so much of a
challenge... if you use a tape, it isn't much harder than measuring to even
values and avoids rounding altogether.
4. For turns and thrust: An artifact of the turn system being based on a six
point rotation (or any granular value) is that you'll have breakpoints.
Whether, in the existing system, you choose to make them at even numbers or
odd, that's kind of an academic distinction. You'll have them and you either
get a thrust 3 turning 1 or a thrust 3 turning 2. In the latter case, thrust 4
becomes less important as it won't be a turning breakpoint. So I think
whichever way you go with rounding for turns is just a matter of preference.
5. Fighter/PDS/Ship fire model
The only model I've seen that seems to not encourage soapies, that seems to
make fighter endurance matter, and that seems to make FT ship designs (with
small to moderate sized fighter compliments by mass,
with 2-4 PDS) make ANY viable sense is the playtest rules that were
bandied about with fighters burning endurance to avoid PDS fire and to attack
and where PDSes and ship batteries could engage fighters, the PDS any within
range and all PDS groups on a sihp attacked *each*
incoming fighter group. It was more book-keeping intensive, but it
made the existing SSDs make sense.
If the construction system allows soapies, if fighters can form large masses,
if fighter advantage of only a few groups becomes crushing,
and if ships with 2-4 PDS just are *not* a sensible design, then the
existing mechanics are broken. The only fix that I've seen address these
issues has been more complicated, but deals with all of the
major aspects of the broken-ness of the existing FT fighter model.
PDS attack all fighter groups: Makes lower PDS per ship make sense. Also makes
super massive fighter waves a super source of fighter casualties. Soapies make
less sense. Some fighters can be effective
(even 1-4 groups) but a pile of fighters is not dominating vs. a pile
of equivalent CPV of ships.
Fighters burn endurance to attack and to avoid PDS fire: Limits the amount of
times fighters can effectively attack new ships without being cut apart with
PDS.
Batteries can fire at fighters: Not very effective, but every bit of
counter-fighter fire helps.
Fire at loitering fighters: Encourages fighters to stay further away. If they
want to make secondary moves, burns their precious endurance.
Hugh Fisher wrote on 04/28/2010 04:08:48 AM:
> To make it clear, Doug is referring to the distance moved in each
*whew* I was hoping I just hadn't made myself clear, no surprise there, but
the previous snippet made me doubt myself, again no surprise. Sometimes it's
really GOOD to go through all the replies before answering. I haven't dug out
the book to be sure, but Hugh has put my mind at ease a bit.
On to other matters...
The fact that Hugh's had to reply to roughly the same sentiment several times,
including moi, in a couple of cases suggests there're real itches, and it may
well be time to scratch 'em. The disconnect between ship and
fighter/missile movement and attack is probably one, as this may include
'fixing' what and when f/m's take fire.
Weird, I'm usually the one having to explain someone else... ;->=
> >Original probably better models how chem rockets work; each stage has
I
> >think they should still add some mass, and perhaps start slower. Or,
D'oh, of course; I was thinking of maneuver, but that's more an 'combat
endurance' thing, only when the missile has to adjust it's vector. Sort of
the way ships fly... ;->=
> I think this would, once worked through, be a genuine improvement,
Probably necessary, if only as an alternate rule, to be available in the
face of min-maxing, but nice to hear I'm not the only one thinking it
worth an effort, even if for later.
Fair enough!
> Hugh Fisher wrote:
> * Turns in cinematic: half drive rounded UP or DOWN?
If you want the published designs to make any sense at all in Cinematic, you
round down. A single point of accel is not a very big deal, but 5% of TMF and
a single point of (Cinematic) turn rate both are.
Also, the half-*distance* moved isn't rounded - if the current speed
is an odd number, the ship moves something-and-a-half mu before the
mid-move course change. Course changes are rounded only because ships
are supposed to adhere strictly to the 12 clock facings; there is no such
requirement for distances (unless you play FT on a grid of some sort, but then
you're probably not using the published movement rules anyway <g>).
> * Point defence
Those players facing large numbers of fighters will.
> Scatterguns in FT:XD roll 3 PDS dice instead of 1D6 casualties as in
Sounds good to me.
> * Ship fire phase: before or after fighters/missiles?
Since you allow anti-ship weapons to engage fighters, before. That
way a ship can resolve *all* of its fire, both anti-ship and
anti-fighter/missile, at the same time without forcing the players to
track which weapons fired in what phase. No biggie in smaller skirmishes, but
it can be a real pain in large battles.
> * Graser-2 mass reduced to 8
I'm not nearly as worried about the single-arc version as about the
multi-arc ones. +3 mass per extra arc is slightly too much, but +2
mass/arc is definitely too little... Maybe 8+3/extra arc?
> (Regardless of whether grasers re-roll or not - that's another
Run both versions. With rerolls at a cost of 4xMass, without at 3xMass <shrug>
***
Doug asked:
> Is mixing these [fighter/missile] attacks into the ship initiative
When you have a dozen or more fighter groups... yes, it is :-/
Regards,
I generally agree with a number of points in this, except for one or two.
[quoted original message omitted]
Eric,
You picked at some of my points as if they were threads, but they are integral
to the whole.
The playtest rules for fighters address a number of defficiencies in a
combined manner.
I have seen nothing in your proposals that suggests that fighter advantage
becomes much less of a crushing advantage than it is. I forget the numbers,
but having even a handful more fighter groups in the FB rules makes chowing
down on standard ships (even SDNs and BBs) fairly inexpensive for the fighter
side.
I have similarly seen nothing that makes bringing one or two fighter squadrons
have any point whatsoever (several BDNs do this sort of thing).
The playtest rules made small fighter squadrons worth a bit more, as I recall
(nearer what you pay for them) and larger groupings worth less (more in line
with what you pay for them). I don't see your rules doing that.
Notice I didn't mention soapies here.
Soapies, another hazard in many FT games and for many groups that allow any
sort of build your own, just make the problem more pronounced and obvious.
You can still arrive with enough fighters to be crushing to an enemy even with
both sides using FB designs.
I agree there is an issue where having many PDS would be problematic in an
'all PDS fire at everything' but I don't imagine there is a published SSD with
more than 5 PDS, most SDN's don't seem to have that many PDSes.
And why you would not worry about soapies (unpublished things actually
constructible under the rules) but worry about ships with 10+ PDS
(unpublished things constructible under the rules) seems to be cherry picking
things for a flavour.
TomB
Oerjan Ariander wrote
> If you want the published designs to make any sense at all in
I missed the implication of this first time through.
So, the published designs (FB1 & 2) *don't make sense* in FT Lite?
Intentionally?
cheers,
> Eric Foley wrote:
> >5. Fighter/PDS/Ship fire model
Unfortunately you don't need basestar-like fighter numbers to rip
through a Fleet Book fleet. It is quite sufficient to bring a couple of Fleet
Book fleet carriers (except the NSL ones), unless the opposing fleet brings a
similar number of fighters of their own or
consists mostly of escort cruisers (since most of the ADFC-equipped
ships in the Fleet Books only carry 3 PDSs each). IOW, under the Fleet Book
rules the PDS levels featured on the Fleet Book ships
don't make sense *even in the GZGverse* - and I know several
"official designs only" gaming groups that have implemented rather
strict rules on permissible fleet structures to ensure that no-one
can bring too many fighters to the fight. (Or too many
superdreadnoughts, for that matter - though the CPV rules seem to
have reduced that problem, at least.)
(FWIW I'm not sure which version of the beta-test fighter rules TomB
is talking about - the ones I've seen /either/ allow all PDSs on a
ship to engage all incoming fighter groups /or/ allow anti-ship
weapons to engage fighters effectively, but not both at once.)
Regards,
> Tom B wrote:
I think PDS fire per fighter group goes too far the other way, especially with
ADFC escorts.
I'd like to see fighter attacks divided up by carrier into waves. PDS fire
gets divided among the groups in a wave, but a ship under attack by multiple
waves gets to fire PDS at each.
Example: a battleship with 3 PDS under attack by 6 flights from an Ark Royal
fleet carrier can only shoot 1 PDS at every second group. The same ship
attacked by 6 flights from 3 small UNSC Comet carriers gets to fire 1 or 2 PDS
at every incoming group.
Under this rule, big fleet carriers become more effective than the equivalent
number of little carriers combined. I don't have
a problem with this: FT generally follows wet-navy/sci-fi
conventions that one big ship is worth more than the equivalent number of
little ships.
It also would be a start towards the integrated ship/fighter
attack phase that Doug Evans asked about.
> Fighters burn endurance to attack and to avoid PDS fire: Limits the
Fighters can burn a CEF to avoid PDS fire. Is this equivalent to evading ship
fire: spend a CEF, no PDS casualties, but you break off your attack that turn?
Or do you mean that by spending an extra CEF the fighters don't take PDS fire?
> Batteries can fire at fighters: Not very effective, but every bit of
Already in FT:XD. As you say, not very effective but every bit helps.
cheers,
[quoted original message omitted]
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________________________________
From: Hugh Fisher <laranzu@ozemail.com.au>
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
I'd like to see fighter attacks divided up by carrier into waves. PDS fire
gets divided among the groups in a wave, but a ship under attack by multiple
waves gets to fire PDS at each.
This doesn't make any sense to me and looks really hard to maintain in
practice. You seem to be saying that fighters from two different carriers
can't combine together to attack one carrier. This seems like an odd attempt
to fix something that isn't working with the rules.. Why can't I "stack"
ordnance markers from source into a wave and make a combined attack regardless
of source.
it also gets way worse if you include missiles. Do you allow PDS to fire at
missiles and fighters in the same turn? What happens if a ship is attacked by
missiles from one ship and fighters from another? What happens if they both
come from the same ship?
Also what does allowing PDS to fire at multiple attackers in the same turn do
to the ballance with the scatter pack. Does the scatter pack get to fire at
all attackers in one turn and then count as used up? If not it suddenly
becomes much less valuable than a PDS.
I think that fundamentally the problem with fighters is that they are too
effective agaisnt ships. I think you get a much better game if you drop
fighters and make people chose between interceptors and torpedo bombers.
People then have to chose what proportion they want and then plan on how to
make an effective strike.
For the record, I was speaking about a version of fighter rules where you
could shoot at all targets with all PDS on a ship. You may not have been able
to fire at fighters with ship weaponry, but I thought you could at least fire
PDS and B1s against loiterers. I may have that wrong, but the 'all PDSes fire
at every group' was a characteristic of that. In that system, I believe there
was some way to expend CEF to avoid casualties or something of that sort (not
fully avoid the PDS entirely) when attacking. There was also some increase to
endurance since you burnt endurance for secondary moves, attacks, and evasions
of anti-fighter fire.
But that's all from memory. And distant.
Waves don't make sense. In build your owns, how would waves make sense against
two ships of varying masses, say mass 30 and mass 600? I'm not saying you'd do
this, but the point is the waves would have to scale with size and you'd get
breakpoints.
Looked at another way:
IF fighters are attacking from a great distance, ship size is irrelevant, but
then wave size is everyone. If they have to get in close, then ship size is
relevant to wave size and waves might make sense against a ship. What is
engagement range? 6 km or 6000 km? That really changes how sensible a wave
feels.
I find it funny Eric hates CPV since: a) it is marginally different in use
than NPV (one figure per ship to calculate) b) it more accurately reflects
combat value of a number of ships
Points in a game that is going to bother with them for 'play balance' have to
be about actual value on the table, not about economics. If you want to use
them to establish flavour, you are bending play balance. Even balance means
any combination of X points should, *give or take some small variance*, yield
about equal efficacy.
With FB designs and even moderate fighter imbalances, this is not so. With
BDNs with single fighter groups, this sure isn't so either. Even the actual
designs in the FB don't make sense with the existing rules unless you really
cherry pick your fleet combos and that's just silly to try to preserve that
state of affairs.
So, if you want to change it, what do you change?
SSDs are published and common and NPV, while not CPV, works reasonably for
most things. Virtually no two playing groups understand the FT rules the same
way to start with, due to versions of the game, vague points in rules, and
variants inflicted by even supposedly 'official rules' groups for various
reasons.
To me, preserving SSDs make sense. They are the common base to the game for
many people. For those that aren't using them, they're no worse off. They
already probably use house rules, so they aren't affected by any changes in
the official rules which are mostly used by those playing with cannon fleets.
Those fleets SHOULD work within the point system.
CPV tweaks it for some stuff like freighters, carriers, and very large ships.
Otherwise, it is low impact. Hence a change that does some good, but costs
little or nothing to implement.
The playtest fighter rules were more extensive overhauls, but they addressed
all of the problems of the existing SSDs and point costs of fighters and
published carriers. They also did some good versus soapies.
Just as Eric hates my notion of rules, I find his distasteful. That's just
simply down to a matter of taste and embodies no personal slur. I
assume our tastes are not better or worse - mine is just oriented
around making the official rules make the official designs make more sense.
Whatever changes anyone makes, some of us won't like it. Some people
resent the FT to MT changes, some resent FB1 changes from FT/MT,
others resent FB1 -> FB2 changes, and others resent various playtest
rules or interpretations to fix the various observed problems. Most of the
time, the dislike is because the game (in one variant or another) falls closer
to group or personal prejudices. If you feel combat should reflect a certain
feel, rules that go against that won't be popular with you.
I think FT3 will annoy about 3/4 of us. In the long run, half of us
might use the rules, 1/2 not, staying with prior versions in some
form. Of the half that use it, many of them will house rule some aspect of it.
My own prejudice is easily stated:
I want the FB designs to be as close to sensible and balanced in any normal
mix as feasible. With CPV and the playtest fighter rules I got to play once up
on a time, many of the problems with FB designs were resolved. I would be
equally open to any other system that addressed the same criteria. I don't
have a 'feel' for any particular style of combat, I just want the existing
SSDs to be useful and reduce the
obvious fighter-heavy exploits in the point system now.
Okay, now I've run long. <blah blah, shut the he** up, Tom...>
I liked some things in Cross Dimensions. I thought some ideas were good. Some
I didn't like. In that respect, I felt it was much like FB.
I thought FB was less broken than FT/MT, although I miss a few of the
older aspects. I think FT3 may or may not be a step forward but suspect if it
ever ensues, it will be different. In the long run, we'll all house rule what
we want for a feel anyway.
Me, my main use for FT until I can get a more complete production of the
aforementioned playtest fighter rules and NPV and thus find the FB designs
useful again, is using it as a basis for my Stargate: Armada adaption. But
unlike Dean Gundberg's 'Mix it up cross genre' games, my adaption is strictly
aimed at simulating fights in the show, including some ludicrious weapons and
very large (in FT terms) ships.
But I'd still like to see the official SSDs make sense. Any system that can do
that without breaking the things which work in FB already, I'm willing to try.
> Hugh Fisher wrote:
> If you want the published designs to make any sense at all in
Correct. At least in Cinematic they'd be considerably more
cost-effective if redesigned with odd-numbered thrust ratings.
> Intentionally?
No. The intent was to avoid having a special rule for thrust-1 ships
in the simplified intro rules set; that it messes up the usefulness of the
published designs in the full game was overlooked.
Regards,
> Eric Foley wrote:
> >Unfortunately you don't need basestar-like fighter numbers to rip
To me, that kind of hand-waving is pretty much the same as saying
that "all GZGverse admirals are complete idiots" - because if you can
get as a big advantage as the current rules allow by prying loose just *one*
extra fleet carrier (or pair of light carriers) to reinforce your strike
fleet, anyone but a complete idiot would do his utmost to arrange just that.
Particularly since, in any setting where it takes time to build ships and move
them from the yards to the front (such as the GZGverse), the enemy can't
radically change his fleet mix for the next battle in order to counter the
strike fleet
the way players can do in one-off games (or narrative campaigns with
no restricting fleet design rules) :-/
> The game system, as it already sits, is actually quite good at
...in one-off custom games where you can change your entire fleet mix
from one battle to the next. Agreed. The problem really comes to the fore when
someone tries to use the game as the tactical engine of a
full-blown campaign (which is effectively what the GZGverse
background is supposed to be), because then you need all sorts of
arbitrary limitations on ship/fleet design to avoid having a "rock"
fleet tear up an entire sector simply because the opponents started out with a
"scissors" fleet mix and couldn't switch to "papers" fast enough.
> (Not fond of the CPV system either. Hate it, in fact.)
Could be because you're so fond of big superdreadnoughts;)
> >(FWIW I'm not sure which version of the beta-test fighter rules TomB
"Hits-fighters-on-6-only" gives about the same number of fighter
casualties as the beta-test rules with 2-3 CEF spent on evasive
manoeuvres; "hits-on-5+" corresponds roughly to 1 CEF spent on
evasion. IME the former makes the fighters a bit too survivable
(which is why the beta-test rules made them pay a lot of CEF for it);
the latter should work OK without any additional CEF cost. The
important things for the fighter-vs-ship game balance are
1) To allow all that Mass spent on anti-ship weapons to be of at
least *some* use against a fighter strike, instead of sitting
completely idle as they do in the FT2/FB rules. The purpose is to
reduce the current rather extreme gradient in PD firepower as a ship
goes from low PDS/lots of anti-ship weapons to lots of PDS/light
anti-ship armament. (Relying on improved PDSs only, as in the "each
PDS fires at every incoming fighter" concept, is NOT a solution since as you
noted it makes it pretty easy to make a ship completely
invulnerable to fighter attacks - IOW, improving the PD systems only
will increase the PD gradient even further, when the very root of the problem
is that it is already too steep.)
2) To allow ships to *gradually* attrit enemy fighters from a range instead of
being able to shoot at them only when the fighters deign to attack (enabling
escort screening formations etc. to work, and reducing the need for massive PD
batteries that can stop the fighters cold with a single salvo).
The original beta-test rules were the first "semi-official" attempt
to do both of these things at once, and I quite agree that they did them in
too complex a way. (They also attempted to clean up a
number of other features such as the badly messed-up FT2/FB dogfight
rules, and to top it off spent roughly three times the verbiage
they'd've needed if a native English-speaker had written them which
reinforced the *impression* of complexity way beyond the *actual*
complexity level <g>) The XD "hit-on-a-6-only" is IME too weak;
"hit-on-a-5" should be pretty much OK.
(Oh, and you're by no means the only one to go on at length at times
<g>)
Regards,
Could I butt in, on the premise that I know virtually nothing about the
playtest rules?
It seems like the core problem is that fighters are being costed out
as a ship-level asset, when they're actually a fleet-level asset.
Fighters' effectiveness increases exponentially as you add groups to your
fleet. Adding your first fighter group is less powerful than its points value
as components in capital ships, but your eleventh fighter group is far MORE
powerful than its points value suggests.
Changing the fighter cost could scale the exponential term up or down, but it
won't remove the fact that that ten groups are far more than twice as
effective as five. Fighters project power; once they launch from a ship they
aren't adding to the SHIP's power, they're adding to the FLEET's power.
So why have the ship's points value include any fighters at all? Why not just
pay for your ships (with empty fighter bays), and then buy fighters separately
when you're costing out a fleet? Then you can put your exponential term in
THERE.
Example: A standard multirole fighter group costs 18 points. To add it to your
fleet, put it in a "slot" (squadron, group etc) in your fleet record, applying
the multiplier for that slot:
Slot 1: 0.5 Slot 2: 0.5 Slot 3: 1 Slot 4: 1 Slot 5: 2 Slot 6: 2 Slot 7: 4 Slot
8: 4 Slot 9: 8 Slot 10: 8
...etc, with each additional pair of slots costing twice as much as the last
pair.
Thus, a fleet with two squadrons would cost 18 points (but would still pay
full price for the bays to carry them!) The third squadron brings the total
fighter wing cost to 36, then 54, then 90, then 126, etc
etc. Obviously, the exact values would have to be play-tested. The
point is: big swarms of fighters cost more per fighter because they're more
EFFECTIVE per fighter.
Once you've bought the fleet's fighter groups, you can pay to give them
upgrades (eg 6 more points for attack fighters). Then you assign them to their
carriers. (Alternatively, you could pay BEFORE assigning them to a group. Then
it's optimal to put your priciest fighters in the cheap slots and padding your
numbers with cheap multirole fighters.) You might even use salvo and MT
missiles and other "ordnance" weapons with this same rule.
This could mean in a campaign that your fleet has empty bays. That's
ok-- look at fighter attrition rates in the Tuffleyverse and tell me
how we've been playing with FULL bays all this time. Even if the
pilots have been recovered, often you'll have fighters off-line
waiting for repairs. Depending on the scenario and background, you might be
allowed to have more fighter groups than bays (eg planetary
defense or settings where fighters have FTL). In a one-off game, of
course, you just have to juggle your ships.
Star Wars, B5 and BSG all have battles where fighters arrive using FTL
and engage capital ships or each other without having an on-screen
carrier. You can't play those battles in out-of-the box FT2, but you
can with these rules. And fleets with one squadron aren't over-paying
for what is a very limited capability.
Obviously, you'd have to drop the NPV = $$$ conceit, but I don't Jon was ever
wedded to that; it was just a convenience for writing the Fleet Books. It's
not exactly core to the setting.
Just a thought.
[quoted original message omitted]
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________________________________
From: Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>
No non-idiotic, non-suicidal species is going to intentionally use a
military doctrine that fundamentally involves wagering their entire
civilization or any significant subset of it on a completely blind guess.Â
So not human beings then.
Every Military development has come out of the experiences of the previous
wars and a lot of theoretical arm waving. Thats fine if the next war is
exactly the same as the last one and not if you are completely different.
Look at tank design between ww1 and ww2. No one had any idea about how to use
them and what sort of requiremetns they needed to provide. So the British
ended up with the slow infantry tanks designed to shoot up machinegun nests
and the fast cruiser tanks that drew doctrinal inspriation from naval
destroyers and cavalry squadrons.
In a modern war it takes so long to make new weapon systems you will have to
fight with what you have it's very likely that you could get some scissors
paper stone going on.
If your army is designed to fight enemy armoured vehicles in a total war
scenario in in open rurla planes, what happens if the next war is a limirted
engagement taking place in island archapelegos, jungle, urban areas or artic
snowdrifts.
In my FT gaming group, this sort of theoretical design and doctrine
development went on all the time. People designed fleets to fight the sort of
games they imagined would take place and could give them an advantage in those
games. When the actual battles resembled neither sides expectations people
were suddenly left improvising tactics to use in the games.
I think that one of the fundamental problems with the FT mechanisms is that
there are two different rule mechanisms one for firign at ships and one for
firing at ordnance and they don't interact well and produce some odd anomalies
as a result.
For example, firing at a missile can't be done with ship weapons but firing
at a mass 3 ship uses completely different mechanics and it is as easy to hit
a mass 3 ship as it is a mass 300 dreadnought. If targetting systems are such
that the size of the target doesn't matter then why does it matter when
shooting at a missile or fighter squadron?
If target size does matter then why isn't there a graduated series of
DRMs based on the size of the target, say -2 for <1 mass targets
(ordnance), -1 for 1-50 mass, +1 for 100-150 amd +2 150 and above? Then
all you need to do is change the PDS weapons to rapid fire say 6 beam dice.
> Robert Mayberry wrote:
Hey, not knowing what the playtest group is up to doesn't stop me!
(And if anyone else worries about not being somehow qualified, if you play
Full Thrust and have an opinion, *I* want to hear from you. Email me directly
if you don't think it's worth bothering the entire list.)
Longer response to your idea to follow after proper consideration.
cheers,
> Robert Mayberry wrote:
> It seems like the core problem is that fighters are being costed out
Well... close, but you miss one very important feature: the value of your
fleet's fighters depends very heavily on the ratio between how
many fighters you have and the amount of anti-fighter defences
(including defending fighters) the ENEMY has. If the enemy brings enough PD
firepower to handle twenty fighter groups, your eleventh fighter group is
worth very nearly as little as your first one (ie. close to zero) and the
exponential value increase doesn't really set
in until you buy your *twenty-first* group.
Of course there are plenty of other weapons system that varies in value
depending on the enemy fleet design (eg. beams vs screened targets), but due
to the very steep PD firepower gradient (ie., with
the FT2/FB rules a little more mass spent on anti-fighter defences
can improve your PD firepower a lot) the fighters are at least an order of
magnitude more sensitive to the opposing fleet design than any of the others.
This means that an exponential fighter cost scheme will only work if the
opponent obliges by taking precisely the amount
of anti-fighter defences the scheme was designed for: if the enemy
brings too weak defences your fighters will still be seriously underpriced,
while if he brings stronger defences than expected your
fighters will be way overpriced instead - which is pretty much the
same situation as now, only with a more complex points system :-( Of
course you could develop multiple exponential fighter cost schemes to cover
different opposing PD strengths, but then you'd depend on your
opponent to tell you beforehand how strong his anti-fighter defences
are to allow you to pick the right cost scheme for your fighters...
Regards,
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Campaigns I often see run with an 'official designs only' perspective. I often
see them run with limited (very) or no intelligence about what the enemy is
bringing to the campaign or to the individual fight. The amount of variance in
fleets between fights varies by campaign from complete to very little.
In these scenarios, paper-scissors-rock isn't uncommon. And, although
you might not agree, it is quite defensible from a 'PSB' standpoint. It may be
*very* hard to gain meaningful intelligence about alien fleets (human
fleets... there's enough interconnectivity between humans at varying levels to
gaurantee some leakage). Enemies can show up with little warning via FTL and
could conceivable arrive with anything (allowed in the campaign).
Even if you only play with official designs, if you don't know what a foe is
bringing (often done for entirely practical reasons related to real world
miniatures available, players available, or time to pre-plan available
or lack of), you can get 'rock'ed.
If you want to be able to run a low-overhead (ie little intel rules,
little logistics rules, using official designs) campaign, you'd still better
be able to deal with the fighter swarm. And there *aren't* enough ships in the
game built do deal with it. ADFC ships are rare and still don't pack enough
PDS to overcome the gradient Oerjan mentions. There *are* enough fighter
bearing designs.
So some people can show up with the sledge and no one can have a defense.
Similarly, if people try to defend even partially against this with existing
designs, BDNs and small carriers look pretty dumb as small fighter contingents
are really worthless.
I think the 'official design' games are not uncommon. I further submit that a
lot of people want a simple, low overhead campaign framework and don't
want to handle pre-game intel, mid-game intel, particularized fleet
composition restrictions, etc.
Given I believe this to be the case, I would like to see rules that make the
existing designs make sense in those sorts of games.
Let's face reality:
People like you, Hugh, Beth and Derek, Oerjan, etc. who might actually play
the game in a campaign setting will likely create rules (either explicit or
just by scenario setup) to control fleet compositions. You'll also add house
rules that give you the feel you want.
So the default ruleset in the game is not really aimed at you. You're going to
build your own custom game no matter what, both at the tactical and campaign
levels.
It seems to me the default game rules should be targeted at the casual
tactical or campaign player who wants to throw some official ships down, have
a fight, and not find a huge exploit hiding in the rules.
Right now, that's not the case without a bunch of post-facto
restrictions on fleet compositions.
So, although I respect your experiences in your own group and your interest in
having a certain feel and flavour in your games, I'm not convinced the game
rules should flow in the direction you, as what I will call a top 10% player,
are after. You'll be able to make whatever you want happen in your own group's
games regardless.
The same is not true of the more casual player (say the middle 70-80% of
players) who might like the official designs to work and fast/light
campaigns with minimal overhead to work as well. Today, there's some
critically glaring holes for them and they don't have your resources and
dedication to fix them.
So, I submit, your points are likely valid for you and your dedicated
adversaries. But they are not, IMO, a basis for the default rules to be
designed a particular way. Note that I don't mean this in any critical sense,
just that you can work around anything you don't like and will change whatever
is published in some significant respects in any event, regardless of what
that is.
[quoted original message omitted]
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campaigns we have played, many of the situations you describe don't eventuate.
 It's pretty simple to get something that means the fleet book designs are
viable and that you have some idea about what is going on. Â We use a map so
the empires share borders with multiple neighbours. There are usually way more
missions for the fleet to do than it has ships for. You need a home defence
division, an offensive squadron and border squadrons. Dividing your fleet into
the required number of units usually means pretty small ships will make up
most of the fleet. Â It's not stated directly in the fleet book, buit it's
implied in the ESU doctrine and the description of their ships, that you have
to return to your base to replenish ordnance. I imagine that it's even harder
to get replacement fighters and fighter pilots so It's easy to imagine that
carriers need to go back to the sector capital to get replacement squadrons. Â
Experienced carrier aircrew could be hard to come by and the training times
could be quite long so carriers need to be carefully used and threfore are
likely rarely used. Â
We have strategic intelligence in our campaigns because eash ship/unit
is represented by a counter and the counter indicates the mass of the
ship divided by 50 rounded up (so a mass 150-200) is size 4. So you have
some idea what the enemy is bringing to a fight even if you have no idea what
their ships are.
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http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lJust to be
clear:
I do think you can solve almost any of the flaws of a ship design system
(which are really only flaws of a ship design system + a tactical set of
game rules) by scenario design.
However, not everyone is up to that. I don't think everyone should have to be
up to that.
And oft times, people will focus on one aspect of the way things are broken,
neglecting another. They patch one situation, creating a focus on another.
Then they try to fix it, rinse repeat.
You sort of need a complete fix. You can do that if you truly understand the
problems. Most of the time, that's a doubtful circumstance.
Again, I'm not married to any particular solution, but I want one that
addresses the range of issues that have been identified. No sense fixing
half of the gaping hole in the hull - the air is still getting out. :0)
Let's say I agree that, by manifestation of design + tactical rules,
ships appear to have too little point defense. You'd fix this by changing the
amount of point defense and requiring reconstruction of various SSDs. That's
one solution, though I think it makes the single-squadron BDN and small
carriers look *even worse* instead of better. So I call this a 'half the
problem' solution.
My solution of making the existing designs work reasonably is based on the
hassle of redoing all the SSDs and the fact that I'd rather solve all of the
problem aspects. If designs include a fighter squadron and it is worth X in
terms of on table combat power in the points system, if it is actually worth 0
(or near to it) every time it meets an enemy ship, then you've got something
broken.
I concede that, in a custom construction game, since you can build anything,
your rules would have to cope gracefully with all combinations. That's a
bigger challenge that what I suggest.
If you are only worried about official designs or those that attended the same
Naval Architecture College, then you've got a smaller subset of issues to deal
with.
Most of my situations are predicated on human fleets clashing with human
fleets and with no integrated alien tech. I've played with Kra'Vak a fair bit,
but not much with Savasku and have (for aesthetic reasons) rejected Phalons
from my table.
Given the standard human on human battles, using official designs, I'd like to
see both the 'fighter advantage = crushing advantage' and the 'few fighters =
pointless waste of time' dealt with in whatever rules incarnation ensues. If
your suggestion only fixes half of the problem, that's still only half of the
solution.
Note to John:
If fighters are very hard to replace, then their campaign cost (if you want to
think of it that way) would have to reflect that. At that point, other units
other than carriers would come into vogue and you have problem solved
on the mass-fighter appearance. OTOH, you haven't solved the BDN single
fighter squadron being worthless.
Plus, and this goes to a point Eric made earlier:
It doesn't matter what the normal convention has been. As soon as one admiral
discovers he can bring a slightly bigger hammer and have disproportionate
success, the tactic will catch on. Which means, given time, it will become a
standard tactic.
No active conflict conventions will extend to ensuring regular losses. No
active conflict conventions will prohibit the following of a significantly
better strategy if it is discovered.
The theory that both campaign proposals I've seen advanced to avoid the
'fighter imbalance issue' have failed on is this very point.
Sure, at the start of a conflict, maybe nobody has figured out the fighter
imbalance. But when someone does, they will ruthlessly use it to crush their
foes and their foes will take note. Shortly, since there is no adequate
defense in existing fleet designs, they will have to either surrender or adopt
a similar strategy.
One could argue this forces them to redesign their fleets and that would be a
long term result. Short term, everyone would try like the dickens to show up
to battles with more carrier strength than the enemy and to flee from fights
where they had even a weak fighter disadvantage to avoid disproportionate
losses.
Campaign conventions that don't act in oppostition to winning tactical
doctrines can persist for some time. Those that do try to run in the face of
survival will be quickly ignored or worked around.
Better to solve the problem in the ruleset, I believe.
> On Sun, May 02, 2010 at 07:37:00AM -0400, Tom B wrote:
> I do think you can solve almost any of the flaws of a ship design
In a campaign game in which players can design and build their own
ships - which may be unrealistic if it's less than a multi-year war, but
it's something people enjoy playing anyway - you can't. At that point
the construction system (which is often the same thing as the one-shot
scenario's points system) needs to give a fair reflection of combat
power vs cost-to-build...
E
[quoted original message omitted]
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very hard to replace, then their campaign cost (if you want to think of it
that way) would have to reflect that. At that point, other units other than
carriers would come into vogue and you have problem solved on
the mass-fighter appearance. OTOH, you haven't solved the BDN single
fighter squadron being worthless.
I don't think a BDN with a single squadron is worthless. I can see the single
squadron being used as: Extra point defence if attacked by enemy ordnance.
Recon to de blip the enemy at long range and get a scan of what you are going
up against. Also to stop the enemy getting such information from your ship.
Pursuit of enemy scout ships, frigates and destroyers that your BDN has
encountered and you want to stop them getting away, a squadron of fighters
could make a real mess of an enemy unit that is trying to activate it's FTL
and so can't manouvre or use weapons. Â All of these uses would be relatively
high survivability so casualties would be low. Certainly compared to attacking
enemy fleet ships. Â In our games (and our ships are custom designs with
higher point defence suits) fighter groups are pretty much one shot. Â Even if
you adjusted the existing fleet SSDs to increase the PDS suits all you do is
make the problem a lot worse. If ships typically run with 10% of their mass as
PDS then you either need to have a doctrine of every ship is a carrier or you
don't bother at all. Â I think if you want to fix the ordnance "problem" thenÂ
you need to review the whole firing rules. Having completey different rules
for targetting fighters and for targetting small frigates seems to me to be
the root cause of the problem and you won't fix it until you have PDS as short
range rapid fire weapons at one end of a graduated scale of weaponry.
[quoted original message omitted]
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com> wrote:
> To some degree, I agree... although if you allow easy fire at
They become less effective to be sure but they don't stop being effective. All
this talk about fighters (for all these years) seems to be keeping the rest of
the system from moving forward. Fighters
are much too cheap for what they bring to the table -- if everything
else stayed the same has anyone toyed with simply increasing the point cost by
100% or so? I'm sure someone has done this...
Thankfully I've only ever played small fleet games from the FBs so the
players couldn't easily bring hordes of fighters with them --
basically only light and fleet carriers.
D.
> They become less effective to be sure but they don't stop
All that does is shift the balance point upwards.
Small groups of fighters = cost more than they are worth Huge groups = worth
more than they cost
Doubling the cost just changes where you transition between the two states.
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Chris Ronnfeldt <zephyr2112@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Doubling the cost just changes where you transition between the two
Sure if you view that sliding scale as the only variable in play --
but it's the interaction between fighters and other assets that's important
here. You can't build a thrust 24" ship with six beams using the normal rules
but you can start to figure out parts of it ( 2
* (120% mass for the engines) + 18 for the beams...) . You have one
scale used to build everything -- and then fighters slapped on top of
it using an arbitrary scale.
If you were to point out fighters using the same scale what would
their points be? A Lenov class scout is 21 points -- breaking the
rules and building a mass 1 fighter with thrust 18, a beam, and a hull
box comes out to about 13 points per fighter... It should be more
than this but the app I'm using will only let you devote 90% of mass to
drives.;)
Then you would scale this down a bit because of the
meta-naval-architectural PSB (no firecon, no ftl, limited
endurance...).
Another option is to classify fighters as denial weapons that simply modify
the amount of firepower coming out of the ship they're attacking....but that
isn't nearly as fun as sending in a small horde of torpedo armed fighters.
Damo
I think all the "naval gazing" that's going into this is confounding the key
problem. As Chris points out, each fighter grows in its
in-game effectiveness the more of them you have. So a single flat
point cost will over-charge at one point and undercharge at another.
All this other talk about campaign rules, industrial capabilities and PSB
ignores the fact that:
a) they're situational and setting-dependent
b) not used at all in one-off games, and
c) defeat the point of FT being adaptable for many settings
A point cost formula evaluates the relative likelihood of fleet A beating
fleet B, not counting the cleverness of the player. That's all that's
important, really. If at the end of the day we can adapt the points system to
also work as an economics system or justify it using PSB, then great.
Wonderful. But not actually necessary. And, hell, we're smart people. We can
figure out a PSB explanation for any points system we invent.
Now, I don't think that Damond's answered Chris's point. Sure, we could
extrapolate what a FT fighter would cost if it had been a ship
and not a fighter, and then apply some kind of discount/penalty for
its fighter attributes. But then you'd be back to charging a linear points
cost to an asset whose actual value increases exponentially. No matter how
cleverly your calculation method, or how many decimal points you calculate the
fighter's value to, you'll be stuck with this
problem. And I doubt that, for 2-3 squadrons, that the number we have
already is that far off.
If 1 squadron in a fleet is less powerful than listed, why not give a discount
for it? And if 10 are too powerful, why not charge for that advantage?
Yes, one solution is to drop fighters entirely, or somehow limit them so that
they can't gang up like they can now. Another is to create an
inverted U-shaped relationship, some reason why large numbers of
squadrons is bad, to force people to have a certain number and be done with
it. But one of the strengths of FT2 is its flexibility.
Star Trek doesn't have fighters at all. B5 and Star Wars have some,
but they aren't the be-all and end-all of space combat. In BSG, they
are, and everyone uses huge carriers with colossal numbers of fighters. I like
that flexibility, that FT2 can model all of these settings and more. It's what
most people seem to use FT for. So it seems crazy to drop that advantage just
because we can't use a table or handle the exponent key on our calculators.
> On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Damond Walker <damosan@gmail.com> wrote:
wrote:
> Doubling the cost just changes where you transition between the two
> On Mon, May 03, 2010 at 03:35:00PM -0400, Robert Mayberry wrote:
That's what I think of as a "change the points system" solution. I
prefer, conceptually, to change the _rules_ such that fighters lose the
exponential value characteristic (or at least have no more of it than ships
do).
R
[quoted original message omitted]
[quoted original message omitted]
There is also something to be said about thinking about a problem too hard.
Isn't just about everything in FT situational in nature: armor,
screens, certain weapons tied to fast/slow platforms, movement styles,
etc.?
(Granted some situations are bigger offenders than others - but it's
situational and difficult to account for.)
Can you really ever fix that? No.
This is the trap of a points system - while there may be a good
solution out there somewhere the minute you get it out to the genpop someone
will break it.
You are always going to have edge cases that will break a system. For me the
fleet books set the tone for my games and designs so I was never really
concerned about the system's edge cases.
D.
> On 5/3/10, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com> wrote:
wrote:
> To some degree, I agree... although if you allow easy fire at
Even at
> that, the FB2 powers kind of throw the balance off in a different
[quoted original message omitted]
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com> wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
 For
> me the fleet books set the tone for my games and designs so I was
I've never met a point system I couldn't break. Most of the time (probably
close to 100%) I wasn't even trying to do anything
over-powered, I was just trying to do something different. Ultimately
I decided that point systems don't really work, but they work "good enough"
for most people. I also concluded that "from scratch" forces will never do
anything but engender animosity and angst unless the person who designed the
force is not the one running it. Even then there is a high probability of
significant ire being directed towards the force architect either during or
after the game.
As an example, many moons agone I designed a force that didn't use Class 3
beams, didn't use fighters, used torps, but only in broadside configuration.
They did use ADFC's on anything bigger than a CL, but didn't overload on PDS
turrets. The force got played once. To his credit the person I played against
didn't whine, but I could tell he was not happy. Such an experience is rule
rather than the exception.
For what it's worth I would balance the point system to the best it can be,
within the constraints of the FB's. Make it work really well for the published
ships. Anything outside of those and you really can't expect to have a lot of
success because you will always run afoul of someone who makes a better
mousetrap.
Bill the Lurker
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lWhereas I
generally agree with Damond (and to a lesser extent Eric) on the point
system's inherent natural flaw (all point systems have some exploits and I am
a big proponent of SG because it has NONE), I also think there are reasons it
is worth looking at some problems within the context of the point system.
After all, you've bothered enough to *have one in the first place*, so trying
to make it work as well as possible isn't a bad idea. Otherwise, why have it?
Rely entirely on campaign frameworks to make a workable larger campaign.
So, the problem of fighters was well stated as:
"too few, value lower than you pay, too many (relative to PDS and enemy
fighters), you pay too little"
Oerjan identified this issue as an order of magnitude more sensitive to
disparities relative to other in-game systems. That's a pretty big
distinction. So, yes, in custom builds you do get an element of
Paper-Scissors-Rock, but with fighters it is Paper-Scissors-Plasmagun.
I see nothing wrong with trying to address this *excessive* sensitivity to
disparities.
Eric is right insofar as it is entirely possible to build fleets that have
design flaws and get whacked. And he points out there are counters for most of
them in the form of alternate designs. But in order to figure out if these
combinations are somewhat balanced against one another, one must look at what%
of cost and mass you have to devote to dealing with <enemy tactic>. To deal
with the mid to large fighter swarm, you need to devote
*a
lot* of mass and cost to dealing with this. A well rounded ship will loose to
the fighter swarm in many cases.
I don't believe the fighter case is equivalent to all of the other cases.
Certainly, some other weapons may yield nasty results against an opponent
unprepared to deal with them (slow battleships vs. SMs). But even there, a
relatively modest mass of PDS or some BJs will reduce the SM impact to
manageable levels without devoting too much mass or points to the fix. That
doesn't work with fighters because of the particulars of the situation. You
need to devote a lot more points and mass to dealing with the threat.
Having been on the recieving end of Can Am 1 (due to an intelligence failure,
and you can read that either way and both would have been true), three beam
heavy battleships and their escorts were utterly consumed by fighters with (I
believe) little or no damage to the enemy carrier force, I got a good luck at
the far extremum of being owned by fighters. The battleship fleet had better
than FB level PDS, ADFC and DDEs. But the
enemy had something obscene like 25-30 fighter groups, against 4 or 6
groups of heavy interceptors and the point defense. And the death swarm just
ate their way through a modified Komarov (more mid sized beams, more PDS) in
each attack, after concentrating on the DDEs for a round, eliminating them.
I guess my point here is just that the fighter issue is more pronounced than
other issues of design choice. Mess up your balance versus an enemy in this
regard and the effects will be magnified compared to most other cases (even
the ones Eric pointed out).
That's why we should look at addressing it. I'm not saying we can fix the
points system (inherently, they all break somewhere). I am saying we can
reduce fighter-related proclivities, perhaps bringing them into the same
order of magnitude as other potential imbalances.
I'm not looking for a pancea, but a tourniquet.
And campaign rules can do it, but I'd rather have the fix in the tactical
rules. And I don't really see any reason that's valid for not doing the fix
there.
TomB (and others) have made some very good points and observations. I'm
relatively "new" to the fighter problem, having heard about it for years but
never having experienced it. My small gaming group could be fighter heavy at
times if our players (especially me!) got motivated enough to paint their
fighters and carriers. The worst that I think
i've experienced was around 10-12 fighter groups in a 3k point game.
They mattered, but weren't any more of a deciding factor than SMs and such.
I had a thought while reading TomB's post. Maybe this has been thought of
before, maybe not. Seems that part of the problem is that tons of fighters vs
not tons of PDS gives the fighters a HUGE impact on the battle. Can the
problem be resolved by toning down the effect?
> From what I recally, we essentially have 3 damage modes:
Interceptors - no damage to capitol ships
Standard - 1 beam die per fighter (0-2 points each)
Torp bombers - 1-6 (or 3-6 or something, depending on which set of
rules/playtest rules you use).
You want fighters to be able to impact the battle. But do you (in a
sci-fi setting) want them to dominate "naval battles" as they tend to
on Earth bound wet navies? Or do you want them to be a huge annoyance that has
to be defended against, but won't always turn the tide?
What if we went with something like:
Interceptors - no damage vs capitol ships (weapons too small to matter)
Standard - 0-1 points. Maybe not as bad as PDS vs ships, but nearly.
Like, score 1 DP on a 5,6.
Torp bombers - 0-2 points. Roll a beam die. No re-rolls on any
fighter attacks vs capitol ships.
A large fighter swarm would be able to do some serious damage, mostly if they
were TBs, but only hitting on 5,6 (vs shielded in FT 2.5, make it 1 point on a
6, even if double shielded, or otherwise adjust the numbers some) reduces the
effectiveness of standard fighters. Then if TBs are essentially useless in
dogfights (any battle vs ordinance), maybe only scoring a hit on a 6 (sorry, I
haven't looked at this for a
while and don't want to go read to look it up), then they are one-shot
one trick ponies that still are much less likely to simply vaporize capitol
ships. If a full squadron fires that's 6 beam dice. Nasty, but not... earth
shattering.
Worth thinking about?
J
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn Mon, May 3,
> 2010 at 6:47 PM, John Lerchey <lerchey@gmail.com> wrote:
> I had a thought while reading TomB's post. Maybe this has been
No, because that's only half the problem.
The other half of the problem is that it doesn't take all that much extra in
PDS to make fighters impotent.
It's a curve, with the sweet spot *almost* where the FB designs reside. Most
of the fixes suggested simply shift the curve one way or another, but don't do
anything about the steepness of the curve.
There are a couple of solutions devised by the playtest group, but they
haven't received an official sanction lo these many years since they first
appeared, nor are they universally accepted.
Those of us who need a cohesive rule book and prefer a fix to the problem in
order to recruit the local players find the situation... frustrating.
I find 10+ year update cycles frustrating...but that wouldn't keep me
from recruiting new players.
D.
> On 5/3/10, Allan Goodall <agoodall@hyperbear.com> wrote:
wrote:
> I had a thought while reading TomB's post. Maybe this has been
> On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 6:47 PM, John Lerchey <lerchey@gmail.com>
wrote:
> I had a thought while reading TomB's post. Â Maybe this has been
I think one of the challenges of fighters is that they can stack up. That is,
you can concentrate fighters from many ships into one big swarm. Lacking ADFC,
you're left matching each ship's defenses individually against all the enemy
fighters collectively. As fleets get bigger, fighters become more numerous,
but ship defenses don't change at all. That's why I proposed costing fighters
separately as their own component of a fleet.
The other problem is that they can project power. You launch a fighter from a
crappy "soap bubble" carrier and then break for it while the fighters stay
with the battle group or charge ahead into the enemy. Much of the points cost
of your fighters is the carrier they deploy
from-- which in the case of soap bubbles is off- or nearly off-table.
There aren't many other ways to Endurance rules help for this by keeping the
fighter on a tighter leash.
Another is the rock-paper-scissors issue. There are components that
are only useful for defending against fighters (PDS / ADFC). They can
counter fighter swarms in enough numbers, but lend nothing else to the game,
and if you don't have enough, they're dead weight. Most other weapons don't
affect fighters at all. Combine this with the
soap-bubble strategy, and you can send your teeth, resistant to most
weapons, into battle and keep your (vulnerable and expensive) tail out of the
fight.
A side effect (I'm glad it was pointed out) is that the break-even
point varies with fleet size.
So if we're going to tone this stuff down with rules rather than points, I
think we need to address all three of these big issues.
Anti-swarming rules would have to be developed. Fighters would have to
be constrained to stay close to their carriers (whether by endurance,
range, speed, re-arming rules, or what have you). Finally, fighters
would have to lose at least some of their invincibility versus most
anti-ship weapons.
The alternative is to create some new rules dynamic which makes you want to
have SOME fighters but not too many, so there's a sweet spot. The B5 setting
does this. JMS basically decided that fighters were important for scraping off
surface gear (weapons) on enemy ships, but that they can't really destroy
ships on their own. You see this in The Fall of Night:
"This episode shows the new defense grid (cf. "GROPOS") in action for the
first time. As promised it is an even match for a heavy battle cruiser. The
battle doctrine for the B5 universe is one of fighters engage fighters, heavy
ships engage heavy ships. During this combat sequence we see what happens when
a heavy ship ignores the fighters and fails (for whatever reason) to deploy
its own fighters. While not capable of inducing complete destruction of a
heavy vessel in the short term, the fighters can strip a heavy vessel of its
offensive/defensive armament since such weaponry is small
compared to the ship and necessarily exposed in order to be effective. "
(lurker's guide commentary).
The downside of doing this is that it's harder to adapt to existing fictional
settings.
I'm open to ideas which make fighters behave in a more linear fashion, or
points systems which acknowledge their exponential properties. A battle
settled in drydock the night before the game is unsatisfying to me.
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lOn Mon, May 3,
> 2010 at 7:47 PM, Damond Walker <damosan@gmail.com> wrote:
> I find 10+ year update cycles frustrating...but that wouldn't keep me
You misunderstand me.
The lack of a coherent rule book, plus mentioning (perhaps stupidly) the
fighter problem, turned off my potential recruits.
They are looking at other options.
--
Allan Goodall http://www.hyperbear.com
awgoodall@gmail.com agoodall@hyperbear.com
> From: Tom B
> After all, you've bothered enough to *have one in the first place*, so
There's a certain amount of merit to that... but there's also an automatic
caution that's already been brought up. That being, no matter
where you put the point system to adjust for it, you're _never_ going to
have a perfect situation in a system that's got this many different things you
can do in it and which is intended to represent as many different genres as
possible.
Stargrunt might well be a lot more balanced in this respect, but it's also got
simplicity working for it: it's only attempting to model a
form of not-far-removed futuristic infantry-centric small unit combat
between generally human-motivated opponents. Get back to me when I can
play the Jedi versus the Jem Haddar versus the demons from Doom versus an army
made up of Jason Vorheeses versus Aliens versus WH40K Space Marines versus
Predators versus Glitter Boys versus Terminators versus the Time Lords versus
the Flood versus the Borg in it and all the edge cases are still stable and
everybody's happy with the result.:P
> Eric is right insofar as it is entirely possible to build fleets that
It depends. If your ship is going to get killed easily by fighter swarms, I
would tend to say that this, by itself, indicates that it isn't very "well
rounded", now, is it?
However, I'll skip ahead to the convention example...
> Having been on the recieving end of Can Am 1 (due to an intelligence
I do _understand_ the issue... 25-30 fighters in what looks like it was
probably a roughly 3000 NPV game is a _little_ high even for my games.
(The average, half-balanced carrier force in my games would've been
closer to about 15-20 at that NPV.) On the other hand, I wouldn't have
called it truly ridiculous or anything. If it were me, I'd have swapped out at
least the fighters, PDS, and maybe about 11 hull boxes for scatterguns, which
(in formation) is pretty much untouchable against
naked fighter strikes of comparable NPV -- at the resulting 810 NPV,
that many scatterguns kills 14 fighter groups per ship on average with
overkill spillover; soap bubble carriers filling out that NPV can only deploy
12.8. It just gets worse for a carrier force if I've got some
more densely scattergun armed DDEs on top of it. If I _had_ to use
ADFC/PDS then I won't beat soapies any more, but I'd still probably win
the CanAm1 fight. (And if somebody told me they're allowed to use soapies an d
I can't use scatterguns I'd be reaching for a trout to slap them
with...)
And moreover, neither of those two variants touches the Komarovs' offensive
weapons at all. If someone used battleships against the
scattergun variant, oh well... here's 72 + escorts' scatterguns on your
ships if/when I get within range plus the Komarovs' regular weapons,
have fun with that.
(My plasma-and-torpedo bombers tactics would still kill the described
fleet whether it used scatterguns or PDS, so no, it's not impervious to
_supported_ fighters, just _naked_ fighters.)
E
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lAlthough I'm no
expert in these matters, it occurs to me that perhaps one might consider the
logistics of fighters (particularly in the campaign setting) in terms of the
true limiting factor: the flight crew (pilot, for a
single-seater).
Fighter technology is well understood in the GZGverse and adoption appears
relatively trivial. In other words, building the fighters for a fighter arm is
no big deal. Anyone with an industrial base could
conceivably pile fighters high enough that lined up fin-tip to fin-tip,
one could walk from here to Ceres. Great. Somebody let the contract, and the
last thing those redacted Kra'vak will ever see is 400 million fighters
howling down on 'em.
Just one question, though. Who's gonna fly 'em?
Consider Earth's largest wet navy. How many total personnel are in the US
Navy, and what percentage of those could be classified by any stretch
of the imagination as high-performance fighter pilots? Bet it's pretty
small, and by invoking the Law of the Minimum by way of the fighter pilot, a
solution might perhaps be found.
One could ramp up production, telescope the syllabus, and send out hordes of
green pilots, but the result should be some species of the Pleiades Turkey
Shoot: at worst, the damage a gaggle of tyros could inflict ought to be about
what happened to the fleet off Okinawa over the several weeks of the campaign.
The impact wasn't trivial, but remind me: Who won at Okinawa?
I would look at modeling logistical limits on fighters two ways:
1. Regardless of construction cost, fighters can be no more than some quite
small percentage of the total (tonnage, construction cost, what have you) of a
given fleet. This construct represents the idea that a fighter pilot comes
from a smallish pool at the right end of a species' bell curve, whose training
involves significant time and cost just to make it all the way to "nugget."
2. In the campaign setting, making good fighter losses -- even with the
sorriest nuggets one can scrape out of the bottom of the flight school
-- will be a relative trickle. The surviving American carriers were near
the end of their rope by the end of the Battle of Midway, due to aircraft
attrition.
I'm sorry that I don't have a copy of the rules right in front of me, to
ground-truth these ideas, but they're just things I wanted to toss out
for general consideration anyway.
Best, Ken United Stars
> --- On Mon, 5/3/10, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com> wrote:
From: Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>
Subject: Re: [GZG] FT:XD changes, part 1
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Date: Monday, May 3, 2010, 4:35 PM
[quoted original message omitted]
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lEric said:
"Get back to me when I can play the Jedi versus the Jem Haddar versus the
demons from Doom versus an army made up of Jason Vorheeses versus Aliens
versus WH40K Space Marines versus Predators versus Glitter Boys versus
Terminators versus the Time Lords versus the Flood versus the Borg in it and
all the edge cases are still stable and everybody's happy with the result.
"
I have two words for you Eric:
Aaron Newman.
I rest my case.
(Those who have attended ECC know whereof I speak....)
------------
More seriously, I think Stargrunt can do a lot of things well because it
depends on judgement to balance the scenario. It doesn't create a misleading
point system. You *can* build rather unbalanced Scenarios (I remember a
certain battle with fast PA against regular, non-too-heavily armoured
infantry in the woods.... Damn stinking Minbari.....). But the game doesn't
tell you they are balanced with some magic numbers.
That's the difference. FT sort of does. I mean, the point system is supposed
to yield reasonable results and balance otherwise there would be no point in
having it. The areas where it is broken are the areas where it could be
adjusted.
------------
To CanAm1:
1. My options were to swap beam mass around, not make wholesale weapon swaps.
PDS was considered beam mass. I pulled out some big guns, piled in
some class-2s, and a few more PDS and ADFC. On the DDs, I pulled out
pretty much all guns in favour of PDS and ADFCs. No scatterguns.
I'm not sure how exactly the enemy got their mass of fighters, I recall they
had every carrier they could bring. And the geography of the game saw our
fleet 1/3rd dead before we could see anything other than enemy fighters
(planet in the way). A turn later, one of our Komarovs was fighting the entire
carrier fleet, but the odds weren't in my favour by that time, the other one
messed up Titan's Turn around the planet.
Now, if both of us had made the turn around the planet, we'd have done a bit
more damage at range 12-18" to the enemy carriers before they wrapped
around the planet the other way. But their fighters did eat my Komarov, their
few salvo missiles didn't help, and the third Komarov would have got eaten too
if he didn't FTL.
I think I might have had 6-8 mass of PDS on each Komarov, about that on
each DDE (2 or 3 of those), and six squadrons of heavy interceptors (or was it
four?) which did do an awful lot of damage before they were overrun.
Ultimately, the fact the swarm never had to face all my PDS (fighter
manouverability) at once and that they ate the DDEs in 1 round (as they were
trying to screen the fleet), meant that the Komarovs were then consumed by
the remaining fighters at a rate of about 1/round.
I'm not sure the other side even used Soapies. I think every ship on their
side carried fighters, but I don't think there was any true soapies. And a few
of the ships they had were not carriers I think.
Ultimately, if I'd got the intel report right and realized it meant 'enemy
loading out with fighters', I'd have probably brought about 12 mass more of
PDSes on each Komarov and probably done in the fighter wing reasonably
effectively. But that just goes to show how easy, with less than half a fleet
book based fleet (more or less), you can use fighters to totally shift the
balance.