From: Eric Foley <stiltman@t...>
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:35:19 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: [GZG] House rules, was Monster ships
Hm. I suppose when I really think about this, you're right. MT missiles really are kind of overpowered as compared to salvos if you only let them get hit on a 6. The trouble is, are salvos not just completely better (at least on damage) if you have heavy missiles get hit the same as individual missiles in a salvo? Sure, they might be _smarter_ but if they never get through against even barely adequate point defense, what's the point? (And by my custom-brew standardss that's loosely defined as, "you can have at least an outside chance of surviving an unassisted strike of about 30 fighters in a 5000 NPV game, although maybe not so much if they've got torpedo bombers".) On another note, the house rules in my games basically go like this (they are many, so this is long): 1. We tend to play a series of custom one-offs, where mixing what is considered Kra'Vak, Phalon, or human tech is perfectly fine but where there may be story limits to what a given power might build in terms of size of ships and how many different advanced systems are used. 2. We allow advanced screens from Cross Dimensions for particularly advanced powers. (We have two of them imagined in the greater galaxy thus far, which are not in direct contact with one another.) Against Kra'Vak weapons, these are treated as reducing K-gun effective class by 1 per level of screen straight up. An effective class 0 K-gun may do its original class damage, without chance of reroll, on a reroll of 5+ after the initial hit, or else it does no damage at all. An effective class -1 K-gun may do the same on a 6+. 3. Armor reduces K-gun double damage chances by -1 per layer of armor, similar to how Kra'Vak armor levels did so in the older game. Nobody has more than four layers of armor or bigger K-guns than K6's. This is cumulative with the reduction effect of advanced screens. (General sense is, the defenses as such are more expensive in many ways than the K-guns themselves in the bite they take out of cost and ship mass, so it doesn't really nerf K-guns too much but makes them something other than the completely undefendable weapons they are in the base fleet books.) 4. Point defense and fighter-to-fighter rolls will bleed over from one fighter group to the next. (We've always taken the view than when 400 fighters attack a single ship or fighter flotilla, groups of 6 are meaningless.) We are not currently doing this for salvo missiles due to the greater difficulties to hit. 5. All direct fire on a single ship must be resolved at the same time. It's just faster, and it also prevents people from experimentally probing a ship's defenses (i.e. whether they are putting up a reflex field) and minimizing the damage. With particularly large piles of die rolls we allow subdividing by 2 or 4 and multiplying the totals. 6. Point defense is not allowed to identify and decide which groups of fighters it wishes to prioritize when firing -- fighter strike ECM is considered good enough that regular fighters may be used as decoys for more powerful bombers, so long as the regular fighters actually have a ship strike capability. (We haven't allowed interceptors to play as soaks in this fashion.) Fighter-to-fighter attacks _are_ allowed to do this, if someone's stupid enough to actually let bombers in range of other fighters while any of their own standard fighters or interceptors are still alive. 7. Scatterguns miss completely on a natural 1. If they're being used in an area defense role, they still do friendly fire damage to the other ship. 8. We allow a point defense missile rack, envisioned loosely as a bomb-pumped laser, that has a mass of 1, cost 4, and does the same damage as four PDS systems all firing at once, but may only fire once before it is expended. Area defense fire controls are required the same way as PDS does (i.e. they do not get the auto-area defense ability of scatterguns). 9. Ship to ship beam and K-gun weapons may attack a fighter group within 12 MU and hit it on a 6; if the fighter group spends an endurance to evade, the fire is useless. 10. For +1 NPV cost per fighter, a fighter group may be equipped as an artillery spotter. Instead of attacking another ship within 12 MU directly, it may give a +1 bonus to all fire from its mother ship, and allow salvo missiles, antimatter torpedoes, or plasma from its mother ship to have a secondary move of 6 MU similar to how fighters would be allowed to go. The other ship may not engage the fighter with point defense, but may use ship-to-ship weapons against it. If the spotter evades, it may not spot in that turn. Spotter bonuses do not allow a ship to automatically hit (i.e. reducing a 2+ roll on a torpedo or K-gun to 1+), and do not allow a missile or plasma bolt to exceed its normal range. The general idea of this, besides modeling something like an Iowa BB from wet navy years that had such gunnery spotters, is twofold: to allow a fleet book style dreadnought (i.e. primarily a warship with only a couple or three fighters) to have an actual use for its fighters a gainst similarly sized battleships (i.e. all guns and no fighters) that have too much point defense to effectively attack, and to allow placed ordnance to actually have a shot at hitting high powered advanced thrust vessels. 11. Swing role fighters as per Cross Dimensions are allowed, although they're considered an advanced form of fighter and as such are not common. Heavy and fast modifications are taken as base modifications to the overall fighter that are costed only once. At present, IJN style "multi role" fighters are not allowed. 12. Spinal mount weapons are considered front-arc weapons. 13. Cloaking devices are allowed. Cloaked ships may not be targeted by missiles or fighters, nor may they fire them. They may not use or charge spinal mount weapons in any turn in which they are cloaked, cloaking or decloaking. A ship's cloak typically takes effect at the end of ordnance placement. A ship's decloak may take place at the end of movement, or prior to movement in order to fire its own missiles, but if it takes place prior, the ship gives warning to the enemy that it may be about to be fired on by a decloaking ship and the enemy ship is allowed to account for this in making its movement orders. A ship that decloaks after movement may not use its own placed ordnance nor dispatch its fighters. As with FT2, the length of time for a cloaked ship to remain cloaked and all of its movement orders must be plotted in advance. A cloaked formation _may_ enter the board under cloak, but its initial placement and formation must be decided upon in advance and all of it s first several turns of movement plotted as such. They _are_ allowed to know the speed and distance of enemy ships at the beginning of the game in this case prior to writing these orders. The PSB for this is that there are two levels of cloak: (a) a "strategic" cloak where they are invisible to long range sensors but are visible within combat ranges, but they retain their ability to use their own long range sensors to detect an enemy fleet and therefore try to at start to maneuver into tactical range and strike against it. (b) a "tactical" cloak where they are invisible to all sensors but are unable to tell where the enemy is or what course changes they make. The range at which a ship must go to "tactical" cloak or become visible is loosely (and conveniently) judged to be the length of the board at the start of the battle. 14. We used fixed tables approximately 80-100 MU by about 60-80 MU. Hence, very long beam ranges are generally not used because they don't do a whole lot of good. 15. We have three speeds of fighters: fast (+1 NPV per fighter, 36 MU base movement), standard (regular cost, 24MU), or slow (-1 NPV per fighter, 18 MU). These speeds also affect the dogfighting capabilities of the fighter. (a) Equal speeds of fighters, when engaged in dogfights, may not escape them without giving up a free shot to the enemy fighters. (b) A faster grade of fighter may evade a dogfight against a slower one without giving up the free shot. The slower grade of fighter may not evade the dogfight at all. (c) If the fastest (+1 NPV) grade of fighters engages the slowest (-1 NPV), then not only may the slowest not escape, but they must give up a first shot against the fastest and then can only retaliate with whatever survives. (i.e. the slowest fighters are going to be cheaper, but they're going to have a serious vulnerability in dogfights, and hence should only be deployed as dedicated bombers that aren't designed to engage in dogfights at all, or as the standard but vastly inferior fighters of a power that is simply behind or cutting too many corners in their fighter tech.) I think that's the lot of it. I've been playing for a good decade or more (and off and on babbling on the list for most of that, both under my real name and as "Stilt Man"), and all of these rules have generally been tweaked as time goes on both to make the game more interesting, balance out pieces of it, and give us more variety in modelling all sorts of different interstellar powers that may be (and frequently are) invented on the fly to model a fairly vast galaxy of different star nations in constant turmoil. The storylines and ship designs have evolved a lot of different ways, with a lot of different tactics that have proven useful -- and advances in different nations' ships are generally by way of doctrine within the weapons available to them rather than being given new weapons very often. It's been a fun ride with this game, and I don't really want it to end particularly soon. E [quoted original message omitted]