So, I'm reading an interesting and readable history of the bomber war over
Germany, called (unsurprisingly) The Bomber War by Robin Neillands.
One of the topics it touches on, of course, is the organization of RAF bomber
squadrons and Luftwaffe fighter staffels. An RAF bomber squadron consisted of
2 or 3 flights of 10 aircraft each, on paper. Of course not all of these would
be operational on any given day. A Luftwaffe staffel was 9 fighters, again at
full strength. Probably
6-8 was more average on most days.
Anyway, the point of this is this: Anyone ever played around with
using larger squadrons than the 6-ship ones assumed in the rules? Due
to the way the rules for hanger size are written, odd-numbered
squadrons would be difficult to work. Are there any game balance issues that
immediately spring to anyone's mind? I havn't worked with bunches and bunches
of fighters and I havn't got an opponent handy to test it out. Any thought?
Off the top of my head, the morale rules gave an edge to larger groups,
as did the PDS rules under FT2.0/MT. Now, with rerolls for PDS (and
many weapons under UF-AFP) and no morale rules, smaller groups would
seem to have some advantage.
Along with much of FT, I never considered the squadrons HAD to be six
fighters; just six steps of damage and fire, with other fighter versions
variation on the same.
That said, the fact that you can get dice higher numbered than a d6, a not
uncommon way of representing a squadron being a single die, I played with the
idea of 'em being larger. I've never been good about point valuations,
so can't comment about NPV/CPV adjustments, either to squadrons or the
ships that carry them.
The one area I had a concern about, strangely, was fighters vs. SM's. With a
Teske field in effect, a squadron that takes out a full salvo could itself be
annihilated by back blast. Couldn't happen if the squadron was larger.
Doesn't mean I'm totally missing obvious problems elsewhere...
Which, I suppose, begs another question: how about variant size salvos?
The_Beast
> John Atkinson wrote:
> Anyway, the point of this is this: Anyone ever played around with
Both larger and smaller groups, yes. My main inspiration wasn't
real-world
combat though, but rather SF movies and TV shows - Star Wars rebel
fighters
operating in 3-fighter groups facing TIE fighters in 4-fighter groups,
etc.
> Due to the way the rules for hanger size are written, odd-numbered
Plenty of them. The biggest ones are PDS rerolls (groups with less than 6
fighters don't have enough "hit points" to let the PDSs reach their nominal
average of 0.8 fighter kills per die) and movement initiative vs fire
initiative (for a given number of fighters, organising them into lots of
small groups gives an advantage during movement - you get to move more
groups later on, thus being able to react to the enemy fighters' moves -
but suffer a disadvantage in combat since many of the small groups will *fire*
after the opposition does; if the fighters are instead organised into a few
large groups you get the opposite initiative effects instead).
Regards,
Have the fighter morale rules been rescinded? I thought they were still
current as an optional, just as they've been since MT.
> Robert Bryett wrote:
> Have the fighter morale rules been rescinded?
With the beta-test fighter rules (aka UF-AFP), they have been rescinded.
With the Fleet Book fighter rules they're still "optional but strongly
recommended".
Ah, I see. Thanks for that. I didn't realise that UF-AFP referred to
rules still in beta test.
Best regards, Robert Bryett rbryett@mail.com
> On 27/10/2005, at 3:05 PM, Oerjan Ariander wrote:
> Robert Bryett wrote: