> Uhm, are these for a selected crowd only, or could I partake of them
Quick question from someone who is new to the list but is by no means new to
the game (have played for about three or four years with my
brother-in-law
and other assorted recruits). What are FMA-type skirmish rules?
[warning: long rambling to follow]
Just to give folks an idea of how I usually play, these are the house rules we
usually go by (in as much completeness as I can remember). I don't know who
else might even care about this, but this is the way we usually go. It might
be food for interesting discussion, on a way of playing the game, but one
never knows...
1. Each side gets 5000 points to work with to build a fleet, and we pretty
much always use our own custom-built ships. We're allowed any human
tech from the first fleet book (or, before this came out, we used only the
human tech
from the FT/MT books). Neither side knows what the other is going to
bring to the floor until we actually set it up.
2. Exception to the last sentence of rule 1: if you're flying things that are
clearly superships, the other side is allowed to know in advance about it and
use that knowledge to respond in their own fleet organization, unless the
supership is equipped with a cloaking device.
3. Ships equipped with cloaking devices do not need to be visible at first
sighting; however, at least one ship on each side must be visible. The cloaked
ships are allowed to "fudge" the "double-edged sword" nature of the
cloaking devices with the initial movement orders; however, all cloaked ships
must write their move orders for all turns, including when they decloak, at
the moment they cloak (or, if they start the game cloaked, at the beginning of
the game).
4. Cloaking devices and missile magazines may not be targetted by needle
beams, as they are considered internal systems. They have to roll for these
things on thresholds but they have no external components that can be
targetted to knock them out. (The original game-oriented reason for
this was
that cloak-capable ships take such a tradeoff to equip themselves with
the things in the first place that it would be rather "cheap" for the opponent
to be allowed to just needle the things out and cripple them so badly by
destroying such a costly system.)
5. Nova cannons and wave guns do _not_ affect missiles, fighters, and
cloaked ships in our games. Our technobabble rationale for this is that a
giant,
hulking battleship wielding a fixed-emplacement gun the size of Tokyo
simply
isn't going to be able to aim it effectively at darting gnat-like
fighters or ships that it can't see. The physics assumption is that the
fighters and cloaked ships simply can fly over or under the blast without that
much trouble.
The game-oriented rationale was that this made nova cannons and wave
guns too
powerful (in the case of fighters/missiles) and made for too much
annoying calculation in the case of having to pull cloaked ships onto the
board to see whether or not they got hit or not.
6. Ships may be armed with wave guns and can fire as many as they like, but
they're only allowed to _charge_ one at a time.
7. Needle weaponry may not target drives unless they are behind the enemy
ship, and may not target "super guns" unless they are in front of the enemy
ship. The rationale behind this one should be obvious: super guns and drives
all are considered to involve a hole in one side of the ship and not the
other, so you can't hit anything critical that will knock the thing out when
you're on the wrong side of the vessel from the hole. e.g. if you are, for
whatever reason, on the OPPOSITE side of the Death Star from the superlaser,
you're not going to take out the superlaser with a needle beam from that
direction.
However [tongue-in-cheek Hitchhikers' Guidish babble warning] there is
some speculation amongst physicists as to whether the sheer magnitude of the
Death Star construction projects actually created a warp in the physics of
visible light. To wit, no matter WHAT angle you looked at the stations from,
you ALWAYS saw the superlaser, even though there's only one of them on the
station. Thus, the theory must be raised that the Death Star itself must
somehow represent a warp in photonic physics that assures that this is the
case. Surely, no counterexample to this theory has been raised, because not a
single sighting of either Death Star was ever reported in which the superlaser
was not visible. Think about it... have YOU ever seen a Death Star where it
wasn't?:) So, in the end, the Death Star might not be a good example.:)
8. It isn't clarified in the main books well as to whether fighters can fire
upon one another outside of a dogfight context. We allow them to.
9. Fighter launch and recovery operations have been a bit tweaked under our
rules. In the FT/MT lineage we considered anything that had more
offensive weaponry mass than fighter mass to be a dreadnought, anything with
the converse situation was a carrier. However, since superships could
potentially have enough fighters that it would take them all day to launch
them, we scaled up the amount of fighters allowed to be launched and
recovered. Thus,
under FT/MT
we allowed any ships to launch 1 or 2 fighters per turn per 100 mass, rounded
down, and recover 1 per turn per 100 mass, rounded down. Thus, normal sized
dreadnoughts could launch and recover 1, carriers launch 2 and recover
1.
Dreadnoughts from mass 101-200 could launch and recover 2, carriers 4
and 2, and so on. In the fleet book the scaling got a bit uglier, so we just
went to a simple "you can launch and recover a third of your fighters, rounded
up to the nearest full group, regardless of your mass or number of fighters."
This wound up allowing carriers of up to six fighters to launch 2 as long as
they carried more than 3, and anything that carried three or less fighters
could only launch 1. And it also allows us to scale it up easier for those
ships that might carry a dozen or more fighter bays. (Our games can involve
fighter numbers well into the fourties.)
10. Cloaking and decloaking is considered part of movement. Thus, missiles
launched at a ship that cloaks that turn will always miss, because the
missiles are launched at something they will no longer be able to detect by
the time they reach their target (movement happens between missile firing and
missile attack). A cloaked ship is effectively untargetable and invulnerable
while cloaked; it can fire in the turn it decloaks (aside from missiles, since
as mentioned above, decloaking happens after missile firing), may not be fired
at in the turn it cloaks.
11. Reflex fields don't work against missiles and torpedoes any more than
screens do. (For this reason, they're not often used except on the occasional
ship that is largely unarmed with ship-to-ship weaponry.) They do work
in conjunction with screens; the screens of whatever ship gets hit with the
beam fire will take effect. (i.e. you can't cheat and use a reflex field with
no screens behind it and thereby damage a ship that has level 2's up any more
than another identical ship would damage the screened vessel with the same die
rolls.)
I realize that a lot of this might be considered a radical departure from how
the game's played elsewhere, but it's worked quite well for us. I guess this
is what happens when we play the game for a long time amongst ourselves
without
subscribing to an on-line mailing list like this one and answer all the
wild questions of game balance that can come up whenever you mix all the
different systems of different genres.
We've had a number of different tactics. Ships armed with a mix of pulse
torpedos and short-range beams (needle or class 1) are a typical
battleship archetype of whatever size. Cloaking devices are relatively rare,
because they're expensive enough that you usually have to exploit some form of
mismatch or over-anticipation in the opposition in order to win with
them.
(I've caught my brother-in-law with a number of "gotchas" games when he
over-anticipates my more typical fighter-oriented tactics and I suddenly
throw a phalanx of "Warbirds" at him just to throw him for a loop.) Missiles
haven't been used a whole lot, partially because we sort of neutered them in
the FT/MT days and haven't gotten used to them as much again now that
the
salvoes are present (we put in a to-hit rule based on range, and gave
massive penalties if the target ships were under ECM effect, because we
quickly realized that the bare MT missile rules would quickly reduce the game
to a "nuclear exchange" if they weren't changed fairly drastically). OTOH,
speed and fighter screens tend to be good all-around defenses against
them so we don't tend to overload on them much. (Though the one time I did so,
it was effective enough that I've started rethinking a few things lately.)
Anyway... there's my ramble for the day. Might be good for a discussion or
two.
> Quick question from someone who is new to the list but is by no
(snip interesting discussion of Full Thrust setup).
FMA = Full Metal Anorak = infantry skirmish rules using the same general
system as DS2 and SG2 (opposed die rolls, die types ranging from d4 through
d12).
You wouldn't cross Full Thrust and FMA unless you were running a (small)
boarding action or something similar.
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> 4. Cloaking devices and missile magazines may not be targetted by
Considering how weak needle beams are, removing two of the rather few
worthwhile targets they have seems a bit harsh :-/
> 5. Nova cannons and wave guns do _not_ affect missiles, fighters,
It is the area crisped by the Nova Cannon round which is the size of Tokyo. If
someone nukes Tokyo, I wouldn't give very much for the survival chances of
individual cars or motorbikes (corresponding to
fighters in this case) caught in the blast :-/
> 7. Needle weaponry may not target drives unless they are behind the
See comment to 4 :-/
> 8. It isn't clarified in the main books well as to whether fighters
FT2 p.17: "If a Fighter Group is within range (6") of an enemy Group
[snip reference to fighter fire arc] then it may attack the enemy
Fighters excactly as it would an enemy warship,..."
The next paragraf says: "If, however, the Groups are moved so that their bases
are actually TOUCHING, the two Groups may 'dogfight'..."
To me it seems very clear that fighters can attack one another without being
involved in a dogfight.
[snip tactics]
The three important questions here are:
* Which movement system do you use? * How big is your gaming table? * How fast
do you tend to fly?
> From the tactics and designs you describe I'd guess either at "Vector"
on the first *or* "rather small" and "slowly" on the second two
respectively - playing on a large table in Cinematic tends to give
higher speeds, and make short-range weapons rather weaker. Similarly
I've never found MT missiles to be a big worry in themselves in
high-speed battles; they tend to restrict the enemy maneuverability
somewhat, but that's about it.
Regards,
> stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> >4. Cloaking devices and missile magazines may not be targetted by
> Considering how weak needle beams are, removing two of the rather few
We've actually found very differently in our battles. Needle beams are indeed
rather weak if you only carry a couple of them on a ship. If you specialize
ships as "surgical strike" vessels, and carry anywhere from eight to two dozen
of them... not so. Fast or cloaked ships equipped with these can cripple an
enemy very, very fast.
The current record for the shortest battle between my brother-in-law and
I was decided by needle beams back in our FT2 days. He was flying a 5000 point
monster battleship armed to the gills. I was flying a fleet of more
conventional capital ships escorted by a group of heavy cruisers with a thrust
rating of 8 and six needle beams apiece. His drive systems lasted about two
turns. Knowing that all I had to do from there was to get my capital ships
behind him and pick him apart at my leisure, he struck his colors immediately.
In custom rules, being able to pick out critical elements of your enemy's
systems and take them out with a concentrated strike of needle fire prior to
the real battle is a major factor. If you're heavy on carriers, taking out
area defense fire controls is big. If you're heavy on beams, taking
out screens is big. If your enemy is heavy _in_general_, taking out his
drives is big. (And our prohibition doesn't make it impossible, it just
requires us to maneuver a bit.)
> >5. Nova cannons and wave guns do _not_ affect missiles, fighters,
> It is the area crisped by the Nova Cannon round which is the size of
Well, our technical rationale is simple: a fighter has an inertialess drive.
And the nova cannon is a fixed emplacement that gives a lot of warning before
it can fire (i.e. the ship has to fly in a straight line for a time before
firing). Whether the fighter can outmaneuver the nova cannon is not a big
issue. There _are_ three dimensions in space, and logically speaking,
just
because the game makes it two-dimensional doesn't mean that a tiny craft
with an inertialess drive can't stay ahead of a hulking battleship with a gun
that it can't aim other than by its unwieldy maneuvering jets.
The other part is, we decided that this made a line of ships armed with
super-guns too powerful, because they could just fire their weapons
repeatedly and render fighters and missiles relatively moot (especially with
wave guns). So we allow fighters to automatically evade them unless they're
landing or taking off (a situation where they DO have to be in a predictable
place).
> >8. It isn't clarified in the main books well as to whether fighters
> FT2 p.17: "If a Fighter Group is within range (6") of an enemy Group
True. I figured it was in there, I didn't happen to have it handy when I wrote
this email.:)
> The three important questions here are:
> * Which movement system do you use?
Cinematic.
> * How big is your gaming table?
We usually play in an open floor space, going by inches scale. Depending on
the size of the room, the opening gap between fleets is typically
60-80".
The total "legal" playing area tends to be 60x100 or so. Going off the board
is considered an automatic removal from play with no chance of
re-entering.
> * How fast do you tend to fly?
> From the tactics and designs you describe I'd guess either at "Vector"
It's true, we _do_ tend to fly rather slowly. There's a reason for
that: when the gloves come off, the battle tends to be won by slower ships
over faster ones.
A slower battleship is going to have more weapons, armor, screens, what have
you. And against faster battleships, they can just park and spin as they need
to keep that superior armament pointed the right direction. The extra speed
doesn't really do the faster guys much good. The slower ones can just
form a phalanx and out-pound them.
A slower carrier is going to be able to carry more fighters. Any game where
fighters are involved usually takes two stages: first the fighters dogpile on
one another and someone wins. Then the fighters of the winning side dogpile
the ships of the other side. If you don't have the capability to establish
fighter superiority it's almost not even worth the bother of carrying fighters
at all, unless your game is to blunt the enemy's fighter
superiority and then beat their carriers ship-to-ship. However, even
that takes a lot of fighters. And in any case, the slower carrier still will
usually beat the faster carrier. If the slower carrier's fighters win the
dogpile because he's got more of them, the faster one's speed won't matter
because his main armament has been annihilated.
Sounds like you've rock/scissor/papered yourself into a corner.
Add some SMs into the mix and watch those big hulking brutes die a horrible
death. This doesn't mean you need to adjust the rules to fix this "problem",
it means those big hulking brutes need to move faster or die.
Also, fighters are a big deal, however, remember that for every fighter
squadron you can have 9 PDSs or 8 and an ADFC. Life could get very short for
fighter pilots. At which point he counters by leaving off the fighters and
your PDSs are useless, to which you counter...
> Sounds like you've rock/scissor/papered yourself into a corner.
Not really... the way we play does tend to create the occasional really gross
mismatch if one guy over-anticipates what the other's doing. My
brother-in-law
tends to be guilty of that more often than I am. If you balance out your
tactical considerations you don't get caught like this too often.
> Add some SMs into the mix and watch those big hulking brutes die
Or cloak.:)
> Also, fighters are a big deal, however, remember that for every
Actually, PDS _by_itself_ is not of significant use against fighters on
conventional sized ships. Simple reason: fighters are an additive resource,
PDS's aren't by themselves. Fighters can single out one ship at a time and
pulverize them; the ships have to wait for the fighters to attack and can't
choose their targets. And piling up on fighters is wiser than piling up on
PDS, because overwhelming fighter superiority can be adapted to a multitude of
uses (screening against missiles, destroying enemy fighters, destroying enemy
ships), whereas PDS have only one.
If they add area defense to the mix, you add needle beam escorts or nova
cannons to yours. The tight formations needed for effective area defense are
horribly vulnerable to nova cannon fire, for reasons that should be obvious.
And a fast cruiser or a cloaking escort equipped with enough needle beams to
play the percentages and take out three or four area defense fire controls can
be a major factor. Sure, the cruisers and escorts will most likely be
valiantly reduced to their component atoms... but if they take some ADFC's
with them, they've done their job, because now the fighters can single out
ships en masse and annihilate them.
How exactly you do it depends on how they do it. If they use lots of small
ships to provide more ADFC's in hopes of minimizing the effect of needle
beams, they're more vulnerable to a nova cannon blast or two torching the
whole lot of them. If they concentrate their efforts on a few larger ships to
defend against the nova cannons, the needle beams can cripple them.
So you see... there _is_ a way to put up balanced effectiveness here.