Limits on armour? and Full Steam

"McCarthy, Tom \(xwave\)" <Tom.McCarthy@xwave.com> wrote on 07/05/2006
08:43:00 AM:

***snippage***
> Personally, I've been tempted to do the following:
***snippage***

Is it your intention to force threshold checks one hit sooner in most cases?

> http://www.frontierlaser.ca/images/MetalSaw.jpg

I return to the state of utter blankness, i.e., WTF?

The_Beast

> ***snippage***

I certainly think it's an acceptable tradeoff. My list is probably the most
extreme version of change I'd advocate; simply limiting an armour layer to the
length of the 1st or last hull row would work fine, as would limiting an
armour layer to 10% of the hull.

Armour can be a very effective way to keep a ship at full strength for a
very long time.  Some NSL ships require about 3/4 of their sum of hull
and armour boxes destroyed in order to force the second threshold check. It's
a bit excessive, and I think most of those ships, rebuilt under FB2 rules,
would play better with a bit more hull and a bit less armour (and by play
better, I mean 'be a foe that opponents feel they have an equal chance to
beat').

> On Jul 6, 2006, at 8:50 AM, McCarthy, Tom ((xwave)) wrote:

I would disagree. The big armor layers on the NSL are a thing of beauty for KV
gunners. For other opponents, the NSL heavy armor recommends more maneuvering
to get into more favorable arcs. It's never been a good idea to go
head-on with an NSL battle wall. But get behind one...

---

“I could have gone on flying through space forever.” – Yuri Gagarin

It's rock/scissors paper time.

Put them up against K'rvak or P-torps.

Roger

> On 7/6/06, McCarthy, Tom (xwave) <Tom.McCarthy@xwave.com> wrote:

Tom wrote on 07/06/2006 07:50:28 AM:

***snippage***
> >
***snippage***

Oh, I can live with it; just wanted to be the first to point it out before
the howls began. ;->=

The_Beast

> From: "McCarthy, Tom (xwave)"

Well, that's what it's there for. I don't see a problem with it as
is--but then again, most of my designs have a full hull row's worth of
armor. What bugs me more is going up against a Komorov or something similar,
where you feel there's no point in shooting at it because it'll take five
turns just to get to the first threshold, and until then he's utterly safe
from losing any systems.

> snip

It's rock/scissors paper time.

Put them up against K'rvak or P-torps.
> [quoted text omitted]

I accept rock/paper/scissors because it costs me no time and money to
win or lose because of an incorrect choice before the game starts.

When a choice involves spending $400 CAN on models, 12 hours to clean and
assemble and 12 hours to paint and base them, 2 hours to make up the forces
and scenarios, and 4 hours to play the game, I don't like losing
because of a rudimentary fleet design decision (ref.  ECC Can/Am FT
battle).

And I sure don't want the next printing of FB1 to say, "These are the four
major powers of the FT universe. Given equal point values, expect NSL to beat
NAC 90% of the time, FSE to beat NSL 90% of the time, ESU to beat FSE 90% of
the time, and ESU to beat NAC 90% of the time. If you only have one opponent,
good luck figuring out which two fleets out of this book to buy."

> On 7/6/06, McCarthy, Tom (xwave) <Tom.McCarthy@xwave.com> wrote:

Huh. It's taken me a few decades and I don't know how much money (on food,
exercise, etc) to get my game pieces into the shape they are currently in
for winning/.losing at r/p/s.

;-)

Mk

It's only a problem if you play custom fleets. If you play custom
ships...

Human weapons are usable by any fleet.  Throw those P-Torps on that ESU
cruiser and shock your opponent.

We had 4 players with different fleets. The house rule was you had to play the
same designs versus everyone. It kept design balanced. You can accomplish the
same thing by allowing complete redesign every time so you don't know what you
will be facing.

Roger

> On 7/6/06, McCarthy, Tom (xwave) <Tom.McCarthy@xwave.com> wrote:

> From: "McCarthy, Tom (xwave)"

You started off talking about armor, but now you appear to be saying that the
NSL is overpowered (due to armor). Is that what you intended? My son usually
plays NSL and I don't notice that NSL is unbalanced.

> On 7/6/06, McCarthy, Tom (xwave) <Tom.McCarthy@xwave.com> wrote:

What's stopping you from buying an FSE fleet and using NSL stats? Not as
pretty, sure, but it can be done.

Or, as I've done with old ship models a friend gave to me, use a different
company's figures (sacrilege! Yes, I know...) as the UN.

The rules don't require that you only use the official figures for the
official models. (Admittedly they look aesthetically more pleasing if you buy
the "correct" fleet. NSL ships "look" like NSL ships...)

> From: "Mark & Staci Drake"

I stole it from General Quarters, which predates first edition Harpoon. GQ
doesn't have hull boxes. That part I came up with on my own. I first came up
with that concept in 1998 or 1999 (can't remember the exact date I started
working on it).

> Huh. It's taken me a few decades and I don't know how much money

And, quite honestly, your paint job on those pieces could be greatly improved.

-P.

> On Thu, 06 Jul 2006 11:34:32 -400, paul@otd.com <paul@otd.com> wrote:

Hey, I try to get that realistic bloody look periodically when I go crack
climbing. :-D

Mk

> On 7/6/06 12:36 PM, "Indy" <indy.kochte@gmail.com> wrote:

> when I go crack> climbing.

O.o

Damo

As FSE I love to encounter Komorov type ships.

Needle Beams?:)

Roger

> On 7/6/06, laserlight@verizon.net <laserlight@verizon.net> wrote:
What
> bugs me more is going up against a Komorov or something similar, where

> What

In some ways, that what it feels like to me against the Markgraf, even. Or the
Ark Royal. Average hulls and more than 10% in armour is brutal to chew
through, and even weak hulls seem incredibly durable with 2 screens and 5%
armour.

> On 7/6/06, McCarthy, Tom (xwave) <Tom.McCarthy@xwave.com> wrote:

Well....isn't that part of the point of having those passive defenses on the
ship?

You just need to hit it with heavier damaging weapons (larger the ship, larger
the weapon to take it down). Of course then you hit the flip side with weapon
vaporizing all the little ships long before little ships can get into
engagement range.

Mk

> From: Indy

Yep. I don't even bother to shoot at the big ships--I just kill the
small fry, because that's a much faster way to reduce the amount of incoming
fire. Generally we know who's won before we get around to shooting at the SDN.

I have to agree with Indy. Armor and stronger hulls are why those ships

are hard to kill, and that's the point. Such ships should either carry fewer
weapons overall, or be really expensive. The last three games of FT I've
played I ran NSL ships (and only by choice in one of them!). I broke even at
best in all three. Of course, scenario design factored in, but the lack of
thrust and manueverability of the NSL ships is a huge offset

to having heavy armor. Yeah, the NSL ships die slower, but they don't get
to do much to choose when/where/how to engage. :)

If armor is to get a revamp, I'd think more about a complete overhaul than
limiting the max based on hull row length.

J

John K. Lerchey Assistant Director for Incident Response Information Security
Office Carnegie Mellon University

> On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Indy wrote:

> On 7/6/06, McCarthy, Tom (xwave) <Tom.McCarthy@xwave.com> wrote:

One armor idea I floated a while back is to make armor cheaper (like 2 per
mass), but have all damage above about 3 points from a single source (one
attacking ship, one fighter group, one missile salvo, one plasma bolt etc)
penetrate to the hull. This simulates directional coverage of armor (in that
it can be locally overwhelmed) without using armor facings. This makes it more
possible that heavily armored ships like the NSL might actually get destroyed
before losing all their armor, which has a certain logic to it.

K-guns still penetrate after only 1 point.

> On Jul 6, 2006, at 3:51 PM, John K Lerchey wrote:

> If armor is to get a revamp, I'd think more about a complete

---

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
          -- H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

On Jul 6, 2006, at 3:33 PM, <laserlight@verizon.net>
> <laserlight@verizon.net> wrote:

On reason to send the SDN to wade in first slugging it out and keep
the small fry in back (12+ mu back) if you're not using them as
missile targets or defense. (also to cover the aft arc of the pig-
slow heavies once they've plowed through the contact line.)

---

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to
achieve it through not dying." -- Woody Allen

> In some ways, that what it feels like to me against the Markgraf, even.
Or the Ark Royal. Average hulls and more than 10% in armour is brutal to chew
through, and even weak hulls seem incredibly durable with 2 screens and 5%
armour.

I'd still like some kind of critical hit which doesn't require chewing through
all the hull. Just off the top of my head, let's say that if an
individual attack does 6+ points of damage, you roll onthe crit table
for that ship. Results might be "lose all portside weapons for 1 turn" or
"lose 1 Thrust until repaired" or "steering problem, must turn starboard until
repaired" or such.

G'day,

Admittedly its been a while since we had a game of FT, but when we were
playing a lot of it heavily armoured ships didn't stand out as winning a
lot and winning/losing at least felt like it came down to the player and
sometimes a bit of dice like. With rerolls penetrating to the hull (and ptorps
etc punching through too) you can see thresholds happening without having
stripped all the armour anyway. I agree running up against a big NSL SDN can
be a major pain, but isn't that why they had to pay through the nose for them?
Derek felt equally frustrated when my FSE SDN could flit away from my SMs, but
his certainly couldn't escape mine.

Not to be brutal (but what the heck its a wargaming list right?), its kinda
funny to watch these comments come out over the years. Tom finds the armour a
bit stiff, but 2 years back there was a major whinge (can't remember by who)
that you couldn't win with the NSL as they're too slow. Reading between the
lines (when people describe playing preferences) much of this comes down to
taste for different playing styles (fixed vs floating, Oerjan speeds vs
crawling pace, cinematic vs vector). Another case of not going to please
everyone all of the time. Not to say you shouldn't try new mods to see what
happens, see if it suits your gaming group better, but it may be worth
remembering it probably won't be everyone's cup of tea. Bit like the idea of
making more predictable missile results, some groups dislike the extremes that
can crop up, others relish it.

Then again maybe you shouldn't listen to a gaming group that laughed as much
when I rolled 18 1s as it did when our ESU dice master had a scout take out an
SDN with rerolls.... 47 on the trot;)

Cheers

Sounds like a threshold check based on total accumulated damage, rather than
being based on hull rows destroyed...

J

John K. Lerchey Assistant Director for Incident Response Information Security
Office Carnegie Mellon University

> On Thu, 6 Jul 2006 laserlight@verizon.net wrote:

> In some ways, that what it feels like to me against the Markgraf,
or "lose 1 Thrust until repaired" or "steering problem, must turn starboard
until repaired" or such.
> [quoted text omitted]

> On 7/6/06, Roger Books <roger.books@gmail.com> wrote:

As near as I can tell, more than a tiny bit of armor is wasted mass if
you are fighting KraVak.  Personally, my anti-KV designs have lots and
lots of hull boxes, no or practically no armor.

So it's all in what you are fighting.

> On Thu, 6 Jul 2006 laserlight@verizon.net wrote:

> "lose 1 Thrust until repaired" or "steering problem, must turn

JohnL said:
> Sounds like a threshold check based on total accumulated damage,

Well, not exactly--I'm suggesting that if an individual weapon scores 6
damage in one attack, it gets a crit 9or a chance to crit). For beams, that
would be an individual die getting two rerolls of 6, so you could still roll a
handful of dice for the beam weapons without having to keep track of "these
three are from this weapon, those two from that one".
You could lay out the table so that you get a +DRM for each hull row
you've destroyed, making it more likely that you'll get a crit, or a more
devasting crit, after you've scraped off more layers of hull..

In a message dated 7/6/2006 10:11:50 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  n
> oam.izenberg@jhuapl.edu writes:

I would disagree. The big armor layers on the NSL are a thing of beauty for KV
gunners. For other opponents, the NSL heavy armor recommends more maneuvering
to get into more favorable arcs. It's never been a good idea to go
head-on with an NSL battle wall. But get behind  one...

What about ships that have lesser armor then their first row? Several ships
actually have lesser armor then their hull, would they automatically upgraded
and what is the change to the battle points?

Also, captials that use armr and screens combo, are they now affected as

well?

Vince

"You are about to boldly go where every man has gone before" Susanne
Ivonova...

In a message dated 7/6/2006 1:27:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
> roger.books@gmail.com writes:

As FSE I love to encounter Komorov type ships.

IJN ships love to add new ESU ships to the scrap yards...

Vinnie

> our ESU dice master had a scout take out an SDN with rerolls.... 47

That Captain must have recieved the Hero of The Solar Union.... That's
insane.... (and where do I recruit some of his ilk?)...

TomB

> John K Lerchey wrote:

One idea that we tried once was that hits on the armour lets 1 of each 6

points of damage from a single salvo bleed through.

All salvos must be from a single source. All beams would count as one
salvo.  P-torps from the same ship would be a salvo for this.  ect.

I am still trying to get some numbers on this, but it would at least set

an upper practical limit on the length of the armour row to 5 times the length
of the hull rows.:>

> On 7/6/06, Thomas Barclay <kaladorn@magma.ca> wrote:

He was a descendent of Aaron Teske.

;-)

Mk

G'day,

> That Captain must have recieved the Hero of The Solar Union....

John Langlui was a fairly impressive dice beast for sure. He lives in Perth
now. As to his heritage, his family is Ukranian (and he's older than Aaron, so
there goes that theory Indy).

Cheers

> On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 02:59:17PM -0400, McCarthy, Tom (xwave) wrote:

> In some ways, that what it feels like to me against the Markgraf, even.

It suddenly occurs to me: how are you balancing these battles? If you're using
the old NPV rather than the CPV system, you'll end up with disproportinately
many big ships...

R

> McCarthy, Tom (xwave) wrote:

> In some ways, that what it feels like to me against the Markgraf,

We're using CPV. It's not strictly the size of the ships that's daunting; it's
the firepower versus survivability.

There's a huge difference in feel between the 'soft' targets with 30% of
MASS in hull and those with 30% MASS in hull plus 10%-12% in armour.
There's also a huge difference in feel between the Ticonderoga, which packs
enough firepower in the F arc to cripple itself with one volley, and the
Waldburg which has the same armament but enough armour to take two such
volleys.

Now that I've had some time to reassess our most recent battle, it may have
had more to do with i) paying too much for the carrier (even with CPV), ii)
paying too much for the fighters (which lost their rerolls), and iii) having
too many ships on the board for the board size. Point iii), in particular,
prevented the NAC from maneouvring into good positions.

But I'd still like to see some FB1 designs rewritten to eliminate extremely
heavily armoured or armoured and shielded designs.

To the people on the list, it's clearly not an issue. Apparently, my group's
use of FB1 designs is purely an anomaly. If the list population is to be taken
as typical, most players of the game design their own ships and do not use FB
designs or limit themselves to the design doctrines illustrated by the FT
powers in the FB books.

> -----Original Message-----

> On Thursday 06 July 2006 05:11 pm, laserlight@verizon.net wrote:

How about something like:  For every beam-die re-roll that does damage
make a
thresh-hold check for one non-core system, chosen by the attacking
player. Can represent commands like "Target their forward batteries". Granted,
you still have to do hull damage to the enemy ship, but you don't have to chew
the ship to tatters to take out some piece of equipment.

> On 7/7/06, Beth.Fulton@csiro.au <Beth.Fulton@csiro.au> wrote:

> From: "Tim (Flak Magnet)

I'd want PTorps and missiles and other weapons to have the chance to do crits
also, which is why I was saying "6 damage in one attack". I would
like to be able to target specific systems, at least to some extent--I'd
like to be able to order "aim at their drives" or "don't hit the cargo
pods", although you might have to be at close range and/or lower your
chance of "hit anywhere" to get a higher chance to "hit specific target"

> From: "McCarthy, Tom (xwave)"

> Apparently, my group's use of FB1 designs is purely an anomaly. If

I almost never set two FB1 fleets against each other. Usually we have UN, IF,
or ORC as one of the belligerents; the other side might be one of those, or
ESU or NSL, or a custom fleet.

> On 7/7/06, laserlight@verizon.net <laserlight@verizon.net> wrote:

> I almost never set two FB1 fleets against each other. Usually we have

I usually only use the FB1 fleets, because I am lazy and I don't play enough
to waste time "debugging" ship designs.

On Jul 7, 2006, at 11:50 AM, <laserlight@verizon.net>
> <laserlight@verizon.net> wrote:

> I'd want PTorps and missiles and other weapons to have the chance

Each has his own tastes, but to this I say "Blah!" Use Needle Beams to hit
specific targets (and good luck on that!). The directed attacks described
above give exacerbate the "Big Ship" problem, since they are more likely to be
able to muster the 6 points needed all at once than smaller ships.

Alternately if you _really_ want to try to target "standard" weapons,
dedicate _two_ firecons to the target And/or halve the range bands.

---

"The mind should not multiply entities beyond necessity. What can be
done with fewer ... is done in vain with more." -- William of Ockham

On Jul 7, 2006, at 11:54 AM, <laserlight@verizon.net>
> <laserlight@verizon.net> wrote:

> From: "McCarthy, Tom (xwave)"

Most of my games are straight FleetBook, FB+beta test fleets, and FB
+custom. Rarely do I have pure custom fleet games.

---

“Freedom will cure most things.” Earnest Renan

> I'd want PTorps and missiles and other weapons to have the chance to

Noam said:
> Each has his own tastes, but to this I say "Blah!" Use Needle Beams to

YMMV, but I really dislike having needle beams as a separate system. I'd
much rather give some kind of needle-like ability to a normal weapon.

> The directed attacks described above give exacerbate the "Big Ship"
problem, since they are more likely to be able to muster the 6 points needed
all at once than smaller ships.

Not at all. I said six points of damage by one weapon, not by one ship's
firepower. So if a Ptorp or an individual salvo missile rolls a 6, or a
heavy missile does 6+ on its 2d6, or a a beam die gets two reroll 6's,
then it gets a chance of a crit. If you roll nineteen beam dice and all of
them roll sixes and then roll 5's on their rerolls, then no individual beam
die did 6 points so you dont get a crit. Ideally you'd roll beam dice per
weapon, but I'd rather rollthem in a bunch and I assume most other people
would as well.

> I'd want PTorps and missiles and other weapons to have the chance to

Noam said:
> Each has his own tastes, but to this I say "Blah!" Use Needle Beams to

> YMMV, but I really dislike having needle beams as a separate system.
I'd
much rather give some kind of needle-like ability to a normal weapon.

Why not a special targeting system that allows a beam to target as a needle
beam at half the normal range of the beam with limit of two beams per
targeting system. The system can be used a normal sensor, has the same mass
and twice the cost?

On 7/6/06 10:02 PM, "VinsFullThrust@aol.com" <VinsFullThrust@aol.com>
wrote:

> For other opponents, the NSL heavy armor recommends more maneuvering

Which can really only happen with cinematic movement all things being equal.

And DON'T tell me about that one scout who caused 6895.34 points of damage
with a beam 1 and 3400+ rerolls.  ;)

Damo

> On 7/6/06 7:35 PM, "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> So it's all in what you are fighting.

Are you somehow hinting that one should design forces based on who you think
you'll be fighting instead of the more reasonable general case?

How dare you sir.;)