From: Mikko Kurki-Suonio <maxxon@s...>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 11:05:19 +0300 (EEST)
Subject: My final word on missiles
Whew, what a can of worms. I want to stress this one point: The most FT games I played were under the old FT/MT rules. I never claimed I've tested this under the new rules, or in fact, that there is anything wrong with the *current* rules. I merely outlined the game-breaking scenario that used to be. If someone is absolutely convinced that his new missile rules cannot be used in such a fashion, hey GOOD, that's just what I was aiming for. I moved house about the time FB1 came out and after a few abortive attempts to fit FT on an 80cm dining table gave up. (Now I've moved again and have a game room with a ping-pong table as playing surface) - ha! Some bennies for the education. The game has improved *a lot* since. I heartily applaud the movement to actually balance the game instead of hand-waving and "make a scenario". With my limited free time, I do not want to playtest a scenario until it's balanced (and everyone is soooo fed up with it). I need a game that plays well "off the shelf". FT is there, pretty much. DS is close, but SG is nowhere near it. Which about sums up the ratio how much I play these games. It's kinda like the difference between buying a ready application and buying an "application development platform". I just wanted to express my feeling that I *DO* *NOT* want to go back to what was. - beam battery costs were fixed. GOOD - rerolls strengthen beams. GOOD - PT costs were fixed. GOOD - screen-3 was banned. GOOD - capital ships can have something besides MD2 without paying through the nose. GOOD - The missile problem was largely fixed by the change in PDS/ADFC rules. GOOD This perhaps makes the old MTM underpowered/limited in scope, but frankly I do not miss them. And actually, Ãrjan, I never play a space game with hard edges. I find the concept patently absurd, and because I cannot reasonably justify it, I can't enforce it on the players. IMHO, hard edges in a space game is just a lame cover-up for not figuring it all out. What I do not like, though, is a game that actively rewards tactics that cause hassle. And floating the table is a hassle. Moving your figures literally out the window to loop for another high-speed pass is a hassle. Hit&run is a hassle, generally. You would also notice that entry parameters make quite a lot of difference when you try to do a hit&run. There were (still are?) no hard rules for this. I used to use initial speed max 10+thrust, facing in general direction of the enemy. Allowing free facing and/or free initial speed changes things, naturally (and brings other problems). Interestingly enough, most of these games were in a campaign. The funny thing about campaign games is that typically one side wants to run away immediately, and nobody wants to take any losses. That's what gave birth to the missile swarms. And then everyone started stocking up on interceptors, since that was the only thing with any chance of cost-effectively shooting down the missiles (house rule gave fighters better chances to better fit the game background, under vanilla I think they'd have sucked just as bad as PDS). In the end, the fleets were about 1/3 missile boats (a maxed out DDG was popular), 1/3 carriers/interceptors and 1/3 actually able to slug it out. And btw: There are no hard rules for ammo resupply costs either. (The problem with those is that they often make all ammo-using weapons too expensive to use in a campaign environment -- which, frankly, is pretty realistic if boring)