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From - Thu May 03 16:24:06 2001
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Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 23:44:52 -0400
To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
From: John Crimmins <johncrim@voicenet.com>
Subject: [FT] Not quite an AAR
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I ran another small FT game on Friday night, and it's left me with a few
questions that I am hoping to get some input upon.

It was a small game, with three players (each running two ships) on each side.
The Alphans had a total of 2386 points, and the Betans had 2378.

The SSDs have been posted here:
http://www.voicenet.com/~johncrim/FTGame.html

(For the game, each SSD was printed out and laminated, and each player's ships
were put on a small ring to keep them together. Worked out well, and damage
was recorded with grease pencils so the sheets could be reused. I've finally
found a record system that I really like.)

Despite the point totals being very well balanced, the game turned into
something of a rout. The Betans lost one BC (S17), and their SDN had only
a few hull boxes remaining at the end of the game -- the rest of their
ships had suffered superficial damage at worst. The Alphans, on the other
hand, lost every single ship.

While discussing the game afterwards, the Alphan players insisted that,
despite the equality of the point values, their ships were decidedly inferior
to those of the Betans. They felt that speed and screens were of far less
importance than heavy hulls and armor, and that their pulse torps were nowhere
near as good as Class 4 and Class 4 beams. They were all impressed by the
PBLs, though, which nearly reduced the Betan's Superdreadnought to a gutted
hulk with a single shot.

I disagreed. I felt that their heavy loses could be attributed to a number of
factors, especially: Unfamiliarity with the Vector system. The Betan players
all had a much easier time managing movement under this system for some
reason. A prime
example came from the third turn of the game -- my pair of BCs ended the
movement phase directly behind the FSE SDN, racing away from it, and had
rotated to face the enemy. The Alphan player, having underestimated my final
position, was facing *away* from my ships and could bring almost none of his
guns to bear.

(I had intended to use the cinematic system that night, but after I described
vector movement there was enough enthusiasm that we decided to give it a try.
Everyone loved it, and I've resolved not to underestimate these people again.)

A failure to concentrate their forces. They had four ships on one side of the
board (which caused the single Betan loss), facing two Betan ships, and the
remaining two ships were far enough away from each other to provide mutual
support. Each of these ships was destroyed by a different pair of Betan ships,
which were then able to concentrate fire on the remaining ships.

And just plain *terrible* dice rolling. Not so much on their hit rolls, but
the threshold rolls were terrible to behold.

...but maybe I'm just rationalizing. It was too late to switch sides and play
another game, but we are planning to do just this the next time around. But I
wanted to get some opinions from more experienced players in the meantime.
What's more important, speed or durability? And are beams really that much
better than pulse torps? Do the forces we used seem particularly unbalanced to
anyone out there? I wanted to make the forces as distinctly different as I
could when I designed these ships, and it's more than possible that I just
went too far and made the Alphan ships just too damn fragile..

I should add, by the way, that everyone had a good time and there were really
no serious complaints about the game itself. Everyone is looking forward to
playing again, although it's likely to be a bit of a while before we are able
to do so again, since we already have games planned for the next few weeks.

John X Crimmins johncrim@voicenet.com "...is one of the secret masters of the
world: a librarian. They control information. Don't ever piss one off."
  --Spider Robinson, The Callahan Touch.
From - Thu May 03 16:24:06 2001
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To: GZG-L@csua.berkeley.edu
Subject: Stepped squad casualties in SG2
Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 23:01:53 -0500
From: Andy Cowell <andy@cowell.org>
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(This is a retransmission-- it never came back to me, so I'm assuming
it never went to the list. Sorry if you do get this twice.)

Has anybody ever thought about running SG2 rules with a more standard basing?
I've been looking around at similar scale rulesets, and the standard basing
really seems to be something like 3 figures to a 1
1/2" square base, each base representing squad, half-squad or
fireteam.

Any ideas how to play SG2 with such basing? You could just play as normal, and
track casualties, but that seems to be somewhat lacking. My first thought was
some sort of "stepped casualty" system, where, once you took a certain amount
of casualties, your FP was adjusted down a notch and a stand removed (or some
such).

Any thoughts on this?
From - Thu May 03 16:24:07 2001
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Subject: Re: [FT] Not quite an AAR
Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 00:10:36 -0400
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> around. But I wanted to get some opinions from more experienced

In Vector, IMO, durability is better than speed. If you're opponent