> Thomas Barclay wrote:
> Oerjan spake thusly upon matters weighty:
Similar in scope to the ISW-4 battles, I suspect <shudder>
> I think the other rules got in the way as you say. But I'm
In SFB, no. In Full Thrust, yes - because of the simultaneous movement
and lack of hexes. There is no obvious place in which to interrupt the FT
movement in order to execute the under-way fire. Sure, you could move
all
ships half-way, then fire some of them, then move them the rest, but it
would only push the problem away a bit, to those ships travelling at double
speeds... and you get two movement phases, both of which take as
long time to execute as the single one we had before. Hex-based movement
is a *lot* faster to execute than measured movement in my experience -
it is the measuring which takes time.
> Frankly, having an
Not unless you can fire at any point during the movement, and that slows down
the game to a crawl. The best we could come up with was to start
each movement phase with declaring/indicating how each squadron (or
individual ship) would move, then determine how big a fraction of the move
should be carried out before someone wanted to fire, move all ships that far,
fire, determine the next fraction before the next fire exchange, etc.
> Just how long do we think it takes modern weapons to inflict damage?
Just how long (ie, how many shots) do you think it takes to achieve even one
single *hit* at a range of 20,000 km at ships moving at high speeds?
> Don't get me wrong, I'm not suffering munchkinism. But I find the
Simpler, yes. More elegant, yes - because the alternatives I've seen
becomes horrendously clumsy, and horrendously clumsy is by definition
*not* elegant by any means :-(
Later,
> On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:
> In SFB, no. In Full Thrust, yes - because of the simultaneous movement
In Sky Galleons of Mars, each ship moves in turn (playing cards are good for
initiative) and after each move *any* ship can fire (but one gun can fire only
once per turn). Yes, this is not entirely satisfactory either, but it leans
the other way, allowing shots that should have been impossible thus increasing
the level of carnage and reducing the number of inconclusive engagements.
Car Wars, which I used to play a lot, uses phased movement. You don't need
hexes to move in discrete units. An inch or any other measure works just
as well. This *does* slow down the game but could be used for those 1-2
ships per player, ultra-detail games. The *real* problem with this is
that
it only works with vanilla movement -- the way you move your ship in
vector movement does *not* represent the actual course it follows.
In Peter Pig's Hammering Iron ships lay down a track of hexes used to
determine whether broadside shots were possible. Ok, so ACW ironclads only
move 1-3 units per turn, the number of hexes (or plot points or
whatever) would make this cumbersome in FT (but it might look cool on the
table).
Other possibilities include fudging range determination, e.g. if a target was
clearly in range during movement, allow max range shots at it even if it ends
movement out of range. Increases book keeping and requires judgement calls.
To sum it up: Ofcourse increasing the detail level slows down the game, but if
the alternative is that the game abstractions fail to represent what's
"really" happening, you have to get your priorities in order and decide which
detriment is the lesser evil.
> Mikko Kurki-Suonio wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Aug 1998, Nyrath the nearly wise wrote:
> In reality, thrust is applied continuously
Which is exactly what I see as the biggest "problem" with the "hollywood
vector" system in FB.
> Would this help the problem detailed in the quote above?
Not really. The problem here is that you move your ship according to component
vectors, one at a time. Thus while the end position may be exactly correct,
the positions in the middle of the move are not.
A simple example to illustrate the point: Figure you're moving 8" straight
ahead and you want to stop. You order "rotate 180, thrust
8".
You move your ship according to the rules:
1) 8" along the old vector 2) Rotate 180 degrees 3) 8" back to where you
started
Thus you see-saw over 8" of space even though you end up motionless
right where you were (in addition, this is not even where you'd really end up
with constant thrust).
Hmmm... maybe this yo-yo movement doesn't show it clear enough:
Figure the same situation, but you want to turn instead: rot90,th8.
1) Move 8" north 2) Rotate 3) Move 8" east
So the path you move your ship along is kind of L-shaped, while
in reality it's more like a curve (most specifically you're never really in
the corner of the L). So, if someone interrupts you when you've just applied
all your initial vector, he can shoot at you in a spot where you'd never
really be.
(Or you have to break the component vectors into phase-sized chunks,
slowing the game quite a bit more).
maxxon spake thusly upon matters weighty:
> So the path you move your ship along is kind of L-shaped, while
Totally correct. I retract my comments about moving and shooting. Until one
can think of a good way to represent vectored thrust, maybe firing on the move
is infeasible. It actually occurs to me you have another question.
Ship A has Th4. Ship B has Th8. They both start at the same place, move
straight, Thrust 4 Port. So they both end up in the same place. But the Th8
ship (having twice the thrust) could have thrust 8 for half a round (to get
Th4) whereas the Thrust4 ship went full thrust all round. The Courses between
their start point and end point would be quite different. Which makes even
phasing vectored movement a real problematic solution. As of now, I see no
answer.
Tom.