SV: SV: What makes a Capital ship Capital?

> Mikko wrote:

> > It should be, yes. In FTII, at least for smaller battles (up to a

But convenience tends to have great impact <g> Especially since it is much
more comfortable (and thus convenient) to win with your designs rather than
your tactics! ;-) In a tournament, it is _very_ inconvenient to have to
relocate the entire board due to the time involved...

> I would really like to see the design team play out some battles

Sure - but I'll have to measure in mm to do it :-)

More seriously, I _have_ played a battle where the speeds eventually
approached 100 even for the battle-wagons. (Starting speeds were in the
10-20 range.) It used the vector movement rules though, and the general
direction of travel was the same for most of the ships - so after a
while we did a Galileic coordinate transformation and made the table move with
the ships... Great fun, that was. Had we used the standard movement rules we'd
have been in trouble <g>

...
> Agreed, but scanning rules are optional anyway. I personally stopped

How much info do you give on the size of the various ships? (This is not
defined anywhere in the rules... they just assume that the size of the model
has some sort of relationship to the size of the ship it represents
:-/ )

> In general, I don't think one should take such a dim view of
It's
> very boring, true, but valid because a viable alternative does not

But this is IMO the same thing as your other examples above - an
optimization stemming from a bad rule (in this case, the too-low mass of
the A). And thus, IMO, a bad optimization.

The problem as I see it, or at least part of it, is that FT lacks the kind of
"tech development" which forces new designs. This means that in order to
encourage design variety, all weapons present in the game need one area where
they are better than the others. As the A was without a shadow of doubt the
best of the beam batteries prior to the mass change (to 4), the other beam
sizes simply weren't needed.

> -- which may very well be true even if it is boring. Would you call

No. However, if he gave all his troops bolt-action ones instead of
breach-loaders in a mid-19th century skirmish I might, though.

> It is a fault of the rules not to offer viable alternatives, not a

Exactly. Which is why the non-viable ones need some strengthening -
enough to make them viable once more.

Later,

> On Fri, 5 Dec 1997, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:

> But convenience tends to have great impact <g>

It does... but every once in a while you wake up and think in the middle

of a game you're losing: "Why the f**k am I doing a stupid thing like this?"
and realize the only answer is that you're too lazy to place your

ships on the window sill or do whatever else that would be logical and
effective, but inconvenient.

For me, moments like this flush the enjoyment of the game straight down the
toilet.

> Especially since it is much

Hee hee hee. Just the attitude I love to see encouraged.

> Sure - but I'll have to measure in mm to do it :-)

Yeah, and your C-batts wouldn't even reach the edge of your ship's
base...

> More seriously, I _have_ played a battle where the speeds eventually

I should have said *relative* speeds. I should have made it expressly clear
that I meant the FT rules as printed. Silly me.

> How much info do you give on the size of the various ships? (This is

Errmm... there's an extensive scanning table in MT. Even a few ships with
improved sensors brought the game to a halt. I never bothered with spray

painting ping pong balls.

> But this is IMO the same thing as your other examples above - an

Erm. it's a bad rule, but not an unrealistic one (I should have made this
distinction). The situation may very well be that A-beams are the
cutting edge of technology and B's and C's are simply obsolete (which is the
situation in vanilla rules). Massless armor is a bit harder to swallow.

> The problem as I see it, or at least part of it, is that FT lacks the

Agreed. So it's 4 now? How about the "3 arcs is the only thing that makes
sense" problem?

> No. However, if he gave all his troops bolt-action ones instead of

You mean *repeating* bolt-action rifles, don't you?

Hmmm... depending on what you consider "mid-19th C."... both the Henry
and the Spencer rifle saw use in ACW. It is quite conceivable that a skirmish
scale unit (especially a select one) would be completely armed with repeaters.

A similar case would be MP-44 armed germans in a WWII game. Possible,
but didn't happen that often in real life. Yanks, OTOH, had Garands
a-plenty.

In any case, it's the job of the point system to balance the dominance of
emerging technologies.

> Exactly. Which is why the non-viable ones need some strengthening -

I sincerely hope the new design system in FB will be better without added
complexity, instead of simply throwing anoraks at anyone who finds a flaw in
it.