I am concerned with a number of changes that will weaken the effectiveness of
Capital ships. Right now Capital ships have two major advantages on a cost
basis:
1) It is cheaper to buy defenses for a 100 mass Dreadnought than it is for 10
10 mass ships. 2) Capital ships have access to certain weapons smaller classes
don't. AA guns, Nova Guns, Fighter Groups...
I have a problem with changing the costs of shields to a percentage of mass
basis. If you make all weapons and defenses available to all classes FT will
simply become a contest between huge numbers of Escorts.
Capital ships should dominate whatever battle they are in, but a good fleet
with have heavy cruisers for pursuit, and escorts for scouting and
destractions. The limitation on Capital ships classicly is that they are too
big and too slow for certain jobs, like
convoy escorts and anti-pirate patrol.
I don't like wonder weenie fleets of scores of low mass Escorts, and I'd
prefer to limit them by emphasizing Ships of the Wall.
There are a couple of ways of keeping Capital ships in the driver seat. Some
people have proposed giving Superior and Enhanced Sensors the extra benefit of
being able to give a +1 or +2 to hit for beam weapons.
Versus level 3 shields these bonuses effectively double or triple the amount
of damage a ship can do with beam weapons.
Other people have proposed advanced Fire Control Systems. These constant mass
systems give larger mass ships an advantage because a special system will
apply to a larger number of weapons.
There is so much for smaller ships to do, why not let
the heavy ships dominate the head-to-head clash of
fleet? Give them bonuses in combat, but require a fleet to have lots of
smaller ships for the more mundane fleet tasks.
> I am concerned with a number of changes that will
What changes are you concerned with?
> I have a problem with changing the costs of shields
You think? What are you basing your information on here?
> Capital ships should dominate whatever battle they
Redesign your big ships with speed '4' or something. Sure, it costs more
points, but you *are* a bigger ship. Doesn't take up any more Mass, so you can
have the same weapons array you had at speed 2.
I understand your intent and point here, but just wanted to point out
a...ummm....workaround...to this.
> I don't like wonder weenie fleets of scores of low
[...]
> There is so much for smaller ships to do, why not let
Ya know, it's interesting that just a couple few months ago there was a thread
running here was complaining about the
ineffectiveness of Escort-class ships, and how to make them
more desirable to players...
> Give them bonuses in combat, but require a
How would you enforce this? Especially in one-up games? Say the
game is with 1200 pts of ships. How do you 'limit' the number of
Caps vs smaller ships here? Pick an arbitrary %-age ratio?
I don't personally hav a problem with Escorts or Caps, or Cruisers, but then I
tend to build rounded fleets if I can. Was never a big fan of lopsided ones. I
think most people are reasonable about this
(I said *most*, Mark S... ;-)
Mk
Mk,
If I may put in my two cents/pence.
He who is running the game will decide what he considers
the play/game balance and fleet composition. The game master
gets enjoyment out of this or he wouldn't be doing it.
I am not above trying to talk the organizer into a concept that I favor, but
if he doesn't like it, it won't fly.
Fleet composition can be either and number of ship requirement (not really
effective) or a points value plus or minus some percentage.
Bye for now, Johm L.
I have a hard time sympathizing with people who can't fit escorts into their
battleline. A fleet without some escorts is dead meat versus a fleet designed
to exploit that lack.
On the other hand, if Capital ships don't have a slight edge in fleet to fleet
combat, why in world would they be built?
Obligatory silly ship design:
Marine Scout cost 5-7
Mass 1 (Only if odd massed ships are allowed) move 8 damage 1 (everyone keeps
telling me to round up for damage and down for systems, sounds fair) systems:
Crew consists of 1 armored marine with an ejection system (cost, 1 or 2?)
The Marine Scout has four important roles that it can serve: 1) There is no
cheaper scout. If you want to quickly scan everybody in the opposing fleet, or
to shadow their fleet reporting their position, these guys are great.
2) Decoys. With 180 point frigates around, having a few cheap decoys around
will keep your Torpedo frigates around long enough to get some use out of
their weapons.
3) Boarding, 4 marine scouts = 1PDF. Fleet tactics would be to disable an
enemy ship's drive and then board. A variant on this scheme would be to have a
heavier Cloaking version which approaches a drive disabled ship under Cloak
and then boards. Technically, you could say that any ship has enough mass
available for a Cloak as the mass required for
the Cloak is 1/10 the mass of the ship.
4) The ship can attempt to ram. It is always on its last threshold check and
would do 1d6 damage if it hits, which is competitive with missile costs. It is
possible to include an ejection system which gets the pilot clear before final
maneuvers. Of course, if the ship misses its ram attempt the pilot has to
signal his ship to rendevous with him, which takes 1d6 turns or so...
On this general subject: Remember that pirate ship design someone came up with
a while ago, a ship with its own Marine Barracks, a good fleet design would be
a whole bunch of missile boats with needle missiles to take out drives, and a
bunch of cloaked ships completely filled with marines.
Once the drives are knocked out it is a trivial matter for your cloaked ships
to match courses and then decloak right behind the afflicted ship. Depending
on the initiative roll boarding could be accomplished before anyone gets a
chance to fire!
Also known as the "How I lost my Superdreadnought to three Escorts"
courtmartial.
I would like to add my voice to those who want to change the ADAF, PDAF, C
Beam rolls versus missiles
to 4+. Say, how much would a missile with shielding-1
cost? 7 points? I don't want a single Escort to be able to decloak, fire 4
needle missiles, destroy a Dreadnought's drives in a single volley and
effectively take a 1000 point ship right out of the war without giving the
Dreadnought some effective defense against them.
If a player chooses to skimp on missile defense because he scorns missiles,
that is one thing, but a ship with the ability to scrag a whole fighter group
should be able to stop a few missiles!
Although, there is a scenario in that: Take the Kramsib!
Start the scenario with a successful sneak attack or needle mine that kills
the dreadnoughts drive. Don't inform the dreadnought player of this when he
constructs his fleet however. Have the other player construct a much smaller
fleet, knowing what the scenario is going to be like.
Basically, have the dreadnought player set up, inform him that 2 or 3 escorts
suddenly decloaked, fired a load of needles at its drives, were crunched. Roll
for, say, 6 needle missiles. The escorts promptly scuttled their vessels and
surrendered, or were blown up.
The dreadnought player has the initial vector the escorts were coming from,
and a few turns to shift formation. Shortly after, the other player brings his
force on field, with a quick report of the damage done to the Dreadnought.
Unless the Dreadnought player does something quick, a fast force is going to
come on map in his 6.
Victory points: Capturing the Kramsib and getting away: Total raider victory
even with 100% ship losses. Fending off the raiders with equal losses or less
for
10 turns, (+5 for each Threshold check on the Kramsib)
which is how long it will take the Kramsib's engineers
to jury-rig her drives. Total Kramsib victory.
Set up the scenario so that if the raiders lose all their ships but destroy
the Kramsib that it would be a Draw. Basically, if you can't take a
Dreadnought with surprise and a good composition fleet you aren't going to win
the war!
If the raiders abort the mission it is a partial Kramsib victory.
Special rules: Repairing Needle Damage: Okay, normally this can't be done, but
we can make an exception.
Basically, for every 30 DCS-turns you have you can jury-rig
one system. Captured DCS working at gunpoint don't work so well, so if the
Raiders want to repair the Kramsib's drive they need to bring their own techs.
They can also have some drive components with them.
The thing to remember is: You can't enter FTL with no drive.
Moving a disabled ship: Okay, what about using small ships to help the
Dreadnought maneuever? This should be a dangerous, but highly dramatic move.
For one thing, if the small ship blows up the Dreadnought will take a
significant amount of damage from that, and no, the Dreadnought's shields
can't be up during this.
The strength of Capitals (points/mass) vs Escorts & Cruisers depend
somewhat on what size fleet you are using and the size of the play area.
Take a small fleet of say 1000 points per side. 2 Standard Battleships will
generally win against 2 Standard Escort Cruisers, 1 Missile Cruiser and 4
Standard Destroyers
Take a large fleet of 5000 points per side. 1 Fleet Carrier, 3 Supper
Dreadnoughts, 4 Battleships, & 3 Battlecruisers may not win against 13 Missile
Cruisers, 8 Escort Cruisers, & 10 Destroyers.
Also a larger play area allows for highter velocity. This helps smaller,
faster ships to fly into range of thier weapons without giving larger ships
free shots. If a play area is small (keeping speed under 24") a ship with A
bats will get free shots on a ship with C bats.
----------
> Mikko wrote:
> > Especially since it is much
It's the attitude that made sure I'll never play WHFB or WH40K any
more...
and an attitude I've seen far too many times in other games too, including
FT. The smiley at the end should've been :-/ (cynic) rather than ;-)
(joking), though...
> > Sure - but I'll have to measure in mm to do it :-)
No :-)
> > More seriously, I _have_ played a battle where the speeds eventually
Not at all; I understood that very well (which is why I mentioned that I
didn't use them in the battle in question). I haven't played really
high-speed battles with the normal movement rules due to restricted
floor space (no place to put the furniture).
> > How much info do you give on the size of the various ships? (This is
Ah, yes. Sorry.
> Even a few ships with
So both fleets hover at range 50 or so until they know what they're facing?
With home-built ships, the need for bogey markers disappears - you can't
be sure what the target is anyway <shrug>
> > But this is IMO the same thing as your other examples above - an
> The situation may very well be that A-beams are the cutting
> > The problem as I see it, or at least part of it, is that FT lacks
As suggested by both Jon T. and Mike E. on this list, yes.
> How about the "3 arcs is the only thing that makes sense" problem?
No quick patch for FTII, no.
> > No. However, if he gave all his troops bolt-action ones instead of
Yes, true. [snip]
> I sincerely hope the new design system in FB will be better without
We're working on it...
I'm cutting this short as we actually agree on most things.
> On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:
> So both fleets hover at range 50 or so until they know what they're
No, they closed all right. It's just that the scanning attempts and reciting
ship sheets (mostly the latter) took so much time... since it doesn't *cost*
anything to scan, they guys with the scanners were using them all
the time and bogging down play.
> With home-built ships, the need for bogey markers disappears - you
Err... never been a problem with us. We use any minis we like to represent
anything we think they might represent, though I *do* have a bunch of
Official(tm) FT minis.
> > Agreed. So it's 4 now?
Oh, I thought you were talking about how you're going to change it for the
Fleet Book. I was under the impression the FB would have the FTIII design
system (or at least an extremely close relative).
> > > How about the "3 arcs is the only thing that makes sense" problem?
How about doubling or tripling the cost of the third arc? A Beam costs would
go 7 10 16. or 7 10 19 B Beam 5 7 11 or 5 7 13 C Beam 3 4 6 or 3 4 7
It might encourage people to reconsider three arcs for everything.