Re: Torpedoes

On Fri, 9 Aug 1996 17:19:18 -0600 (MDT) Binhan Lin
<Binhan.Lin@UCHSC.edu>
writes:

>Things tend to balance out if you pit two rules lawyers together.  
>Similar to the above case, there is "nothing in the rules" about making
a 
>special hull carrier that is Mass 12, loading a single fighter bay and 
>throwing dozens of micro carriers into battle. 

Actually, the rules say you have to be capitol class to carry fighters,
but I think it's silly. In Star Wars and many other Genres, EVERYTHING
with mass carries fighters for self defense ... it's the best there is!

> This was done once in our group
>with both the fighters and carriers attacking as kamikaze ships (i.e. 
>the fighters didn't care about endurance and attacked at every
opportunity 
>and the carriers attempted to ram at every opportunity.) After this we
>instituted flak ships to make it more diffifult for fighter swarms and
>tacked on VP costs for fighters lost as well as carriers. 
>Of course the next time we saw a swarm of Needle beam armed 
>ships. A few well placed Nova cannon shot eliminated or diverted the
swarm 
>long enough for A batteries to eliminate a significant number of the
swarm. 
> If this swarm was applied to the above 14 A-battery ship, I would
place

>the bets on the swarm since only 3 ships per turn could be killed by
the

>large ship and the swarm only needs three fire control hits to knock
out
the
>larger ship.  
>The only good way to fight a swarm is to have multiple fire
>platforms with sufficient firepower to knock down 1-2 of the swarm 
>each turn.  This forces players to spread out their firepower in
designing
>ships, that is until someone generates a supership capable of knocking 
>out 1-2 of the medium sized ships per turn. Then you enter the standard

>cycle of various tactics being rotated endlessly to take advantage of a
>deficiency of another tactic.	At this point they either figure out 
>that it's a vicious circle and make more reasonable ships or stop
playing
>because they figure the game is pointless when played with swarms. 

Like you said, through time it all balances out. You get fighters, I get
*daf's and lots of c's. You get A's and I get pulse torpedoes and
shields. You then get fighters and we com full circle. We've never had a
problem.

Paul