FT Battles

John Kovalic writes:

@:) Just wondering, as I'm new to Full Thrust, what size battles do
@:) people normally fight out? I'm guessing 1,500 points or so, per
@:) side, make for a good one-on-one game.

  Actually, in our last campaign we used _much_ smaller numbers and
found it to be pretty enjoyable.  We were playing a "take over the
solar system" game (on TSR's Buck Rogers board game solar system map,
if anyone's ever heard of that) and we started out with very small
forces - I think about 500 points each.  We also limited the number of
types of ship (classes) that could be built, ala MOO, to five.	We got
ship construction points for holding territory, and there were native
forces in most locations.  What this meant was that we tended to split
up our forces quite a bit.  On the first turn of the game, most of us
came in with five 100-point ships and sent each one to a seperate
location.

  Obviously there isn't a lot of room for fancy tactics in a
confrontation between, say, a destroyer and a wing of "native"
fighters, but then again such battles took less than fifteen minutes -
so the campaign portion of the game moved forward quite rapidly.  Near
the end we had some larger battles involving up to about 1,000 points
per side, but frankly I preferred some of the smaller, quicker
battles, especially the 600-800 point battles between pairs of
cruisers.

  Before that campaign we had another with higher point values and
variations in technology.  That was cool because we all had lots of
big ships and none of us knew what gadgets the others had.  The
problem with that campaign was that we spent the first 90% of the time
circling each other menacingly and wondering what weapons we had, and
the last 10% of the time in a few huge battles, at the end of which no
one had the forces to continue.  I guess the battles themselves were
kinda fun.  That was something like 3000 points on a side, different
technologies (four players and two instances of each technology), and
one terrifying mass 70 thrust 8 railgun-packin speed battleship.

  I ran a scenario for which I invented some ships.  My idea was to
have one side be high tech but have fewer ships and the other side be
low tech and have more ships.  The points came out to 2700 vs 2100,
and it was a lot fairer than it sounds.  In fact, it was so fair that
it almost worked.  The attacking forces saw a big battleship and got
spooked but they didn't realize that it didn't have anything better
than a C battery.  Anyway, that was a four player battle, so call it a
little more than 1000 points per player, and it worked out pretty
well.

  So I guess I endorse the 1500 number, although probably 1000 ppp
(points per player) seems to me to be plenty.  The problem with the
big ships is that they take forever to kill - if you want your battle
to actually end, you might consider doing a "cruisers or less" kind of
scenario.  And you might be surprised at how enjoyable that can be.

-joachim