Re: Still Lousy After All These Years

On Wed, 29 Jan 1997, Binhan Lin wrote:

>  It's not your tactics that are wrong, it's the strategy.  It's
apparent 
> that your opponents have decided that mega-ships are the order of the
day 
> and have tried to keep it that way.  Since they have banned fighters
two 
> solutions are: micro torpedo boat fleet or massive missile fleet.  It 
> sounds as if their designs are built to battle few numbers of mega
ships, 
> throwing a fleet of 100-150 micro torpedoe boats of having a couple of

> dozen missiles slam into a mega hulk can really turn people off mega 
> ships.  Most people don't both putting lots of extra fire controls in 
> their superships, leaving them vulnerable to swarms of mini-ships
since a 
> standard capital ship only has three fire controls.  Secondly, if they

> have banned fignters, no one will have taken ADAF'S OR PDAF'S leaving 
> them bare of anti-missile defense.  By using weapons that avoid
shields 
> you can bypass one of the advantages of superships, beings able to
take 
> large amounts of damage at low levels until a threshold check is
needed, 
> now oyu can damage them at a rapid pace.  If you average the damage
from 
> a missile (7 points) few ships will be able to stand more than 4 or
five 
> before taking major threshold checks, and with that many systems, it 
> won't be pretty.  I suspect that that game after you try this with 
> missiles, missles will mysteriosly be banned.
> 
> --Binhan
> 
As a follow up to my own message, the reason I know is is personal 
experience.  i went through the mega-ship stage until my kindly friends 
who love to push the envelope in all directions pointed out the error of

my ways by 1) using micro-carriers -- my mega ship lasted three and one 
half turns before being vaporized by 20 squadrons of fighters, one turn 
was spent in flying towards my ship... 2) massed mini-torpedo boats, I 
killed 10 before losing all fire controls in the second threshold check.

and 3) 60+ missiles fired from halfway across the board witht he
cruisers 
just sitting there enjoying the fireworks.  I dodged half since we have 
missiles move before the ships move their pre-written orders but getting

hit by 12 still was ugly ( didn't help that a multitudes of sixes were 
rolled).  I found that designing a supership to deal with these type of 
tactics totally elimiated any capability against other super-ships
making 
the design effectively useless.  (compromises gave the worst of both 
worlds, not enough firepower to affect superships and not enough fire 
control to deal with mini-ships/fighters/missiles)

--Binhan