Re: [OFFICIAL] new ideas!

At 09:58 22/02/97 +0000, Jon  wrote:

>1) We intend to do away with the artificial distinctions between
Escorts,
>Cruisers and Capitals, and have a single "sliding scale" of ship
designs
Presumably this would entail a different ship record form, yes? You
would
lose the distinct three 'shapes' you have now., to replace them with one
generic one. That would be MOST interesting to me. I was thinking of
doing
a windows program to do fleet / ship design and print out complete
record
forms of the fleets ready to play and wasn't looking forward to having
to
work out how to print three different designs. One would speed things up
a
lot..

>2) Under the new system, you will have more MASS per ship to play with
in
>(OK, I know this will change the ship designs considerably, but then so
>will a simple change like making A batts cost 4 mass....)
Seems fair. I always wondered what all that empty volume was for :-).

>4) Rear-arc fire MAY be allowed (for weapons that bear there), but ONLY
in
>a turn in which the ship uses no thrust from its main drive... should
>change tactics a little and possibly help to avoid the "plughole"
effect of
>all ships circling madly in the centre of the table!
Ok, I'm a bit unsure about the restriction being sufficient - I can see
it
leading to some very odd battles with ships stopping & starting all the
time in case they got attacked from the rear arc. If you are going to
allow
rear arc fire I would prefer a system where you needed very expensive
extrasuperduper dedicated firecons to do it, plus maybe the restriction
of
no increase or decrease in speed - there is no reason to suggest a ship
might have small maneuvering thrusters to turn which don't have the
effect
of 'chaffing up'  your rear arc.

>5) Fighter movement may stay basically as per FTII, but with greatly
>increased fighter move distances (24" or 36"?) and making the revised
turn
>sequence from MT a standard basic rule (ie: fighters move after order
>writing, but before ships move, so you have to anticipate the enemy's
>move). 
I'm ambivalent about this one - it depends what sort of game you want.
In
most 'film' sci fi fighters are horribly effective - in Star Wars a
group
of fighters take out a supership (OK, lucky shot but :-) ) and in B5 it
seems a ship without fighter cover is toast.  Indeed, in B5 and SW
Fighters
have the capability to be virtually independant from any mother ship. If
you are going to do this I think (for game balance) you HAVE to enforce
some sort of ammo limit on fighters, or give all warships some sort of
'base' antifighter protection.

>6) Instead of four equal 90 degree fire arcs, we may change to fore/aft
>arcs of 60 degrees each and side arcs of 120 degrees - this brings the
arcs
>in line with the 12 course directions, and makes fire arcs easy to
judge
>from a hexagonal model base (1 base side = 60 degrees, 2 = 120). Do you
>think this will make a great deal of difference to the game, other than
>(perhaps) making broadside mounts a little more acctractive?
I have to say, everyone I know uses hexagonal bases, so this could be a
good idea. I would prefer the hexagon to four uneven quardrants, but
then
that will make beam weapons more costly. I don't think this is
necessarily
a bad thing though.

			TTFN
					Jon
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