Re: Capital Ships in Campeign Games

At 05:01 AM 3/27/97 +0000, you wrote:
>James Butler wrote:
>> 
>> At 07:10 PM 3/26/97 +0000, you wrote:
>> 
>>	   A friend of mine, Bill Walley, used to play in this big
galactic
>> conquest play by mail game called Mobius III. In that game, you are
allowed
>> to design one ship and one ship only. You produce that design which
has to
>> do all of your fleet jobs. My friend built himself a dreadnought,
which as
>> I've said meant that his entire fleet consisted of dreadnoughts. The
joke
>> was that even though they were all exactly the same, they were
classed
>> according to mission: hence, the Scout Dreadnought, the Colonization
>> Dreadnought, the Diplomatic Dreadnought, etc.
>> 
>>	   James
>>
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><snip>
>How did he do?
>
>Donald Hosford
>

	Well enough, but I suspect that was in spite of his ship design.
Bill has always had a penchant for organization and record keeping and I
think it was his administrative edge that compensated for his ship
design.
He's very conservative and so was his design, it emphasized defense. 

	The Mobius rules gave you not only the ship design rules but the
ship combat rules. I was interested in playing so I designed a ship that
I
was going to use in the game. It was a lean and mean light cruiser
design
with tons of guns and a little room for cargo and very thin on defense
(at
least compared to Bill's DN design). The problem was that each of my
cruisers fielded something like 40%-60% of the firepower of his
dreadnought
design and I would be able to build three cruisers to every one of his
dreadnoughts. We ran three of my cruisers vs. one of his DNs through the
game's combat simulation (on paper) a few times and the most common
result
was that I would lose one cruiser, have a second one crippled and his DN
would be destroyed. Combine that to the fact that my ships would have
taken
one-third the time to build and that while he's still waiting for a new
DN
to come off the slipways I would have already gotten two cruisers out
into
space to do things, I'm pretty sure I would have come out ahead.

	I don't know what kind of ships Bill's opponents used. I never
did
wind up joining Mobius III. Last I heard, they were planning on a new
version where you would get at least three ship designs.

	James
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	Battlecruiser INTREPID, CORMORANT-class
	Captain James L. Butler III, Commanding
	JAMESBUTLER@worldnet.att.net