RE: Capital Ships in Campeign Games

On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Ground Zero Games wrote:

> Does anyone feel we should actually legislate on things like
> this in future rules (maybe on the lines of the previously-suggested
> "maximum % of certain ship types in fleet"), or do we continue as
before
> and leave it up to the players to be "reasonable" about this....:) ?

Legislate? No.

Give an indication of what is a "reasonable" fleet composition? Yes.

If you game in a fixed background - say Star Wars, or B5 - all involved 
know roughly what is "reasonable" in that universe. We all know how 
god-awfully powerful Star Destroyers are, and we all know roughly what a

Star Fury is capable to. A game set in such a universe has to take this 
into account.

Jon probably has a very clear idea of how things work in the "official" 
FT universe, and thus of what he thinks is "reasonable". The problem is 
that many of us either have no idea, or have very different ideas of
what 
"reasonable" is. Try gaming the battles in David Weber's "Armageddon 
Inheritance", for example; those fleets certainly aren't "reasonable" in

the FT universe - but they are, or at least one of them is, given the 
background in that book.

If the background is created for use with a set of rules - like the 
Starfire background is, and I suspect most home-grown Full Thrust 
backgrounds are too (mine certainly is!) - the rules, both the design 
rules and the actual games mechanics, determine what a "reasonable" 
design or fleet mix would be. After all, I doubt if many players 
intentionally make their "own" races look any more stupid than they have

to (...well, there are exceptions - look at the early Orion designs in 
Starfire <g>). The universe is molded in such a way that the game is a 
good simulation of it.

If the design rules and games mechanics make one type of unit better 
than the others, well - since the game is a simulation of the
background, 
then the warship designers will, in all likelyhood, have noticed that 
that type is better than others... and that will (since the same 
designers don't want to be court-martialled or fired (at)) lead to a 
preponderance of that type. 

I've seen it in Starfire, where the 80 HS Battlecruiser and the 200 HS
Monitor were the only ships you ever built (the BC because it was the
biggest thing you could build with speed 6, which was the fastest any
ship
could go; and the MT because it was the biggest thing you could build,
period - but you didn't lose that much mobility with the MT, either). We

solved that by adjusting the ship design rules - not by very much, but 
enough to make other units than those two reasonable. Starfire is very 
much a campaign game, too, so the problem with one-off battles didn't 
come into play here.

I think the solution for FTIII is to make sure that the design system 
works - ie, that units are costed at least fairly close to their combat 
power. If a given unit is god-powerful, then it should cost... lots. The

enemy could, for the same amount of "points", get a LOT of weaker ships.

Yes, it is hard to make such a system. Yes, it will need lots and lots
of 
playtesting - I know how much work the new Starfire hull tables took,
and 
a re-balancing of Full Thrust will need more work still. Even so, I
don't 
really see any other way.

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson

"Life is like a sewer.
 What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
 -Hen3ry