Re: FTIII: A Plea to End "Me Too" Firing.

On Mon, 2 Jun 1997, Joachim Heck - SunSoft wrote:

>   I guess that's the question, whether we're talking volleys of fire,

We know we're talking *batteries* of beams ;-)

> or more generally what the speed of combat is here.  In yet another of
> my totally goofy examples, if you and I are standing next to each
> other with one atom bomb each, our fingers on the triggers, and I
> press my trigger, you won't have time to say "me too" and shoot back.
> But if I had to aim a gun and you saw tracer fire or ranging shots or
> that kind of thing, you might still have a chance to shoot back.

This is a flawed example. In FT, when the firing phase comes you are
going
to shoot at *something*. There's no point in delaying your fire in 90%
of
the cases. The only "me too" about it is target selection. 

If you're concerned about issues of detection and such, IMHO you should 
be concerned about the ultra-accurate and superfast detection of damage 
dealt coupled with incredibly effective coordinated fire control the 
vanilla system allows.

>   I think the FT system works fine.  It's simple and fast.  

Take a duel. First fire, and consequently first damage, is decided by a 
simple roll of 1d6, unmodified by any tactical factors. Quite simply I 
don't find this satisfactory.

If you think about it, the duelists would be either firing as fast as 
they can, like naval ships of the first half of this century, or they'd 
be hedging their bets for the perfect moment to shoot like in SFB. It 
depends on the rate-of-fire vs. speed really...

The latter case FT cannot model, but the former one it can -- with 
simultaneous fire.

> In SFB
> people are always trying to figure out the odds every phase (32 times
> a turn).  Hmmm... chances are I'll lose some weapons if he shoots at
> me, but how many?  Let's see, he's got five phasers and a disruptor,
> so his average damage is....	Boring.

But that's exactly what you get with the current official system!
Just not for phases but the firing order of your ships.

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