Re: Quick subject switch to SGII (was: Re: Vector Movement)

On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Roger Books wrote:

> On 20-Aug-99 at 13:15, devans@uneb.edu (devans@uneb.edu) wrote:
>
> > ***
> > Yeah, that's a cool way to play also.  Adds suspense.
> > 
> > - Buddy
> > ***
> > 
> > In spite of what it may have looked like in my 'Ming the
> > Merciless' post, this is the way we ALWAYS play FTII.
> > 
> > Talk of fairness and the capability of fire controls does not
> > stand up to simple game mechanics and flow. I'm lousy at table
> > estimation, but I know that the game can really bog down if
> > every shot stops while the commander starts measuring distances
> > to various targets to determine optimum. Eyeballing and guess-
> > timating aren't instantanous, but are mechanically quicker, and
> > easier to call a friendly 'delay of game' taunt.
> 
> It doesn't really slow us down.  What we do is immediately after
> movement someone picks up a tape measure (the ref if we have one)
> and does a quick inside 36 between these guys, inside 24 for
> these, inside 12 for these, and we roll, usually takes all of
> 10 seconds.

exactly; you get out your tape measure, set it to 24 or whatever, put
the
held end over your battlegroup and sweep the ruler over the table: you
get
to see what's in range and and what isn't in less than a second (with
practice). if it's borderline, you can adjust your hand slightly a few
times to measure for individual ships, but this is rare. you can then
re-sweep for other ranges if necessary. if you have ships spread out,
adjust your hand further. it's still quite quick. the trick is not to go
for an accurate measurement every time: only do that if the distance is
borderline and you absolutely need to know.

the only time you might make several exact measurements is if you had to
know where a ship could move, eg to lay an SM salvo, but this generally
only happens once or twice.

plus, everyone gets to see the results, and range is reflexive, so if
i'm
in 24 of him, he's in 24 of me.

> Of course, if we were playing 30 units on a side
> it might make a difference.

provided the ships are kept in clumps (as they should be - CONCENTRATE!
:)
), large numbers of ships can be handled easily.

> Our big slowdown is the one newbie who is constantly going "I
> don't know, I don't know if I should do this or this...".

i find that the plotting and movement phases are usually the main
slowdown.

as a last word, i'd add that i would support measuring ranges even in
ancient warfare: the argument that people had no rangefinders is pure
comedy. professional soldiers would be able to judge distance
sufficiently
accurately with ease: it's a core skill.

tom