Re: Pre-measuring things

> >Frankly, no. Just last Friday I lost the game because I
>couldn't eyeball
> >the length of the gaming table. And it's my own bloody table to
>boot! I've
> >had it for 15 years! And I couldn't remember how long it was.
>Because I
> >don't like to base my tactics on gamesmanship like that.
>
>So, your ships don't have radar?

PSB-wise, it's easy to justify forbidding pre-measurement.  I assume
that 
each and every ship is employing several forms of ECM, launching decoys
of 
various sorts, and doing everything possible to "blur" their actual 
position.

I have to admit that I don't quite grasp the idea that people who are
better 
at estimating ranges have some kind of unfair advantage.  I game with
people 
who have absolutely NO grasp of strategy and/or tactics, and have shown
no 
signs of developing such skills over the years that I have been gaming
with 
them.  They don't consider it to be "unfair" when they are pitted
against 
someone much more tactically skilled than themselves.  More challenging,

certainly, but not unfair.  It helps that our best tacticians are
terrible 
dice rollers, though.  I think of range estimation as being a very
similar 
thing.

We don't allow pre-measurement in any of our games, and never have.  We 
don't like the time that it takes, and we all have bad memories of some
of 
the pre-measurers that we used to game with...

(forty-five bloody minutes to move ONE 10 MAN UNIT so that they occupied

that precise half inch where HIS troops were firing at close range but
the 
ENEMIES' were firing at medium range...repeat this process three or four

times in a single night, eating up almost half of our total gaming time,
and 
you will get some sense of our frustration)

But when you get right down to it, it's a personal preference and
nothing 
more.  My group shares this common trauma, but most people (fortunately)
are 
free of it.

That's how we prefer it.  I'm a terrible estimator, but I muddle
through.  
We all do.  Plus, along with our terrible dice rolling, it gives us 
something else to blame if we should happen to lose.  If we have someone
who 
is literally unable to see the board, we'll cheerfully make an 
exception...but that hasn't become relevant yet.  At the rate some of us
are 
aging, though, that could change at any moment.  Check back in a month
or 
two.

(This is all particularly relevant to me right now.  I hope to run a
fleet 
game in another week or two, with forty or fifty ships on each side.  It

will be an all-day affair, but we're going to need things to move as
quickly 
as possible if we want any hope of finishing.)

John Crimmins			  john1x@hotmail.com
     http://www.voicenet.com/~johncrim/index.html

   "We're not at home to Mr. Reasonable, sergeant."
   "I do not hear him knockin', sir."
    --Terry Pratchett, _The Fifth Elephant_

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