Re: House rules (was re: FMA rules?)

> Sounds like you've rock/scissor/papered yourself into a corner.

Not really... the way we play does tend to create the occasional really
gross
mismatch if one guy over-anticipates what the other's doing.  My
brother-in-law
tends to be guilty of that more often than I am.  If you balance out
your
tactical considerations you don't get caught like this too often.

> Add some SMs into the mix and watch those big hulking brutes die
> a horrible death.  This doesn't mean you need to adjust the rules
> to fix this "problem", it means those big hulking brutes need to
> move faster or die.

Or cloak.  :)

> Also, fighters are a big deal, however, remember that for every
> fighter squadron you can have 9 PDSs or 8 and an ADFC.  Life
> could get very short for fighter pilots.  At which point he counters
> by leaving off the fighters and your PDSs are useless, to which you
> counter...

Actually, PDS _by_itself_ is not of significant use against fighters on
conventional sized ships.  Simple reason:  fighters are an additive
resource,
PDS's aren't by themselves.  Fighters can single out one ship at a time
and
pulverize them; the ships have to wait for the fighters to attack and
can't
choose their targets.  And piling up on fighters is wiser than piling up
on
PDS, because overwhelming fighter superiority can be adapted to a
multitude
of uses (screening against missiles, destroying enemy fighters,
destroying
enemy ships), whereas PDS have only one.

If they add area defense to the mix, you add needle beam escorts or nova
cannons to yours.  The tight formations needed for effective area
defense
are horribly vulnerable to nova cannon fire, for reasons that should be
obvious.  And a fast cruiser or a cloaking escort equipped with enough
needle beams to play the percentages and take out three or four area
defense
fire controls can be a major factor.  Sure, the cruisers and escorts
will
most likely be valiantly reduced to their component atoms... but if they
take some ADFC's with them, they've done their job, because now the
fighters
can single out ships en masse and annihilate them.

How exactly you do it depends on how they do it.  If they use lots of
small
ships to provide more ADFC's in hopes of minimizing the effect of needle
beams,
they're more vulnerable to a nova cannon blast or two torching the whole
lot
of them.  If they concentrate their efforts on a few larger ships to
defend
against the nova cannons, the needle beams can cripple them.

So you see... there _is_ a way to put up balanced effectiveness here.
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