Re: "Custom" fleets

> >> What's your brother-in-law's E-mail? I've got a fleet for him.
 
> > Uhhhh... stiltman@teleport.com?  ;)
> >Actually, if you had a suggestion I seriously wouldn't 
> > mind seeing it and, if it seems like it'd be 
> > interesting, letting my wife play it a few times against me.
 
> Vs. the dreadplanet you posted, I'd take a scaled up, Cinematic
modification
> of my Cygnus BYO fleet:
 
> 8xBC's (4976 points)
> Mass 174/NPV 622
> Hull 17
> Thrust 4
> FTL
> Armor 10
> 1xFC
> 1xClass 6 Beam F/FP/AP
> 42xPDS
> 2xADFC

[SLASH]

*muttering*  All right, all right, thank you... I _think_ that I'd
figured
out on my own that if you crammed a ship to the gills with PDS, the
Super
Orb is toast.  Especially if you give it weapons that can reach halfway
across a solar system, and permit it to fly at fraction-C speeds right
at
the beginning of the game instead of being forced to actually start at
a more reasonable cruising speed and actually having to use its thrust
to
attain those kinds of speeds.

That said, I don't think my brother-in-law would thank you terribly for
suggesting this fleet to him to fly against me, because in 98.7% of the
battles we fly, I would utterly annihilate these guys and he'd tell you
that after about a three second glance.  You're misunderstanding why he
usually doesn't beat me; it's not an issue where I fly just _one_
particular
idea at him and he doesn't know what to do about it.  It's an issue
where
I have an entire notebook full of ship designs, under several different
tabbed sections where the entire doctrine and game plan that the fleet
tries to establish changes from one group to the next (which,
incidentally,
represents different subject races in the Hierarchy), our rules don't
allow you to know what I'm doing in advance (nor do I get to know what
you're doing), and I'm simply better than he is at reading the field,
comparing my weapons to his, and then dictating the way the battle's
going to be fought to my own best advantage and his worst.

One of the critical elements in that is, I don't tend to design my ships
with an eye to overspecialization.  When I put them together, I think a
good two or three levels into it.  "Here's what I want to do mainly.  If
they take that away, I'll do this.  If they take that away too, I've got
this..." and so on.  My brother-in-law, on the other hand, tends to give
in to the temptation to over-compensate for what he expects me to do.
Then he loses either because I didn't do what he expected or, even if I
did, I fall back on the backup plan and force him to come up with one of
his own, and since he's over-compensated for my first plan, he doesn't
usually have an answer for the second or third one.

The "dreadplanet" example's layers of thinking go about like this...

1.  Primary game plan:	establish overwhelming fighter superiority.

2.  If they take that away by out-fightering me, they probably don't
have
as good a ship-to-ship armament as I do, so have my fighters dilute
theirs
as much as possible while the monster zones off the board and outguns
them.

3.  If they take that away by a stiff area defense phalanx, hold back on
the fighters and let the plasma give them something else to shoot that
PDS at.

4.  If they _do_ manage to survive the fighters and plasma, the needle
beams ought to prevent anyone from wanting to fly too close to the
monster
itself, which will give the fighters and plasma extra time to finish the
job.  If they park too close, the needle beams can disable their fire
control before they do too much damage.

Most _broadly_sound_ enemy fleets can be defeated by one or more of the
above plans.  Yes, you can really grossly overspecialize and defeat that
one plan in particular, but the problem with this plan lies in the fact
that you _don't_ know what I'm going to do, and the pseudo-campaign
nature
of our games reflects that.  No admiral's going to countenance building
a fleet _that_ over-specialized and risk an entire task force's
resources
doing so, when its real usefulness in the broader campaign is going to
be horrifically limited.  That gets reflected in game terms by our lack
of warning of what the other guy's going to bring to the table.

The issue of suggesting that the dreadplanet would be nasty isn't that
you
couldn't think of _anything_ to beat it.  The issue is that you couldn't
think of anything to beat it that is itself just as broadly sound.
--
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
   http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
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