Re: [FT\DS2] Fleet and Army sizes for games

on 8/16/00 20:11, stiltman@teleport.com at stiltman@teleport.com wrote:

> Indirectly.  Soap bubble carriers are not very useful in a real
campaign
> game (as you yourself observed) because just about anything that gets
past
> their fighters can shred them in droves.  My preferred method would
probably
> be to borrow a page from my bro-in-law's screwy tricks book and just
keep a
> reserve arsenal of cloaking submunition bombships.  Turn one,
bombships
> decloak and inundate the soap bubbles in submunitions without much
warning.
> Turn two, bombships either cloak and bug out or, if possible and
prudent,
> FTL-bomb the remaining soap bubbles in kamikaze runs.  I don't think
that
> submunition bombships are _that_ great of a tactic on the whole, but
they're
> not bad for softening people up, they're virtually impossible to keep
away
> from their targets (particularly if the targets are comparatively
immobile,
> as soap bubble carriers are), and they'd take out soap bubble carriers
at
> a five- or even ten-to-one clip in NPV cost.

I respectfully disagree here.  Unless your group plays the cloaked rules
differently I haven't found cloaked ships to be the end all and be all
of
back line hitters.  The limitation of not knowing exactly where your
ship is
during it's moves combined with the need to decide at the time of
engaging
the cloaking device how many turns it will remain under cloak makes runs
like this type of tactic a little more chancy.

It would seem reasonable that an opponent have some idea that there are
cloaked ships around somewhere on the table (but where's the real
question).
;-)   After all there suppose to be a reference marker on the table that
the
cloaked ship uses to figure it's new position out from after decloaking.

Another point is that some of people do not allow the cloaking field in
their campaign games, preferring to stay with the Tuffley universe ship
systems.  Nova cannons, wave guns, cloak fields (and more) are usually
considered genre specific.

> Most gimmicky ships are not going to be very effective in a long term
> campaign game... and soap bubble carriers are about as gimmicky as
they
> get.

Would not a cloaked submunition bombship be considered a "gimmicky" ship
and
as such fall under the "not going to very effective in the long term..."
status.

Kevin Walker
sage@bresnanlink.net