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

stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> 
> > At 01:09 AM 8/17/00 -0400, mary wrote:
> > >It occurs to me that the only simple and balanced way to prevent
this
> > >problem is by excluding fighters from your campaign altogether.
> 
> > Actually, the way to balance this is to get rid of the screwy (IMO)
house
> > rules that stiltman and his group plays with, which give an
overwhelming
> > advantage to carrier/fighter based ships.
> 
> No, they don't.  Our rules cut both ways -- you don't get to spook the
fighters
> for free, but you _can_ kill them more efficiently because we also
don't stop
> counting kills when you're firing into a crowd at the first six dead.
> 
> Since my email yesterday, I've been going over some of the math in my
head.
> The submunition bomb design I've generally settled on would probably
be a
> mass 34 ship with a cloaking device, fragile hull, FTL, and MD 4 core
drive
> with modular sockets to fit whatever I felt like adding on for a
particular
> target.  Depending on the mission that the campaign required, I'd have
a
> relatively small stockpile of spare MKP's, submunitions, scatterguns,
fire
> control modules, and sublight drive modules waiting to get fitted to
them
> for a particular task.  For soap bubble carriers I'd probably stay
with MD 4,
> and fit six scatterguns, four FCs, and eight submunitions to each
bombship.
> That would be enough to fend off the fighter assault of three or four
soap
> bubbles' loads and present a high likelihood of killing at least four
soap
> bubbles per bombship, maybe as many as ten if the soap bubbles don't
scramble
> fast enough and I get a spare turn to fire submunitions against a new
set
> of four with scatterguns for backup.	This is just 48 points' worth of
> ammo; those soap bubbles cost 63 points each at barebones payload. 
_Very_
> cost-effective.

But the rules in FB2 say that you cannot mix tech (scatterguns and 
submunitions) unless everyone agrees.  So you need to make your fleet 
entirely Kra'Vak, or forget the scatterguns.  How much does it cost to 
make the soap bubbles cloak?  They cloak immediately after launching 
fighters and uncloak a secretly determined, but random time later; 
hopefully to recover them, possibly just to see that they must run.
the density of fighters becomes less than ideal, but now you have to
be lucky to be uncloaked at the same time that they are.