Re: [FT] Questions from a new Full Thrust player

On Wed, 30 August 2000, stiltman@teleport.com wrote:

> 
> 4.  We use simultaneous damage.  All the fighters and placed weapons
hit,
> threshold phase, all the ship-to-ship weapons hit, threshold phase, no
> initiatives or anything else to muck things up.

*Shudder*

I agree that simultaneous damage does speed things up. However, IMO, it
also takes out the only real piece of tactics in the game. Yes, tactical
manoeuvring is important, but usually I find you have to make an
educated guess as to what your opponent will do. It's not often that big
a deal to figure out what you have to do movement wise. The big
"tension" in the game, for me, is choosing the right ship to fire in the
right order.

In my Full Steam game (guess I'd better hurry up and finish it!), I
speed up play by creating two types of games: encounter games and battle
games. Encounter games have ships looking much like FT. Battle games
half the number of hull boxes on a ship, and double the distance moved.
Guns do the same damage as normal, but torpedoes (due to the way damage
is calculated) do half damage. Firing, by necessity of simulating the
era, is not simultaneous.

Not sure this kind of thing would work with FT, and I'm not sure that I
would want to try and playtest it all (salvo missiles, in particular,
would be problematic). So, your way is probably the best for playing
very large battles in a short period of time. Personally, I'd just as
soon scale down the ships and fight with smaller ships than go with
simultaneous damage.

But, of course, FT is such a good framework for a game that it lends
itself to these kinds of house rules. 

Allan Goodall - agoodall@canada.com
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