Re: [FT] BFG Conversion Notes

stranger wrote:

>>Very difficult to balance this one. *Extremely* powerful against
>>unscreened targets due to its very high average damage at long
>>range, similar to B3s against level-1 screens, and virtually
powerless
>>against level-2 screens - this would be the weapon of choice to
>>destroy enemy escorts, not the battleship-killer the BFG Lance is.
> 
>I agree.  I never quite saw the BFG Lance as  a BB killer though,
>unless employed in numbers and as the follow up for a 1-2 punch.

You've never fought Imperial fleets which insist on pointing their prow
armour towards you, then? Lances with their "always hit on 4+" are
invaluable in this situation... particularly since you have to beat the
*armour* value of a BFG ships simply to knock down its *shields* :-/

>Now, the Eldar Lance is another story.....and I think the EFSB HB
>works for that one.

Agree.

>The question is, How do you get essentially a heavy beam type >weapon,
that is affected by shields and unaffected by armor that does
>consitent damage all along its range?
>
>Perhaps a modified v2 Lance.  Does 1d3 damage, hit based on range
>bands, shields add +1 per level to hit chance:

This is how I might do it:

I want consistent damage all along the range, so can't base the
to-hit number on the range. Instead I use the same to-hit number at all
ranges, but modify it for the target screen level - if possible I'd
like screens to have the same effect against the lances as against
normal beams. One way to achieve this is:

Target has...		To-hit roll:
No screen		2+
Level-1 screen	3+
Level-2 screen	4+

The effect by level-1 screens is almost identical for beams and lances.
The lance is slightly better against level-2 screens, so it is better
to use your lances against enemy capitals than against escorts, but
it's close enough that I only need to look at the effect against
unscreened targets for balancing the lances against the standard beam
weapons.

Lances come in varying ranges, but I'll stick with the long-range
version used on the capital ships - 36mu in FT terms, so the B3 becomes
the baseline for balancing the lance. The 1D3 damage and K-gun-style
armour penetration sounds OK (the armour penetration won't have a very
big effect unless the targets use *very* heavy armour, but it gives
some extra flavour).

Using the 1-2-3 band weights discussed below (OK, I'm writing this on a
computer but don't want to zap from one program to another <g>), the B3
battery has an average firepower of (2.4*1+1.6*2+0.8*3)/3 = 2.67. (I
use the term "firepower" instead of "damage" to remind myself that it
isn't a real damage.) The lance has an average firepower of
(1.67*(1+2+3))/3 = 3.33, or 25% more than the B3 (against unscreened
targets; slightly more against screened targets as well because of the
to-hit mechanic). The other range weights give slightly higher results,
putting the lance at 27-30% more than the B3.

So now "all" that remains is to choose a Mass and cost/Mass ratio such
that the lance does cost 25% more than the B3 including the cost of the
basic hull and engines for both systems. (I posted the formulae for the
total cost of systems some days back, but it's easy to derive. If I go
with the B3 Mass rating (4+1/extra arc) the lance needs to cost
somewhere between 4.5xMass and 5xMass to be balanced - by the numbers
alone 5x should be on the high side, but the lance is a little better
against both screens and armour which makes it more valuable. Besides,
I don't like fractional points costs :-/ I could also make the Lance
bigger and lower the cost/Mass ratio, or make it smaller but extremely
expensive per Mass - or I could change the damage per hit.

Now repeat the procedure for the shorter-ranged lance versions used by
escorts and cruisers <g>

(I'm not saying that this is a good or original representation of the
lances - the end result feels rather similar to the FB2 Pulser-L,
although the actual mechanics used are very different. It should be
reasonably well balanced though.)

>>Also, this weapon hits unscreened targets automatically at *all*
>>ranges. The "note of caution" above applies in triplicate to this
>>version.
>>
>> However, all range bands *don't* have the same weights.
> 
>I agree.  Waht weight did you assign to each band?

Several different sets. No matter which of them I use, I use the B1 as
the "norm" (ie., it has an average firepower of 1 no matter how I
weight the range bands).

The "correct" band weights depend on several things, foremost of which
are the size of your gaming table and whether or not the fleet which
wants to close the range has higher thrust ratings than its enemy. It
also depends on what weapons both sides have - eg., if neither side has
any weapons able to fire further than 12mu, of course no shots will be
fired in the outer bands! 

My gaming table is large (120x80mu), and my weighting of the outer
bands reflect this. For quick analyses I use 0-12: 1, 12-24: 2 and
24-36: 3 etc.; the 0-12 band further splits as 0-6: 0.3 and 6-12: 0.7.
This is a rough rule of thumb only; it overvalues the 24-36 band
somewhat and breaks down beyond range 36, but it catches the bigger
balance features - and I can do the maths in my head rather than resort
to paper or computers :-)

In theory, the bands "should" be weighted in proportion to the area
covered by each band (so the 0-6 band gets a weight of 6^2 = 36, the
6-12 band gets 12^2 - 6^2 = 108, etc). Unfortunately practise only
follows this theory if all maneuvers are completely random <g>, so when
I have a computer available nowadays I tend to use a
somewhat-less-than-square relationship instead. Range^1.75 seems to
give the best fits to my recorded data so far, though I don't have
enough recorded data that I'd dare to trust it too much :-( Recording
the range at which each and every shot was fired slows the game down
*lots*, and my local opponents don't think it is very fun... they're
not prepared to make any sacrifices in the name of science <g>

Later,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."