(fwd) Re: [FT] F***ters [was: Operational game]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 13:39:47 +0100 , Ohlson Örjan
<orjan.ohlson@dynamics.saab.se> wrote:

First, I'll echo CS Renegade's thanks to Allan for acting as a relay!
(BTW,
Allan, don't worry about not being able to forward these posts
immediately -
if not for you, these posts would've been sent at best several days
later,
and at worst (? <g>) not at all!)

***
Imre Szabo wrote:

>>In other words, you launched your missiles too early and paid the cost
for
>>it <shrug>.
>
>No I didn't.  

Launching missiles before you have cleared enemy Banzai Jammers away
definitely qualifies as "launching too early". You launched before you
had
cleared the enemy BJs away.

The cost of launching too early in this fashion is that you risk having
your
missiles hit the BJs instead of the larger ships. You paid this cost in
full.

In other words, you launched too early and paid the cost for it - which
is
exactly what I wrote above :-7

>Try 3,000 points with 2 Kamorov's, 4 Gorshikov's, 2 Beijing B ADFC's,
and 4

>Lenovs...

Been there, done that, posted two AARs from very similar battles to this
mailing list some years back (an archive search should find them).

OK, I haven't faced this *exact* enemy fleet, but I have encountered and
defeated fleets which were quite similar. Eg., the ones that were
smashed by
my FSE forces in the above-mentioned AARs were NSL, but overall I'd rate
them as harder missile targets than the above ESU fleet: more point and
area
defences (in one of the AARed battles including a pair of interceptor
squadrons), more direct-fire weapons to hurt the FSE ships, and
considerably
more numerous and individually tougher Banzai Jammers making it very
much
harder for the FSE to clear them away before launching missiles. The NSL
opening missile salvo wasn't quite as strong (4 and 5 SMLs respectively,
compared to the above ESU force's 8 SMRs), but I don't think that
another
3-4 salvoes in the NSL's initial launch would've changed the overall
outcome
of the two AAR battles much.

>>...so don't be surprised if the 'official' fighter-balance fix
resembles
some of
>>the stuff you've seen here :-)
>
>Hopefully not the chart and/or the PDS percentage of mass schemes.  I'd
>rather just have a lower mass ADFC (mass 1) and more escort varients
that
>give a few weapons for ADFC and more PDS.  Or the second PDS phase.

If all you want is more escort variants, why don't you design those for
yourself? That's the reason why the Fleet Books include ship design
rules,
you know... and also the reason why the Fleet Books explicitly state
that
the designs shown therein are only a small subset of the designs used by
the
various powers <shrug>

However, since none of the other options you mention give the effects
we're
looking for (see Allan's reply to Hugh Fisher), I don't think we'll pick
any
of them up <g>

***

CS Renegade wrote:

>>> No, but then I wouldn't permit designs armed exlusively
>>> with PTs, 
>
>> ...presumably because the absence of beam rerolls make
>> them overpowered :-/
>
>Before that point, objections would be raised about the
>cheese factor.

"Cheese" in gaming means "exploiting weaknesses in the rules or
design/points system to get an advantage over your opponent".

In this particular case the weakness (P-torps being more powerful than
the
same cost of beam batteries) stems from your not using the reroll rule. 

If OTOH you had used the reroll rule then this particular weakness
wouldn't
be there,  and a ship armed with a pure P-torp armament would be no
"cheesier" than a ship armed with a pure beam armament... FWIW more than
half of the warship designs in FB1 are armed with pure beam armaments,
so I
do hope that you don't consider pure-beam armaments particularly
"cheesy"
:-/

>If the design was swallowed nonetheless, there would then be a general
lack

>of bright ideas as to how to deal with the monster, which would then go
on 
>the rampage.

It'd go on the rampage for a few battles, until some of the other
players
*do* come up with bright ideas for tactics to deal with it. After all
many
other gaming groups have faced the same type of designs and dealt
successfully with them by using effective counter-tactics; I see no
reason
why your group wouldn't do that as well given the chance.

On PDS vs SMs:

>Yes, I'd grabbed at the average 3.5 missiles per salvo versus
>the basic 0.66 kills per PDS and neglected all the special
>permutations.

Trouble is, those special permutations get important surprisingly fast
:-/

>>If (which is the normal case) the SM salvo rolls a normal
>>D6 (ie., roughly 1 salvo in 6 only gets 1 missile on target)
>>then the average PDS missile kills per salvo become:
>
>(Oerjan's table in plain text sans tabs, if I got them all)

I know... different mail handlers treat tabs and spaces differently, so
when
an email is forwarded any tables in it will almost invariably get
wrecked no
matter how they're typed in :-(

>> #PDS:  No PDS    With PDS   PDS gives -1
>>		re-roll:   re-roll:   to SM roll:
>>   1	   0.64       0.71	 1.00
>>   2	   0.60       0.66	 0.92
>>   3	   0.56       0.61	 0.83
>
>So the re-roll rule increases the effectiveness of PDS by 10%?

Roughly 10%, yes. (In contrast it increases the effectiveness of beam
batteries firing at ships by 20% against unscreened targets, 27% against
targets with level-1 screens and 40% against targets with level-2
screens;
ships usually have enough damage boxes that the risk of losing re-roll
damage to overkill is very small.)

>I'm a bit uncertain about the use of overkill here. A simple
>average is no longer a good enough measure unless you turn
>the problem on its head and say "for these defences, what is
>the chance of a weapon getting through" which is something a
>real-world architect might worry about. To measure PDS
>effectiveness by including the relative availability of
>targets seems strange.

Strange? Not at all - you can't determine the one without calculating
the
other. If your real-world architect had *not* included the availability
of
targets (in this case the number of missiles on target from a particular
salvo), he would underestimate the probability of an enemy weapon
getting
through the defences he is designing (IOW, he'd overestimate the
effectiveness of the defences). 

For example, a single SM salvo is engaged by 3 PDSs. How many missiles
will,
on average, get past the PDS and hit the target? The too-simplified
analysis
says "Well, the average number of missiles on target is 3.5, and each
PDS
shoots down on average 2/3, so 3 PDSs shoot down on average 2 missiles
which
leaves 1.5 to hit the target". However, the real value is ~20% higher
(just
over 1.8 missiles)... and it is the very same availability of targets
that
you feel is strange to include which causes this 20% difference.

>>and also when it is hit by a single salvo missile salvo
>>where the pair of B1s significantly increase the
>>probability of the ship getting away with no damage at
>>all.
>
>Also true. But if just one missile gets home, a typical
>two-column frigate is almost certainly taking its first
>threshold check and possibly its second at the same time.

Sure, as long as it is unarmoured (otherwise the ability to eat a single
missile without taking even one threshold check increases dramatically).
OTOH your typical two-and-a-half-column-plus-some-armour destroyer is
quite
*likely* to take a single missile without reaching even the first
threshold
:-/

>Another gross simplification coming up: each B1 shoots
>down 0.33 missiles. Our plucky frigate has 1 PDS and 2 B1
>against a single salvo. With the chance of a re-roll on
>the PDS, it should on average knock down 1.37 salvo
>missiles.

If you use the reroll rule the B1s get rerolls as well (so the
simplistic
kill number is 0.40), but in spite of that the aggregate knock-down is
only
1.35 due to the limited availability of targets. Even so, that's enough
to
give the frigate a 26% chance of getting away with no damage at all and
another 16% to get hit by a single missile only (with a roughly 50%
chance
of getting killed or knocked out of the fight for the FB1 frigate
designs),
giving an overall p(Ouch) of 60-65%  Without the B1s, the overall
p(Ouch) is
75-80% instead Dunno about you, but reducing the p(Ouch) by 15
percentage
points doesn't look *that* irrelevant to me :-/

***
Re: Stiltman and Aaron:

No, Aaron, the KV scatterguns were not reduced in power vs. *fighters*
from
their MT incarnation. It was their anti-*ship* performance which was
seriously degraded.

Your points about most groups not mixing technologies is very valid,
however. What's more, Full Thrust is supposed to be a generic space
combat
game system which can be used to fight out battles in a wide range of
backgrounds for SF movies, TV series or books - and AFAIK very few such
backgrounds have any single-shot scatter-gun-style anti-fighter/missile
weapons at all, whereas most of them do have PDS-style defences... so
the
current need to rely on scatterguns for your anti-fighter defences
seriously
reduces FT's genericity.

It is also worth keeping in mind that the difference between "too few
PDSs/scatterguns to give any significant protection against enemy
fighters"
and "so many PDSs/scatterguns that the enemy fighters are completely
wiped
out" is surprisingly small. No matter in which direction you err in the
amount of point defences you bring, the battle is likely to be quite
short.

Re: Binhan Lin: Considering that the cheapest possible FTL-capable
soap-bubble carriers cost 63 pts per (standard) fighter squadron
carried,
I'm a bit curious about how you manage to get 250+ fighter squadrons
into a
10,000-pt battle...?

Later,

Oerjan

Allan Goodall		       agoodall@hyperbear.com
http://www.hyperbear.com

"We come into the world and take our chances
 Fate is just the weight of circumstances
 That's the way that Lady Luck dances
 Roll the bones." - N. Peart