Re: DS: Walkers

Symon Cook wrote:
>
> Many years ago (pre Clan) I read a very interesting series of
Battletech
> design philosophy articles by a veteran player in a magazine. His
final
> article covered his discovery that a well designed force of GEV could
> take out an equivalent or 'superior' force of mechs EVERY time. He
> apparently used to demonstrate this at clubs and cons. I was amazed
that
> actually Battletech had got something plausible.

I recall these. I don't recall the publication name but I think
they were written by Glenn Wallbridge. For "design philosophy" I
would substitute "power gaming" or "minimaxing".

The GEV force exploited a rules bug regarding hit modifiers
applied regarding shooter and target speed. The shooter is
penalised according to whether his own speed is walk or run for
that design (was it flank and cruise for vehicles? it's been a
good few years), but penalised according to the absolute speed of
the target. If a design is capable of a very high speed it becomes
impossible to be targeted by any enemy but still it has a slight
chance of hitting a slow target.

This GEV force ("Iron Wolves", IIRC) would "win" by inflicting a
small amount of damage by throwing SRMs about and then running
away to reload. Their enemy could plausibly push the hit modifiers
to the point where the GEVs couldn't hit them either by skulking
in heavy woods so the GEVs had to include a proportion of flamers
(to burn them out), further diluting their rather wan firepower.

Something like that anyway, it has been ten years, plus.

-- 
David Brewer

"The mentally disturbed do not employ the Theory of Scientific 
Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of 
facts." - P.K.Dick (from VALIS)