Re: I give up

bail9672@bellsouth.net wrote:
[...]
> You want to know how Steve rolls?  In a game tonight,
> he rolled 12 "beam" dice (pulsers).  One die was a 3,
> the rest were 4+ against an unscreened target.
> Then he did it again on a later turn.  He did have a
> few not-so-good rolls, but nothing to offset those
> particular two salvoes.

We have come to term this the "Teske Field" effect. Aaron
Teske, lister here (but mostly lurker if he's still on due
to his workloads) has the uncanny ability to roll very high
when he needs to. This was first recognized in the early
playtest periods of FB1. I was his opponent, and it hurt
repeatedly and over and over again (was that enough redundancy
to cover it all? ;-) when he would fire beam dice at me and
roll lots of 5s and 6s (and repeat 6s on rerolls), whereas
I could throw similar amounts of dice and roll 1s, 2s, and 3s
primarily (and this became known as the "Kochte Effect", alas).

>> Sorry for asking this, but could one of the reasons for your
>repeated
>> defeats be that Steve is a more skilled *tactician* than you are (in
>> addition to having better luck with his dice than you do)?
>
> Thanks for the insult.   I run rings around Steve when it comes to
>movement. But movement doesn't out do firepower.

I don't think Oerjan intended any insult whatsoever. I don't like
to admit it (who does, really?), but I'm not as good a tactician
as compared to Noam, or Aaron, or Oerjan, on the list. It hurts,
but it's reality. I just try to hold my own when going up against
them. ;-)

Also, another thought, you mentioned having higher thrust ships
with single-arc weapons vs Steve's lower-thrust ships with multi-
arc weapons. Doesn't matter running rings around someone if they
can shoot you from any angle you are but you need to centerline
them in order to deal damage to them.

One thought is to redesign your ships in an off-axis configuration.
Instead of facing your guns (whatever they are) forward, face them
to an offside arc, THEN run rings around Steve! ;-)  Noam did that
to me with his NI once a couple years ago. Annoying, it was. ;-)

Mk