Re: Fighters.... Re: Full Thrust vs Starmada

>>> If you're fighting a battle where both sides have the same amount of
points, it ought to be a fairly even match, yes?  So take a 6000 point
game with 30 fighter squadrons on one side and no fighters on the other.
Tell us how many turns you played... <<<
 
>> Okay...now you take as many 1 hull, firecon, t-4, Beam-4 ships as you
can fit in those 6000 points. Don't have the books handy but it's got to
be over 100. <<

> Right, but the fighters STILL can't be attacked or destroyed by ANY of
those "weenie madness" ships. The fighters will still slaughter those
weenie ships unless you imposed some currently non-existant rules about
fighter groups being degraded by the loss of their carrier. <

Irrelevant, because that wasn't the point of the suggestion, which was
that the "weenie ships" are as effective in the anti-ship role as the
massed fighters. Okay, so the ships are in trouble against the fighters,
but could that be alleviated by adding a PDS to each ship? They're still
small, and there will be fewer of them, but now they have some defensive
capability against the fighters, and high-speed passes against the
carriers will still leave the fighters in deep kimchee.

It seems to me that this is an unsolvable problem if we demand complete
balance and munchkin-proof rules. Back in FT2, fighters could only be
carried by capital ships, and no more than two groups by non-CVs; that
was changed in the interests of more flexibility, and now we can have
"Cylon Tankers" -- no weapons but fighters if that's what the designer
wants -- but we're no happier. This boils down to a difference in genre
that is best dealt with away from the table -- in scenario design and
the discouragement of rules lawyers/munchkins who play the rules rather
than the game.

Fact is, fighters can be made vital or irrelevant in a specific setting
according to the level and kind of PSB assumed, and FT, as a generic
game, needs to be able to deal with both ends of the spectrum -- but
does it have to cope with both ends at the same time? I can't help but
think that we're spending far too much time trying to hammer out a
system specifically for the use of munchkins when a little sense would
show that the setting dictates ship design and saying that any force of
6000 points must be equal to any other force of the same nominal value
is an impossible demand to meet.

Phil