RE: Critical hits (was Limits on armour?)

I like to distinguish between critical hits and steady attrition of a
unit's strengths.



In Silent Death, for example, many boxes on the damage track are marked
to show a particular system being degraded or destroyed.  A few squares
directed you to a table with results ranging from a momentary movement
penalty to instant annihilation.  The former were simple attrition, the
latter were true critical hits.



In FT, checking systems at the end of a row of hull boxes is a simple
mechanism for attrition of systems.  The core systems (and striking the
colours) are, for all intents and purposes, the critical hits in the
game.



________________________________

From: Binhan Lin [mailto:binhan.lin@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 07, 2006 12:14 PM
To: gzg@firedrake.org
Subject: Re: Critical hits (was Limits on armour?)



Calculating critical hits is a continum - at one extreme you ignore
critical hits, at the other you calculate the probability of thousands
of individual systems failing on a given hit.  FT has decided to add a
few critical hit checks (at each threshold) rather than checking at each
hit.  In addition it has bundled the hit locations into a generic space
rather than try to determing direction of shots etc. 



In short I think that FT has done a reasonable job of adding detail
without too much additional work - for instance if you had to roll
addtional critical hit checks every time your ship was hit, you'd have
tons more dice rolling for little additional result. 



For example - if a cruiser loses its SML to a hit, does it matter that
it was hit from the port side with a Mk.XXXI energy torpedo that
penetrated the second missile outer hull door as a salvo was being fired
which prematurely detonated the fusion igniter detonation booster in the
missile and the blast travelled back down the tube, but the blast doors
deflected most of the force outward through the blow out panels, but the
high magenetic field generated an EMP that fried the fire control
station at that weapon and the back-up circuits failed to kick in vs.
the SML is out of action? 



If you're argument is that it's too predictable as to when critical hits
happen (i.e. only a threshold checks vs.not every time you're hit) again
that comes down how much detail you want.  In theory each system should
roll for a critical constantly, not just when hit - i.e. parts wear out
under normal use.  If we wanted to simulate that, then each ship would
roll for some small chance of critical hit every turn, but again,
diminishing returns as you'd have a lot of effort for very little
result, especially if the chance of any particular system failing is
very low. 



Other possibilities - special critical check cards - these would be a
deck of cards with one drawn at the beginning of the turn by each player
which would  force the drawing player to roll for a critical hit against
a card specified ship class and system ( i.e. check for a FTL on a
carrier, or one beam battery or one missile system on a cruiser) if the
player doesn't have that particular class, the card is ignored.  To
balance the deck, it would also include some free DCP cards to repair
damage that would be immediately used to repair a system. 

--Binhan



On 7/7/06, Allan Goodall <agoodall@hyperbear.com> wrote: 

On 7/7/06, Hugh Fisher <laranzu@ozemail.com.au> wrote:

> I really like the Full Thrust threshold checks as opposed
> to just about every other critical hit system I've ever
> seen because they don't occur very often.

I prefer the system in _Silent Death_, myself. It's major failing is 
that critical hits are very predictable.

One thing that bugs me about Full Thrust is the fact that you can be
attacked primarily from one direction and lose the weapons on the
other side of the ship. I know people have PSB to cover it, and I know 
there is no easy fix to the problem.

(Funny enough, I don't have that much of a problem with it in Full
Steam, but beams don't "plunge" into a specific part of a ship.)

I've never been crazy about the break point idea. A ship takes a 
pounding but is fully functional until it loses that one point on a
hull row... and then, bang!, it loses all its weapons. Again, no easy
way to fix it, and it is a big part of FT. It just bugs me.

--
Allan Goodall		 http://www.hyperbear.com
agoodall@hyperbear.com
awgoodall@gmail.com