RE: Blue Sky Thinking (was: Re: [GZG] re: Wanted)

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some little time before I can actually _play_ in a campaign, I would be
obliged if you'd post the rules, John. I think campaigns, all else
equal, are the only way to go in naval (or starship) gaming. "What job
is this going to do in peacetime, in wartime, and against whom?" is
always in the back of my head when I design ships.
   
  Best,
  Ken

David Rodemaker <dar@horusinc.com> wrote:
  John Atkinson wrote:
On 11/9/06, David Rodemaker wrote:
> Sort of the reason why I don't mind fighters being so damn effective -
we
> play campaigns and as valuable as the fighters are - the pilots are
much
> more so... Losing fighters is a huge pain in the ass, loosing the
pilot 
> can be crippling. At the end of a long campaign (ours) carriers are
always
> understrengthed, some of them massively so. The concept of "throwing"
your
> fighters at the enemy the way I see some people do it in pick-up games
> quickly goes by the wayside after a couple of nasty fights. It instead
> becomes a tactic of desperation.
>>Hehe. . . maybe you could do the Japanese thing and have more fighters
than qualified pilots, and be forced to choose between using them as
large cruise missles, or putting them up with pilots with 12 hours of
training and hoping they will luck out and shoot down an American
aircraft. :)<<

That happened a couple of times as well. :-) Somebody usually ends up
with
more fighters than pilots - and usually at the expense of some other
thing
like frigates or cruisers because they dumped a bunch of points into the
wrong building capacity.

Then there's always the issues when you end up with more of both and no
carriers to put them in - or no way to get them to the front lines...

It all boils down to logistics.

---------
>>That's the real killer on fielding fighters, qualified pilots. As the
Syrians and Egyptians discovered over and over again, you can buy all
the fighters you like, without qualified pilots they are pretty much
worthless except as decoys to draw the enemy into AA traps. Perhaps
you could have a whole ranking of uselessness below the standard rules
for fighters for use in campaign games. :)<<

We actually did that. Had four levels of skill (Recruit, Green,
Regulars,
Veterans), plus Aces. If anyone likes I can post the rules we used for
the
differences.

----------
>>But that's always going to be the difference between campaign games
and
on-offs.<<

Very true. One of the reason I prefer campaign games - while you can
always
min-max, in a well-designed campaign it's much harder to sustain that
after
people figure out what you're doing. And I generally don't mind "taking
the
long view" when somebody has seriously whacked their forces in one way
or
the other - that sort of thing always comes home to roost if you're
patient
and/or resourceful enough.

Though I have to admit that one time I had to talk people into setting
up a
second campaign to follow the first one. We ending up having a nice
diplomatic game with some skirmishes with pirates and the like for a
couple
of "years" and then hostilities broke out again...

David Rodemaker