Re: [GZG] FT:XD changes, part 1

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lEric said:

"Get back to me when I can play the Jedi versus the Jem Haddar versus
the
demons from Doom versus an army made up of Jason Vorheeses versus Aliens
versus WH40K Space Marines versus Predators versus Glitter Boys versus
Terminators versus the Time Lords versus the Flood versus the Borg in it
and
all the edge cases are still stable and everybody's happy with the
result.
"

I have two words for you Eric:

Aaron Newman.

I rest my case.

(Those who have attended ECC know whereof I speak....)
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More seriously, I think Stargrunt can do a lot of things well because it
depends on judgement to balance the scenario. It doesn't create a
misleading
point system. You *can* build rather unbalanced Scenarios (I remember a
certain battle with fast PA against regular, non-too-heavily armoured
infantry in the woods.... Damn stinking Minbari.....).	But the game
doesn't
tell you they are balanced with some magic numbers.

That's the difference. FT sort of does. I mean, the point system is
supposed
to yield reasonable results and balance otherwise there would be no
point in
having it. The areas where it is broken are the areas where it could be
adjusted.

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To CanAm1:

1. My options were to swap beam mass around, not make wholesale weapon
swaps. PDS was considered beam mass. I pulled out some big guns, piled
in
some class-2s, and a few more PDS and ADFC. On the DDs, I pulled out
pretty
much all guns in favour of PDS and ADFCs. No scatterguns.

I'm not sure how exactly the enemy got their mass of fighters, I recall
they
had every carrier they could bring. And the geography of the game saw
our
fleet 1/3rd dead before we could see anything other than enemy fighters
(planet in the way). A turn later, one of our Komarovs was fighting the
entire carrier fleet, but the odds weren't in my favour by that time,
the
other one messed up Titan's Turn around the planet.

Now, if both of us had made the turn around the planet, we'd have done a
bit
more damage at range 12-18" to the enemy carriers before they wrapped
around
the planet the other way. But their fighters did eat my Komarov, their
few
salvo missiles didn't help, and the third Komarov would have got eaten
too
if he didn't FTL.

I think I might have had 6-8 mass of PDS on each Komarov, about that on
each
DDE (2 or 3 of those), and six squadrons of heavy interceptors (or was
it
four?) which did do an awful lot of damage before they were overrun.

Ultimately, the fact the swarm never had to face all my PDS (fighter
manouverability) at once and that they ate the DDEs in 1 round (as they
were
trying to screen the fleet), meant that the Komarovs were then consumed
by
the remaining fighters at a rate of about 1/round.

I'm not sure the other side even used Soapies. I think every ship on
their
side carried fighters, but I don't think there was any true soapies. And
a
few of the ships they had were not carriers I think.

Ultimately, if I'd got the intel report right and realized it meant
'enemy
loading out with fighters', I'd have probably brought about 12 mass more
of
PDSes on each Komarov and probably done in the fighter wing reasonably
effectively. But that just goes to show how easy, with less than half a
fleet book based fleet (more or less), you can use fighters to totally
shift
the balance.

Tom