Re: [GZG] a peek from FT3 on fighters/ordnance (was: Re:

>From: Indy 
>Sent: May 7, 2010 12:37 PM 
>>On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>
wrote:
 
>>Okay... I have another question which could be pretty important.  In
what order do the various
>> defensive systems fire?  It would make some sense for PDS to go
before the lightning shield,
>> so that the latter truly is a last-resort defensive weapon... but
balance-wise, that's going to
>> steepen the curve where the shield isn't as good as the equivalent
mass of PDS at higher masses.

>CIDS effectively fires last against inbound small targets. 

Hmm.  So PDS fires first, and CIDS only takes out up to half the
survivors?  I think that's going to come out to a situation where a
capital ship doesn't break even by taking a CIDS of any size over the
equivalent mass of PDS until they're swarmed by the equivalent of three
or four fleet carriers' entire fighter loads (or one basestar's).  So is
the point of this basically to be swarm insurance and nothing else?

>>Plasma bolts should be 6-only to hit as well.  Plasma's a pretty
expensive system to pile up on -
>> at 5 mass per level, and you only get _one_ level that PDS can kill
just as easily as fighters,
>> that's not going to make it too hard to knock down now unless you at
least have to roll a 6, and
>> even at that, you're still making PDS three times as powerful against
it.  (e.g. in my old games,
>> we saw 5000 NPV fleets evolve towards carrying about 150 PDS.  Back
then that's good for killing 25
>> dice of plasma; now it'll be 75, which will be prohibitively
expensive to actually throw.)

>You tend to play larger games than most groups I am familiar with, but
imo that's okay. You help
> with seeing the breaking points on that extreme end. :-)

>The counter-balance to the plasma bolt concern is that it is a
renewable resource, whereas missiles,
> and to a large extent fighters, are not. So you are paying for the
ability (or privilege) of being
> able to fire multiple times w/out worries about running out of ammo.

Eh.  Not sold.	By my math you can max out at _maybe_ 100 dice of plasma
in a 5000 NPV fight, as opposed to up to 480 fighters (in 80 groups). 
That 150 PDS I described earlier would be pretty much invulnerable to
the plasma but would get shredded by the fighters.  That's not even
considering that with a level 2 screen you can take down the damage of
plasma by over half as it is.  I'm not sold that it needed this bad of a
change at all.	I don't necessarily mind the small target dice in there,
but I'm thinking that we should either make it take multiple (four? 
six?) hits or just send plasma back to the "one die for PDS, 6 or
nothing" rule.

Another question on top of this... that twice-moving-half-distance rule
for ordnance is not on the same turn?  As in, it moves half the turn
it's launched, the other half the turn after?  That's terrible.  It's
already almost completely impossible to hit advanced drive ships at
anything from thrust 4 upwards, now we're going to give them a turn of
warning at longer distances?  If anything, I think it should be moving
twice for half distance in the _same_ turn just to make it harder for
Kra'Vak to completely laugh off missiles.

>>I'm suspicious that heavy fighters are going to get really, really
popular in this system.
>>You're effectively going to need to go with other fighters to stop
them this way.

>These suspicions are things we want to see if they come to pass. Things
will change whenever some
>aspect of the rules change. That's a given. But is it a desired or
unforeseen result? 

I don't know that I'd call it terribly "desired", even for me as a guy
who _likes_ fighters.  You can throw 480 fighters for 5000 NPV if
they're standards; you can throw 396 heavies.  The gap created by heavy
fighters was already a little dangerous -- I was making scatterguns
_better_ against them in my campaign because soapies could half
trivially make it much more expensive to defend against them by simply
stocking up with heavy fighters.  Now we're giving PDS a similar gap?  I
don't think that's such a hot idea.

E
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