Re: New Full Thrust point defence rules

On Tue, 24 Mar 2015 08:21:35 +1100, Damond Walker <damosan@gmail.com>  
wrote:

>
> 2) Having only ever played FB games I never really had to deal with a
> soap-bubble.	It always seemed very odd to me to spend so much time
going
> back and forth over an edge case.

Two reasons why I'm spending so much time on the problem.

Philosophically, Full Thrust is a game system with a LOT of flexibility 

that tries not to limit what players can design and do. So if players
can  
design soap bubble carriers, I'd like to try and make them work within
the  
rules. (Although I would also strongly support any gaming group that
says  
"No! Those are silly, you can't have them." as a response.) As I noted	
elsewhere, in both Babylon 5 and new Battlestar Galactica merchant ships
 
were used as improvised soap bubble carriers, so there are "historical" 

examples.

More importantly, IMHO soap bubble carriers are a symptom of a more  
general problem, that FT games involving fighters are often decided by	
fleet composition rather than player tactics. If you bring a fleet with 

not much point defence and your opponent has loaded up on fighters,
you're	
going to lose. At the other end of the spectrum, if your opponent has  
loaded up on point defence, then the one or two squadrons of fighters  
carried by Fleet Book 1 dreadnoughts and superdreads will be useless.

Soap bubbles are the most extreme case than many (but not all, as I've	
been reminded!) FT players know about, so proposing my new rules as a  
solution gets people interested. But I should have put more stress on  
their general use, not so specific.

-- 
	 cheers,
	 Hugh Fisher