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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@xxxxxxxxx] 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. On 7/7/06, Allan
Goodall <agoodall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote: On 7/7/06, Hugh Fisher
<laranzu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote: |