Re: [GZG] Re: Full Thrust Playtest? organic tech

["john tailby" <John_Tailby@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I ran an organic tech fleet in one of our campaigns recently. Based on the 
B5 shadow vessels.

Mass 144
Hull    41
Power 40
Armour 10 (regen)
Firecon 3
Advanced sensors (the powerful ones)
2 pod launchers
1 drone wonb
4 stinger nodes providing doubled up all round coverage
4 spicules

This proved to be one of the most powerful vessels in the campaign.
The high power sensors means you get to deblip your opponent at long ranges 
and find out what kind of technology they have. You can then adapt your 
power allocations accordingly.
You don't need massed stinger nodes because you can put all your power into 
weapons in the early turns and dish out 5 beam dice to 48mu. Therea re not 
many human ships that can fire than many beam dice that far even if you make 
them yourselves.
If the enemy is a beam fleet with typically lots of beam 2 and some beam 3 
mounts you can use your superior mobility to stay out of their fron arc and 
maintain the range. In a running battle where the organic ship can keep the 
range at long they can then fire some / all their firepower out of their 
rear arc and still feep out of the front arc of a standard tech ship.
If you play on a small table with fixed boundaries that favours close in 
brawling style ships then this ability of the organic ships is lessened.

In this particular iteration of the campaign the other player that did very 
well was the other player using the organic tech.

After playing with the organic ships as they are written our group changed 
them so that you can only put 8 power through each stinger nodes and 
increased the cost of generators by 1 point each.

To highlight the difficulties in costing points values. Last week I played 
one of our campaign encounters. I am again using organic tech, after a 
break, as this lets me try out the new rules.

I had a mass 74 organic cruiser
I was facing a 500 point brawler style battleship ~13 mass. This ship was 
very powerful with ~12 gatling (pulsars but locked to close setting) 
batteries, loads of armour point defences etc.  and some AMT missiles. The 
weakness of this ship was that it was thrust 3. The cruiser stayed out of 
range (operating at a speed 15-20 Mu) while the other ship wandered about at 
speed 12 and then tried to turn and slow down once I got behind him.
Just to show it wasn't all one way I got to close once and lost all my 
armour and 1.5 rows of hull in one go.   The same ship fitted with twin 
particle arrays would have been much harder to beat It would have to have 
been done from further away to stay out of range and so the game would have 
been much slower.
The same battleship design would be very powerful at smashing defences or 
the like or at defending against fighter attacks but coul not cope with a 
more manouverable opponent.

Maybe the SV ships in the book are a fair reflection of the NPV because they 
are so inefficient in design, but the overall formula for their points value 
is wrong.

Vins comments could be taken as "I know when I am on to a good thing and I 
want to keep winning with ships that have an advantage in points". I am not 
sure whether this is the case or not.


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