Ahhh yes Missle sponges, let the admiral relying on Missle Sponges against someone with More Thrust missles and watch him move his command to a cutter as the big boys and cruisers go mision killed. At 54 plus 6 movement units away the launch cruisers are ready to take out the small boys. Missle sponges are old and obsolite today with smart cruise missle. Compare Cruise missles with MT Missles while Salvo missles are likened to short range dumb missles carried by lesser navies.
--- On Tue, 1/12/10, Indy <indy.kochte@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Indy <indy.kochte@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships
To: gzg-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2010, 11:34 AM
On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 10:00 PM, John Tailby <john_tailby@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Not really sure what you mean by banzi jammers and it depends on your rules about mixed and on table hyperspace assaults. We don't allow mixed on table and hyper assault games because it makes it too easy to just jump accross the table and do you might as well equip all ships with close range weapons if you can tactical jump.
Banzai Jammer was a termed coined years ago for small, usually nigh-worthlesss ships (scouts, corvettes, etc) to surround larger targetable ships to self-intercept salvo missiles. Given the current rules for salvos (attacking closest target, irregardless of targets in the attack envelope), sacrificing a 6- or 10-mass ship to several swarms of salvo missiles is highly cost-effective in saving the larger ship, which could, in turn, blast the snot out of the salvo missile firing ship.
If I understand Eric's paragraph correctly, I believe he was suggesting that while banzai jammers are easy to kill with anti-ship (i.e., beam) fire, having a bunch of them means not all may be killed off in one turn by direct-fire ships. So the easiest way to eliminate the horde of banzai jammers would be to send a similar horde of dinky ships into point-blank range and having them fire up their FTL drives, blowing all the tiny ships (including the banzai
jammers) to smithereens.
Mk
PS: amusing to see the number of replies in this thread and the subject line of the thread; I think this has become one of the larger/largest on-going threads we have had here in a long, long time
Sent: Tue, 12 January, 2010 2:58:27 PM
Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships
Yeah, I've been somewhat pondering what to do with this. On the one hand, I think it's not a bad idea to treat MT missiles sort of like plasma bolts for point defense fire, because if you treat them the same as individual salvo missiles then they get a little _too_ easy to shoot down and they'll have no effectiveness at all. At the same time, I think it's a good idea to let fighters shoot at them as well, which wasn't possible in More Thrust. We wound requiring each MT missile to use an individual fire control partly because of this. Area defense got a lot better in the fleet books, though, although we wound up mostly using salvoes in the old group.
Resupply for missile ships and carriers is a potential issue, but a lot of this depends on how easy you make it to resupply them. The decoy drones aren't going to work very long if the other side's even the slightest bit balanced or inventive, though. Even if there's way too many of them to ever reasonably shoot them all with conventional beam support, it's still so easy to just send a similar swarm of drones into the midst of the banzai jammers and FTL bomb the lot of them, even if you don't feel like actually arming them. Different variants of this can pretty much trash anything that tries to exploit the design rules with 1 hull point, really. Take a few scatterguns and ruin soap bubble carriers too, for instance.
There's really a lot of different things that can work in battles if you've got the logistics to support it, though, but you usually have to have at least a semi-credible Plan B for it to work. Good carriers and missile ships still usually need to keep it semi-honest with beams or K-guns at some point, because sometimes it takes a lot of work to get through point defense.
E
-----Original Message-----
From: John Tailby
Sent: Jan 11, 2010 11:37 AM
To: gzg-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships
Charles
Our gaming group dropped the penalty to PDS hitting the MT missiles a long time ago. A couple of players made fleets whose doctrine was Missiles, Beam 2 and PDS, very like a modern naval fleet... With the increased protection agaisnt PDS fire they were a very superior weapon system especially when compared to Salvo missile weapons.
Unfortunately massed missiles and fighter squadrons make for a rather boring game. The ships sit at opposite ends of the table and moves waves of counters at each other.
I agree that missile armed destroyers especially if equipped with stealth technology to protect against long range sniping are pretty effective strike ships
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