Re: Torpedoes

On Fri, 9 Aug 1996, JAMES BUTLER wrote:

>	  It's a definite problem. One of my group's players (for a
quick
> equal point game) put together a capital ship with 14 (!) A-bats and a
> screen generator. That's it. Now if you think that's bad--wait for
it--he
> had no point defense in his entire fleet!! The battle was a four way
free
> for all and one player had a ton of missiles on his ships but he chose
to
> use them against a player whose fleet was closer to his. The other two
> players had neither fighters nor missiles to exploit his fleet's
weakness.
> Now personally, I think building a fleet with no point defense and
cramming
> the hulls with A-bats is so bad as to nearly be obscene but there's
nothing
> in the rules to prevent it. 

> James

Things tend to balance out if you pit two rules lawyers together. 
Similar
to the above case, there is "nothing in the rules" about making a
special
hull carrier that is Mass 12, loading a single fighter bay and throwing
dozens of micro carriers into battle.  This was done once in our group
with both the fighters and carriers attacking as kamikaze ships (i.e.
the
fighters didn't care about endurance and attacked at every opportunity
and
the carriers attempted to ram at every opportunity.) After this we
instituted flak ships to make it more diffifult for fighter swarms and
tacked on VP costs for fighters lost as well as carriers. 
	Of course the next time we saw a swarm of Needle beam armed
ships. 
A few well placed Nova cannon shot eliminated or diverted the swarm long
enough for A batteries to eliminate a significant number of the swarm. 
If
this swarm was applied to the above 14 A-battery ship, I would place the
bets on the swarm since only 3 ships per turn could be killed by the
large
ship and the swarm only needs three fire control hits to knock out the
larger ship.  
	The only good way to fight a swarm is to have multiple fire
platforms with sufficient firepower to knock down 1-2 of the swarm each
turn.  This forces players to spread out their firepower in designing
ships, that is until someone generates a supership capable of knocking
out
1-2 of the medium sized ships per turn. Then you enter the standard
cycle
of various tactics being rotated endlessly to take advantage of a
deficiency of another tactic.  At this point they either figure out that
it's a vicious circle and make more reasonable ships or stop playing
because they figure the game is pointless when played with swarms. 

--Binhan Lin