Re: Wave, Nova, j-torps ... uberweapon imbalance?

At 05:54 PM 7/17/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Okay,	uberweapons like WaveGuns seem neat.  However, have you ever had
a
well
>balanced, nasty-designed, fearsome force to be reconned with, fleet ...
set it
>up ... and someone Waves, Novas or puts you between a pair of j-torps?

J-torps??

>Big nasty weapons seem to take-away the feeling of fleet manuevering,
missile
>chasing and the like.	Its no longer mano-a-mano, ship-to-ship, but
just a
big
>energy flush that washes away anything in its path.

The main effect I've seen from waveguns is forcing more manuevering. 
The
first shot seems to catch them off gaurd, then the next shots don't do
alot.  I seem to use waveguns as an anti-missile defense (offense?)

>Anyone else out there thinking the same way?
>I would like to see it "cost" more to use these things.  How about a
>percentage of the wave or nova blast washes back over the owner? 
J-Torps can
>bounce back?  Each time you fire a "biggie" roll Threshold on all
systems to
>see if using the big weapon fries any of the ship's systems?

I think that the penalties that are in the rules are really good.  First
time I used a Nova Cannon, I got one shot off.	My opponent just blasted
at
the ship and got a threshold level, which of course the only weapon lost
was the Nova Cannon.  With waveguns, it seems that the second or third
charging does more damage to the wavegun ship than any enemy (it usually
takes that many turns before threshold levels start blowing them up).
		 +++++++++++++++
    +------------+	       +----------------+
   +		 Eric Fialkowski	       +
  +    http://netnow.micron.net/~ericski      +
 +					     +
+----------------+	       +------------+
		 +++++++++++++++