Re: FTIII Rules Tryout

On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Tom Granvold wrote:

>     Just to play devil's avocate, there are cases where the Thr8
missile
> raiders make perfect sense.  While most Full Thrust games are one off
> battles, one could play a campaign where the cost of
repairing/replacing
> ships is significant.  Wouldn't it make sense to use cheaper missiles
> to do damage to the enemy, and run away to avoid damage to yourself?
> The only problem is that it makes for boring battles.  

Exactly. What makes sense and what makes a good game (for BOTH players) 
are not necessarily the same thing.

> Of the opponents
> challange is to come up with a counter startegy.

The problem is, in vanilla FTII there isn't one. I'll offer an analogy: 
You have Yamato and all the rest of the Japanese WWII surface fleet
except
carriers. I have the entire US carrier fleet (WWII or modern -- doesn't
really matter). 

What's your counterstrategy?

There isn't one. You die, it's just a matter of time. Just to score a
single hit on my ships you'd need incredible blind luck. Even an
extremely
accident-prone lumberjack can count the number of carriers sunk by
surface vessels with his fingers. 

The problem is heightened with the Thr8 missile boats -- the only things
they don't have a 100% defense against are AA batteries and surprise.
The
former is very expensive (more so if you want to pack enough of them to
kill a ship with one turn's worth of fire -- as you would need to) and
the
latter can only be achieved somewhat reliably with cloakers (and as they
are optional, I won't go into *their* logical campaign effects, played
as
written). 

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