No longer Re: GenCon Review with a GZG Emphasis (part 3 of 4)

Mikko wrote:

> > Yes, but they'd involve taking advantage of rules. In RL (or what 
> > would pass for), you could fire as you passed. 
> 
> Which is exactly my point: The game's believability breaks down when
you
> encounter these "in real life this would be a really stupid thing to
do,
> but the rules let me get away with it and even benefit from it"
things.

> Let me offer an analogy.
> 
> It is technically possible to fly ships at any speed in FT. However, I
> claim that the game's playability starts to seriously break down when
> speeds exceed weapon ranges.
> 
> Likewise, you could technically play out the entire battle of Kursk
using
> Advanced Squad Leader. However, I don't think you can find a single
sane
> person thinking 200,000+ counters will not have impact on playability.
> Except maybe Örjan.

I take it that you consider me "sane", then :-) 

Although I *have* played most of the battles in ISW-4 (..."In Death
Ground" and its sequel for you non-Starfire players) in full scale -
several hundred capital ships per side, plus endless numbers of escorts
and fighters - I do think that size has some importance for playability
<g>

However, there are some things you can do when faced by (the threat of)
high-speed strikes:

1. For defence of fixed positions (ie, planets) assume that the planet
has longer-ranged sensors than any ship, or that there is a net of
sensor
platforms. Use these to guide your own fleet onto an intercepting vector
- but time lag etc can cause interesting problems. If you use the vector
movement, do a galilean transform of the velocities (ie, deduct the
largest possible common vector from the velocities of both fleets and
consider the relative velocities of the ships only). Preferrably, this
interception should be assumed to have been carried out prior to the
actual game <g>

2. For defence of a moving fleet, require that the enemy explain how
they
managed to pin-point the target. If they are the system defenders thoy
can, but if they are invaders - no chance.

The above solutions are what the SF authors I've read have come up with.
So far, they've worked for me on the table as well.

3. For the "formations passing each other at high speeds", well... it
depends on how fast the ships move. I consider the FT combat outcomes as
the result of fire over the entire turn, or at least a large part of it
-
which is, of course, an idealisation leading to a host of other
contradictions :-). If the ships move past one another too fast they
won't have a full turn of time, or whatever, in which to fire before
they
have passed each other by. For the low-speed equivalent this solution
breaks down, of course (eg, two ships with forward-arc Class-2
batteries,
starting at range 25 facing each other, and both with speed 13 - they
end
up 1 mu from each other but are unable to fire any weapon, in spite of
the fact that they have been both within range and arc for most of the
turn!). However, the only real solution to this problem - fire during
movement - causes IMO a (much) bigger reduction in playability than the
problem it was supposed to solve. Try fighting a large battle in SFB,
for
example (although SFB have a lot of other features that slow the game
down as well, of course).

Later,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@nacka.mail.telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry