Re: No longer ...

On Thu, 13 Aug 1998, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:

> In SFB, no. In Full Thrust, yes - because of the simultaneous movement
> and lack of hexes. There is no obvious place in which to interrupt the
FT
> movement in order to execute the under-way fire. Sure, you could move
all
> ships half-way, then fire some of them, then move them the rest, but
it
> would only push the problem away a bit, to those ships travelling at
> double speeds... and you get two movement phases, both of which take
as
> long time to execute as the single one we had before. Hex-based
movement
> is a *lot* faster to execute than measured movement in my experience -
it
> is the measuring which takes time.

In Sky Galleons of Mars, each ship moves in turn (playing cards are good
for initiative) and after each move *any* ship can fire (but one gun can
fire only once per turn). Yes, this is not entirely satisfactory either,
but it leans the other way, allowing shots that should have been
impossible thus increasing the level of carnage and reducing the number
of
inconclusive engagements.

Car Wars, which I used to play a lot, uses phased movement. You don't
need
hexes to move in discrete units. An inch or any other measure works just
as well.  This *does* slow down the game but could be used for those 1-2
ships per player, ultra-detail games. The *real* problem with this is
that
it only works with vanilla movement -- the way you move your ship in
vector movement does *not* represent the actual course it follows.

In Peter Pig's Hammering Iron ships lay down a track of hexes used to
determine whether broadside shots were possible. Ok, so ACW ironclads
only
move 1-3 units per turn, the number of hexes (or plot points or
whatever)
would make this cumbersome in FT (but it might look cool on the table).

Other possibilities include fudging range determination, e.g. if a
target
was clearly in range during movement, allow max range shots at it even
if
it ends movement out of range. Increases book keeping and requires
judgement calls.

To sum it up: Ofcourse increasing the detail level slows down the game,
but if the alternative is that the game abstractions fail to represent
what's "really" happening, you have to get your priorities in order and
decide which detriment is the lesser evil. 

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