House rules (was re: FMA rules?)

> Uhm, are these for a selected crowd only, or could I partake of them
too?
> 
> I've just been fooling around with some FMA-type skirmish rules with
some
> friends, as we would like something for smaller actions. My intention
was to
> have edited in our post-playtest changes and posted them for the list
to
> comment, but haven't really had the energy.

Quick question from someone who is new to the list but is by no means
new to
the game (have played for about three or four years with my
brother-in-law
and other assorted recruits).  What are FMA-type skirmish rules?

[warning:  long rambling to follow]

Just to give folks an idea of how I usually play, these are the house
rules
we usually go by (in as much completeness as I can remember).  I don't
know
who else might even care about this, but this is the way we usually go. 
It
might be food for interesting discussion, on a way of playing the game,
but
one never knows...

1.  Each side gets 5000 points to work with to build a fleet, and we
pretty
much always use our own custom-built ships.  We're allowed any human
tech from
the first fleet book (or, before this came out, we used only the human
tech
from the FT/MT books).	Neither side knows what the other is going to
bring
to the floor until we actually set it up.

2.  Exception to the last sentence of rule 1:  if you're flying things
that
are clearly superships, the other side is allowed to know in advance
about
it and use that knowledge to respond in their own fleet organization,
unless
the supership is equipped with a cloaking device.

3.  Ships equipped with cloaking devices do not need to be visible at
first
sighting; however, at least one ship on each side must be visible.  The
cloaked
ships are allowed to "fudge" the "double-edged sword" nature of the
cloaking
devices with the initial movement orders; however, all cloaked ships
must
write their move orders for all turns, including when they decloak, at
the
moment they cloak (or, if they start the game cloaked, at the beginning
of
the game).

4.  Cloaking devices and missile magazines may not be targetted by
needle
beams, as they are considered internal systems.  They have to roll for
these
things on thresholds but they have no external components that can be
targetted to knock them out.  (The original game-oriented reason for
this was
that cloak-capable ships take such a tradeoff to equip themselves with
the
things in the first place that it would be rather "cheap" for the
opponent
to be allowed to just needle the things out and cripple them so badly by
destroying such a costly system.)

5.  Nova cannons and wave guns do _not_ affect missiles, fighters, and
cloaked
ships in our games.  Our technobabble rationale for this is that a
giant,
hulking battleship wielding a fixed-emplacement gun the size of Tokyo
simply
isn't going to be able to aim it effectively at darting gnat-like
fighters
or ships that it can't see.  The physics assumption is that the fighters
and
cloaked ships simply can fly over or under the blast without that much
trouble.
The game-oriented rationale was that this made nova cannons and wave
guns too
powerful (in the case of fighters/missiles) and made for too much
annoying
calculation in the case of having to pull cloaked ships onto the board
to see
whether or not they got hit or not.

6.  Ships may be armed with wave guns and can fire as many as they like,
but
they're only allowed to _charge_ one at a time.

7.  Needle weaponry may not target drives unless they are behind the
enemy
ship, and may not target "super guns" unless they are in front of the
enemy
ship.  The rationale behind this one should be obvious:  super guns and
drives
all are considered to involve a hole in one side of the ship and not the
other,
so you can't hit anything critical that will knock the thing out when
you're
on the wrong side of the vessel from the hole.	e.g. if you are, for
whatever
reason, on the OPPOSITE side of the Death Star from the superlaser,
you're not
going to take out the superlaser with a needle beam from that direction.
However [tongue-in-cheek Hitchhikers' Guidish babble warning] there is
some
speculation amongst physicists as to whether the sheer magnitude of the
Death Star construction projects actually created a warp in the physics
of
visible light.	To wit, no matter WHAT angle you looked at the stations
from,
you ALWAYS saw the superlaser, even though there's only one of them on
the
station.  Thus, the theory must be raised that the Death Star itself
must
somehow represent a warp in photonic physics that assures that this is
the
case.  Surely, no counterexample to this theory has been raised, because
not
a single sighting of either Death Star was ever reported in which the
superlaser was not visible.  Think about it... have YOU ever seen a
Death
Star where it wasn't?  :)  So, in the end, the Death Star might not be a
good
example.  :)

8.  It isn't clarified in the main books well as to whether fighters can
fire
upon one another outside of a dogfight context.  We allow them to.

9.  Fighter launch and recovery operations have been a bit tweaked under
our
rules.	In the FT/MT lineage we considered anything that had more
offensive
weaponry mass than fighter mass to be a dreadnought, anything with the
converse
situation was a carrier.  However, since superships could potentially
have
enough fighters that it would take them all day to launch them, we
scaled up
the amount of fighters allowed to be launched and recovered.  Thus,
under FT/MT
we allowed any ships to launch 1 or 2 fighters per turn per 100 mass,
rounded
down, and recover 1 per turn per 100 mass, rounded down.  Thus, normal
sized
dreadnoughts could launch and recover 1, carriers launch 2 and recover
1.
Dreadnoughts from mass 101-200 could launch and recover 2, carriers 4
and 2,
and so on.  In the fleet book the scaling got a bit uglier, so we just
went
to a simple "you can launch and recover a third of your fighters,
rounded up
to the nearest full group, regardless of your mass or number of
fighters."
This wound up allowing carriers of up to six fighters to launch 2 as
long as
they carried more than 3, and anything that carried three or less
fighters
could only launch 1.  And it also allows us to scale it up easier for
those
ships that might carry a dozen or more fighter bays.  (Our games can
involve
fighter numbers well into the fourties.)

10.  Cloaking and decloaking is considered part of movement.  Thus,
missiles
launched at a ship that cloaks that turn will always miss, because the
missiles
are launched at something they will no longer be able to detect by the
time
they reach their target (movement happens between missile firing and
missile
attack).  A cloaked ship is effectively untargetable and invulnerable
while
cloaked; it can fire in the turn it decloaks (aside from missiles, since
as
mentioned above, decloaking happens after missile firing), may not be
fired
at in the turn it cloaks.

11.  Reflex fields don't work against missiles and torpedoes any more
than
screens do.  (For this reason, they're not often used except on the
occasional
ship that is largely unarmed with ship-to-ship weaponry.)  They do work
in
conjunction with screens; the screens of whatever ship gets hit with the
beam
fire will take effect.	(i.e. you can't cheat and use a reflex field
with
no screens behind it and thereby damage a ship that has level 2's up any
more than another identical ship would damage the screened vessel with
the
same die rolls.)

I realize that a lot of this might be considered a radical departure
from how
the game's played elsewhere, but it's worked quite well for us.  I guess
this
is what happens when we play the game for a long time amongst ourselves
without
subscribing to an on-line mailing list like this one and answer all the
wild
questions of game balance that can come up whenever you mix all the
different
systems of different genres.

We've had a number of different tactics.  Ships armed with a mix of
pulse
torpedos and short-range beams (needle or class 1) are a typical
battleship
archetype of whatever size.  Cloaking devices are relatively rare,
because
they're expensive enough that you usually have to exploit some form of
mismatch or over-anticipation in the opposition in order to win with
them.
(I've caught my brother-in-law with a number of "gotchas" games when he
over-anticipates my more typical fighter-oriented tactics and I suddenly
throw a phalanx of "Warbirds" at him just to throw him for a loop.) 
Missiles
haven't been used a whole lot, partially because we sort of neutered
them in
the FT/MT days and haven't gotten used to them as much again now that
the
salvoes are present (we put in a to-hit rule based on range, and gave
massive
penalties if the target ships were under ECM effect, because we quickly
realized that the bare MT missile rules would quickly reduce the game to
a "nuclear exchange" if they weren't changed fairly drastically).  OTOH,
speed and fighter screens tend to be good all-around defenses against
them
so we don't tend to overload on them much.  (Though the one time I did
so, it
was effective enough that I've started rethinking a few things lately.)

Anyway... there's my ramble for the day.  Might be good for a discussion
or
two.

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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
   http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
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