Retrograde gimmickry

> Stilt:
> > *shrugs*  We just don't over-design things so that they can't 
> > deal with a broad variety of situations.
 
> I disagree that a Beam-6 fleet is more overdesigned than a 41-45
fighter
> group dreadplanet. Each _is_ overdesigned, and each needs to be
tweaked to
> deal with different types of threats.

Well, here's the problem.  (And the rest of the email I'm responding to
sort
of goes around this same circle, so....)  It sort of goes for just about
every sort of retrograde keepaway game from hell.

The purpose of a starfleet of any sort of starfaring power is to keep
your
enemies from going places where you don't want them.  The reasons for
this
aren't too difficult to figure out.  Oerjan touched on it a bit, but I'm
not sure he quite got the point across, so I'll state it a bit more
explicitly.
The general point is that science fiction is rife with examples of what
happens when a starship is given some sort of free rein to hammer away
at
a planet that can't run away from it, regardless of how slow it is.

In "Independence Day", a force of about 40-50 orbital interface craft
were
capable of destroying most of human civilization inside twenty four
hours.
In "Star Trek", a photon torpedo has enough firepower to induce tectonic
upheaval and a single Borg cube can assimilate an entire planet's
population
in fairly short order.	In "Battlestar Galactica", the Twelve Colonies
of Man
were annihilated by the Cylons when their ships just _once_ got caught
out of
position to prevent the Cylons' base ships from mounting a swift
blitzkrieg.
In "Babylon 5", giving either the Vorlons or the Shadows a few hours to
work with when they really meant business resulted in an entire planet
being
destroyed.  In "Star Wars", this time frame for the same result got
scaled
down to the few minutes it took the Death Star to get off a single clean
shot.

A starfaring power that does _not_ want this to happen to them has to be
able to put ships between the enemy and their planets that can hold the
line
to make sure that it doesn't.  If they're dedicating much of their
resources
to what amount to "skirmish forces" that are going to be good for little
but
flying away from an enemy in deep space and slinging insults at them,
they've
lost sight of this simple goal.  An enemy with slower ships with greater
short-range firepower is not truly being stopped by speed and range. 
The
skirmishers need all day to do significant damage to the enemy at the
range
they need to maximize their effectiveness; the planets they'd be charged
with
defending won't have that long to live.

_That_ is why I would not give a lot of respect to the broad
effectiveness
of a retrograde keepaway force and be more inclined to consider it
"gimmickry"
than a dreadplanet overloaded with fighters.  In a serious war effort,
the
effectiveness of the keepaway forces will be marginal.	The dreadplanet
can
let them brag about being able to drive it off in open space all they
like;
it'll just head straight to the enemy homeworlds and reduce them to
their
component atoms.  A few short bursts of high-focus plasma will do that
rather
nicely; the dreadplanet can happily ignore the comparatively light
breeze of
long-range beams it takes in return.  Then the dreadplanet will simply
leave
under FTL again, and if the enemy wants to claim bragging rights for
holding
the empty space that remains where the homeworld was blown away, I think
the
dreadplanet will happily let them.

IMHO, show me a game where keepaway tactics are considered sound, and
I'll
show you a game that has just flat out lost sight of what an
interstellar
war is _really_ about.	And if you need to remind a player who abuses
them,
give him a few more stationary scenarios where he has to protect
something
that isn't as mobile as his ships are.	That's what any competent enemy
is
going to do to a fleet relying on skirmishers anyway, and if your games
aren't reflecting that, you need to change the nature of the game to do
so.
Sure, the skirmisher's going to probably not agree to play in that
scenario.
And in doing so, they're pretty bluntly admitting that no interstellar
nation
in their right mind would fight a war like that, either... which says to
me
that the retrograde keepaway tactics simply have no sound place in the
game.
If it wouldn't be useful in a real situation, it shouldn't be useful in
the
game.  (To be fair to Jon, though:  In this case, "the game" refers to
the
way a given scenario is set up rather than any inherent flaw in the
actual
Full Thrust rules design.)

Sure, it worked for the Viet Cong.  But the Viet Cong didn't have any
easily-
identified, stationary targets that they needed to keep.  A starfaring
power
doesn't have that luxury.  (Over-)Using one particular sort of weapon is
a
strategic decision; if it can still inflict serious amounts of damage if
it
isn't kept away from an enemy planet, I'd call it a valid war strategy. 
Using
a strategy that is _only_ useful when you don't have anything important
and
stationary to protect is not.  And regardless of how you consider the
merits
of a fixed-versus-floating edge argument, SOMEWHERE out there is an
important
and stationary target that you're going to need to protect in an
interstellar
war.  If you can't protect it, you're going to lose the war regardless
of
what you can do out in the open.
-- 
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
   http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
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