Re: [FT\DS2] Fleet and Army sizes for games

> At 01:09 AM 8/17/00 -0400, mary wrote:
> >It occurs to me that the only simple and balanced way to prevent this
> >problem is by excluding fighters from your campaign altogether.
 
> Actually, the way to balance this is to get rid of the screwy (IMO)
house
> rules that stiltman and his group plays with, which give an
overwhelming
> advantage to carrier/fighter based ships.

No, they don't.  Our rules cut both ways -- you don't get to spook the
fighters
for free, but you _can_ kill them more efficiently because we also don't
stop
counting kills when you're firing into a crowd at the first six dead.

Since my email yesterday, I've been going over some of the math in my
head.
The submunition bomb design I've generally settled on would probably be
a
mass 34 ship with a cloaking device, fragile hull, FTL, and MD 4 core
drive
with modular sockets to fit whatever I felt like adding on for a
particular
target.  Depending on the mission that the campaign required, I'd have a
relatively small stockpile of spare MKP's, submunitions, scatterguns,
fire
control modules, and sublight drive modules waiting to get fitted to
them
for a particular task.	For soap bubble carriers I'd probably stay with
MD 4,
and fit six scatterguns, four FCs, and eight submunitions to each
bombship.
That would be enough to fend off the fighter assault of three or four
soap
bubbles' loads and present a high likelihood of killing at least four
soap
bubbles per bombship, maybe as many as ten if the soap bubbles don't
scramble
fast enough and I get a spare turn to fire submunitions against a new
set
of four with scatterguns for backup.  This is just 48 points' worth of
ammo; those soap bubbles cost 63 points each at barebones payload. 
_Very_
cost-effective.

My bro-in-law used to use larger versions of these, which he termed
"Expendible
class escorts" as something of a half-joke to burn off extra NPV he had
in a
given game.  They'd fly up to my ships, fire off their submunitions to
no
great effect (they're nowhere near as efficient against ships with real
hulls
and armor), and then get reduced to their component atoms.

> [to stilt]
> No offense intended, Stilt, but while drastically changing the rules
to
> suit your group's playstyle is the fine & dandy
no-one-else-really-cares
> sort of thing to do, all of your arguments and points are really
presented
> in an apples and oranges format, and your designs and tactics need to
be
> totally reevaluated when you step outside of your immediate playgroup
and
> join other games that follow more of the "book" as written.

> I hope to see you up here at Dragonflight, but *don't* expect me or
others
> to play by your group's houserules. :-)

I'll be there.	The wife and I have already arranged for babysitting,
and my
bro-in-law lives in Seattle to begin with. :)

And... likewise no offense intended here... but *don't* expect our
playgroup
to be complete pushovers when we're there.  Our performance at
conventions
with people outside our group has not generally called our strategic
soundness
into question.	(That's putting it very humbly. :)
-- 
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
   http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
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