Re: Range and arc effects on cost

Charles Stanley Taylor wrote:

>So, looking at it, as a general rule, if you multiply range by 'n'
>then you multiply MASS (and also COST) by the square on 'n' ?

Basically yes - at least n^2 gives the upper limit of what the weapon
is worth - which means that you probably want to cost it somewhat
higher than this to be on the safe side! <g> Note that it only applies
as long as you *only* change the size of the range bands and not the
damage inflicted in each band, or start adding more bands (eg. B2 and
B3 batteries have different numbers of range bands), or use sensor
rules to cap the maximum theoretical weapon ranges etc.

'Course, the long range of a weapon is only worth this much if you
actually *use* its range. If you play on a cramped table where
shorter-ranged weapons can pin you against the edge, or you park your
ship close to the enemy to use your other weapons, or something like
that - then you won't get the full value out of your long-ranged
weapon.

>Hmm.. so MASS is proportional to area covered, hang on! what about
>adding extra fire arcs, each arc increased the area covered by an
>amount equal to the original area covered - darn it, I though I had it
>sussed,  now I'm confused >:-?

This is where it starts getting interesting :-)

* If the locations and facings after movement were completely random
for all ships, a weapon's value would be linearly proportional to the
number of arcs it could fire into. However, the locations and facings
aren't random - they are fairly predictable, of course depending on the
movement system used, the ships' thrust ratings and the players' skill
levels - and so extra arcs have a diminishing return value. The more
maneuverable your ship is and the better you are at manuver it, the
less important it becomes to have wide fire arcs. In Vector you can
always rotate to point the fire arc of your choice towards where you
think the enemy will end up, even if you only have thrust-1.

* The value of extra arcs also depends on the weapon's range - it is
easier to keep a single-arc weapon trained on the target at long ranges
than at short ranges, whereas having a 6-arc field of fire pays off
better at point-blank range than at long range.

My rule of thumb - for Cinematic; I don't have one for Vector yet - is
that 1:3:6 arcs is worth 1:1.5:2 cost (or slightly more; the beam
batteries - B2 and up - are 1:1.5:2.25 in order to avoid having
fractional Mass ratings). 

Judging from the relative popularities of 1-, 3- and 6-arc weapons this
undervalues the 3-arc weapons and overvalues the 1- and 6-arc ones -
for beams at least; in the designs in my archive B2-3s occur about 5
times as often as B2-6s while  B3-3s are used almost 10 times as often
as B3-1s (or B3-4s, -5s and -6s taken together). However, if you look
at P-torps the 1-arc version is used almost exactly as often as the
3-arc one, and the P-torps have the same Mass progression for extra
arcs as the B3s... I have no idea why, though.

My playtest results gives a somewhat different picture. In my Cinematic
FB2 playtests (and a bunch of other battles since then as well), I kept
track of the number of shots each weapon fired (as well as how many
turns the weapon was intact when the ship fired, whether or not the
weapon had any target to shoot at - this latter is what I refer to as
"weapon-turn" below). The sample is only 22 battles which is too little
to draw any real conclusions, and most of them were played in my group
(the rest are various PBeMs I've lurked in and remembered to save all
posts from) which means that our gaming style biases the results, but
with these caveats I'll draw some conclusions:

Looking different numbers of arcs for weapons with identical range, we
found that:

* PC-6s (Pulser/C, 6-arc) and B1-6s fired (ie., had targets within both
range and arc) 1.4 times as often as PC-3s, and 8 (!) times as often as
PC-1s. 
* PM-6s and B2-6s fired 1.3 times as often as PM-3s and B2-3s, and 4
times as often as PM-1s
* PL-6s fired 1.4 times as often as PL-3s and B3-3s, and 2.3 times as
often as PL-1s and B3-1s. 

So the 1:1.5:2.25 scheme used for the beam weapons (Mass ratio between
6- and 3-arc weapons is 1.5) makes the 6-arc weapons slightly
overpriced compared to the 3-arc ones, while the 1:1.5:2 scheme (Mass
ratio 1:33 between 6 and 3 arcs) used for the Pulsers seems to make the
6-arcers slightly underpriced instead.

The extremely low shot/weapon-turn ratios for the PC-1s and PM-1s in
these battles is largely due to the fact that they weren't the main
armament - there weren't very many of them, so we usually didn't really
attempt to point them in the right direction since it wouldn't
significantly increase the firepower we could pour into the target
anyway.

When we used ships where significant percentages of the armament was
single-arc (ie., when playtesting the Kra'Vak and also when flying FB1
NAC ships), the results were markedly different. Here we can directly
compare K1-6s with the bigger, single-arc K-guns since they have the
same ranges, and also 3- and 1-arc P-torps; all of these have the same
range and hit probabilities. We found that:

* K1-6s got to fire only 1.13 times as often as the 1-arc K-guns
(compare this to the 8, 4 and 2.3 ratios between 6- and 1-arc
Pulsers!). The main reason for this was that when the 1-arc K-guns
weren't pointing at anything (during the turn-arounds between the
attack runs), the KV ships were usually out of range entirely so their
K1s couldn't fire either. 
Some of the other FB2 playtesters reported that K1-6s got to fire 2-3
times as often as the K#-1s; I believe that this was because they
fought on smaller tables ( => lower speeds so they didn't get out of K1
range between their attack runs), and probably also because they
weren't  used to flying ships with mostly single-arc weapons (some of
them complained about being "spoiled by using 3-arc weapons" <g>, and
they also seemed to get more and more use out of the single-arc K-guns
as they learned how to use the KV maneuverability to full effect).

* The deliberate attempts to aim the K-guns, coupled with Kra'Vak
maneuverability, meant that 1-arc K-guns got to fire about 1.4 times as
often as the (longer-ranged) PL-1s, *4* times as often as the (slightly
shorter-ranged) PM-1s, and almost exactly as often as PM-6s, PL-3s,
PT-3s and PT-1s. 

(The PT-1 values - mostly from NAC ships - are a bit misleading; while
it *seems* that they got to fire about as often as the K#-1s in spite
of the lower human maneuverability this is largely an effect of the
PT-1-armed ships being destroyed during their initial attack run...
very few PT-1s fired more than one shot before dying, and several
didn't even manage that much :-/)

All in all, the 1:1.5:2(-ish) scheme holds reasonably true in our
Cinematic games, as long as your ships aren't capable of making 3pt
turns or better (preferrably much better <g>). If they can turn this
sharply, they
don't benefit nearly as much from having wide-arc weapons (particularly
not all-arc ones).

Later,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

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