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Re: Salvo missile escalation

From: stiltman@t...
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2000 23:23:04 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: Salvo missile escalation

Corey Burger wrote:
> Yes, but I will take three thousand points of small ships and beat
your 
> three thousand point ship any day. Numbers, as with SML's and fighters
are
> big.

In my experience, that's pretty much completely wrong.	SMLs are a bit
less
effective against numbers of smaller ships (if only because you can
easily put
in way too many missiles on just a few of them and not touch the rest),
but
just about every other weapon in the game works better against smaller
ships
than large ones.  That's because smaller ships are going to have their
firepower degraded far faster than the larger one, because the damage it
takes
to kill a puny escort is a fraction of what it takes just to get a
threshold
roll on a giant supership.  That's completely setting aside the fact
that a
plasma hit is going to have its damage multiplied by the number of ships
it
hits; if it's hitting lots of smaller ships, it could eradicate the
whole lot,
whereas a larger ship only has to take that damage once.

All other things being equal, there are very few situations where I'd
prefer
to have lots of smaller ships carrying the same weapons load as a larger
ship
carrying that same payload in one package.  For a battleship it's often
a good
idea not to take it to the full extreme of just one huge ship (i.e. a
couple
or three slightly less huge ships is usually better than a single really
huge
one because they can cover one another's back arcs), but even then a few
big
ships will still usually squish lots of small ones if all other things
are
equal.
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