Re: Kinetic Shields

--- Oerjan Ohlson <oerjan.ohlson@telia.com> wrote:
...
> 
> No, it isn't an exaggeration. The reason the beams
> aren't useless in spite 
> of the existance of screens is that the
> screen-skipping weapons are about 
> as powerful against unscreened ships as beams are
> against ships with 
> level-1 screens. If all ships always had level-*2*
> screens, then beams 
> would indeed be useless...
> 

The word "useless" to me implies that they do no
damage. Clearly that is not the case. When a weapon
is vulnerable to a defense, it is "worth less"
perhaps but it still causes damage. Lots of my
ships have no trouble getting destroyed despite
the fact that they have level 2 screens. And this
is against ships with beams.

> >Tell you what, you take such a screen and I'll
> >sit outside with 30 pulse torpedoes and we'll
> >see how it goes ;-).
> 
> If the shields degrade beams and P-torps equally and
> we both take them, it 
> is quite easy to predict the outcome: my beams...

No no, since p torps would be "useless" in this
context, you don't get any weapons! After all what
do you have to fear from ships armed with a useless
weapon?

Now with tongue out of cheek, I'd like to suggest
that there are already things like this in the game.
Consider the dilemma of a Kra'vak player up against
a human ship with no shields and very little armor
who has a main weapon consisting of beams. His
weapons skip armor and shields, but there are none
to skip. He is on the other hand vulnerable to beams.

He is somewhat disadvantaged in that situation, but
those k gun hits STILL hurt and the kra'vak can
still win. There is no such thing as perfect balance.
If you introduce such a system there will be 
combinations which turn out to have unbalancing
characteristics, but it seems to me that you could
easily come up with a number that is balanced most
of the time, which is how the systems in the game
are balanced now.

...
> It was possible to balance screens against beams and
> P-torps because they 
> were designed at the same time. It was possible to
> fit the K-guns into the 
> scheme because they are very similar to the P-torps,
> and Pulsers because 
> they are essentially beams.
> 

I would like to point out that K guns have very
different behavior than ptorps. They do damage
differently, can double (where ptorps can't) and
punch through armor a lot more effectively than
ptorps do. I for one would rather take an average
of 3.5 points, half to armor than a K5 hit that
doubles 1 point to armor and 9 points to hull.
Ask the Phalon players if they think pulse torpedoes
are equivalent to kguns. Maybe you can make a
mathematical argument that the expected damage from
k guns is the same as pulse torpedoes, I don't know,
but I know they feel very different in play.

Even so, you can come up with a cost that balances
the fight most of the time. If I look at the 10
or so battles I've seen with the kra'vak, they seem
to win about as often as they lose. There's no
obvious balance problem.

We are talking about systems for Fleet Book III
(essentially FT3) here. If Jon decided to add
such a system, and if he believed as you do that
it has fundamental balance problems with other
weapons (something that I don't believe), it would
be possible to integrate it into the costs for those
weapons with the new version of the ship construction
rules. Anything taken to extremes can be unbalancing,
so you'd probably want to limit the shield level just
as the screen level was limited.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail - only $35 
a year!  http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/