RE: Size Class Escalation -- How high in Mass?

David Griffin wrote:

> > *Are* the ships in the Fleet Books already balanced
> > wrt size?
> >
> > No. Not really. Large FT/FB ships have several
> > advantages over small ones
> > which aren't reflected in the points/design system,

[snip]

>Ok, I can see that. There are probably a *few*
>counterexamples like catastrophically bad rolls
>on the first threshhold for your one and only ship
>totally eliminating your combat power rather than
>just reducing it by 1/3 or 1/2, but ok.

The first threshold usually only reduces the combat power by 1/6... yes,
a 
single big ship can take a catastrophic threshold check early on (having
a 
Yu'Kas lose all five of its FCSs on the first threshold, for example -
been 
there, done that), but smaller ships with fewer critical systems 
(particularly FCSs) and DCPs are considerably more likely to be 
mission-killed early on than the big ship is.

>So, if the point costs are supposed to balance the
>sides in a battle, is the current point cost wrong?

For one-off battles they are wrong, yes. For campaigns they seem to work
OK.

>If so, why?

Several reasons. The main one was that most of the test fleets were
mixed, 
so the problem didn't show its real size during the initial FB1 testing 
(IIRC it didn't turn up at all). Another is that the formulae necessary
to 
get more accurate points values are both more complicated for the 
mathematically challenged and also counter-intuitive - see eg. your own 
arguments that twice the mass should only cost twice the money to build 
(which is exactly what the FB design system does). (The problem is of 
course that intuition about real-world construction costs isn't
necessarily 
relevant for combat power comparisons :-/ )

>When the fleet book was being written
>was it envisioned that all fleets would be composed
>of all different classes, or was it envisioned that
>the battles would be typically fought by similar
>sizes of ships on both sides? SDN's vs. SDN's --
>Cruisers vs. cruisers, destroyers vs. destroyers?

It was envisioned that fleets be mixed-size - that is, it was envisioned

that BOTH sides consist of mixes of all sizes of ships. In this case the

problem doesn't appear, since both sides have both large-ship advantages

and small-ship penalties in roughly the same proportions and the 
(dis)advantages of the two sides more or less cancel one another.

If however one side's fleet consists of a single or a few very large 
ship(s) while the other side is mixed-size or consists of smaller ships 
only, then the large-ship fleet only has big-ship advantages but no 
small-ship penalties while the other fleet has fewer or no large-ship 
advantages and significant small-ship penalties - and this gives the 
big-ship fleet a significant overall advantage. This case wasn't tested 
enough during the FB1 playtesting, so we didn't realise just how big a 
problem it could be.

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

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