Re: Points, was Re: grav

John Atkinson wrote:

>Is that necessarily true?  Under DSII rules, a
>vehicle's signature has no effect vs. artillery, which
>is what I generally use to kill off swarms of annoying
>Size 1 vehicles with GMS.

Which is why a force with a considerable number of size 1 vehicles would
do 
well to be backed up by it's OWN arty with CBR.  Theire's a fine line 
betweeen points being unbalanced and tactics being unsound.

>On a simillar note,
>ablative armor is tremedously useful in fighting
>HEL-using factions, but extra useless weight when
>fighting troops armed with HKPs.

Which is why you don't equip your vehicles with it if you know you're
not 
facing HEL's -- but if you are, the cost of Ablative is justified.  If 
you're not, and you use Ablative, that's not a case of the points sytem 
being unbalanced, it's a case of being a poor tactician.

GMSs are incredibly
>effective weapons--until you have to try to fight it
>out with infantry.

Which is why you equip your GMS vehicles with APFC's, APSW's, and even
their 
OWN infantry.

>My point in saying this is to say
>that any points cost is necessarily going to be
>unbalanced in certain situations.

Only if the points are SPENT in an unbalanced manner.

Too many variables
>to keep track of.  If you restrict your analysis to
>"how is it affected by direct fire weapons" then you
>could come up with a 100% accurate solution,

If that was the only basis of analysis for an entire force, or even an 
entire vehicle, true.  But each component system should be valued on a 
different set of criteria, and the vehicle as a whole should be based on
how 
well it combines those criteria.  That's why a unit with both armor AND 
stealth is obviously more survivable than either a high stealth/low
armor OR 
High armor/low stealth design. As for the force as a whole, how balanced
or 
unbalanced the points are towards a certain set of circumstances is
entirely 
dependent on the quality of the player/commander who assembles the
force.

>but once
>you introduce combined arms into the equation, you no
>longer have anything but rough guidelines.  Is a
>300-point grav tank going to be equal in value on the
>battlefield to 300 points of infantry?  The answer is
>simply "Depends on what you want to do."

Actually, a well-balanced combined arms force should lend itself better
to a 
well-balanced points system.  If I know my opponent will spend all his 
points on the same type of vehicle, with a fixed set of strengths and 
weaknesses, I will design a force that will avoid his strengths, exploit
his 
weaknesses, and slaughter him every time.  Again, this is not because
the 
point system is unbalanced in favor of the weapons *I* chose - it's
because 
my opponent falls short in the military thinking category.

Your own point about a 300-point grav tank and 300 points of infantry is
a 
perfect example - if your whole force consisted of 300-point grav tanks,
or 
all infantry, then certainly it would be easy to assume that the points
were 
unbalanced.  But if spent wisely on a good mixed force, it's going to be
a 
little more even a fight.  This has everything to do with the player,
not 
the points system.

"The Irish are the only race of people on Earth for which psychoanalysis
is 
of no use."

				 - S. Freud

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