Re: Ship designs

----- Original Message -----
From: "MSN Renegade" <msnrenegade@cs.com>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 2:01 PM
Subject: RE: Ship designs

> I came to the conclusion that ADFC was either
> overpriced or overmass, but many of my experiments
> were with the earlier ADAF system from FT2. Given the
> way ADFC works and is priced, it only makes sense to
> put it on the largest ships possible.

This is more or less the way it's tended to go in my games.  As has been
previously discussed on the list, small ships mixed in with formations
of
capital ships tend to die quickly without being able to do a whole lot
of
good.  We use ADFCs very frequently (in fact, they're considered an
almost
necessary system for any fleet that doesn't use fighters of its own for
cover), but they're usually just integrated in to capital ships in order
to
protect their own formations.  Small ships with ADFCs that are escorting
larger ships without them are almost always going to be targeted by
enemy
vessels, probably before the fighters are sent to strike.

I've seen about two or three different types of small ships that are
truly
effective in fleet actions:

1.  Small ships equipped with cloaking devices and large quantities of
either needle beams, submunitions, or MKPs.  These ships are usually
sent to
try to get behind enemy fleets under cloak and strike quick, nasty blows
before they're inevitably destroyed whenever someone gets around the
sneezing on them.  Needle beams in enough numbers on such vessels are
usually able to inflict damage to enough key systems to make it
worthwhile,
while submunitions or MKPs usually can do decent softening up damage and
are
one-shot weapons anyway.  Of course, if you just don't permit cloaking
devices in your games, this won't work.

2.  Battlecruiser sized vessels that detach early from full blown "ships
of
the wall" (to use the Honor Harrington term), with enough speed to get
fairly quickly behind an enemy line and enough resilience that they can
survive long ranged fire while they typically swing out wide before
cutting
in behind them.  These are usually armed with needle beams similar to
the
previous example, and are sometimes even more effective than the
"cloaked
assassin" model due to their modest staying power.  This staying power
makes
the one-shot idea a bit less efficient under these circumstances.

3.  Swarms of small ships designed to simply overwhelm the enemy by
striking
in numbers such that enemy fire controls simply can't shoot back at
enough
of them at once to reduce their effectiveness.

The first two sorts have generally been pretty effective.  Small
squadrons
of cloaked needle beam escorts can usually find something good to shoot
at
when they reappear and chase down the enemy, and cloaking
MKP/submunition
bombers can do really sick amounts of damage without much warning.  (My
last
FT game with my wife saw a mass 1500 starbase get double-thresholded in
one
turn by a squadron of ten mass 34 "Martyr" class destroyers with 10 MKPs
and
4 scatterguns each, which simply came in under cloak and fired all their
weapons at point blank range all at once.)  Even if cloaking devices
aren't
allowed in your games, medium sized vessels that can take a few long
range
hits can still put needle beams in places where they're not wanted if
they've got a good speed advantage and a little staying power.

The swarm tactic, on the other hand, isn't terribly effective, in my
experience.  Small ships just die too fast and have their capabilities
reduced too quickly to be effective in this way, even when there are
more of
them than there are enemy FireCons.