Re: Tomb's Rating System

> Unfortunately, everyone has overinflated opinions of
> their own favorite picks, and deprecatory opinions of
> whatever faction they don't favor.

a) not necessarily--IF is one of "my" countries and IMO there's no way
that they're as good as, say, FSE.
Yes, I define the AE Imperials as being top notch, but I throw in a
couple of important exceptions ("but there aren't many of them" and
"only in their specific environment").

b) if we poll and take the averages, we should get a reasonable view.
Now, this isn't always a good thing, because it's more interesting to
have a wide variety of extremes (white, red, blue) instead of a few
near-identical armies (white, offwhite, eggshell).  However, it should
avoid some of the "UK and Canada take over US? China and Russia merge?
No way!" disbelief.

What we really ought to do is take a few extremes and then make up a
fresh nationality to go along with it.	Does anyone aside from me
know, without looking it up, what ethnic groups went into making the
AE?  If not, then when I say that AE militia tend to be ineffective,
no one gets stressed about it.	And it's more creative than the plague
of Celts-in-Space.

For instance, picking on Beth just because I haven't done that for a
while and I'm sure she's getting paranoid--if I were doing the IAS, I
might toss out something like this:

60% QD4, 35%QD6, 5%QD8
80% LDR1, 20% LDR2
Personal weapons are FP3 d12.  Squads tend to be fairly large, say 10
guys each--even though that's inefficient use of firepower, it's
better for morale.  Support weapons are d12/d10* but on a double1 are
out of order--"perfected in the laboratory, needed a little more field
testing."   Each platoon has a trooper with a GMS/P-sized missile
launcher which does damage like GMS/L, again double 1's means
something's screwed up.  Troops are in d6 armor with chameleon
surface, upshift defense die vs spotting and vs shooting (but do not
upshift armor die); sensors are d8.  They have 2 electronic warfare
techs per platoon.   This army has more leaders than usual, but
attempts at command reactivations are treated a 1 die type worse