Re: Points balance on K-guns vs Beams, part 2

John Atkinson wrote:

 >>>Are you saying the K'V are more or less balanced
 >>>in vector?
 >>
 >>The KV are considerably weaker in Vector than they
 >>are in Cinematic, yes [...]
 >
 >Hrmm. . . I dunno.  Seems to me that when Fleet Book 2
 >first came out, I was not the only one that felt the
 >K'V were extremely powerful, and even questioned the
 >balance thereof. Maybe my memory is faulty, but there
 >were a lot of battle reports which indicated the K'V
 >walked through standard designs pretty easily.

They can hold their own against *FB1-style* designs (including most of
your 
NRE designs) in Vector. During the first few months after FB2 was
published 
several players who didn't know how to fight the KV in Vector made some 
fundamental tactical mistakes leading to a series of quite spectacular 
human defeats; now that they've learned better anti-KV tactics the
honours 
are a lot more even.

However, FB1-style designs are in no way "standard designs", and
treating 
them as such is IMO badly misleading.

The FB1 designs were created for Cinematic movement, and in gaming
groups 
which use Cinematic movement they and designs similar to them are fairly

common; in this sense they can be thought of as "standard CINEMATIC
warships".

However, the FB1 designs were not designed for Vector movement, and are
in 
fact quite *poor* combattants in Vector - and so are any ships designed 
with similar wide-arc weapon layouts, including most of your NRE ships.

In those Vector-playing groups whose designs I've seen and who haven't 
consciously or unconsciously enforced an adherence to the FB1 wide-arced

design style the way you have with your NRE, the most common design
style 
by far is similar to your "KV hunters" - ie., low-to-moderate thrust 
ratings and armed with very heavy single-arc, long-range batteries
(usually 
a mix of B4s, B3s and P-torps) and only a few secondary wide-arc weapons

for use when the enemy finally manages to get close. (This is not a new 
development, BTW, nor a reaction to the FB2 Kra'Vak - I first saw ships
of 
this type in early 1999, ie. less than a year after FB1 was published
and 
before we had even begun work on FB2. I suspect that the only reason I 
didn't see them even earlier was that I didn't begin to study and record

what players did with the then-new FB1 ship design system until January 
1999 :-/ )

*This* style, not the FB1 one, is the closest you get to a "standard
VECTOR 
warship" style... and as you have found out, ships of this type are
quite 
good indeed at beating Kra'Vak in Vector. They're also quite good indeed
at 
beating any human ships designed for Cinematic, eg. the FB1 ships and
their 
NRE clones or derivatives <g> - but you don't seem to have  experienced 
this yet :-/

The root of the problem is that the basic "KV concept" is essentially to
be 
manoeuvrable enough to use single-arc weapons effectively, and in
Cinematic 
that pretty much requires Advanced drives (unless *all* your enemies use

thrust-2  standard drives) - and the vastly improved manoeuvrability you

get from those Advanced drives is worth the extra points they cost to 
install. Their K-guns are really only window dressing - the basic
concept 
would've worked just as well with P-torps instead, or even beams.

In Vector however, *anyone* can use single-arc weapons effectively no 
matter what drives they're using, and the extra cost for Advanced drives
is 
rather higher than the extra manoeuvrability they give is worth in
Vector - 
with the result that pretty much everyone who designs their own ships
for 
Vector *uses* single-arc weapons - but only the KV have to pay extra for

the Advanced drives.

(As far as I can tell from the designs I've seen used by various groups
all 
over the world, those who design their own FB1-style wide-arced ships
for 
use in Vector form a fairly small minority. Most other Vector groups I
know 
of which use wide-arc designs at all don't allow any home-grown ships at

all - they tend to use the designs in FB1 only, or *maybe* the FB1 ships

supplemented by Dean's (Star Ranger's) "FB Reinforcement" designs. The 
vector groups who do allow homegrown designs usually seem to gravitate 
towards the single-arc style quite fast, and reject the FB1-style wide 
firing arcs.)

So, well... I guess that one way to describe the problem is that the
human 
tech base described in FB1 is flexible enough to let you optimize your 
designs either for Cinematic or for Vector (but not for both at once,
since 
those different optimizations look very different from one another), 
whereas the FB2 Kra'Vak tech base essentially only allows you to build 
Cinematic ships with no way to re-optimize them for use in Vector.

 >>If your "KV hunters" attempt to move in *Cinematic*,
 >>they're dead meat to the Kra'Vak - too unmanoeuvrable to keep the KV
in
 >>their own (F) arcs, and also too unmanoeuvrable to stay out of the
*KV* (F)
 >>arcs for very long.
 >
 >OK, I'll buy that.  Sounds to me like K'V should be hell on wheels in 
Cinematic.

Not really. When fighting FB1-style human forces in Cinematic, they're
like 
a man with a rapier fighting a thug with a club - the rapier is a
precision 
weapon which can kill swiftly and cleanly if used well, but if the
wielder 
isn't careful when he attacks he'll get mashed to pulp by the club. Same

with the Kra'Vak; if they're not careful when they set up their attack
runs 
they can get crushed very fast by human close-range wide-arc beam fire.

 >They are still tough against your standard warships in Vector, just
not
 >overpowering.

Define "standard warships" - *after* you've read what I wrote about the 
subject above :-/

Yes, in Vector the KV (which are designed for Cinematic) are tough
against 
*FB1-style* warships (which are *also* designed for Cinematic, and which

are even *less* suitable for Vector movement than the KV ships are).

If the KV run into designs which can be considered "standard VECTOR 
warships", then they aren't tough at all. Of course, those "standard
VECTOR 
warships" also tend to make mincemeat out of any FB1-style wide-arced
human 
ships they meet in Vector... just like they'd be turned into mincemeat 
themselves, should they try to fight in Cinematic.

 >>If you play Vector, then the KV force can quite
 >>safely hang around at range 25-30 mu; at that range every K-gun in
the
fleet >>can hit the human ships, and the humans can only reply with a
small
fraction
 >>of their own firepower.
 >
 >I've heard of this but never seen it in practice.
 >Usually we end up closing because we begin on
 >converging vectors in scenario setup.

It depends quite a bit on the set-up, yes. The KV player needs to plan
for 
it from the very start of the battle... but if he does, it is quite
doable.

 >Hanging back only works if you've got more speed, and your opponent
 >doesn't mind.

Er... shouldn't that "and" be an "or"? Kra'Vak ships quite often have
more 
useable thrust than human ships (which sooner or later translates into
more 
speed), and if you have more useable thrust than your opponent he
usually 
can't do much about your keeping the range open even if he *does* mind
:-/

 >>If you play Cinematic on a small table, ie. one
 >>where you can't manoeuvre
 >>outside the enemy's weapon envelope, the Kra'Vak are
 >
 >This I've never done.  Always been floating.	Of
 >course, 90%+ of my opponents are old SFB players so
 >floating tables are no big deal to them.

I very much prefer large floating tables as well, but there are at least

some groups who don't. Competitions often don't do it either, due to
lack 
of suitably large tables and/or time restrictions.

For some strange reason, there's a very strong correlation between the 
groups which play on cramped non-floating tables and the groups who 
consider the FB2 Kra'Vak to be underpowered and the Phalon Pulser-C
tuning 
to be way overpowered <g>

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry