Re: DS: Walkers

--- John Atkinson <johnmatkinson@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> --- Brian Bilderback <greywanderer987@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > And while I felt they favored necha TOO heavily,
> > they
> 
> Players favored mecha too heavily.  

The rules did to a certain extent too.	certain rules
about how damage is resolved, for instance, made it
easier to kill a vehicle if you hit it than to kill a
mech if you hit it.

Last time I
> played
> Battletech my opponent conceeded 2 games in a row in
> the deployment phase, and lost the third one badly. 
> BTech vehicles, especially GEVs, are fraggin' nasty
> if
> designed and used correctly.

Imagine how much nastier if the above mentioned
restrictions had not been in place.
 
> My favorite was a personal design--50 tons, 1 gauss
> rifle, couple tons of ammo, 6/9 movement (I think,
> it's been a long time) and the rest in armor.  

Elegant.

> There's a fine line to walk here.  I enjoy designing
> vehicles.  Even more do I enjoy working out the
> interrelations between various vehicle designs,
> where
> vehicles fit on the MTOE, what their battlefield
> role
> is, and what doctrine they would need.

As do I, though I suspect you're much better at it
than I (given our different levels of real life and
gaming experience, that is to be expected).

> If you make the rules so fuzzy that bad design
> choices
> aren't penalized then it takes away a lot of the fun
> for me.  

Agreed.  I'm just saying there should be ways of
preventing walkers from being an automatic bad design
choice just by merit of being a walker.  Give it
advantages in certain situations, and disadvantages in
others, so that it's merit as a design choice is as
dependent on the situation and other considerations as
it is for any other vehicle type.  For instance, if
you give walkers slower actual MP's, but make certain
terrains like mountains, forests, or cities easier for
them to traverse, then things get more interesting: 
Open plains, I'm going to run GEV or Grav before I'll
take a walker.	Fighting on the Olympic peninsula of
Washington?  Walkers backed by VTOL.  *shrug* just a
possible variation on the theme.  Tomb and I had a
talk about this, and how a smart army's going to have
several different types of vehicles up it's sleeve -
even the highest tech force around won't run pure
grav.

I realize this approach occasionally
> results
> in fights being won before a single dice is rolled,
> but then again didn't Sun Tzu say the highest
> achievement of skill is to win without fighting?

He did indeed.

=====
Qui me amat, amet et canem meum.

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