Re: DS: Walkers

In article <3E446D9B.C343A9B6@blueyonder.co.uk>, David Brewer
<davidbrewer@blueyonder.co.uk> writes
>Symon Cook wrote:
>>
>> Many years ago (pre Clan) I read a very interesting series of
Battletech
>> design philosophy articles by a veteran player in a magazine. His
final
>> article covered his discovery that a well designed force of GEV could
>> take out an equivalent or 'superior' force of mechs EVERY time. He
>> apparently used to demonstrate this at clubs and cons. I was amazed
that
>> actually Battletech had got something plausible.
>
>I recall these. I don't recall the publication name but I think
>they were written by Glenn Wallbridge. For "design philosophy" I
>would substitute "power gaming" or "minimaxing".

Depends if you can defend the production of inferior designs I suppose.
Not being a Battletech player, I couldn't tell the difference between
rational optimized design and rules exploiting design.

>
>The GEV force exploited a rules bug regarding hit modifiers
>applied regarding shooter and target speed. The shooter is
>penalised according to whether his own speed is walk or run for
>that design (was it flank and cruise for vehicles? it's been a
>good few years), but penalised according to the absolute speed of
>the target. If a design is capable of a very high speed it becomes
>impossible to be targeted by any enemy but still it has a slight
>chance of hitting a slow target.
>
>This GEV force ("Iron Wolves", IIRC)

That's the one. I've still got the magazines somewhere.

> would "win" by inflicting a
>small amount of damage by throwing SRMs about and then running
>away to reload. Their enemy could plausibly push the hit modifiers
>to the point where the GEVs couldn't hit them either by skulking
>in heavy woods so the GEVs had to include a proportion of flamers
>(to burn them out), further diluting their rather wan firepower.
>
>Something like that anyway, it has been ten years, plus.
>

Is it really that long? (Sigh)

Cheers
-- 
Symon Cook (founder member of Camros)(The Campaign for Real Operating
Systems).
.....
"You fertility deities are worse than Marxists," he said. "You think
that's all 
that goes on between people."

Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. 1971.