Re: [FT] CPV vs. NPV

A late reply to some of the posts in this thread:

To Stiltman: Yes, if your ships are more manoeuvrable than the enemy
ships 
you can use this to gain an advantage; similarly a good weapon mix
usually 
gives you an edge over opponents with a worse weapon mix. In both of the

examples you described, as well as in the KV-vs-DPR battle I fought and 
reported, the smaller ships were individually far more manoeuvrable than

the large ship and in at least two of the battles also had weapon mixes 
well suited to defeat it.

Unfortunately this doesn't show that the ship size has no impact on the 
game balance. All it shows is that being more manoeuvrable or having a
well 
thought-out armament can be provide even larger advantages to a good
player 
- but unlike the inherent large-ship advantages, the manoeuvrability and

armament advantages are not tied to one specific size range. Nothing 
prevents the large ship from being as manoeuvrable or having as
effective 
an armament as the small ones... or, for that matter, from being *more* 
manoeuvrable and having a *better* weapon mix than the small ones.

In order to see the game balance effects of the large-ship advantage
alone 
(ie., without getting them mixed up with manoeuvrability or armaments 
advantages), you need to pit the large ship against small ships which
are 
about as manoeuvrable and which use roughly the same weapon mix as
itself. 
This was very much NOT the case in the above-mentioned examples :-/

(FWIW I'm another member of this list who has played FT for several
years 
(since 1993); and while I have used FB designs the vast majority of my 
games have used custom designs only :-/)

***

To Hugh Fisher:

 >I never claimed that points systems were intended to achieve
 >an equal chance of winning.

No, *I* made that claim.

(Well, not so much a claim as a *statement* - I helped writing the FB1 
points system, so I know reasonably well what it was intended to do...
and 
I also know that it doesn't do it. It is certainly an improvement over
the 
original FT2 system, but it is still flawed. )

 >I'm arguing that if you rated historical warships by a points system 
similar to
 >Full Thrust then their combat effectiveness, in particular that of big
 >ships vs small ships, would work out roughly the way it does
 >in Full Thrust.

And I am arguing that such a rating would be quite useless, because it 
won't give you any real information about how the various ships would 
perform in combat.

The combat effectiveness should not be a *function* of some abstract
rating 
the way you suggest; instead it should be what *determines* the rating 
(ie., the rating should be a function - a *linear* function - of the
combat 
effectiveness). If that is not possible, the formula for calculating the

rating should at least approximate the combat effectiveness as closely
as 
possible. Neither of these is the case in the current FB ship design
rules.

The monetary costs given for the FB1 are pure background fluff, with no 
relevance for the game. All they mean is that Jon was too too short on
time 
to come up with different numbers for the background fluff :-/ If, which
I 
hope, the CPVs are introduced either in FT3 or in FB3 (whichever comes 
first), then these "fluff" costs will remain at their old values - ie., 
disconnected from the points values.

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