Re: [FT] CPV vs. NPV

----- Original Message -----
From: "Oerjan Ohlson" <oerjan.ohlson@telia.com>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2003 10:00 AM
Subject: 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.

Yes, I agree on basically all of this.	Which is one major reason why I
was
suggesting that another fix for the size advantage would be to make the
maneuverability costs directly proportional to the size, as they were in
FT2
but not in FT2.5.  I realize that there's no physics-related reason why
this
has to be the case, but for game balance purposes I think it's probably
necessary.  I don't know if I'd say it's a house rule already here that
really big ships have to have fairly puny drives, but it does happen to
be
the case that most of our really big designs do in fact have a bit of
trouble with turning radius.

Is one of the proposals on the playtest list for solving this running
along
these lines?  If it isn't, it probably should be.  If PSB is needed to
justify it, figure that the technology to move larger ships gets more
expensive than the same technology to move smaller ones (which probably
would be more or less the case anyway).

While we're at it, the fact that FT2 restricted fighter carrying to
capital
ships also had a tendency to mitigate massed fighters, too, but I don't
know
how you'd mimic that in FT2.5 or FT3.

E
(aka Stilt Man)