Re: T8 B5 BC was Re: Classed Weapons

Jared Hilal wrote:

 >>I could have done so - if I had realized at the time that these were
 >>the ONLY set-ups your group uses, rather than some EXAMPLES of the
many 
types
 >>of set-ups you use.
 >
 >You are correct that they are not the ONLY set-ups, but as I said at
 >the time, they are the vast majority (by which I meant 80% or more).

That was indeed the impression I got initially. What made me start
thinking 
that they were the ONLY set-ups you use was when I speculated in how
you'd 
set up a T8B5 pursuit battle (which judging from your earlier posts
would 
be  very much a *non*-standard battle for your group) and you retorted

 >Actually, I explained our standard set-ups in the snipped section
right 
above the quoted >section about scenario objectives.

The reason I speculated in set-ups different from your standard ones is 
that I know (from experience with playing on large tables) that none of 
your standard set-ups was very appropriate for this particular battle in

terms of larger-scale pre-game manoeuvres. Since the T8B5 has a massive 
range advantage and at least thrust parity (your other recent post 
described T8 escorts, but back then it still sounded as if the expected 
opposition was T6 or slower which would've given it a 2-pt thrust
advantage 
instead) the shorter-range force has no way of forcing it into any of
your 
standard set-ups, and the T8B5 itself has absolutely no reason to 
voluntarily enter any of those standard set-ups; therefore the only way 
your standard set-ups can occur at all in this particular battle is if
the 
T8B5 commander screws up in a major way even before the shooting has
started.

Although games set up on the assumption that one side's commander has 
already screwed up and now needs to save whatever he can are often very
fun 
to play, I don't consider them to be appropriate for assessing how 
effective a design concept is under normal conditions, ie. when the 
commander does *not* screw up :-/ (OK, for some space navies screwing up

*is* the normal condition, but those navies usually don't last very
long...)

Because of this, your retort about already having described your
*standard* 
set-ups made it seem very much as if you hadn't considered how and why
the 
opposing forces got into the set-up positions in the first place. If you

had considered this already, you would already have realized that the 
standard set-ups you had described were inappropriate for this *non*- 
standard battle - and you would also have understood why I automatically

assumed that you wouldn't use any of your standard set-ups but instead
to 
game it out, but instead look for a more appropriate (albeit
non-standard) 
set-up.

 >>When I finally did begin to suspect that the set-ups you had listed
 >>actually were the only ones you use, and also realized the rather
major
 >>importance you put on leaving the table in spite of its scrolling
(which
 >>would prevent a faster ship from catching up with a slower one once
it
 >>had left the table), I immediately described a more appropriate
set-up
 >>for this particular scenario.
 >
 >That importance is because we usually use forces totaling 6-20 ships
 >per side, rather than 1 or 2, so that having ships on both edges of
the play
 >area is not uncommon.

And in such larger games it makes a lot more sense (answered in the
other 
post today). Again however you didn't seem to have considered what the 
change in number of ships could mean in this situation - eg., if one
side 
only consists of 1 ship then it can't possibly have ships on both edges
of 
the gaming area :-/

[...]

 >As for the rotation rate vs fire arcs topic (where this all started),
I
 >very explicitly stated a) the limited extent of my experience with the
 >vector system (3x EFSB, 1x FB1, 0x FB2),

That's very true. However, and unfortunately for this part of your
defence, 
the relationships between rotation rate and fire arc value are if not 
identical then at least *extremely* similar in Cinematic and Vector: if
you 
can change your facing quickly (and thus bring single-arc weapons to
bear 
quickly), then you don't need wide-arc weapons.
Thus wide weapon arcs are valuable in Cinematic (where you can't change 
facing quickly unless you've spent a lot of resources on powerful
drives) 
but not in FB1/FB2 Vector (where just about anyone can change facing 
quickly, even if they only have thrust-1 engines).

Your "gap" in this particular case was your failure to consider what
makes 
wide weapon arcs valuable *in Cinematic* - a game system which you
should 
have plenty of experience with.

 >b) that I was essaying a solution to a problem I had read as perceived
by 
others on this >list, rather than one from my own experience, and c) the

places where I viewed the
 >problem to be rooted. From the way the responses et al. flowed, it
seemed 
as if
 >most of the members who answered had only skimmed or outright skipped
that
 >part (my introduction to the post) and then went straight to debating
my
 >suggestion. No one pointed out "Your suggestion flows from a faulty 
premise of XYZ. It
 >is actually ABC. Does that change what you want to suggest?"

Hm? From what I could see back then, and also what I can see going
through 
the list archive again now, neither of these initial statements of yours

were ignored.

You, however, appearently ignored a post sent by Brendan Robertson
within 
ten minutes of your first proposal, where he described how EFSB handled
the 
same problem (which is also the best of the two working solutions to the

problem). You also seem to have totally failed to understand the post I 
wrote on August 28th, after your second post to the thread had made me 
realize that you hadn't yet grasped the implications of Brendan's post.

Let's take a closer look at this thread. I can't answer for why others 
wrote what they did or when they did, only for my own posts:

You posted your proposal on the 21st of August.

Within 10 minutes you got a reply from Brendan which, as I read it then,

was somewhat terse but nonetheless said pretty much everything that
needed 
to be said about the rules part of your post: EFSB, an FT-based game
system 
explicitly written to emulate B5 space combat, limited the rotation
*rate* 
(the very thing your proposal explicitly sought to avoid) instead of the

*number* of rotations (which was what you proposed). I'm not sure if you

ever read that post; all I know is that  you didn't reply to it. Since I

then thought that Brendan had already covered the game mechanics parts,
my 
own reply on the 22nd only commented on "sillyness" of RBRF manoeuvres
and 
their on-screen appearance in B5.

With one exception the rest of the discussion between the 21st and 27th 
concerned the *aesthetics* of FB2 vector movement (ie., whether or not 
"RBRF" sequences look silly), and how Vector movement appeared on screen
in 
the B5 TV show. The one exception was Alan Brain's post of the 24th,
which 
suggested a minor change to your proposal which wouldn't help the game 
balance any more than your original version would. No-one seems to have 
commented on his post, not even you.

On the 27th you returned to the thread:

 >I only made the suggestion because several posts had complained that
in 
the vector
 >system multi-arc weapons are useless, and that Advanced Grav drives
are
 >overpriced.  To my visualization of the action, this should not be, so
I 
thought I would
 >reason out the cause and a solution.	My description of the 
Rotate-Burn-Rotate-Fire
 >sequence went undisputed, so I will assume that I was right.

and so on. This post made it clear to me that you hadn't grasped the 
implications of Brendan's post: although it didn't dispute your 
*description* of the RBRF sequence (which was after all essentially 
correct, so there was no reason to dispute it) it did dispute your 
*proposed solution* to the game balance problem by pointing out that 
limiting the rotation rate - the very thing your proposal sought to
avoid - 
was the way EFSB did it. EFSB was specifically written to emulate B5
space 
combat; since the first two examples of ships you believed would benefit

from your proposal were taken from that show it is a quite relevant 
counter-example. Your post of the 27th also put more emphasis on the 
game-balance problems (as opposed to the aesthetic side of things).

(Looking back at Brendan's post now I can see why you didn't understand 
that it disputed your proposal; but when I first read it I thought that
it 
was pretty straight-forward.)

17 hours after you posted your second post - ie. as soon as I had waked
up 
(you sent it at approx. 1 am, my local time), download and read it in
the 
morning, realize that you hadn't noticed the implications of Brendan's 
post, spend a full day at work, return home, and write a reply - I
posted a 
detailed explanation as to what caused the game balance problems in 
question and why your proposal wouldn't solve them. In other words, if
as 
you say:

 >No one pointed out "Your suggestion flows from a faulty premise of
XYZ. 
It is
 >actually ABC. Does that change what you want to suggest?"

then I must be the proverbial "No one" since I did point exactly that
out 
to you close to two weeks ago, and I did it as soon as I realized that
you 
were trying to solve the wrong problem.

This post can be found in the archive at 
http://lists.firedrake.org/gzg/200308/msg00352.html ; the bit explaining

the game balance problem and why your proposal wouldn't solve it starts
with

"Unfortunately for your suggestion, you haven't correctly identified the

problem."

about one-third down the page.

Then the real debacle began, and it was entirely your own. When (on the
2nd 
of September, after Matt Tope's getting into the thread) you finally 
replied to the game-mechanics parts of my August-28th post (you had
already 
replied to the first, B5/aesthetics, part of it on August 31st), you
wrote 
among other things:

"Actually, this [ie. ships being able to make 2 rotations per turn in
FB2 
Vector] is the root cause of the problems (symptoms) that I am trying to

solve, namely that AGD does not give enough extra benefit in Vector to 
justify its higher cost and that multi-arc weapons are also not useful 
enough to justify the extra cost."

and

"Then what is the root cause of the problem?"

- the latter in direct reply to my "Unfortunately for your suggestion,
you 
haven't correctly identified the problem."

Your writing these two sections in a post where you extensively quoted
my 
post of the 28th in which I had described, explicitly and in a fair
amount 
of detail,

* why, contrary to your belief at the time FB2's "2 rotations" system is

NOT the root cause of the problems with overpriced wide firing arcs and 
Advanced Drives in Vector,

* why the ability to rotate 180 degrees for a single thrust point (even
if 
you can only do it once per turn) IS the root cause of these problems,
and

* why your proposal wouldn't solve the problems whereas the solution 
Brendan pointed you at would do so

- well, let's just say that your writing the above comments gave a
rather 
strong impression that you either was outright stupid and therefore
unable 
to understand the post you had just read and quoted, OR - and this was
the 
interpretation I arrived at - that the aesthetics, not the game balance,

was your primary reason for this proposal.  Statements like

"But in vector, narrow arc standard drive ships /should/ be able to keep

the enemy under continuous fire /if/ they forego accelerating in any 
direction except towards the enemy. [...] Accelerating /toward/ the
enemy 
and then rotating (once) to keep him under fire is reasonable to me."

further reinforced the impression that your main interest was the 
aesthetics, not the game balance - that something is "reasonable to you"

only means that you find it aesthetically pleasing; it is completely 
irrelevant to whether or not said something is also the root cause of a 
game balance problem.

On the 3rd of September I re-stated my explanation of the 28th in
somewhat 
different words (http://lists.firedrake.org/gzg/200309/msg00040.html),
and 
also adding a fair deal of cynicism. I'm not sure if you ever replied 
directly to that post; but I don't know if that means that you read and 
understood it without having any further questions or comments, or you 
simply ignored it, or you did in fact reply to it but I couldn't find
your 
reply in the mailing list archive - considering the ways these threads
have 
merged, split up and re-merged under new subject headers I may very well

have missed it during tonight's quick search.

To summarize, I wrote a detailed explanation why your proposal would not

solve the game balance problem as soon as I realized that you hadn't
fully 
understood the implications of Brendan's earlier comment about it and
that 
you were trying to solve the wrong problem. This makes your recent 
complaints about "getting answers in passing or after much wrangling" 
quite... exasperating.

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