Re: (FT) small vs large ships, was YAFS

Binhan Lin wrote:

 >Well that strayed well off the original topic - which was a point
 >system should allow people to create fleets of equal point values that

should
 >perform equally well against each other.  The fact that the current
system
 >has certain loop holes (fighters) indicates that the point system is
not
 >perfect yet.

Correct. The two remaining major problem areas are fighters and 
large-vs-small ships (and of course the FB2 Sa'Vasku rules, but their 
problems don't have very much to do with the rest of the game); we're 
working on solutions for these.

The issues you suggested that we work on *instead* however (weapon
ranges, 
damage and fire arcs) aren't causing any serious balance problems in 
Cinematic, and in Vector only the fire arcs cause problems because the 
entire Vector movement system was added in as an afterthought when the
ship 
design rules had already been done :-/ (FWIW we're working on that too.)

 >I used an example of 300 POINTS of small boats vs. two 150 POINT ships
 >as example of how even if FLEETS are of equivalent value, the actual
 >composition of the fleet (assuming 1 point of value is equal to 1
point of
 >value) can allow you temporary tactical advantages (the 300 points on
150
 >points example).

Unfortunately your example completely ignored that BOTH sides can use 
tactics to get a temporary tactical advantage. Indeed, the entire point
of 
the game is to try and gain a temporary advantage over your opponent 
through the use of superior tactics; if tactics were irrelevant you
could 
just as easily flip a coin or something like that to see who wins!
However, 
with a balanced system it is the side with the better *tactics* who wins

the game - not the side with the better *ship designs*.

Instead of recognizing that both sides can gain a tactical advantage to
win 
the battle, your example assumed that one *specific* side (the
strikeboats) 
would ALWAYS (or almost always) gain the MAXIMUM possible advantage and 
that the other side (the cruisers) would not even lift a finger to try
to 
prevent it (eg. by manoeuvring to stay outside the boats' (F) arcs or by

shooting at the boats). Since this assumption is extremely unlikely to 
actually be met on the gaming table, your prediction (ie. that the 
strikeboats would nearly always win this fight) simply doesn't hold true
in 
practise: it could just as easily be the *cruisers* which gain a
temporary 
advantage over the strikeboats, and then the cruisers win instead.

With an *un*balanced system OTOH, the side with the better ship designs
has 
a *permanent* advantage over the other - one which might be possible to 
counter with vastly superior tactics, but which nonetheless makes it
much 
harder for the weaker side to win. This is what currently happens if one

side's average ship size is significantly larger than the other's (the 
cruisers in your example aren't big enough to gain that much from this 
though), or when one side guesses wrong in the PD-vs-fighters gamble.

 >Since the point system takes an "average" effect into consideration,
 >the fuzzy parts occur at the extreme tactics side. And from what I'm 
hearing,
 >that's exactly the direction that people don't want to go.

Not entirely correct. Tactics is all about getting on the side of these 
averages that is most favourable to you; they are what makes the game 
interesting. In the unbalanced areas of the design system however
tactics 
become less important than design, and *that* is a direction most people

don't want to go. Which is of course why we're working on balancing
those 
currently unbalanced areas.

 >One solution is to expand the Fleet Books.

Excuse me, but how do you think the ships in the Fleet Books are
designed? 
By magic, or something?

As I wrote in another post yesterday, the term "custom ships" *includes*

*all* *future* *Fleet* *Book* *designs* - so in order to get any
potential 
future Fleet Book fleets reasonably balanced against the existing ones,
we 
first need to get the overall game balance right.

If we just expand the Fleet Books without first getting the overall
balance 
right, all we do is make the unbalanced extremes "officially approved".
Is 
that what you want? I doubt it.

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