Re: Fighters and Hangers

Randall wrote

> Some nit-picking, 10 fighter are not likely 
> to kill a cruiser in one turn.  

Okay, say a destroyer. Or add enough fighters to make it possible to
kill the cruiser.

> Bob was 
> foolish for jumping the fighter's already assigned to attack, he needs

> to jump ones that haven't been assigned.

Won't make much of a difference, as long as Jack wasn't silly enough to
have them clumped together. Jack moves to Destroyer 1. Bob moves against
one of Jack's unassigned fighters. Jack moves a fighter to Destroyer 2.
Bob moves against one of Jack's unassigned fighters. Jack now has 8
fighters to move. He could have all 8 of them jump on one of the ships
already assigned, so he now has 9 fighters going up against a destroyer
(instead of 10 in my first example). 

> And there's some easy rules to deal with this problem.  (Dirtside has 
> solved this problem, in an elegent way, IMHO)

I wondered if you were going to bring that up. SG2 has the same thing.
It won't help matters much if splitting squadrons on the fly are
allowed, and will probably make things worse. Say Jack goes first. He
moves one fighter into contact with one of Bob's fighter squadrons,
pinning it in place. Bob elects to wait as he still only has one fighter
squadron left to move. Okay, so Jack moves another fighter to pin _that_
squadron in place. Now Bob can't move and jack has 10 fighters he can
move as a lump. 

You have to allow Bob to be pinned, though. If you don't, Bob has too
much of an advantage. If you don't let fighter squadrons pin others in
place, Jack could jump one of Bob's squadrons with all of his fighters,
and then Bob could simply move it out of the way. You could allow some
sort of proportional pinning, but what proportion is fair? If it's at
least 2:1 odds, then a squadron of 2 fighters could never pin down an
enemy squadron of 5 or more fighters. They would never dogfight unless
the bigger squadron wanted to, which isn't fair either.

This is why allowing variable sized fighter squadrons opens up a whole
can of worms. 

> If you allow variable group numbers, why enforce grouping in 
> space?  Ie.  Bob has 1 group of 6, Jack has 6 groups of 1.  Bob splits

> his group into 6 groups of 1, and engage's as per normal.

The argument was that one fighter group of 6 was just as effective as
six fighter groups of 1. What Steve and I have been showing is that
isn't the case, and that there are problems when you allow variable
sized squadrons. If you allow splitting, in essence you have changed it
so that each fighter squadron has 1 fighter in it, period. You may have
a group of 6 moving on one stand, but that's essentially just to ease
movement. Do you really want to play FT with each fighter mounted on its
own stand? 

> Finally, as I read the rules, I see no reason why groups of 1, 2, 10
or 
> 50 aren't allowed.  The rules explicitly provide for mass per fighter,

> of hanger space, thus giving the ability to hold partial groups of 
> fighters as is. 

If you have fighter groups of variable size, the guy with the smaller
size always has an advantage, as Steve and I have been showing. Two
fighter groups of 3 are better than 1 fighter group of 6. You want to
put your fighters in groups of 24? Great, I'll play with mine still in
groups of 6. Or groups of 1. I'll have the advantage for the same number
of fighters.

Is there a reason for not allowing fighter squadrons of 1 fighter? Not
really... except it has a horrible effect on speed of play. So, a
minimum size needs to be set, as there's always going to be an advantage
to having squadrons of the minimum size, and no advantage to having
squadrons bigger than the minimum size. So, what should we set as a
minimum size? How about... 6, which is what Jon has done in the RAW.

--
Allan Goodall		   agoodall@att.net
http://www.hyperbear.com   agoodall@hyperbear.com