Re: DS3 design (long)

-----Original Message-----
> From: J L Hilal <jlhilal@yahoo.com>
> Next, some ideas to fix some of the other problems talked about: 

> 6)  Three complaints all seem to me to have a single commonality: i)
> "Vehicle speeds are too slow." [for a 15 minute game turn]
> ii) "If my fire support roll fails, what is my arty battery doing for
> 15 minutes?"
> iii) "Fire rates are too slow.  Modern MBTs could take 50 aimed shots
> in a 15 minute game turn."
> 
> Perhaps part of the problem is the assumption of the 15 min. game
> turn. change it to 4-5 minutes and it reduces the problem
substantially.
> 
> Additionally: change the activation into 2 actions like SG2, allowing
> a vehicle to FIRE-FIRE or MOVE-MOVE

There are a lot of factors that stop tanks and other weapons from
continuously moving or shooting at flat-out rates on the battlefield,
thus the argument about the 50 shots or tank speeds is actually wrong.

Some points:
- Barrel heating, loader fatigue and limited ammo stop high-rate
shooting much earlier
- In a high-lethality battlefield, evrybody hides as far as possible.
Typically, there will be rather less than 50 targets visible. A lot of
time is spent scanning the terrain for possible targets.
- Moving at full speed, observation is impaired, the driver can not use
terrain for cover properly, and you don't know what's behind the hill
you come barreling around. Again, the typical movement pattern is of
short dashes between spots of cover rather than a full-out dash.

So normal movement and shooting is at much lower rates than
theoretically possible. A game system can either simply limit a
vehicle's abilities to sensible values or allow them, but place
extremely heavy penalties on reckless behaviour, e.g.here use limited
ammo bookeeping and make speeding tanks easy targets.

Greetings
Karl Heinz