Re: Game balance (no longer really very VV-related)

RBW wrote:

> >So, you have to ask yourself: why do you plan to use a
battle-balancing
> >points system for a campaign game, instead of designing a
campaign-economic
> >points system?
>
>Here's one reason: so that you have a diversity of fleets, which keeps
>things interesting.

But that's just the problem: unless your campaign rules are either very 
carefully crafted or so simplified that they don't include either
logistics 
or recon, a battle-balancing points system WON'T give you a diversity of

fleets in your campaign.

The reason for this is that the value of a ship in a campaign is NOT 
identical to the value of the same ship in a one-off tactical battle. 
Campaign considerations like strategic (eg. FTL) speed, supply
requirements 
(particularly for missile units and fighter carriers), construction
times 
etc. are at least as important for the ship's value in the campaign as
its 
tactical combat power is: it doesn't matter how powerful a ship is 
tactically if you can't bring it to the battle, a carrier or missile 
platform is useless if its fighter bays or magazines are empty, a
destroyer 
flotilla available for deployment out on the frontier is far more use
than 
a half-built superdreadnought in a spaceyard, and so on.

In one-off battles these campaign considerations are not a factor - the 
ships participating in the one-off battle are by definition present,
they 
are usually completed, usually have full magazines/fighter bays, etc. -
so 
the battle-balancing points system doesn't take these campaign 
considerations into account. In fact it *can't* take them into account, 
because if it did take into account factors which are irrelevant in
one-off 
battles it wouldn't be able to balance one-off battles at all... which 
means that if those factors become *relevant* (which campaign 
considerations tend to do when you play campaigns <g>), the 
battle-balancing points system won't give you balanced outcomes on the 
campaign level. As a result it gives you *reduced* diversity, not
increased.

Some examples are ship size in the CPV system (in campaigns small ships
are 
inherently more useful than they are in tactical battles simply because
two 
small ships can cover twice as many places as a single large one), or
the 
cost of fighters and missiles (which in a campaign are likely to cause 
significant extra costs in logistics, either economic or strategic, that

beams etc. don't have to pay).

>Assume for the sake of argument that we have a points system that's
>perfectly balanced for tactical combat (TPV), and a points system that
>reflects some sort of "real" economic production cost (EPV); and that
>these systems are not identical. Why would anyone build any sort of
>ship other than that with the highest TPV/EPV ratio?

Because in a campaign, it is the ship's *strategic* value (let's call
this 
SPV) which is important - and as I've discussed above, TPV =|= SPV. IOW,
no 
matter which of the TPV and EPV systems you use in the campaign, the 
players will very quickly figure out which ship designs give them the 
highest *S*PV for the TPV or EPV points :-/

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry