Re: Full Thrust vs Starmada

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 05:58:25PM +0200, le morpion wrote:

>I might look a bit na?ve but what is actually the
>Great Fighter Problem ? 
>(it looks impressively dangerous said like this with
>capital letter ... lol)

I'd recommend looking through the archives, but basically:

The cost of your fighter force is linear. Twenty groups cost 20x as much
as
one group.

The effectiveness of your fighter force is nonlinear. One group can't
do much against a moderately well-defended ship. Twenty groups ganging
up on a single ship will generally take only minor losses as they wipe
it out, and can go on to zap another ship next turn.

This means that fighter-heavy forces, particularly large fleets, are
disproportionately effective for their point value. Making fighters
more expensive doesn't help very much - it just moves the balance-point
further out, it still doesn't make the effectiveness linear. (And you
can't really say "the 20th fighter group in your fleet costs 60 points
rather than 36".)

R