Re: Full Thrust vs Starmada

Grant A. Ladue wrote:

>I would be a little hesistant to do it this way, but I suspect it's
just
>the semantics of "optional" that I worry about.  Perhaps it should be
phrased
>as:
>
>Fighter combat can be handled one of two ways:
>
>Option 1 is targetable fighters, with these reasons for why
>you might want to use them and what it leads to.

If done right, it allows a wide spectrum of fleet concepts with varying 
numbers of fighters (from none to huge lots) to be roughly competitive 
against one another. (Babylon 5 is one such setting.)

>Option 2 is non-targetable fighters, with these reasons for
>why you might want to use them and what it leads to.

If you don't put strict restrictions on the number of anti-fighter
weapons 
allowed, it leads to the current rock/scissors/paper knife-edge balance 
described in my other post.

If you do put strict restrictions on the number of anti-fighter weapons 
allowed, *both* sides need to field massed fighters in order to be 
competitive (eg. Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica).

>Then people could choose appropriately based on what they want and what
>genre they're working from.

Could work... at least as long as they don't want to play cross-over
battles.

>Heck if you point based them a bit differently, you could even have 
>different forces using the different options on the table at the same
time.

'Fraid not. If point basing them a bit differently had been enough to 
balance the current Full Thrust fighters (which use Option 2 with no 
restrictions on PD weapons carried), then we would have done so years 
ago... but unfortunately points cost changes on their own only move the 
"knife edge" (cf. my other post).

>The only thing that could really easily balance the problem of many
many
>fighter groups overwhelming a ship would be to just limit the number of
>groups that can attack a certain size of target at once.

This was playtested several years ago, but found ineffective except for 
very large capital ships. Since we don't want to encourage very large 
capital ships even more than the rules already do, this is not a good 
solution to the fighter problem.

>I mean is it really appropriate for 20 fighter groups to be able to all

>target one
>destroyer at the same time?  Wouldn't a lot of them just interfere with
the
>others?

Depends entirely on the game scale. With a fighter attack range of 6mu
and 
1mu = 100km (or 1000km, or more), there's plenty of space for just about

any number of fighters concievable to attack the same target.

What's worse, with this sort of distance scales it doesn't really matter

how large the target ship is - as long as 1mu >> the size of the ship,
you 
can send very nearly the same number of fighters against a tiny
scoutship 
as you can against a superdreadnought, since the volume from which the 
fighters can attack the ship is almost identical for the two ships. This

means that you have to choose which size of defending ship you want the 
maximum number of attacking fighters to balance against: if you set the 
maximum number of attacking fighters to balance against the 
superdreadnought you get no improvement of the balance for smaller ships

(and thus give the players a very strong incentive to use *only* 
superdreadnoughts and larger ships); and if you set the maximum number
of 
attacking fighters to balance against a small ship you end up making 
superdreadnoughts effectively invulnerable to fighter attacks.

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