Re: [GZG] Re: Points systems

On 1/10/06, B Lin <lin@rxkinetix.com> wrote:

> would be the heir to the throne is a Lieutenant j.g. on the DE and
> everyone else is there for his protection.  This means that hitting
the
> largest ship in the enemy fleet may not be the path to victory but you
> won't know that until you destroy the ship and the opponent reveals
the
> VP value.

???

This idea confuses me.	Seriously, every military mission has a
specific goal.	In the Army, it's called "commander's intent".	If I
execute the commander's intent without taking losses out of proportion
to the relative value of that goal, then I have "won" regardless of
what the enemy was trying to achieve or what their perception of the
situation is.  You may get that frigate with the heir to the throne
off the board, but unless my mission was to assasinate the silly git,
then if I just blew up four superdreadnoughts for the loss of one, I'm
going to be pretty pleased with myself.  And my admiralty is going to
hang a medal on me.  Your task force commander is probably an
interstellar dust cloud.

This may lead to situations where both sides walk away pretty pleased
with themselves.  I once played on a five-sided scenario where four of
the players managed to achieve their victory conditions.  We formed a
two-on-two alliance, blew one player completely off the map, and his
ex-ally negotiated a mutually acceptable compromise with the remaining
players.  The fifth player spent the entire time on the communications
channels and didn't, so far as I recall, fire a single shot.  My goals
were simple--prevent the Venusians from taking control of this moon. 
When the last Venusian ship exploded, I had no issue with negotiating
whatever compromise was required to prevent loosing any of my ships in
a pointless shootout that I wasn't required to engage in to fulfill my
mission.

> The advantage to the VP system is that since the VP are not fixed, you
> can play against the same opponents/fleets time and time again and not
> know exactly what the key VP ships are going to be, and would thus
have
> to be prepared to deal with a wide variety of situations, sometimes
> going for the capital ships, sometimes having to wipe all the escorts
> out, or chasing down the cruisers. It also places more emphasis on
ship
> survival - if you have critical VP ships damaged, you are less likely
to
> throw them in on suicide attacks.

And you have no idea what your mission is, you're just guessing about
the relative values of the ships. . . That makes no sense to me.  It
would be like after the Battle of Midway, Yamamoto announces to his
ship captains, 'we won this fight, because fleet carriers have been
arbitrarily assigned a lower points value today!'.  Uhhhh. . . NO. 
Loosing capital ships always sucks, has always sucked, and always will
suck, unto the ages of ages.

John
--
"Thousands of Sarmatians, Thousands of Franks, we've slain them again
and again.  We're looking for thousands of Persians."
--Vita Aureliani

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