[GZG] Full Sail and Morale

Unobtainium Ships and Squishy Men:

At GZG ECC IX, I believe Mike Hudak is running Full Sail, which is his
Full Thrust on
water variant if I recollect correctly. Don't know if Mike is still list
lurking or not.
Maybe someone can pass on the request for a copy of his rules mods. 

Morale:

I find it interesting that people think Morale in SG2 or DS2 necessarily
implies troops
fleeing in terror. I always assume that Morale was a composite of fear,
fatigue,
accumulated loss, and professional judgement. That is to say, sometimes
a relatively
pristine force will fail its morale check... I assume this simply
represents the commander
making a situational appreciation using factors available to him (which
differ from those
available to the player) and his best decision is to retreat, pull back,
etc. Sometimes
this results in momentary disarray until some re-org and rallying is
done. 

I sort of viewed FT's Strike The Colours as the same. The Admiral (the
player) may wish a
particular ship in his fleet to perservere in the attack. The striking
rules mean that
captain has simply made an assessment based on what he knows and his
understanding of his
duty and has elected to save his ship. 

So, I don't see a big problem with having striking of
colours/withdrawing as part of the
game. This encapsulates some professional judgements. Now, I'd give an
Admiral a chance to
rally a withdrawing ship (giving the withdrawing Captain a comm and
being very clear about
his orders). But I think the idea missing from too many of the games I
see is that their
are little imaginary people on these vessels (or in the tanks or
stomping around alien
worlds on the two-step Black Cadillacs). They might just have plans of
their own and a
different situational assessment than their high command (the player). 

This would, in some sense, help to explain historical situations where
modern armchair
analysts look back on something, draw conclusions that X general or Y
admiral made a poor
decision and withdrew when he was about to win/in a position of
advantage/not seriously
damaged. Sometimes a vessel or formation takes moderate damage, but it
seems like the best
time to withdraw to that units commander. Sometimes he is wrong,
sometimes just short on
data, sometimes he might know things that aren't apparent to the
armchair analyst. At any
rate, there are enough cases of people pulling out early to make me
think rules that allow
this (just as we have Last Stand rules) help to make the ships and tanks
and little lead
dudes behave a bit more like their real world counterparts - complete
with frailties, bad
judgements, inconvenient timing, and sometimes with outrageously
tenacious morale. 

TomB 
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