Re: [GZG] Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions

>From: Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se>

>Stilt Man wrote:
>>So I could have a swing role torpedo bomber/interceptor with this
setup 
>>for 45 points?  That's... evil.  If I've got the budget I don't know
why 
>>I'd ever use any other sort of fighter.

>Being unable to change roles on the fly takes most of the evility out
of 
>it, though... you get to launch them as (extremely expensive)
interceptors 
>*or* as torpedo bombers, but if you want to use them in the other role 
>you'll need to recover them on a carrier for rearming. Very useful in a

>campaign with reasonably explicit supply rules; not quite so useful in
a 
>single battle.

Well, it'd depend a lot on how much intelligence you had about your
enemy.	You could pre-design scenarios for just about any of it, but in
my old very-limited-intel, fixed-budget games where you didn't know
whether you were going to be fighting against carriers, battleships, or
whatever the other guy felt like customizing up, swing-role fighters
would have been absolutely awesome.  In our old games, our safest bet
was to have a first wave of fighters to establish superiority and a
second wave to do the bombing run.  The first wave had to be either
interceptors or some sort of regular fighters, spending too much on them
was usually pointless because they always died in droves and were of
minimal shipkilling capability, and it was a dilemma whether to risk
bringing interceptors that would be useless if your opponent had no
carriers.  The second wave pretty much had to be torpedo bombers,
because they were the only thing that could effectively hurt ships
without needing to overwhelm their point defense, and even at that it
helped tremendously to have plasma bolts or missiles to distract PDS or
else even that might not go so well.

Now higher-quality fighters can blur the line between the two waves or,
if you just fielded a whole flotilla of the above, eliminate them.  You
could go into a fight, send a scout with scanners up ahead to determine
what you were up against, and if you ran into no carriers, you just
launch them all as torpedo bombers right away.	If you ran into fighter
opposition, you launch some or all of them as interceptors, or send
ahead a somewhat cheaper superiority fighter in a first wave that could
later be recovered and re-armed as attack fighters, and have a higher
quality multi-role "ultra-evil" bomber in reserve as a second wave that
could either mop up any incoming fighters the rest of the way as either
interceptors or as heavy fighters depending on how much you needed to
kill versus how much you wanted to preserve the second wave for later
bombing runs, or just launch them as bombers straight away for the
ship-killing attack.

i.e. no longer is your fighter embarkment based on taking a guess on
what you need altogether, you can just decide you're going to budget a
certain amount on your fighters and what capabilities you want them to
be able to do.	A true high-quality fighter force can answer to
different needs with good effectiveness and not be caught in a
paper-rock-scissors guessing game where you have to guess which fighters
you want to embark.  Something other than the overwhelming
quantity-over-quality methods of the Sopi and their bubble pods and
basestars pouring maximum fighters for minimum ship cost into the fray
would actually be viable regardless of what your opponent was doing. 
It's more interesting, more fun, and more believable (if that even
applies to a sci fi wargame) that quality fighters could be more
flexible.

Good stuff, Hugh.

Stilt Man

(hope something like this doesn't double-reply)

_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu
http://vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu:1337/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l