Re: [GZG] House rules, was Monster ships

Yeah.  We generally have not been allowing overkill carry over on
missiles, just on fighters.  At the PDS-hits-only-on-6 rules I _have_
been noticing that the side that fields HMs tends to usually win over
the side that has salvo missiles, although to some degree that's also
been the intent because they've been set up in the scenarios as the good
guys.  OTOH, allowing overkill carry over might mitigate that a
little... but there tends to be enough point defense of some sort or
another in our battles that I still worry a little that HMs will wind up
getting kind of left in the cold.

My only other real worry in custom games is that advanced drives are
enough better than normal drives for their cost that unless you have a
scenario reason for not using them there's no real reason anybody would
_not_ want them.  For a lot of my old group's games, we generally were
coming to the conclusion that, at least with normal drives, the
maneuverability advantage you got was not good enough for the mass cost
that, when it really came down to it, slow ships just always beat faster
ships with comparable weapons.	Sure, if you got behind them, you could
get them in a bind, but the slower ships could usually at least force a
semi-close fly-by before that happened, and the faster ships would
usually be crippled badly enough after that due to their firepower
disadvantages that it would be moot.  As a result, almost nobody ever
used more than normal thrust 2 in the main battle lines -- they'd use
them in smaller flanker ships that might break off from the main group,
but unle
 ss they had cloaking devices they didn't usually survive long enough to
do any good, and even at that they usually weren't worth it if they
didn't also have needle beams or something else that you didn't want
close in for even one or two turns.  Well, then one day I threw together
a fleet with advanced thrust 3 -- still mostly on the same principle,
but taking a much more modest mass cost for three times the
maneuverability.  And I've generally found that the gap between
advanced-3 and normal-2 is just... gross, at least in cinematic.

E

-----Original Message-----
>From: Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se>
>Sent: Jan 16, 2010 4:11 PM
>To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
>Subject: Re: [GZG] House rules, was Monster ships
>
>Eric Foley wrote :
>
>>Hm.  I suppose when I really think about this, you're right.	MT 
>>missiles really are kind of overpowered as compared to salvos if you 
>>only let them get hit on a 6.  The trouble is, are salvos not just 
>>completely better (at least on damage) if you have heavy missiles 
>>get hit the same as individual missiles in a salvo? Sure, they might 
>>be _smarter_ but if they never get through against even barely 
>>adequate point defense, what's the point?  (And by my custom-brew 
>>standardss that's loosely defined as, "you can have at least an 
>>outside chance of surviving an unassisted strike of about 30 
>>fighters in a 5000 NPV game, although maybe not so much if they've 
>>got torpedo bombers".)
>
>If you use the FB PD rules, ie. treat each HM as a separate salvo 
>with no PD overkills carrying over from one salvo to the next, then 
>one SMR is somewhat better damage-wise than 2 MTMs (ie., equal Mass) 
>against all but the lightest defences, ranging from 10% better 
>against 2 PDSs (per SM salvo/pair of MTMs, that is) up to around 25% 
>better against 6 PDSs (but at that point even the SM salvo only 
>averages just over 2 pts of damage anyway). Against that the MTMs get 
>to pick their target, so you don't have to worry about them dumping 
>all their damage into a small escort instead of the dreadnought :-/
>
>If OTOH you *do* allow PD overkills to carry over between missile 
>salvoes, then the MT missiles are completely outclassed - doing that 
>increases PDS kills on MTMs far, *far* more than it increases PDS 
>kills on SMs or fighters. The exact increases depend on the PD 
>levels, but generally speaking the PDSs' kill increase from overkills 
>in % vs MTMs is around 5 times what it is vs SMs. (That is to say, 
>where the re-allocated overkills increase the PDS kill rate vs SMs by 
>20%, it'd increase the kill rate vs MTMs by approx. 5x20 = 100% - ie. 
>it doubles.)
>
>Later,
>
>Oerjan 
>
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