Re: [GZG] House rules, was Monster ships

-----Original Message----- 
>From: John Tailby 

>We don't allow overkill from one target to flow onto the next
regardless of what type of
>ordnance it is.

Yeah... there's kind of a few trade-offs there.  We evolved into using a
lot more point defense to defend against both fighters and missiles, and
we found pretty quickly that the bombers got too easy to pick off and
neuter the attack power of fighters in general at any reasonable
numbers, so that was our trade-off.  We allow the overkill flow, but
you're not allowed to cherry-pick which groups you shoot at in point
defense.  Otherwise about 150 PDS in a 5000 NPV game meant you killed
the bombers the first time they came in and took relatively small damage
from the other fighters, then killed the other fighters the next time. 
Regular fighters just don't do enough damage against that level of point
defense to be worth it.
 
>We recognised the significant advantage that advanced drives gave in
our cinematic games
>and as a result we changed the points cost to mass times 5.

That might be about right.  Advanced versions of any system should
probably cost at least twice as much and possibly be even more massive. 
(The advanced screens that appear in Cross Dimensions are 7.5% ship mass
per level and cost 4x.	I've sometimes wondered if keeping them the same
size as regular screens but making them cost 6x would be better, but
I've generally stayed with it in my own games.)
 
>We generally run thrust 4 or so ships in our group the trade off in
manouverability being
>made up for the ability to reduce weapon arcs and still get a good 
concentation of firepower.
 
>We have also seen what happens with ships that have very low speed and
manouverability when
>faced with missile waves they get hammered. This has created a racial
memory in our gaming
>group and that isn't something they want to repeat.

Yeah... for us it was plasma bolts, although missiles have had their day
too.  Our general solution has been lots of scatterguns and (for
missiles) mixing in a few escort ships as well.  My old gaming group
broke up shortly after anybody realized the gap between normal-2 and
advanced-3 thrust, and only had one battle where it was particularly
one-sided in favor of the latter.  However, this has led me to worry a
bit about whether or not powerful enough advanced drives together with
enough scatterguns piled up would tend to take a lot of the variety away
and push everyone towards advanced drive vessels with scads of
scatterguns and only direct fire weapons.
 
>One thing these threads have highlighted is that no one seems to be
playing the same rules
>but we still call it FT.

Yeah.  There's enough overlap that you're not usually going to find
yourself in an alien world if you play it with someone else, though. 
(Although I'll admit it's really weird to go to a convention where two
missile salvoes and four or five fighter groups are actually useful to a
4000 NPV fleet...)

E
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