Re: [GZG] FT:XD changes, part 1

-----Original Message-----
>From: Damond Walker <damosan@gmail.com>
>On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:44 PM, Eric Foley <stiltman@teleport.com>
wrote:

>> To some degree, I agree... although if you allow easy fire at
fighters, they just stop being effective.

>They become less effective to be sure but they don't stop being
>effective.  All this talk about fighters (for all these years) seems
>to be keeping the rest of the system from moving forward.  Fighters
>are much too cheap for what they bring to the table -- if everything
>else stayed the same has anyone toyed with simply increasing the point
>cost by 100% or so?  I'm sure someone has done this...

"Fighters are too cheap for what they bring to the table"... this
statement, in and of itself, is not true, never has been, and never will
be.  It is _conditionally_ true if one side has a lot of fighters and
the other side has neither fighters nor a strong point defense.  It is
quite false if one side has a lot of fighters and the other side has a
lot of point defense.

Fighters are not the only weapon in the game for which this is the case,
it's only the simplest one to use.  I could go on for hours about other
examples.  (e.g. A fleet with all slow battleships with wide arc direct
fire weapons but without point defense will get killed by salvo
missiles, which get killed by Kra'Vak escort cruisers, which get killed
by the slow battleships again.)  When it comes to custom games where all
the gloves are off, a lot of the pre-game strategy is about balancing
out your fleets so you are prepared for a wide variety of things your
opponents could bring, and giving up as few "skunk jobs" where you're
just caught unprepared for what they've got as possible -- and you have
to play in a group where giving up a disastrous loss _because_ you
gambled on something is considered the worst case scenario (because in
real wars, it is).  The end results of this evolution can still be fun
to play with, but they won't resemble the fleet book ships _at_all_.

>Thankfully I've only ever played small fleet games from the FBs so the
>players couldn't easily bring hordes of fighters with them --
>basically only light and fleet carriers.

Yeah... and honestly, I do think that FB1 games are fun in their own
right, but I think that if you want a game quantified reason why they
stay that way and don't evolve into a fighterfest with much stiffer
point defenses, a logistical limit on the number of fighters is the best
way to go.  Even at that, the FB2 powers kind of throw the balance off
in a different direction altogether, because every one of them is better
at either defending against fighters or cranking them out themselves.

E
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l