Re: [GZG] Hugh's New Fighter/Point Defence rules

-----Original Message-----
>From: Hugh Fisher <laranzu@ozemail.com.au>
>>Well, I was describing about where we found the balance where you 
>>could reasonably protect yourself from fighters without giving up 
>>much of your ship-to-ship armament.  I might add that the GZGverse's 
>>conventions about fighters being deployed only from 
>>rarely-encountered capital ships aren't the only ones we scrapped 
>>when we went our own way.  The main other one that got abandoned is 
>>the one where GZGverse ships typically devote around 65-70% of their 
>>ship mass to non-weapon systems (i.e. hull, drives, armor, and 
>>screens).

>OK, we're going to have to agree to disagree. I don't
>particularly want to change salvo missiles. There are
>problems with plasma bolts, but I already suspected that.

Well, when the mailing list was delaying in sending my response I almost
sent a direct response to you with a few brainstorms that I'd had about
plasma bolts and new tactics.  So what I did is I jacked up the Komarov
a little to 250 mass, keeping the strong hull proportions and
everything, and using the remaining 9 mass of weapon space for a second
fighter bay.  I half-kiddingly decided to call it the Kasparov.  Then I
put four of those together with an ESU light carrier, with the Kasparovs
carrying torpedo bombers and the light carrier bringing standard
fighters.  Against this, I put four Phalon Voths, a Ptath, and a
Tuuloth.  Both fleets are at around 5000 NPV, and while 14 fighters
against none is a factor, the Phalon fleet in question has 55 dice of
plasma to throw with 53 pulsers behind it.

I put them apart on my living room floor, starting about 120 MU apart. 
The Phalons came in at around 10 MU a turn, bunched formation.	As a
deliberately anti-plasma bolt tactic, the four Kasparovs were spread out
more than 12 MU apart so that the Phalons could not hit more than one of
them with a concentrated blast.  The fighters reached the Phalons about
three turns out of plasma range, splitting half and half on two Voths in
hopes of crippling both.  One of them got very lucky rolls with its
pulsers and destroyed over half the torpedo bombers assigned to it, plus
got lucky in that even the surviving bombers rolled horribly, so they
only lost about half their armor.  The other one had slightly better
than average pulser rolls but the bombers also rolled pretty well, and
it lost all of its armor and took 17 points of hull damage, bringing it
down to 25 remaining.  However, it only lost two pulsers (which damage
control immediately fixed) and none of its plasma bolts.  The fi
 ghters decided they didn't want anything more of the Voths for now and
shifted their attention to the Tuuloth, which opted to try to wear them
down with its pulsers rather than shroud to protect itself so that the
Voths' pulsers could focus on more torpedo bombers when they came back.

The ESU ships slowed down at this point, and due to an accident of
spacing and timing they managed to stay out of confident plasma range
long enough to get two shots with their B4s and one with the B3s, along
with a second pass from the bombers.  The more-damaged Voth was
destroyed in this time by beams.  The Tuuloth had been destroyed in
exchange for several more fighters, and 2 groups of standard fighters
and just under 5 remaining groups of torpedo bombers hit the less
damaged Voth before the Phalons could get off a plasma shot, deciding
that they didn't want to risk a second lucky roll this time.  Long range
pulsers were able to do 6 points of damage to one Kasparov in this time
before the two surviving Voths and the Ptath were able to drop their 28
dice of plasma on it.  It made no effort to evade, and got a little
lucky and actually brought down 2 dice with its PDS.  The Phalons rolled
a little too well and got a fair number of 5s and 6s that had to be
removed by the Ka
 sparov's screens, but it was still enough to threshold it.  (It lost
half main drives, a B3, a B2, and two PDS; it was able to repair the
beams, failed to repair the drives, and let the PDS go.)  However, in
the ensuing turn the Kasparovs were able to send in a third pass of
bombers, which although diminished in firepower were able to
double-threshold it, and the Kasparovs themselves finished it off in the
ensuing turn with beams as three of the four passed into 24 MU range.

So at this point, a single Voth and a single Ptath is left against all
four Kasparovs (one with a single threshold), and it was clearly time to
throw in the towel.  They'd lost three capital ships and a cruiser in
exchange for 31 points of damage inflicted to one Kasparov and most of
the ESU fighters, despite having more plasma firepower than I've ever
thrown even in custom games at 5000 NPV levels.  The Phalons _could_
have theoretically fielded more fighters of their own to try to
withstand the ESU onslaught... but they don't have the ability to throw
that many fighters and still throw around 50 dice of plasma like my
Teracrons do.  But then even at that, all that takes is mixing in a few
more fighters of your own, take that angle away from me, and just make
sure your ships are well screened and have enough hull space that I
can't blow away more than one at a time, if that.  I'm actually kind of
glad my old opponents didn't think of it... although now that I think
more of o
 ne of the last battles we played, I think something like it is exactly
what they were going for.  They threw a giant supership at me with over
half its mass devoted to hull and armor, with screens on top of that and
a lot less PDS than usual.  Now that I think on it a little more
closely, they were obviously intending to just weather the fighter
strikes while the PDS wore them down, and ignore the plasma and let the
screens and massive hull take care of that.  I never really thought of
it in that light because I didn't bring those tactics that time, I went
with faster battlecruisers with plasma instead, and I was able to
control the range (and avoid their plasma in turn) long enough that I
wore him down over time.  But if I'd brought my conventional Teracron
tactics, I probably would've been in serious trouble.

>My priority is to change the fighter/point defence rules
>for games where Fleet Book 1 and the new human fleets on
>Star Ranger are typical. People who play very different
>styles of FT can adapt them or ignore them as before.

I guess I can understand that... but at the same time, I always like to
see modifications that might actually work well enough across a broad
range of games that it's better across the board than what basic Full
Thrust already does.  If it winds up amounting to house rules that don't
work outside of a particular situation, I'm less interested.  (I'm
thrilled by Cross Dimensions on this note, as you know.)

>I'd really like people to try these rules with FB1/new
>human fleets against say, Cylon Basestars and let me
>know what they think. Anyone? (Doesn't have to be right
>away either, I'm going to leave these on my website for
>a couple of months at least.)

I can try it out anyway.  Just let it be known that I've solved my fears
of plasma bolts now. ;)

E
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