Hi all, I've been following the discussions with undiminshed interest and I thought I would throw in my two pennies' worth (UK equivalent of cents).
Scale
On Gothic I used a nominal scale of 1000km=1cm, nominal as in i used it when convenient
and promptly ignored it when it wasn't. On a related subject you could calculate the time
scale of a turn by using the orbit speed of planets - if I remember rightly the planet
earth orbits the sun at 64,000 mph, or very roughly 96,000 kph. Using the nominal scale
and the fact that planets don't move during the game means you can theoretically work out
how long a turn is. It'll probably work out to be something ridiculously short but its an
interesting side issue.
I just answered a question on The Realm of Inisfail from a guy who had problems with players parking on planets to avoid being shot at....
> "Here's one that always gets my group. It's really complicated.
>
> Okay, so you can't shoot through a planet. Got it. And you don't have to
> move when in planetary orbit. And you can cross over a planet. Now
> according to the rules, there is nothing to stop you from parking half
> way accross the planet, immune to enemy fire but unable to shoot
> back(sort of). Except attack craft can be launched from over the planet
> and can fly out to attack and the enemy can't shoot back at the
> carrier(unless they have attack craft too). Our first games played this
> way led to shps more or less hiding for the game over a planet,
> unkillable. Then we adjusted the rules a little. We made it so if ships
> were both over the planet template then they could shoot at each other.
> Unfortunatly, this led to every ship flying over the planet and stopping
> there while they blasted away at each other. It was a horrible mess and
> the game was kind of boring with no movement(not to mention the
> population of the planet, who had do deal with a veritable shower of
> raining hulks on their planet). Now we play it so that if the entire
> planet it between you and your target, you can't fire at it. But if your
> on the template your assumed to be coming over the horizon of the planet
> and fire as normal. This works okay. But we'd like something more
> official. Personnaly, I think allowing ship to cross a planet was a
> mistake. I mean, yes, it's logical, but it really makes a mess. So to
> simplify my question:
>
> How does combat with a ship passing over(or under) a planet work?"
Hmmmm, I see your problem, while we were playtesting the game all our planet models were 3d (balls, if you get my meaning) the card templates came along later and we had already got into the habit of not parking on planets by that time. With this in mind I think you can go two ways.
1. Say you may not stop on a planet template (unfortunately not very 'realistic' really)
2. Say if you are on the template it means you can be targetted by direct fire weapons as you come 'over the horizon' if you do so. This is the solution you''ve come up with and sounds fair to me.
Personally I prefer 2. as it's easier to understand the reasoning, however if you want to stick to what we gamed with for most of the playtesting 1. is a more accurate representation. You could of course simply ban ships crossing the planet (after all asteroids and dust clouds have effectively 'infinite' height and depth in the game) but I always liked the fact you could fly over and under planets.
Asteroid fields
This has been the subject of much debate on the list and I think it's really refeshing to
see the interesting and varied responses. As with planets there seem to be two main
schools of thought which I'll summarise:
1.That asteroids should only block LOF though them, not into or out of them (probably giving a modifier to shooting tho')
2. That they do block LOF into them and out of them, but ships within an asteroid field can fire on each other, again with an appropriate modifier.
Personally I favour 2. as it keeps that game effect of being able to hide in a field rather than behind it, which feels right. But if this tactic is overly effective it may need to be crocked (colloquial term for "made less effective"). The size of asteroid fields limits the practicality of hiding many ships in them so I suspect it's not too big a problem and, at the end of the day, there are risks involved in doing it. it's not a tactic I've seen used a great deal so I must defer to you honourable gentlemen of the list to make a final call on this one.
Bombers + escorting fighters
This one's come up so many times that I'm seriously considering publishing the following
amendment.
If a bomber wave is intercepted by a fighter squadron the intercepting player may opt to eliminate any single bomber squadron in the wave. This can be used to break up the wave as shown below
B1B2B3B4
F
A wave of four bombers is intercepted by a single fighter, the intercepting player chooses to kill off B2, thus breaking the wave into two groups, B1 as a lone squadron, and B3 and B4 as a two-squadron wave.
B1 XX B3B4
If an escorting fighter squadron is present in the wave it must be the first thing
attacked by the intercepting fighters, thus protecting the integrity of the wave.ie
B1B2B3F1
F
The fighters must take on the escorting fighters first, hence
B1B2B3 X
The bomber wave survives as a three-squadron group (hurrah!)
What do you think folks?
I'm also considering a combat space patrol rule as follows
Combat Space Patrol
When ships get to close quarters it can become virtually impossible to intercept attacking
ordnance with fighters using the normal rules. However, to prevent bombers sneaking
through due to loopholes in the space/time continum (ie the turn sequence) a number of
players have suggested the following option to me.
If fighters are placed on the base of a ship they are said to be performing 'combat space patrol', keeping a close station around the ship so that they can perform a last minute intercept attempt on attacking ordnance. Each fighter marker effectively increases the ship's turret value by one, but if the player chooses to use the fighters in this way the fighter squadron marker is removed immediately as the fighters return to their ship to refuel and rearm.
For example, the Gothic class cruiser Antilles has two fighter markers on its base as a combat space patrol. During the ordnance phase a Styx class cruiser slips in close and unleashes a single wave of six bomber squadrons against the Antilles. The two fighter squadrons are added to the Antilles turret factor of 2 to increase it to 4, four dice are rolled to attack the bombers and their attack is conducted at D6-4 attacks each.
Note that the fighters can only assist against a single attack before they are used up, so if a second wave of bombers attacked the Antilles in our example the fighters would not be available, although the Imperial player could opt to use one squadron to add +1 turrets vs the first wave and save the other squadron to use against the next. In essence each fighter squadron is +1 turret dice which can be used against one ordnance attack and is then exhausted.
One issue about CSP is whether the fighters should have a chance of being eliminated by 'collateral damage' from weapons hits on the ship, blast markers etc. Any feedback on this or other stuff welcome.