So Change them..... 20 minutes, 1000 seconds not much difference if the 1 light second scale bothers you...
Variant initiative determination in High Guard '80
- Thread starter Carlobrand
- Start date
So Change them..... 20 minutes, 1000 seconds not much difference if the 1 light second scale bothers you...
Which still means one missile delivers 100-200 EP while one spinal PB delivers anywhere from 500 to 1000 and gets the same damage roll - which in this case makes a spinal PB weapon almost useless against a heavily armored ship. And, a companion to the spinal variant I was working on provides for additional hits from a large battery depending on how successful the roll was.
High Guard aimed for simplicity. It succeeded in that respect but lost some flavor in the process, at least to me. I want to spice it up a bit. Changing out the initiative process makes it a bit more logical than, say, a random chance of letting a 1G fleet get to long range against a 6G fleet, and it helps the agility problem a bit: even if a player only spends one agility point trying to get to their preferred range, that has a big statistical effect down the line. Changing out some of the other stuff I'm thinking of makes initiative more important because range becomes a more vital consideration, and the game becomes more about tactics and thought than about who has the best mini-maxed design. Fleets can evolve a design philosophy: does your fleet like to stand off and snipe with PBs or does it like to hug in close and knife-fight it with mesons?
(I'm toying with a visual range combat option that could mean life or death for a low tech fleet trying to resist a high tech fleet, not to mention making life much more interesting vis-à-vis fighters, but that one's a good deal more difficult to balance, so I'm still thinking it through.)
Oh, I see what you mean, but I read it differently:
A nuke delivers 100-200 EPs, and rolls once for damage. A (let's say) J factor PA spinal delivers 800 EPs, but rolls 10 times in the damage tables, so, each roll is "worth" 80 EPs (40-80% of the nuke's).
IMHO, this represents the nuke exploding on an specific point of the ship, so concentrating the damage effect, while the PA, being a continuous beam, distributing its effect along several points of the ship.
If the ship is small enough for this not to really have effect, the criticals due to weapon factor vs size will care for it...
Fair point, since each of the rolls is going to be modified by armor. However, a beam-type weapon is going to have a bit more of a tunneling effect than a radiating weapon like a nuke. Your damage in that case is more of a furrow and should be a bit more penetrating, which should compensate.
I'll have to give that some thought. There's still a need to punch it up, or logically they'd stop working on better PA beams after about TL 12 because, between the advances in armor and power of a meson at TL13, the PA would become obsolete. But they wouldn't be as penetrating as I'd first considered.
These ships must be pretty when they come in for repairs: craters from nuke hits, long furrows from PB spinals, the shorter and shallower furrows of laser and fusion beam hits.
I don't see nukes in space as radiating weapons, but as powerful explosives. After all, their radiation damage is quite less tan PA spinals, because they do not get the -6 the spinals do (only surface explosión does, due to the higher explosive power).
Even so, PAs are not obsolete. Being more precise than meson guns, and being no defense against them, they can be quite letal against not so armored ships, or against escorts small enough for criticals being achieved...
I see some similitudes with Plasers vs Blasers. As the former send bursts that either hit or miss, but when they hit they carry more power in a more concentrated burst (hence the -2 to damage table), the latter are more precise, as they are continuous beams, but less powered or concentrated (hence the better factor when more than one).
Agreed, it must be a messy job :rofl:
I'm sorry, I meant radiating as in like a lightbulb, the blast going in all directions unless you've got a nuclear "shaped charge" going on, not radiating as in neutron bombs (which might be something interesting to play with by itself).
You don't expect to see "not so armored ships" taking the line against battleships and heavy cruisers unless the enemy is finding himself in a pickle. Equipping a battleship or heavy cruiser with a spinal intended for such prey is a departure from their primary mission, which is to kill the kind of big heavily armored ships that do typically take the line to defend worlds. That meson spinal may not be ideal for shooting at a lightly armored target, having a lower chance of hitting, but that lightly armored target is itself either carrying a PA that is plinking weapons and fuel on a heavily armored target while the heavy is one-hitting-killing, or it is likewise carrying a meson and having the same low chance to hit - in both cases as well as facing weapons damage from the attacker's secondary weapons while their own secondaries are having little or no effect.
Which means the PA is likely to find a home on raiders whose designs favor range over power and defense, and who hope to encounter soft targets while running away from hard targets.
