CT Only: Combat Report - testing HG2 rules "fixes"

[McPerth]

1. "Fixing" rules isn't easy!

Surprised by that?

It's easier just to criticize, but you took the hardest way...

2. Meson-screens-as-armour isn't working ... you need that "top penetrate" roll which knocks down the potency of the weapon, or the Meson hits come too readily.

When I suggested them to act as armor I never intended for the to penétrate rolls to be forfeited. Time ago I even suggested to reduce this armor factor by the roll over mínimum for penetration as a means to balance it, as I guess using both rules would make MG useless and unbalance it on the other side...

3. What is needed is some way to up the potency of the Particle Accelerator main armament, to give them a better chance of degrading the Meson attacks before they start registering significant numbers of hits. It may be that the way to do this is to scrap the rule that reduces the number of rolls a spinal PA gets by the target's armour factor - whilst leaving in place the full armour DM on the damage tables. This will mean that all a big-ass PA can do is fry the enemy's weapon systems ... but it will do it FAST.

One thing we sometimes forget is that PAs don't seem to be thought to be used against capital ships, but against auxiliaries and minor ships (as hamsters are). With their better to hit numbers and no effective screens against them, they are more likely to damage them (and a single weapon hit usually mission kills them, as their missiles become easier to stop).

4. There is still a need to balance down the amount of damage the Meson weaponry does when it scores a hit - and in particular, to prevent it from killing the entire crew many times over with almost every hit. Perhaps the way to do THIS is to limit the number of hits you can score on any system (including crew) to one hit per turn. Any surplus hits are lost; although if you roll several hits on the same system, you can always choose to have the most severe applied. This ruling will also help to ensure that those BIG ships truly can stand in line longer.

Remember the crew rules as crew sections instead of crew digits. That alone makes the crew hits quite less lethal, and more so as the ship is bigger.

5. I think the "oversize weapons always score at least one critical" ruling is worth persevering with as it does help to redress the balance in favour of the Particle Accelerators a bit.

should be testes, but I see interesting though in any case...

 

[robject]

This shows two things about HG2 standard combat:

1. In a high-tech, high-armour world, even high-factor Particle Accelerators are pretty pointless pieces of kit. They cannot land killer blows; and they are less effective at doing incremental damage than the same tonnage deveted to missile bays.

2. Modest sized Meson Guns aren't much better. Their ability actually to hit a ship with a factor-9 meson screen is pathetic - albeit that the hits, when they come - are devastating.

I detected a third thing about HG2 standard combat from your post, although it might just be a variation on #1 and #2: HG2 defeats players.

By this stage I had lost the will to live, and stopped playing.

 

[Amber Chancer]

Update:

After evaluating my results so far, I am thinking that if I am going to test "fixes" at TL15, I should maybe do so in the context of J-4 fleets rather than J-3 fleets. At J-3 the cruiser size ships can carry the larger spinal mounts without too much difficulty. At J-4 it gets MUCH tougher. If you want to "have it all" - i.e. J-4, 6G, agility 6, armour-15, /9 Nuclear Damper, /9 Meson screen AND a decent spinal mount ... I think the smallest viable hull size is 551,000 tons. Design compromises SOMEWHERE along the line suddenly become a necessity for everything except those super-dreadnoughts. And THEY will always be limied by their inability to be in two places at once ...


The principal objectives remain:

Make spinal particle accelerators a bit more potent as compared to secondary armament

Make meson weaponry a bit less potent, so as to get away from the world of Spinal Meson Hit = automatic mission kill

Try to find a way of making big ships inherently more "suvivable" than small ships.


The next suite of fixes I am minded to test is as follows:

1. Abandon the rule that armour reduces the number of rolls a spinal weapon gets. It is illogical that a Factor S particle accelerator should do 9 times as many damage to an unarmoured ship as a Factor A particle accelerator, but only 3 times as much damage to an armour-15 ship. Even more illogical that a factor Q particle accelerator does 8 times as much damage to an unarmoured ship as a factor-A particle accelerator, but exactly the same amount of damage to an armour-15 ship. PREDICTED EFFECT: spinal particle accelerators will become more potent; which means, in turn, that meson weaponry will become less potent as it is likely ot have suffered more damage by degradation from enemy fire by the time it starts registering hits.

2. Extend the rule that armour reduces the number of critical hits caused by an outsized weapon (i.e. one with a weapon factor larger than the target ship code) to meson weaponry hit. RATIONALE: I envisage these critical hits as being a consequence of massive concussions resonating through the ship and its systems (a bit like the effect of the shock wave when a depth charge detonates near a submarine). Armour reduces them because part of the point of armour is that it enables the designer to create a patchwork of different, aharmonic, resonant frequencies throughout the different parts of the ship. Thus the shock waves so not resonate so much and are dampened down that much quicker. This effect does not depend upon whether the explosion giving rise to the shock wave was internal or external. PREDICTED EFFECT: minor, but noticeable, reduction in the potency of meson weaponry against cruiser-size vessels.

3. Modify the rule for the effect of armour in reducing critical hits caused by outsized weapons, so that an outsized weapon must always score at least one ciritical hit. PREDICTED EFFECT: larger ships have a survivability advantage over smaller ships; and 300KT + ships gain an exclusive advantage which could previously be acquired by any ship of 30KT or more which shipped enough armour. This will incentivise, in some degree, the use of BBs as against BRs or CAs.

4. Where a single weapon strike gets more than one damage roll, do not allow more than one result to be applied against any one ship system (the following count as ship systems: J-drive; M-drive; Power Plant; Computer; Crew; each Screen; the Spinal Mount; each weapon battery). If several hits against the same system are rolled, then the one that does most damage applies (so, e.g. if Computer-2, Computer-3 and Computer-1 are rolled, then the computer suffers a total of 3 points degradation, not 6). PREDICTED EFFECT: meson hits will no longer be more or less guaranteed to wipe out the entire ship's crew, because however many crew hits they roll, only one can take effect. COROLLARY: the carrying of a Frozen Watch (or more than one Frozen Watch) will make sense. Any ship with a frozen watch which suffers a crew hit will always be able to retire to reserve, revive the frozen watch, and re-join the fray. MORE GENERALLY: those multi-roll hits, particularly from meson guns, will seldom result in total mission kill.

5. Switch "Fuel Tanks Shattered" result on the Internal Explosion damage table with "Hangars destroyed" on critical hits table.

6. POSSIBLY play Meson Screen factor as a DM on the damage tables for Meson hits, even after the screen has been penetrated. I am not yet sure whether this will reduce the potency of meson weaponry too far ... but this can be experimented with.


More play tests and combat reports to follow as and when.