TCS With Mongoose High Guard?
- Thread starter fiat_knox
- Start date
Hello,
I have been looking through TCS this week. Never saw this in my CT days but have it on the CT CDROM.
I am not sure there is much to change to be honest. I made a few notes though.
Fuel Tanks
Collapsible Tanks: Could allow as written in TCS. Only useful in campaign.
Demountable Fuel Tanks: 2000Cr per ton (in line with DT pricing).
Exterior Demountable Fuel Tanks: 2500Cr per ton recalculate thrust.
Drop Tanks: As per High Guard page 43
For a campaign, my personal view is to allow the Collapsible Fuel Tanks as written, and Drop Tanks ignore the other 2 options.
Breaking off
Breaking off by jump should just be allowed and take 2 turns, i.e. the enemy gets one turn to shoot before you go. Everyone gets the worst case of TCS as written.
Breaking off by acceleration is tuffer,.
My thoughts: any ships at Distance "Long" or more can announce they have broken off at the end of a turn.
As we do not have a concept of agility, we should use the m-drive rating.
A ship at "Very Long" or greater range gains +2 (modern version of Reserve).
Even if orders are not being used from High Guard, the Maximum Speed Order should be allowed by both the ship breaking off and the pursuer, success on 8+ no effect on failure.
A normal combat equivalent to the "Maximum Speed" order should be an action Average Difficulty Engineering (M-Drive). The Effects from the Task Chain DM table gives the increase (or if bad dice are rolled) the decrease to use.
I need to look through the campaign rules.
Simon
I have been looking through TCS this week. Never saw this in my CT days but have it on the CT CDROM.
I am not sure there is much to change to be honest. I made a few notes though.
Fuel Tanks
Collapsible Tanks: Could allow as written in TCS. Only useful in campaign.
Demountable Fuel Tanks: 2000Cr per ton (in line with DT pricing).
Exterior Demountable Fuel Tanks: 2500Cr per ton recalculate thrust.
Drop Tanks: As per High Guard page 43
For a campaign, my personal view is to allow the Collapsible Fuel Tanks as written, and Drop Tanks ignore the other 2 options.
Breaking off
Breaking off by jump should just be allowed and take 2 turns, i.e. the enemy gets one turn to shoot before you go. Everyone gets the worst case of TCS as written.
Breaking off by acceleration is tuffer,.
My thoughts: any ships at Distance "Long" or more can announce they have broken off at the end of a turn.
As we do not have a concept of agility, we should use the m-drive rating.
A ship at "Very Long" or greater range gains +2 (modern version of Reserve).
Even if orders are not being used from High Guard, the Maximum Speed Order should be allowed by both the ship breaking off and the pursuer, success on 8+ no effect on failure.
A normal combat equivalent to the "Maximum Speed" order should be an action Average Difficulty Engineering (M-Drive). The Effects from the Task Chain DM table gives the increase (or if bad dice are rolled) the decrease to use.
I need to look through the campaign rules.
Simon
I could probably be convinced, without too much effort, to referee a BCS tournament for a limted number of players if there is interest.
Rusty_Unicorn
SOC-1
I'm a newb, so I don't understand the concept of the Trillion Credit Squadron. I can kinda guess from the term, but you could pull that off with a couple good ships, which is more like a task force, not a squadron.
The Concept Of TCS
TCS was a concept for a tournament adventure for Classic Traveller. Players were given a trillion (10^12) credits with which to budget the creation of a fleet of ships. They would then be pitted against one another in tournament play at game cons, with qualifying rounds, heats, quarter finals, semis and a Grand Final.
The objective was basically to design the best fleet. As the designer, you could determine whether or not the fleet you construct was small but mobile, big and slow but tough and well-armoured, or a muscular fleet with lots of weaponry and power but lightly armoured, for instance.
TCS fans became divided into schools of Naval design philosophy, such as whether large battleships and Dreadnoughts were superior to Battle Riders carrying non-Jump-capable ships into a system, or the comparative superiority of SDB squadrons versus single large Monitors, and so on.
I think one winner beat everybody in battle once by creating a vast swarm of tiny drone ships that could descend upon vessels like a cloud, soaking up all the harm that the big ships could deliver unto them and returning the favour with a continuous rain of heavy fire from all sides, all at once.
Give enough geniuses a trillion credits to play with, and sooner or later one of them will always come up with Mantrid drones.
TCS was a concept for a tournament adventure for Classic Traveller. Players were given a trillion (10^12) credits with which to budget the creation of a fleet of ships. They would then be pitted against one another in tournament play at game cons, with qualifying rounds, heats, quarter finals, semis and a Grand Final.
The objective was basically to design the best fleet. As the designer, you could determine whether or not the fleet you construct was small but mobile, big and slow but tough and well-armoured, or a muscular fleet with lots of weaponry and power but lightly armoured, for instance.
TCS fans became divided into schools of Naval design philosophy, such as whether large battleships and Dreadnoughts were superior to Battle Riders carrying non-Jump-capable ships into a system, or the comparative superiority of SDB squadrons versus single large Monitors, and so on.
I think one winner beat everybody in battle once by creating a vast swarm of tiny drone ships that could descend upon vessels like a cloud, soaking up all the harm that the big ships could deliver unto them and returning the favour with a continuous rain of heavy fire from all sides, all at once.
Give enough geniuses a trillion credits to play with, and sooner or later one of them will always come up with Mantrid drones.
E.D.Quibell
SOC-13
I see this from both sides, as my degree is in AI.
From the AI point of view, the heuristics he used were designed to find the best fit of the system provided to win. And in doing so create some knolwedge about machine learning in an rule based enviroment. This is the bit I like about the AI.
From the fan point of view, TCS is set in a role playing enviroment that has some underlying assumptions that he completly ignored, because he wasn't interested in them, and they weren't in the rules.
Because he used (abused) what was supposed to be an enjoyable and fun experiance for Traveller fans for academic purpouses and not game purpouses he runined the experiance for the fans. This is the crux of the issue.
He could have approched the tournament in a different way and still been able to generate the same results, by not enterening but by running his fleets against the winners/loses after the fact.
His goal was not to win the tornament, it was to find how machines learn. He did this _by_ winning the tornament, but that was just a side product of his goal.
The fans goal _was_ to win the tornament, for most of them they wouldn't give a flying f*&^ about expanding the knowledeg in machine learning, although given the opotunity to, and outside the context of the tournamoent, I'm sure they would have loved to help.
He approched it in completly the wrong way, but then academnics arn't known for their people skills!
Best Regards,
Ewan
Tcs
Ewan,
Your summary is balanced, informative, and fair. I commend you for that.
Unfortunately, I am not nearly as generous. In my view, he exploited the poor wording of the tournament rules to build a fleet that, if it did not directly violate the letter of the law, clearly violated the spirit. That he had no intrinsic interest in gaming, that he used a computer, and that he only participated in the tournament for academic reasons in no way change the fact that he won by playing dirty pool. Of course, these are just my opinions, though it is worth noting that the rules were changed after his victory to close that loophole.
But, this horse has long been beaten to death.
The original TCS had two parts: a tournament wargame to allow players to design fleets based on commonly agreed rules (tech level, minimum performance requirements, etc) and pit them against each other head-to-head, and a campaign game which added more depth (construction times, maintenance, repair, refit, etc).
Depending on the design philsophy of the builder, a TCS tournament fleet could be as small as eight or ten battleships or as big as a thousand missile frigates or ten thousand plus fighters. Fleets of this size often forced abstraction or thousands of die rolls per turn and could be unwieldy to play through.
To avoid those problems, some people played BCS (Billion Credit Squadron - 1,000MCr) or 10BCS, which reduced the "fleet" sizes to something much more manageable. There are a couple threads from earlier this year in the PbP OOC forum on these boards if you want to see how such a tournament might play out.
From my perspective, it would be interesting to see if MGT rules break the rock-paper-scissors relationship of the meson sled, missile boat, and rock design archetypes (I suspect they do) and whether fighters can be useful in MGT (they weren't in CT).
Like I said before, I'd be willing to ref a tourney, but I'd want to keep it small (BCS and no more than four players) as I don't want to bite off more than I can chew.
Ewan,
Your summary is balanced, informative, and fair. I commend you for that.
Unfortunately, I am not nearly as generous. In my view, he exploited the poor wording of the tournament rules to build a fleet that, if it did not directly violate the letter of the law, clearly violated the spirit. That he had no intrinsic interest in gaming, that he used a computer, and that he only participated in the tournament for academic reasons in no way change the fact that he won by playing dirty pool. Of course, these are just my opinions, though it is worth noting that the rules were changed after his victory to close that loophole.
But, this horse has long been beaten to death.
The original TCS had two parts: a tournament wargame to allow players to design fleets based on commonly agreed rules (tech level, minimum performance requirements, etc) and pit them against each other head-to-head, and a campaign game which added more depth (construction times, maintenance, repair, refit, etc).
Depending on the design philsophy of the builder, a TCS tournament fleet could be as small as eight or ten battleships or as big as a thousand missile frigates or ten thousand plus fighters. Fleets of this size often forced abstraction or thousands of die rolls per turn and could be unwieldy to play through.
To avoid those problems, some people played BCS (Billion Credit Squadron - 1,000MCr) or 10BCS, which reduced the "fleet" sizes to something much more manageable. There are a couple threads from earlier this year in the PbP OOC forum on these boards if you want to see how such a tournament might play out.
From my perspective, it would be interesting to see if MGT rules break the rock-paper-scissors relationship of the meson sled, missile boat, and rock design archetypes (I suspect they do) and whether fighters can be useful in MGT (they weren't in CT).
Like I said before, I'd be willing to ref a tourney, but I'd want to keep it small (BCS and no more than four players) as I don't want to bite off more than I can chew.
