[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
In my experience, one-sided battles rarely result in great numbers of damaged ships. Many/most players use compact formations which allow concentrated fire on a few targets, rather than spread out fire. If one player concentrates fire and the other doesn't, the spread out player will die. He will constantly lose firepower, while the concentrated player stays consistent throughout the battle. The exception is if the spread out player has vast numerical superiority (which results in concentrated fire on a different scale).

Two reasons concentrated fire is so common on PBW are 1) it works , and 2) strategic combat tends to use concentrated fire.

This is why we need area effect weapons and collateral damage. Currently there is no 'downside' to packing your ships together in ranks like Napoleonic-era soldiers and mowing down the opposition with concentrated fire. If one weapon could hit several ships that were close together, and if a ship blowing up could damage other nearby ships, there would be counter-tactics to this method of slaughter.

As far as mounts are concerned, yes, these are what have rendered Emissive Armor almost useless, and broken a lot of other features of the game. Torpedoes are also nearly useless in SE IV due to the fact that any once-per-turn beam weapon can be made stronger by a mount and just as effective at breaking Emissive Armor as a torpedo would be...

I think that the idea of having a penalty to-hit for larger mounts instead of a bonus is a good idea. We also need to scale-back the degree to which mounts increase weapon power. It's one thing to have larger weapons with larger damage in the same proportion. The original reason for mounts was simply to decrease the number of wepaons that large ships had to fire in combat and so speed up combat resolution. But the VERY large bonuses in size/cost to damage dealt out is a real problem. Moo II actually offered a LOWER ratio of size/damage output for the 'heavy' mount. Remember? Some testing of new proportions for mounts is in order.

[ December 04, 2002, 02:13: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]