Locutus9956
Mongoose
I tend to agree with most of the latter sentiments in this thread. A rarity limit I think would acutally be a good thing for encouraging more variety and more interesting fleets (though I found the the Armageddon point splits tended to do that a bit anyway and apparently theyre coming back soon 
)
To Katadder's suggestion of foricing you to take ships of a certain PL, sorry but I agree with Burger, that's the worst idea I've heard for quite some time. In principle it could actually work but only if all fleets had equal strenght ships across all PLS, and they clearly dont! Some fleets lack ships of some PL's entirely and many others only have very weak (or at least very SPECIALISED choices at a given level.
However I do think that rarity CAN be helpful to a limited extent with balancing some particular types of ship, in particular I'm refering to the 'glass hammer' type ships. As a prime example look at the Saggitarius.
On it's own its a useful support ship and whilst well armed it doesnt really pack much of a whatck than any other ship of it's level. It CAN get alot of crits and with the right missile load can be very dangerous of course but it's not THAT deadly. And furthermore it's actually rather fragile and so the obvious it becomes one of those dangerous ships thats really easy to get rid of and tends to get shot immediately. Now look at what happens if you field 10 of them though, that decent firepower multiplies to the point where it can alpha strike half your opponetns fleet away and beacuse that firepower is spread around so much your opponent has virtually no chance of removing much of it quickly to lower the incoming fire on the next few turns. Now this is a general issue with swarms anyway to be honest and fair enough, superior numbers IS an advantage and rightly so but with ships of this type it becomes utterly dominating.
Most recent tourneys have got round this by limiting fleets to 2 Saggs maximum and that seems to work just fine. Now my point is that limiting the numbers available CAN be a balancing factor for certain types of ship. I personally dont think the Saggitarius is, in it's self, broken, however fielding a spam fleet of them ABSOLUTELY is. The same applies to any fragile, artillery style ship, like the Dag Kar, Vree Bombardment Saucers etc etc.
)To Katadder's suggestion of foricing you to take ships of a certain PL, sorry but I agree with Burger, that's the worst idea I've heard for quite some time. In principle it could actually work but only if all fleets had equal strenght ships across all PLS, and they clearly dont! Some fleets lack ships of some PL's entirely and many others only have very weak (or at least very SPECIALISED choices at a given level.
However I do think that rarity CAN be helpful to a limited extent with balancing some particular types of ship, in particular I'm refering to the 'glass hammer' type ships. As a prime example look at the Saggitarius.
On it's own its a useful support ship and whilst well armed it doesnt really pack much of a whatck than any other ship of it's level. It CAN get alot of crits and with the right missile load can be very dangerous of course but it's not THAT deadly. And furthermore it's actually rather fragile and so the obvious it becomes one of those dangerous ships thats really easy to get rid of and tends to get shot immediately. Now look at what happens if you field 10 of them though, that decent firepower multiplies to the point where it can alpha strike half your opponetns fleet away and beacuse that firepower is spread around so much your opponent has virtually no chance of removing much of it quickly to lower the incoming fire on the next few turns. Now this is a general issue with swarms anyway to be honest and fair enough, superior numbers IS an advantage and rightly so but with ships of this type it becomes utterly dominating.
Most recent tourneys have got round this by limiting fleets to 2 Saggs maximum and that seems to work just fine. Now my point is that limiting the numbers available CAN be a balancing factor for certain types of ship. I personally dont think the Saggitarius is, in it's self, broken, however fielding a spam fleet of them ABSOLUTELY is. The same applies to any fragile, artillery style ship, like the Dag Kar, Vree Bombardment Saucers etc etc.
