I spent a significant amount of time this past weekend examining a thorny issue raised by Frankvas in his thread “So ….. Whos taking Kzinti to the upcoming tournament in the UK?” The specific issue raised has to do with spamming cheap drone ships to produce a critical mass of drones to overwhelm the opponent’s drone defenses creating an unbalanced tournament fleet. In working on this issue I came up with a larger philosophical issue that I am hoping can be addressed.
Before I launch into it, a bit of my history to help illustrate the eventual point of this post. I originally got into ACTA in the B5 days thanks to a demo run by Chernobyl at Kublacon in California. I think that ACTA is a terrific system that carefully balances complexity and tactical options and hits right in the sweet spot for a miniatures game. I have supported this by purchasing several hundred dollars worth of ships over that original ACTA run. I played in convention tournaments, ran some convention tournaments, and played in online matches with people across the USA, the UK, and Europe through Vassal. In fact, in playing in an online campaign with players across the USA I discovered that the organizer randomly lived a few blocks from my house and he is now the core of my regular miniatures group. I am a published game designer (know where near the league of Mongoose – I am a freelance guy and thus make my living elsewhere), which gives me an appreciation of the extreme challenges of the design, play testing and rule writing process. I am posting this thread because I want to see ACTA:SF succeed; I believe the potential is immense with fun and challenge for all for years to come.
I spent the weekend doing a lot of math, testing special formations and running simulations for a meet up with Frankvas on Sunday to test his concerns about drone spamming. I found it to be a tricky issue, but more importantly it lead me to my philosophical dilemma, which is tournament stalemating. My initial numbers for drone spamming were very concerning (1-2 capital ships die per turn starting at range 36”). I thought that Captain Jonah hit the solution when he asked about dropping the crew quality check for Intensify Defensive Firepower. I found that in an “X” formation with all ships on IDF, fleets could nullify enough drones to close (especially the Klingons) and, of course, the Romulans are immune while cloaked (but only move 6”). Of course the Tholians are the big winners here, but pure rock, paper, scissors is more than a bit unsatisfying. The problem then becomes that you have to use all special actions (trust me, rushing fast ships does not work mathematically) while the drone player can use All Power to Engines tangent to your advance and be very difficult to catch if he chooses not to engage – leading to a stalemate. In fact, I realized, this was a bigger problem with the Romulans than with the drones. A Romulan player needs to uncloak and fire at short range to have an advantage, but only can move 6”, which lets the other player, fly away if they wish. In short, the players sort of have to agree to a range at which they each think the risk is acceptable to start the fight at and if they do not agree before the turns are up, they do virtually nothing. Neither is likely to win the tournament – they both lose. Either player can cause the issue. Similar things happen with the Gorn if they take lumbering ships, etc.
To solve this, I propose that tournament matches have scenario objectives that are equal too, or out weigh the value of destroyed ships. After all, few battles are fought just to inflict casualties, there is usually something else at stake. Many of the current scenarios have a single 100 point objective over the course of the game; I believe that higher points gained over the course of the game with lead to more interesting matches and possibly, more variety in fleet design (especially as more specialized ships are released over the coming months and years).
As for drone spamming, although elegant in its way, doing away with IDF crew checks will destroy the effectiveness of the plasma races and ultimately force a rebalance of most of the ships in the game; this is not an acceptable solution. Frankvas suggested to me the answer that I believe is correct: errata the heavy drone ships (small ships with 3+ drones and medium ships with 4+ drones, etc.) to add firing arcs for the drones. This prevents overwhelming drones at range from one direction, which encourages drone ships to mix it up to achieve firepower against the enemy’s fleet. The ~100 point ships could have 3 drones F, S, P (and be at somewhat reduce points), the mid range ships could be at F, S, P, A and F, S, P, T at a little higher points and the ships with more then four drones would have 1 each in F, S, P, A and all the rest as T. This is a simulated (but untested!) solution that would, no doubt, require a little bit of tweaking.
I hope that someone tries drone spamming at this first major tournament so that all of the best minds can take a crack at the issue and I hope that whatever changes, if any, can be made by errata early to help this game achieve the grand success that it richly deserves.
-Humbaba
Before I launch into it, a bit of my history to help illustrate the eventual point of this post. I originally got into ACTA in the B5 days thanks to a demo run by Chernobyl at Kublacon in California. I think that ACTA is a terrific system that carefully balances complexity and tactical options and hits right in the sweet spot for a miniatures game. I have supported this by purchasing several hundred dollars worth of ships over that original ACTA run. I played in convention tournaments, ran some convention tournaments, and played in online matches with people across the USA, the UK, and Europe through Vassal. In fact, in playing in an online campaign with players across the USA I discovered that the organizer randomly lived a few blocks from my house and he is now the core of my regular miniatures group. I am a published game designer (know where near the league of Mongoose – I am a freelance guy and thus make my living elsewhere), which gives me an appreciation of the extreme challenges of the design, play testing and rule writing process. I am posting this thread because I want to see ACTA:SF succeed; I believe the potential is immense with fun and challenge for all for years to come.
I spent the weekend doing a lot of math, testing special formations and running simulations for a meet up with Frankvas on Sunday to test his concerns about drone spamming. I found it to be a tricky issue, but more importantly it lead me to my philosophical dilemma, which is tournament stalemating. My initial numbers for drone spamming were very concerning (1-2 capital ships die per turn starting at range 36”). I thought that Captain Jonah hit the solution when he asked about dropping the crew quality check for Intensify Defensive Firepower. I found that in an “X” formation with all ships on IDF, fleets could nullify enough drones to close (especially the Klingons) and, of course, the Romulans are immune while cloaked (but only move 6”). Of course the Tholians are the big winners here, but pure rock, paper, scissors is more than a bit unsatisfying. The problem then becomes that you have to use all special actions (trust me, rushing fast ships does not work mathematically) while the drone player can use All Power to Engines tangent to your advance and be very difficult to catch if he chooses not to engage – leading to a stalemate. In fact, I realized, this was a bigger problem with the Romulans than with the drones. A Romulan player needs to uncloak and fire at short range to have an advantage, but only can move 6”, which lets the other player, fly away if they wish. In short, the players sort of have to agree to a range at which they each think the risk is acceptable to start the fight at and if they do not agree before the turns are up, they do virtually nothing. Neither is likely to win the tournament – they both lose. Either player can cause the issue. Similar things happen with the Gorn if they take lumbering ships, etc.
To solve this, I propose that tournament matches have scenario objectives that are equal too, or out weigh the value of destroyed ships. After all, few battles are fought just to inflict casualties, there is usually something else at stake. Many of the current scenarios have a single 100 point objective over the course of the game; I believe that higher points gained over the course of the game with lead to more interesting matches and possibly, more variety in fleet design (especially as more specialized ships are released over the coming months and years).
As for drone spamming, although elegant in its way, doing away with IDF crew checks will destroy the effectiveness of the plasma races and ultimately force a rebalance of most of the ships in the game; this is not an acceptable solution. Frankvas suggested to me the answer that I believe is correct: errata the heavy drone ships (small ships with 3+ drones and medium ships with 4+ drones, etc.) to add firing arcs for the drones. This prevents overwhelming drones at range from one direction, which encourages drone ships to mix it up to achieve firepower against the enemy’s fleet. The ~100 point ships could have 3 drones F, S, P (and be at somewhat reduce points), the mid range ships could be at F, S, P, A and F, S, P, T at a little higher points and the ships with more then four drones would have 1 each in F, S, P, A and all the rest as T. This is a simulated (but untested!) solution that would, no doubt, require a little bit of tweaking.
I hope that someone tries drone spamming at this first major tournament so that all of the best minds can take a crack at the issue and I hope that whatever changes, if any, can be made by errata early to help this game achieve the grand success that it richly deserves.
-Humbaba
Remove the CQ from IDF. Increase point cost. SOMETHING! But don't go for logic defying "weapon system becomes worse in future, then suddenly mid-flight gains abilities it lost during launch process" route 
