Suggestion for boresight/inisink problem solution

[daishi]

I believe you have described the action correctly eldiablito - the ship does not get to move only turn on the spot.

I also agree that it should be limited to boresight ships.

I disagree though with the concentrate firepower idea. I think you are really just aiming the bow at the target ship, your other gunners in the other arcs could still fire on other ships if they were still in the new corrected arc. I actually never liked the concentrate all firepower SA - to me it seems like one gunner does all the firing ? I would have thought multiple people would fire the guns ie someone for port someone for starboard etc & if there are more than one weapon in an arc then more than one person

 

[Harry Lonsdale]

I think the idea for the SA is that it not only can turn to face its target, but must once the action is declared--even if the target moves such that the acting ship can't turn enough to keep it in arc. Basically once you try to follow it you're committed to turning that way.

I can see using it for non-boresight ships as well, with the restriction that they must try to boresight the target (so they can't turn past the target).

 

[ShopKeepJon]

There still seems to be some miscommunication going on so I am going to try one more time to clear things up.

Point by point:
1. The game works! There is nothing so wrong with the boresight and/or the initiative system that a good and fun game cannot be played using the rules as written. No one is arguing otherwise.

2. The initiative system, especially as it interacts with the boresight mechanic, has enough of an impact on game play that fleet selection (and maneuvering strategies) is often dictated by it. This is not presented as a bad thing, just an observation intended to show that this is not a trivial aspect of the game.

3. Pretty much everyone involved in this discussion knows how to play the game as written and win. No matter how we feel about the way the initiative/boresight mechanics work, we know how to work around them and play a winning game. No one is complaining that they can't win with the rules as written.

4. The current initiative/boresight system leads to some non-intuitive (and often frustrating) situations. For a lot of people this reduces the fun of the game (not by a huge amount, but noticeably).

5. If a rule reduces the fun being had by a substantial number of people (not just some, but a lot), then that rule is a problem since having fun is the reason we are playing the game.

6. If a problem can be fixed without causing a new problem, then it should be fixed. (Note that causing a new, substantial group of people to have less fun would constitute a new problem...)

7. No one is proposing an immediate change to the rules. The purpose of this sort of discussion is to determine if a situation is really a problem (as defined above) and to discuss possible "fixes".

8. No matter how good a rule sounds on paper, it is impossible to determine it's effect on the game without extensive playtesting. Everyone agrees that any proposed "fix" should be so tested.

Hopefully this is clear.

ShopKeepJon

 

[ShopKeepJon]

I think the idea for the SA is that it not only can turn to face its target, but must once the action is declared--even if the target moves such that the acting ship can't turn enough to keep it in arc. Basically once you try to follow it you're committed to turning that way.

I can see using it for non-boresight ships as well, with the restriction that they must try to boresight the target (so they can't turn past the target).

Also...

Since the ship on the SA must turn to follow its target, it can be "led by the nose" into uncomfortable situations. The SA would not control the movement of the target ship in any way... :wink:

I'm still not convinced that this is an ideal solution, but it is the best that I've heard so far. Hmm... maybe I'll give it a go in a couple games and see how it feels...

ShopKeepJon

 

[GhostRecon]

Personally, I think the SA solution to the boresight "problem" is imperfect; as one poster wrote, too much book keeping. It seems overly complicated.

I think some sort of implementation of "raking" fire, which is most of what we see in boresight fire anyway from the series, is best. Something like "Raking Fire: If you had boresight, but the enemy moved out of it, you can do half AD damage with your boresight weapon to the enemy as your beam shots rake across his hull (Or/additionally, your beam weapon rolls 5+ instead of 4+, possibly 5+ if the beam weapon has just 1AD)."

 

[dag'karlove]

There still seems to be some miscommunication going on so I am going to try one more time to clear things up.

Point by point:
1. The game works! There is nothing so wrong with the boresight and/or the initiative system that a good and fun game cannot be played using the rules as written. No one is arguing otherwise.

2. The initiative system, especially as it interacts with the boresight mechanic, has enough of an impact on game play that fleet selection (and maneuvering strategies) is often dictated by it. This is not presented as a bad thing, just an observation intended to show that this is not a trivial aspect of the game.

3. Pretty much everyone involved in this discussion knows how to play the game as written and win. No matter how we feel about the way the initiative/boresight mechanics work, we know how to work around them and play a winning game. No one is complaining that they can't win with the rules as written.

4. The current initiative/boresight system leads to some non-intuitive (and often frustrating) situations. For a lot of people this reduces the fun of the game (not by a huge amount, but noticeably).

5. If a rule reduces the fun being had by a substantial number of people (not just some, but a lot), then that rule is a problem since having fun is the reason we are playing the game.

6. If a problem can be fixed without causing a new problem, then it should be fixed. (Note that causing a new, substantial group of people to have less fun would constitute a new problem...)

7. No one is proposing an immediate change to the rules. The purpose of this sort of discussion is to determine if a situation is really a problem (as defined above) and to discuss possible "fixes".

8. No matter how good a rule sounds on paper, it is impossible to determine it's effect on the game without extensive playtesting. Everyone agrees that any proposed "fix" should be so tested.

Hopefully this is clear.

ShopKeepJon

Great Post. Some of us are a bit hardheaded and cant drop an argument (Yes Im included in that). Thanks for summing it up for us. And Ill Just Agree to Disgagree that an SA is needed, or that there is a problem.

 

[Ripple]

Agree with Dag'kar, very good summation of the issues involved.

As to the SA 'follow that ship' as proposed...

activate a ship, declare the sa and target, make CQ test(if required, was under dsicussion what level or if), move ship as normal with the exception that the ships final turn is held in reserve (note no movement is reserved just the turn), after all other ship movement (again it was postulated that you could resolve turn after target moves... but unnecessarily adds lots of out of sequence turns) the ship with the SA MUST turn as much as possible to bring it's bore to bear on the target ship.

Total changes to record keeping are minimal, as it is literally no different than what you have to record for CAF and or bore sight anyway, and adds nothing truly new to movement as you already have gravity movement step. It could be argued that have the sa move last would allow no gravity moved ships to target in a gravity well which is not currently possible, not sure I see that as a problem, but could easily fix by having the SA reserved turn take place first then gravity.

Raking fire (the half AD in full arc vs full ad in bore) solution had the issue of adding to a ships maneuver (can now play at the edges of your arcs) and options (can much more easily split ad and effect multiple targets) without giving up anything. The SA approach ment you traded something for your increased right to fire.

Thanks again ShopKeepJon...

Ripple

 

[Lord David the Denied]

Personally, I favour a move away from the you-go-I-go game pattern ACtA has at the moment. Changing to a my-turn-your-turn system would eliminate both these issues neatly. Ships could still have boresight weapons, but they'd always get a target. The only restriction would be on the ship's own positioning; you wouldn't be able to manouevre at will if you wanted to use the spinal mount.

Granted it's a massive re-write of the rule book and it won't happen, but the issues as I see them are in the core mechanics of the game, not fleet balance or the concept of the boresight arc. It's a solution, anyway, and I can't see adding SAs or altering FAP breakdowns being anything more than an ad-hoc, band-aid fix.

 

[Ripple]

The activation system of alternating ships was the big reason I picked up ACta, so would hate to see it go. We've played under the turn based games, and affectionately dubbed them the I go, you go if you have anything left games.

The one compromise I saw between the two was a your turn my turn for movement, with all fire being simultaneous. That worked fairly well, but games tended to be very short, as everyone got to fire everything at least once.

Ripple

 

[Foxmeister]

Having now played the game a grand total of two times, with 1 loss and 1 win, some will probably say that I lack sufficient experience to really comment on this issue, but I am a 25-odd year veteran wargamer I do think that my experience overall is of value.

I think that ShopKeepJon has very eloquently summed up the salient points in this discussion, but there is further point I'd like to add.

Essentially, as I've played it (and seen it played), the boresight and initiative game mechanics can be made to work together such that the game mechanics themselves determine tactics rather than any actual strategy you may have planned.

IMHO, this is generally undesirable, since in a perfect gaming system (and there are none!), the game mechanics should essentially be invisible at a tactical level.

Consider the following example:

1 G'Quan facing off against 1 Omega in open space.

Tactical maneuvering aside for one moment, both of these vessels will be looking to boresight each other with their main weaponry, and the initiative system will generally support this invisibly - whomever wins initiative is likely to be able to get a boresight on their opponent, at least until they've closed to well within range of secondary weapons systems.

So, if the G'Quan consistently wins initiative, the Omega will probably never get their main beam to fire, but this is precisely correct since clearly the captain of the G'Quan has outmaneuvered his opponent.

Now, throw in a Hermes some 50" away from the main action, that never does anything other than an "All Stop" SA. Suddenly, no matter how good the G'Quan captain is, he'll never be able to outmaneuver the Omega and get his boresight to bear, because no matter how well he rolls initiative he'll always move before Omega (assuming the EA player isn't an idiot anyway! )

Now the G'Quan is really left with two options:

1. Close into secondary range with the Omega, which probably isn't a good idea since the Omega has longer ranged secondaries and interceptors.

2. Turn to destroy the Hermes. This is probably easier said than done though since the G'Quan is slow and lumbering - it's likely that the Omegas main beam will have finished it off long before it's even turned to face the Hermes, let alone got within range.

The point here is that the Hermes does not pose a significant threat to the G'Quan. at least compared to the Omega, yet it is having a very significant impact on the tactics of the G'Quan. This is not due to any capability of the ship (it is far to far away to be of any consequence), but due to the boresight and initiative game mechanics.

If this were a real-life situation, the captain of the G'Quan would ignore the Hermes entirely and concentrate on the Omega, but the game mechanics do not allow this.

I'm sure someone will want to say that the G'Quan captain was "out-thought" by the EA fleet, and should've taken out the Hermes earlier in the game, but for the basis of this example we'll assume that the Hermes jumped in from Hyperspace whilst the "end-game" was being played out!

Now I know that this is an abstract game, and as such you will almost inevitably be able to find examples where the abstraction breaks down, and I also agree that these won't generally spoil your enjoyment of the game as such examples should turn up relatively rarely.

However, there are sufficient voices on this forum that believe that this particular issue is a problem and would like to see it addressed. I'd probably consider it more of an "artifact" than a problem per se, but I do see and recognize the issue!

As to potential "fixes", one I'd like to throw into the mix which I hope hasn't been kicked around before would be to allow the initiative winner to always reserve one ship to move last.

At present, winning initiative is supposed to give you a tactical advantage but in the example I posited earlier, winning initiative will do nothing for the Narn player, since the Omega could always move last as long as the Hermes was still in existence. If winning initiative allowed the Narn player to reserve a single ship to move last, the tactical advantage of winning initiative would be restored.

Regards,

Dave

 

[Lorcan Nagle]

The activation system of alternating ships was the big reason I picked up ACta, so would hate to see it go. We've played under the turn based games, and affectionately dubbed them the I go, you go if you have anything left games.

I agree. If there was going to be a change to the phased movement/fire, I'd advocate moving towards something similar to Battletech, where you move two units whenever you have twice as many to move as your opponent.

 

[Ripple]

Foxmeister...

good summation of the issue, and one I presented early on... you may have made the point more readily understandable though...

The reserve one ship concept has been tossed around a bit before, and the primary argument against it, is that it does fix the issue with bore sights, it just insulates one ship from those problems some percentage of the time. It's a big part of why the Drazi are the fleet of choice for discussing the breakdown of the bore initiative interaction.

Five firehawks move in on a Primus, who is distantly supported by twelve havens. Before there is any chance of the Primus being threatened the firehawks have to reach the havens and kill at least eight havens. Your suggestion would allow one firehawk to attack the primus if the drazi won initiative, but ultimately the vast majority of turns you ships will have nothing to fire on. (It's not really that hard to hid a few ships out of twelve, which would reduce the firehawks to killing a single haven a turn likely.)

The issue is local to the ship with the bore sight, to some degree the solution has to be too, all fixed number solutions simply shift the point at which the absurdity becomes evident. With the huge variations in fleet sizes available in the game, fixed answers just get overwhelmed by numbers eventually going up, or start to cover entire fleets going down.

I would note in your description of the abstract of the which ship gets to fire its weapons based on who out maneuvers who only continues to work when both ships have bores. If it was a brakiri Avioki vs the Omega, the net affect of the initiative roll would be the Omega being outmaneuvered half of the time, but never out maneuvering the Avioki, even though both a slow lumbering hulls.

Anyway, thank you for adding to the discussion, and putting forth a suggestion on what you think a good fix would be.

Ripple

 

[Triggy]

I think Foxmeister and Shopkeepjon have summed things up very well and Ripple has really demonstrated the "Drazi issue". The Drazi are a balanced fleet to play with but suffer from a few quirks that mean they can be very frustrating to play (when their ships are perfectly lined up for an attack run but can't take any shots due to not having enough initiative sinks).

Like the Stealth issue before it, this isn't a matter of balance, it's a matter of enjoyment and realism. Personally I find the rules as they currently are written to be balanced and playable. They are not however 100% fair to all ships/situations.

An extreme example where there is nothing a player can do about it, no matter what is Drazi vs Centauri 5FAP Raid on a table with a bit of terrain in a corner that allows ships to hide. The Drazi player knows he needs initiative sinks so takes 20 Sunhawks. The Centauri player also knows this so takes 40 Havens (a fleet that woudn't necessarily be that good if not facing Drazi). Keeping 20 Havens hidden in the corner behind the asteroid field (as initiative sinks), the Centauri player rests easy in the knowledge that his ships can never be shot at, no matter what he does and can win the game at his leisure.

Now, is this situation fun for either player? The Drazi player knowing that no matter what fleet he picks, the enemy can nullify a large proportion of his fleet (even without terrain to hide behind this tactic works). Is this an issue we need to worry about at all? Personally I'd like to see something if possible but it would have to retain most of the balance between the fleets (the winning 40-60% of the time that has been mentioned). If so, and it enhances the fun of the games then I'd be well for it.

 

[Foxmeister]

I would note in your description of the abstract of the which ship gets to fire its weapons based on who out maneuvers who only continues to work when both ships have bores. If it was a brakiri Avioki vs the Omega, the net affect of the initiative roll would be the Omega being outmaneuvered half of the time, but never out maneuvering the Avioki, even though both a slow lumbering hulls.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. If the Omega get's it boresight onto the Avioki, it has still "outmaneuvered" the Avioki. The fact that the Avioki doesn't have a boresight weapon is immaterial to the discussion (IMHO of course! ) since the ship just has a more flexible weapons mounting with its Graviton beam. The Avioki captain, *knowing* that his weapons system is more flexible, should be closing to within range of his Graviton beam, whilst trying to avoid the boresight of the Omega - any turn that he fails to do this, he's outmanuevered, even if his primary weapons system is still able to fire.

Note I'm not ignoring the points you made in the rest of your post - it's just that I think Triggy said everything that I would've said in response!

It's comparatively easy to come up with a "one-trick pony" list to defeat a specific opponent and very hard to try to mitigate against this within the rules. In an open competition against allcomers, the Centauri list you mentioned would probably fair very poorly against almost anything else! One would hope that both players want to have a fun, entertaining game and design their lists accordingly (but with victory in mind of course!).

IMHO, the best way to deal with the "win at all costs" type of gamer is not to play them in the first place, but that's a whole different discussion!

Regards,

DAve

 

[Galatea]

The problem I have with the Boreshight issue is that it hinders me from fielding "nice Fleets".
I want to field a fleet that looks good and feels good - this means I want to group my Marathon up with 3 Hermes and NOT let them fly individually. Unfortunately if I don't houserule this I can't do because I need those Hermes to be moved individually as Init Sinks so that I can line up my boresight beam.

 

[eldiablito]

The activation system of alternating ships was the big reason I picked up ACta, so would hate to see it go. We've played under the turn based games, and affectionately dubbed them the I go, you go if you have anything left games.

The one compromise I saw between the two was a your turn my turn for movement, with all fire being simultaneous. That worked fairly well, but games tended to be very short, as everyone got to fire everything at least once.

Ripple

Here! Here! A certain other science fiction game, involving infantry and very long range guns often is determined by who goes first, because the long range guns can frequently take out the enemy threats, before they can fire. To simply say that an entire fleet cannot fire until their enemy shoots is just plain silly.

On the other hand, if perhaps we take Ripple's idea or if you move AND fire, then perhaps the the game would work smoothly...

Personally, I like the idea of a special action. The book-keeping is not an issue because if you use the target/source markers, then you know who is making the bore sight and who is the intended target. So, a Drazi Sunbird moves and targets a Hyperion (for example). Then several movements later, the Hyperion finally takes it's turn, well the Sunbird is not out of luck if the Hyperion adjusts it's vector by a degree or two. This also makes certain races and movement vectors very good at evading bore sight weapons! Super Maneuverability becomes even cooler! Moving across the tangent of a bore sight becomes very difficult to keep track and hit (which makes a sort of sense in my mind).

Whether you expand Concentrate Firepower or make up a new special action is irrelevant to me (in the end), but expanding an existing special action keeps the rules down a little bit.

 

[EDFDarkAngel1]

If it were up to me, I would say that, when moving, a ship may declare boresight if it fulfills all requirements.

If the target ship moves after boresight is declared, it can do so. However, the attacking ship will still be considered to have "boresight" if the targets ship remains within its front arc. If the ship moves past the front arc, boresight is lost.

My two cents.

Dark Angel

 

[GhostRecon]

If it were up to me, I would say that, when moving, a ship may declare boresight if it fulfills all requirements.

If the target ship moves after boresight is declared, it can do so. However, the attacking ship will still be considered to have "boresight" if the targets ship remains within its front arc. If the ship moves past the front arc, boresight is lost.

My two cents.

Dark Angel

Like the raking fire rule I suggested above!

But yes, I think this is the best solution (With the addition/possibility that ships moving out of boresight cause the beam weapon to have reduced effectiveness: "Raking Fire")

 

[Ripple]

For Foxmeister -

There were a number of non-one trick pony fleets mentioned across the thread that caused the same situation. Triggy was just pointing out that even if you know your trick (drazi need sinks), your opponent can match it.

Back a few pages is the hyperion, oracle, two hermes vs centurion, vorchan, 4 havens. In a four skirmish game with some terrain the hyperion will likely never fire its laser in anger. It's a fairly generalist fleet (could argue that the oracle should by an olympus) that will never use it's main weapon, baring some good shots/crits/mistakes.

On your initiative equating to maneuver... I guess so. It still doesn't feel quite right, but your logic is sound. I have a bit of trouble picturing the scene, but I understand your point.

On Raking Fire -

ah, maybe I had missed exactly how it was working...

activate ship, move to bore sight a ship, declare intention, if the target ship subsequently moves, the bore sighting ship is still allowed to fire its bore sighted weapon in the fire sequence.

The unsettled part is how much the of the bore weapon is allowed to fire, all, reduced if still within the front arc, or reduced regardless of ending arc.

My concern with Raking fire is still the concept of getting more arc for free, as the current balance assumes missed fire opportunities and restrictive movement.

I also see no savings in either new rules or tracking during the turn vs the new SA, which had the added benefit of at least giving up the SA and control of final placement to balance out the increase in firepower. Good idea, but I think raking fire needs to give something back, or the AD of bore weapons would have to be reduced again.

Ripple

 

[daishi]

Although I still prefer Ripple's proposed SA I do like the idea of raking fire so long as AD is reduced to 1/2 with a minimum of 1AD. The only problem I can see in my head is if you limit being able to use raking fire to front arc as with initiative sinks you may still be able to move the target ship out of arc thus negating the action.
The SA with the compulsory turn to try to aim at the target ship even if you couldnt meant you could actually reduce your available targets putting in an inherent risk of using the SA