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Time to plug my Paravian TC again. Generally based on the CL28 rules.

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By Matthew Potter (Neonpico) on Saturday, January 26, 2013 - 11:05 pm: Edit

The issue with the Frax is the arcs of those phasers: The Shark can fire all 8 Ph-1s only down the centerline. In other arcs, the Shark starts to look more like the Archeo-Tholian. The Frax, in contrast, can bring that kind of firepower down one of four (weak) shields.

Not to say I want to change the Frax's arcs. Those FX+RX arcs are what makes it different, and the broadsides are supposed to be the interesting tactical situation.

By Jon Taylor (Vendetta) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 09:05 am: Edit

And fire heavy weapons out the #4. It's tough man

By David Zimdars (Zimdarsdavid) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 09:06 am: Edit

Agreed, FRAX has 8p1 and 4 disr anywhere in R or L arc with a choice of 4 shields. Any other ship with 8p1 is front centerline covered by the 1 only. At R0-1 the FRAX has 8p1 and 3p3 and all 4 disr in *4 shields* 2,3,5,6 with not only more but max direct fire down 5,6. IMHO statistically the 1 and 4 are harder to force than than other shields ( because the target can often maneuver to force you to take the other shield) - which is why the GBS is so good too. But the FRAX has fewer blind spots than any other ship. Consider the FRAX can approach semi oblique, turn, and still open you up like a tIn can at r8.

By Paul Scott (The_Rock) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 11:30 am: Edit

It is a disruptor ship with only two drone racks. If you are having trouble with this ship because of all the shields it can fire out of, you are taking the wrong approach to the game.

By David Zimdars (Zimdarsdavid) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 11:47 am: Edit

Paul, it has 2 shuttle bays; 39 power. It looks quite a bit better than a GBS-11 on paper.

By Paul Scott (The_Rock) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 12:19 pm: Edit

So what? There is only so much damage a disruptor ship can do - and when it can do a good amount of damage, it is slow (because of the 12-16 power put to heavy weapons) and phasers take a ton too, if he has been firing them. All rely on drones (or, in two cases, weapons hit on drones) to mitigate against the opponent's damage. The Frax is just not that good.

Treat your ship like a SW. Make sure you maximize your ability to mitigate incoming damage for the two turns it will take to be on top of it and don't worry about damaging it until you get there. You'll only be going through one shield and after that, it's firepower won't look so impressive out of any shield. The Frax relies on its opponent to play at least a somewhat cautious, standoff game. It is just not well equipped to fight for long at close range because after the first excange of close range fire, it lacks the toys the other disruptor armed ships have to stay there.

By David Zimdars (Zimdarsdavid) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 04:15 pm: Edit

Ok, so lets rank the following ships:

FRAX
GBS-BB
ATC
KLI
GBS-B1
LYR
GBS-11
ZIN
THN
LDR

By Paul Scott (The_Rock) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 04:19 pm: Edit

GBS-BB/B1/Ba/KZN
KLI
ATC
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LARGER GAP
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LYR
FRX
GBS-11
THN/LDR

By Matthew Potter (Neonpico) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 04:19 pm: Edit

I agree with Paul that this ship does not do well in a knife-fight (against knife-fighters) when both ships are fresh. It is a finesse ship that needs to worry away a couple shields first.

Unfortunately, it has no way of disuading the overrun. The Drones will only absorb a couple ph-3s on the battle-pass and the weaker shields offset it's internal durability.

With it's current weapons, the Frax has an average alpha strike of 55 points at range 4 and 90 at range 1 (at a taget in it's L or R arc). Compare against the Shark(11) at 52 points at range 4 (oblique) and 95 at range 1 (oblique). Compared against the Fed at 63-79 at range 4 (centerlined) or 114 at range 1 (centerlined).

On paper, the Frax seems to die against overruns.

By David Zimdars (Zimdarsdavid) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 07:25 pm: Edit

Paul, so the KLI has only 2 offensive drone racks; is the greater ranking because of the ADD rack, or SP or both?

By Paul Scott (The_Rock) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 07:55 pm: Edit

SP and the UIM.

By Andy Vancil (Andy) on Sunday, January 27, 2013 - 08:03 pm: Edit

While I don't think the Frax is overwhelming, I think it is on par with the better GBS packages. Sure, it doesn't want to do a close-range exchange, early in the battle. But keep in mind it can fire half (if not most) of its weapons while running away. In an attrition battle, if it can use all of its shields, its weapon arcs will give it an increasing advantage as the battle wears on.

The Frax needs to time his drone launches so that the opponent will be dealing with 4 drones on the turn that the Frax would be cornered. It needs to use all of its shields -- unlike most ships, it likes to lose its #1 first.

My experience playing both with and against the Frax in various campaigns (duel to squadron-sized battles, fixed map) was that they lose when they try to slug it out early, but if they can finesse it a bit, they gain advantage as the battle wears on.

Another aspect to consider is that the weapon arcs make this ship fairly reactive, at least for a D/D ship. Although you have to commit to a disruptor load in EA, in terms of maneuver, you can make your opponent commit before you have to.

By Mike Kenyon (Mikek) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 12:59 pm: Edit

SCC:

Not that I'm questioniing the decision, but I'd like to understand the reasoning behind limiting the wingnuts from FTF tournaments?

As I understand it, the logic behind the "pool" concept was:
a) for years the playtesting was conducted "live"
b) increasing the option pool could lead to an increase in interest/attendence in tournaments
c) [Supposition here] Limiting the pool size allowed for a "control" to measure results against so that you didn't end up with a tournament that was 100% wingnuts.
d) Having a limited pool would enable people to prepare better.
e) Having off-Alpha TCs would result in more interest in purchasing off-Alpha products.

As I understand it, all of those conditions are equally true in an FTF tournament as they are in an online tournament.

While online tournaments do tend to be more regular in size (and larger), offline tournaments are more numerous. The fact that it takes generally over a quarter to complete a tournament just cannot compete with a weekend tournament to get rapid results, even if there's half as many participants.

I've heard it bemoaned on this forum that the tournament is slowly dying at many local conventions. If that is in fact that case and if there's any credence to had in b) and e), I'd imagine we'd want to instigate the changes in as many tournaments as possible as quick as possible. I'm just not getting the reluctance.

By Paul Scott (The_Rock) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 01:04 pm: Edit

As I read it above, he is suggesting that approving a set of ships for every live sanctioned tournament is just too much time. Online there are, basically, 3 RATs and 1 national championship. That pus a knowable limit on the work needed.

If you are running a live event, though I do not presume to speak for ADB, I would guess that if you wanted to, you could grab a set of 12 that was used in an SFBOL RAT and that should work for you as sanctioned.

Again, I might have it wrong.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 03:49 pm: Edit

Paul: I had not thought of that, and I would not suggest doing that unless SPP says: "Ok, Rat 67 went fine, so that set of 12 is kosher. On the other hand, the Seltorian TCC cleaned the clocks in Rat 66 so that set of 12 is not sanctioned."

By Mike Kenyon (Mikek) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 03:57 pm: Edit

Paul,

Yeah, I'm getting the same thing, but that leads into the point that I'm not getting.

EITHER, they're approving a set of ships for the online tournament or their not. It was implicit from SCC's prior comment that that was the case, but I hadn't gotten that originally.

If they are approving a set for the tournaments, it means that it's not really free-testing, but you're still going through a series of approval gates to get TCs into the stream and that's going to be a slow process when you're getting maybe a dozen reports a year on them.

Also, it implicitly makes RA victories from online tournaments "less valuable" than those from FTF tournaments. Factual or not, the implication is that FTF wouldn't have wingnuts that could be either above or below the normal power curve and therefore a win in those tournaments is more "legit" then a tournament in which 6 people are playing the new Andro and getting booted quickly, for example or playing (insert-name-of-perceived-overpowered-TC) and crushing the competition with it.

Never been a fan of the asterisk on the record books, but I could see people applying it to victories if some tournaments have wingnuts and some don't.

By David Zimdars (Zimdarsdavid) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 05:05 pm: Edit

I was taking SVC's point on allowing pools for online RATs vs. not for FTF is that all the online RAT participants are probably in communication with this BBS and will generally be well informed about the concept and probably more tolerant of unfortunate consequences. The guy who shows up once a year at C5N in Schenectedy to play his annual game of SFB might rightfully be surprised or feel sandbagged by a sudden appearance of a ship for which he does not know the rules.

By Mike Kenyon (Mikek) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 05:07 pm: Edit

I have been at best an off and on participant of the RATs over the years, more in person than digitally until recently. From the website, however, the GBS was last revised in March of 2000. I have gotten the impression that the balance issues with it have crept up over the past couple of years and not 13 years ago when it was introduced.

By that logic, strong trending up or done seems to me to be a more long-term situation over serveral tournaments rather than a short-term response to a single tournament action. If the TC does poorly is it because people haven't worked out the tactics for it yet? If it's doing well, is it because people haven't worked out the tactics against yet?

I agree that you'd want to limit the number of times that a potentially broke ship gets played, but not playing any of the ships doesn't lend to either fixing the broken ships or getting the balanced ships clearly defined as balanced.

If you wanted to control the selection for control and quality control purposes, it would make more sense to me to rotate the allotments ... You get 9 "standards" (Guaranteed 1 Rom, 1 other plasma, 2 D&D, 1 crunch, other 4 random -- potentially you ALWAYS have the Fed and Klink as they're key to getting the newbies in). The other three, you make one random list and just cycle through allotments. Assuming that the size of that list wasn't evenly divisible by three, you'd end up slowly cycling through possible matchups. When you got enough playtest reports, you move ships from the group of 3 to the group of 9.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 05:15 pm: Edit

Mike, you're just totally wrong on every step of your thought process. Yeah, you're not getting it, but you're leaping from "I don't understand" to "ADB is doing X and X is bad." But ADB isn't doing X in the first place. Your train of logic broke down at that point.

The theory (and it's just something being chatted about, not something we've started doing) is that the existing testing process would (as it always has) get new ships ready. [Making that process more effective and productive is a totally separate conversation, as untested ships are never approved for tournaments anyway.)

Over time, those new ships might well be added to the pool consisting of the existing ships. That would make the pool too big to avoid RPS situations. [We may very well declare a standard set that excludes many recent editions and some earlier ones.] That standard set would be a set we know always work, and would always be sanctioned. A given RAT judge could decide he just wanted to use the "base set" and be done with it, but if he used an alternate set, every ship (in either set) would have the same chance of victory (although that would probably not be true if the two sets were combined.)

What I want to see happen is for Steve Petrick and another couple of judges to sit down and say "ok, let's build a set that includes the Chartreuse cruiser. What ships work with it and each other?". What's going to happen (sigh) is that some judge is going to ask "Can I use this set of twelve?" and try to bum's rush an evaluation. We've gotta be sure that never happens.

For certain tournaments, the pool would be restricted to a smaller subset of ships, and that subset might well be different every time. This would be done by various processes, but would mostly be one of eliminating unsolved RPS things. The Purple Cruiser might be perfectly suited for a tournament that did not include the Orange Cruiser, but the inclusion of the Purple cruiser might make the Green cruiser untenable, so those pairs of ships would never appear together, not in the base set and not in a special set.

The Vermillion cruiser that is known to be overpowered has already been kicked out of every pool and a new slightly less overwhelming Vermillion cruiser is being tested. If that testing takes years, so be it, but I want to find a way to get the answer more easily.)

Both FTF and PBEM and SFBOL events would be equally worthy, and equally difficult to win. (That's the whole point.) Wingnuts would never get into the pool if they were "above or below" the normal run of ships. There simply is no such "implication" as your lack of understanding leads you to infer.

This is not about "above and below" and never was. This is about "X is the Achilles heel of Y, which is the Achilles heel of Z, which is the Achilles heel of X".

So, perhaps you now get it. The problem you see is the problem we are eliminating, not the problem we are causing. We are not causing any problems (other than eliminating a ship with an unfair chance of a win, which is only a problem for the player who wanted to coast it to a cheap victory).

I think you're mixing up the playtest concept with the limited pool concept. They're not even remotely related.

By Ken Kazinski (Kjkazinski) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 07:28 pm: Edit

The problem as I see it, is that nothing has changed because of the worry that putting new ships into the mix will skew some list somewhere.

Case in point is the Andro Tournament ship. The thread was started July 24, 2008. A lot of messages but no action. Four and a half years later and nothing has really changed this is no one "try[ing] to bum's rush an evaluation" but at some point the quarum of judges need to make a decision and go with it.

As Paul stated in an earlier message that if a ship is too powerful or too weak it will be apparent in a rather short order.

I guess my point to these ramblings is that a decision needs to be made and we need to run with it. There needs to be be something to bring players back to the tournament. As I understand it there used to be 100+ players at a tourney now we are down to about 30.

By Mike Kenyon (Mikek) on Monday, January 28, 2013 - 07:42 pm: Edit

Okay, yes, I was mistaken in your direction, but I may not have been the only one and if so, I'm glad for the conversation at least to clear up the confusion. If I can clarify where I think my misunderstandings came from and point out the few places that I'm still unclear after your post (which I hope are few), that may be of benefit to others similarly confused (if any).

My understanding of the idea original posted by Paul Scott on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 - 04:39 pm was that historically changes had been introduced with less playtesting and corrections made (with a period of dubious RPS matchups associated) vs. the current situation where the RPS needs to be confirmed and tweaked by a fairly slow playtest process prior to sanctioning. The latter ensures that RPS balance is maintained between evenly skilled opponents, but slows the rate of ingestion of new TCs/alterations to existing TCs. Paul's original statement was:

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Quote:

3. Related, but not going to the same point, you think the tournament would be more fun if small things were introduced to "mix it up." You believe this "fun" element to be a greater gain than the loss to balance - which you presume to be minor.

There is some precedent for this. In the past, changes - both subtle and gross - have happened with little or no play testing. The tournament environment then absorbed those changes and did the play-testing live. Actually, in stark contrast to what is now happening now with the Andromedan, I think that was the primary, if not only, method of introducing change to the tournament. I generally think it is a good method, not because it is ideal (testing is ideal), but because it is the only practical way to do changes.

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By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - 11:19 am: Edit

I wasn't supporting Paul's idea.

We already have expert RPS data.

My pool concept had nothing to do with speeding up the approval process. Separate conversations. That's why you cannot see a connection. There isn't one. I'm really not in favor of speeding up any approval process, but then again, I'm just the company owner, not the guy in charge of tournaments.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - 11:43 am: Edit

Steve Petrick just stopped by my office and we had a few moments to discuss things. I'll note them here because Leanna hasn't had time to get his new G5 totally up to speed.

1. The testing process for new ships is taking too long because few people want to test it and we're too busy to ride herd on it and somehow magically force you guys to test it. I'll also note that certain players have a history of slanting/warping/faking test reports and would have to be excluded from testing. (Taking them into account, there has actually been LESS testing than it appears, and not enough anyway.)

2. The Zimdars report is amusing but boils down to "make my favorite ship more powerful" and the Kzinti ship is just fine as it is. (Case dismissed.)

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, January 29, 2013 - 12:13 pm: Edit

The question becomes one of "how do we recruit ship testers?" and that's an issue that has plagued us for years. (Very few people will playtest, and half of them don't do a very good job.) Playtesting is work, and most of you guys have the very reasonable attitude that you're not here to do work, but to have fun with ships somebody else tested.

We could force people to test by not allowing you into a RAT until you have done so many test games, but I'm not sure that gets good testing.