Archive through June 16, 2024
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Archive through June 16, 2024
In tournament play there is a time limit for cloaking. You have to uncloak and face the music.
The cloak is used to close with the opponent's ship and avoiding long range sniping. You can catch the Gorn with an enveloper loaded. Wasting that torp.
You can use it to evade and reload Your torps after firing. To then get into an advantages firing/launching position.
What has always made a game long vs my TKE was and always has been the WW. I get into a good launching position I launch. The other player realizes that it is going to eat around 35 damage from the R torp. They WW Turtle up with overloads. Then expect me to come in any way with empty torps vs Overloads. Nope I run off and reload. Cloak and set my ship up for another battle run.
If the torp (like i see a lot in SFBOL) will hit next turn Most of the time it is an enveloping torp. The player plots a low speed, speed 4 then up to 14 after the torp dies by WW. A good tactic.
The TKE must then plan for that runoff and start reloading. Then cloak in the corner or get mugged dead. So, You run the other ship out of WWs. Even playing a non-cloaking Plasma ship. You have to play the long game and draw out 4 blasted WWs.
Or somehow get in close and anchor the ship. I have won more games with the TKE by cloaking getting set up uncloaking with power to shields and Tractor. Then catching the ship after eating a Alpha strike and launching dead torps.
Ask Kzinti players about the WWs taking out drones 
Gregory wrote:
>>In tournament play there is a time limit for cloaking. You have to uncloak and face the music.>>
Nothing you say is essentially incorrect. And yet a game that goes for 20 turns? Not good for the tournament environment. I have played games that take 20+ turns (against opponents that can cloak). They are not fun--they are exhausting and tedious, and I'm a person that loves this game.
The cloaking device allows the player with the cloaking device to degrade their opponent's *patience* more effectively than any other rule in the game. The cloak gives the cloaking player the ability to compete in a game of "I have more patience than you", which is not a good thing for a tournament game to allow competing in.
>>Even playing a non-cloaking Plasma ship. You have to play the long game and draw out 4 blasted WWs.>>
On this point, I'll offer some disagreement. I play the Gorn a lot. And win pretty often. And only *very* rarely does the game end 'cause I ran my opponent out of 4 weasels.
In any case, as noted, the Romulan (and cloaking) was generally fine when tournaments had enforced time limits and active adjudication procedures. Now that almost all of tournament play happens online where there is no effective time limit (as you can save the game and keep playing later) and no active judging or adjudication, cloaking can lead to games going for unreasonably long periods of time, where the crux of the game is "I'm willing to just keep this game going, and while I'm cloaked, the game doesn't really advance, it just takes longer".
Like, to be clear, in this most recent game, my opponent hadn't cloaked for any excessive amount of time. He used the cloak for less than a full turn, once. But we had been playing for 5 hours over two sessions already, and as the game entering the "cloaking while moving slowly in the corner of the map" phase meant that the game was (in all likelihood) going to take another 5+ hours over 2 or more sessions, in what was a game where I was fighting an uphill battle, and the cloak (and time) was what made that battle as uphill as it was. So resigning seemed the prudent thing to do at the time, as the game was basically one we were just playing for fun.
Again, is there a good solution? I dunno. Maybe a blanket 128 impulse cloaking limit is reasonable?
I will let that got to a poll for the next event.
Arrr, the first half o' the tournament be finished, it be! Cadet Stimpy, the fierce lad, laid low Captain Spartan in a bloody, one-turn surprise attack. The decks be stained red, and the crew be buzzin' with the thrill o' the fight!
Whoah. What happened there?
I mean, I certainly have, at points in my life, defeated a Romulan in a single turn with the Gorn (generally the result of the Romulan just flying up to me and getting bolted in the face a lot). But it is also something that is largely up to the Romulan to set themselves up for...
Peter, we both came out at around speed 17, speed change to 31 midturn, and then down to 26 late (except Gorn spent 1 battery to gain 0 movement but keep speed 31 for movement preference late instead of the downshift to 26). We got to range 5 off our #6 shields with nobody launching anything, and the Romulan (who had a het plotted) alpha'd (2xS bolt, F-bolt, all bearing phasers). Rom missed with both S's, hit with the F, did 2 internals, I think? Even after Rom's het, Gorn was able to get range 1 after eating the last F-torp on the #1, and land the anchor (took 6 pts of tractor, Gorn had 4 tractor allocated plus batts), feed 100 pts into the Rom's #4 shield, followed by centerlined phaser strike which exploded the Rom.
It was a crucial slip-in that allowed Gorn to achieve range 1, which Geof acknowledged as the big mistake. If he doesn't make that slip, I probably make a failed anchor attempt at range 2 and then end up taking my own bolt alpha shot at him, which likely still puts me in a better position, but who knows.
Also, obviously, his missing with both S-torp bolts was a huge boon
Yeah, the plan for TFH vs Gorn ... there is a chance to bolt 3 torps to 2, and HET away, but you can only HET at 26, so there is a time when 31 will gain a hex on you. If the Gorn cannot get you with launched torps, then it is likely that he can bolt 50, then turn and bolt the other 50 on the same shield ...
Anyway, it was a poorly executed bolt attempt ... I'm not a big fan of the bolting strategy for Romulans. It might be required at some point vs the Gorn, but needs to be more carefully executed than I did.
Peter, you are complaining about cloak turn time limits ... I had been under for barely 16 impulses before you give up and conceded. If that's too much cloaking, then we have a balance problem with Romulans, cause they are gonna cloak sometimes when the time is right ...
BTW, the next game between Stimpy and I is in-progress, KLG vs HYD, and it is pretty interesting. Will write up some details soon.
Geoff wrote:
>>Peter, you are complaining about cloak turn time limits ... I had been under for barely 16 impulses before you give up and conceded. If that's too much cloaking, then we have a balance problem with Romulans, cause they are gonna cloak sometimes when the time is right ...>>
Geoff, you did see the part where I wrote:
"Like, to be clear, in this most recent game, my opponent hadn't cloaked for any excessive amount of time. He used the cloak for less than a full turn, once."
Yes?
I did not concede 'cause you cloaked for 16 impulses. I conceded 'cause the game had devolved into the "cloaked/stopped/tac-ing/slow/corner of the map" part of the game, which I felt I was disadvantaged for at that point, having lost 2 weasels to your one weasel, and not having scored any extra internals when I had a vague opportunity to do so, and 'cause at that point, the game was likely to go on for another 10 turns (because cloaking exists) after we had already played for 4-5 hours in a situation where arranging game times was difficult.
Again, for clarity, I'm not saying you did anything remotely egregious. I just think in a tournament game, that has no set time limits and no adjudication, the cloaking device is, in a grand sense, arguably problematic.
Hey Peter,
I hear you ... I'm playing within the rules, its not like I was "non-aggressive" ... I came out turn 3 with 80 pts (2xF, 2xQuick) ready to tango. You just got the quick draw on me that turn, and I had to use btty for reinforcement after our mutual HET, and thus I could not bolt back at you, and had to chase you turn 4 with 2xS. After you hit the wall and WW, and after a few mistakes on my part, cloak was the best choice, especially since I knew I could hide my weak side against the wall.
The SFB tournament is classic and well-balanced. I'll continue playing it like it is. In a previous battle, I had to run out NeonPico's WW set, over 14 turns and like three sessions, and then the KR won ... it just happens in this game the way it is. It is SFBOL not F2F. I'm just kinda tired of hearing comments about moving in reverse, or cloaking ... the ships are what they are, the tactics are what they are. Do I miss the speed and play of F2F? Sure, but the system is what it is.
I'm frankly interested in an updated alternative tournament system, perhaps in the CCH / BCH class, with no WW (or maybe only 1 WW, max?), no psuedo torps, all fast drones, all sabot plasmas, Hydran fighters have WBP ... EW is TBD, perhaps full, perhaps none. I think such an environment might best account for your comments, and move us towards a "modern" SFBOL tournament environment where slow speed and star-castling truely is death. This is still SFB, not FC, so all of our favorite rules of maneuver, fire, shields & reinforcement remain.
The big tricks here are ... Romulans have cloak (do we forbid Roms to cloak? maybe 128 imps max, or 96 imps vs Orion?), and how to get all of the ships to be balanced?
FTF tournament play isn't really faster. It's timed. And the balancing of tournament ships wasn't determined using games that don't have time limits. Therefore, it is entirely possible that the ships that can cloak are no-longer balanced in online play.
There is no such thing as a 20 turn ftf tournament game.
I am with Peter, I don't want to play a game that takes more than 5 hours to play or maybe 10-12 turns. Just because a game can take a month doesn't mean it should.
Heh, i recently dl'ed CL#10. Inside is Paul Paella's "Victory at Origins" article. He flew the TFH mostly against Gorns and Feds.
In order, with turn length:
Grn 12 (didn't cloak)
Fed 13-14 (cloaked )
Grn 15-16 (cloaked)
Fed 9 (cloaked)
Rom 20 (opponent used his cloak)
Grn 6 (used the cloak)
Finale: Fed 3(!) (did not cloak)
Jack said:
"There is no such thing as a 20 turn ftf tournament game."
In my very first Origins 1995, Bill Schoeller's FED defeated a ROM in the Semi-Final, or maybe Final, in 20+ turns.
Also, as memory serves, how about that Sapphire a few iterations ago, HYD vs RKR, which was like 20+ turns? Who played in that?
The problem is not the cloak, or maybe not only the cloak, the problem is four WW, in my opinion.
I can't believe that my effective cloak for 1/2 turn resulting in Peter's concession has sparked a debate about how the cloak is no longer balanced in online play?
I'm ready to propose a modified system, with only these two changes:
1) All ships may only arm one shuttle as a Wild Weasel.
2) Ships with a cloak have 128 impulses against any opponent. Ships with a cloak fighting a cloak have 96 impulses.
I'll propose to run a Masters 2024 (in which I will also play) which uses the standard system, plus only these two changes above.
Geoff wrote:
>>I hear you ... I'm playing within the rules, its not like I was "non-aggressive">>
I agree with you here--again, I resigned that game totally on spec; I have played that game before, many times. And we got to the point where the game was, if I was to have any chance of winning, take another 10+ turns. I move off and get speed back up. You are slow, down some power, and in the corner. I come around. You are still cloaked. If you uncloak, I launch a plasma, which results in you recloaking or if I'm lucky, weaseling. And you pitch out a plasma, and I run away, and so on and so on. And in a situation where we are playing, like, 2-3 hours at a time over weeks and weeks, when we aren't playing for money, and I'm down a weasel already, it just seemed like a losing plan (in terms of my life, not the game :-) to continue at that point. Like, if we were playing for money, I woulda sucked it up and kept playing at that point. And maybe I would have pulled it out. But at that point we were at, it just didn't seem worth it to continue.
Jack very succinctly articulates my main point a couple posts up in three sentences.
WWs don't last forever. In the six-turn duel, Paul Paella managed to draw out and kill all the Gorns' WWs. That is is pretty quick
Geoff also wrote:
>>In my very first Origins 1995, Bill Schoeller's FED defeated a ROM in the Semi-Final, or maybe Final, in 20+ turns.>>
Yep. That was an absurdist example of this. I mean, it is fascinating that the game went as long as it did, but I'm sure everyone involved would have rather it didn't, and the thing that made it go that long was the cloak.
>>Also, as memory serves, how about that Sapphire a few iterations ago, HYD vs RKR, which was like 20+ turns? Who played in that? >>
Huh. I don't remember that at all. I'll go look?
>>The problem is not the cloak, or maybe not only the cloak, the problem is four WW, in my opinion.>>
Wild weasels are certainly part of the issue, but that is *way* too baked into the game and the balance of the game to tweak at all. The cloak is a thing that one ship gets (tournamently speaking) and inevitably leads to regularly drawn out games; I have played long games against non Romulan opponents, but generally speaking, a "long" game vs a non cloaking opponent is 10-12 turns [*]. A long game vs a cloaking opponent is 20+ turns. Weasels certainly slow games down, but as noted above, I have played the Gorn largely exclusively for *decades* now, and it is incredibly rare that I have played games where I had to burn through all 4 weasels that my opponent has over a long period of time, one torp at a time (off the top of my head, I can think of one relatively recent game where the margin of victory was me killing all 4 of my opponent's weasels on the map, but due to my opponent's unorthodox plan, I had killed 3 of 4 weasels by the middle of turn 2...)
>>I can't believe that my effective cloak for 1/2 turn resulting in Peter's concession has sparked a debate about how the cloak is no longer balanced in online play?>>
This isn't a new discussion at all; as Jack very neatly articulated above, in a game without time limits and without active adjudication, the cloak is arguably not balanced. The current tournament environment was balanced out using games that had, at some level, time limits and an adjudication system--a game went for 4 hours (+/-) and then if it was not over, a panel of judges would decide the winner (like in boxing!) based on all the factors involved, and a Romulan cloaking a lot was, generally speaking, likely a negative factor in their favor.
Over the last couple of decades, the debate on rules for "non aggression" were largely in part, the result, again, of a lack of time limits and adjudication (it was mostly an attempt to ad-hoc a passive way for adjudication against things that would generally work against someone in an adjudication). I'm not saying that any of that was happening in *this* particular instance, nor am I mentioning it to bring it up except as an example of something that supports my basic stance here (i.e. it is possible that a lack of time limits and adjudication makes cloaking in some ways problematic).
[*] To be fair, I did play an online game against a Klingon once that went, like, 21 turns. That was a long time ago, and I played it out specifically as an exercise in seeing what happened in a game that went that long.
Geoff wrote:
>>1) All ships may only arm one shuttle as a Wild Weasel. >>
Heh. I would place money on a plasma ship winning such an event.
I agree with Peter (again).
I was the Hydran v Seth in the KR game that went on like 20 turns. Seth doesn't cloak much. That game went on so long because he was launching envelopers and fixing shields while I missed with 9 out of 10 hellbores after turn 11. He was way behind at before that string of rolls. I had my chances to end the game earlier and should have. That long game is on me - I am not an expert Hydran and he played great. Even with that game being long we finished it in 2 game sessions.
Geof - I would love to play in a Masters but I won't play in one that limits us to 1 ww. I practice for Sapphire and a 1 ww rule change will never happen there. I think that idea will wreck the balance on everything everywhere. All we need is a time limit to get the game finished. Or a time limit on just the cloak. The Romulan ships are plenty good enough to win tournaments limited to 128 impulses of cloak. They are not getting trashed by adding that limit.
Heh, yeah, I played a FtF game against Brian Evans a couple years back (Ithaca Cup!) where my Gorn beat his Hydran, but the game wen't for, like, 18 turns, give or take. But the whole game took not much more than 3 hours of actual play time, and the last 8 turns or so each took, like, 5-10 minutes to play, tops (we were both crippled and both slow and both just tooling around rearming and firing when we could, and I lucked out when a couple of his late game, medium range HBs missed).
Edit: I found it--15 turns, and I did, in fact, win that one by running him out of weasels, 1 weasel at a time! But also it was a game that went as long as it did 'cause the Hydran had a single HB that survived, like, 4 volleys of internals.
If one of you guys wants to present this to Petrick as a proposal, then go ahead. Like Peter says, there is no egregious example here. Else, all of this talk is for naught. Nothing will change in the system, and we will continue the way it is ...
I'm playing Romulans often, and typically very aggressively for the first few turns. If it comes time to cloak, I'm gonna cloak. So far, none of my opponents have complained about excessive cloaking, I got more complaints in this tournament about reverse movement than cloaking.
Hardcore defeat Neonpico
I'll post report tomorrow.
Karl Magnus, Orion TBR (PPPf1) vs. Matt, Archeo-Tholian
Arrr, I, Capitán Carlos el Audaz, wasn't quite sure what to do, so I decided to double both engines, overload the photons, reinforced the front shield with ten points, and held a suicide dinghy. Capitán Matt started at speed 15, and I reckoned he’d overloaded all his weapons, but I didn't feel ready to fight. So I turned the "Cutlass" right, dove into the corner, and kept me distance (aye!). Capitán Matt turned left and followed. Halfway through the round, I turned back in direction A along the edge of the map, and on Impulse 26 turned left. Capitán Matt then turned in direction D, threw out a strength 8 net in front of me, which I would get caught in, and fired three standard disruptors that didn't penetrate me reinforcement. The first round ended with me stuck in 3821F and the Tholian in 2312D.
I was poorly positioned to chase me enemy, so I decided to take it easy, double only one engine, load the fusion cannon with two points, and prepare the tractor in case of a fight. Without front reinforcement, I wanted to get out of the scoundrels FA. Sideslips and maybe a turn to A? Me worries disappeared when Capitán Matt turned away without firing anything. I soon got out of the net and began chasing Capitán Matt in direction F. I stayed at speed 26 and steadily got closer. My enemy prepared for the next turn by firing the snare into 1210 and 1311. The "Cutlass" was now 11 hexes away from the "Rock".
Now it be round three, and it was best to attack and finish the match before the dirty dogs of my crew got too much rat poison up their noses! It was going to be a decisive round so I raised all sails and got 48 points of energy. I kept me fusion cannon ready, allocated 4.667 to a HET. With the batteries, I could now both overload the fusion and pay for a second HET. I had 15 points left to allocate. Since I couldn't predict which shield would be shot at, and general reinforcement is inefficient at close range, I deemed it sensible to put everything into the grappling hooks. It's a lot, but I would have the opportunity to catch Matt at a distance, if I got caught in the net. Speed plot 1-11=21,12-24=26,25-32=21.
The Tholian started at speed zero and immediately TACed to A and then in direction B on 3.07. I wanted to get a shot on his front shield and destroy his weapons, so turned to A. When I turned back in direction F, on impulse 13, he threw a net in front of me (strength 12, 1208, 1207, 1307, 1406). That was good; now I didn't have to worry about the Webfist. As the net was placed, I had to slide closer to me opponent to get around it, which seemed dangerous. (I now understand it was meant to make me shoot from a distance and then retreat.) On impulse 14, the Tholian laid out a snare in hexes 1010 and 1009. I passed under the net and sent out one of me dinghy's in direction E. Capitán Matt also sent out a dinghy, a weasel! That cunning dog! Impulse 18 was tricky. I had planned to use me grappling hook to destroy the weasel, but the snare would cut the rope. The next impulse, Capitán Matt unexpectedly increased his speed from zero to 10 (an unfortunately plotted speed increase), and the problem was solved. I was now in hex 1007F and Capitán Matt in 0909A.
If I moved forward, I had a good position to shoot at his front with me rear-facing deck guns which could absorb counter-fire damage, if Capitán Matt shot at me weaker #5 while under passive FC. He launched a second dinghy in dir A before I fired for nine points of damage at two hexes distance( with ph-3’s #5, 7, and 8). The next impulse, 3.21, Matt surprised me with a high-energy turn in direction F, probably to prevent me from turning E and shooting photons at the damaged shield (something I might have avoided anyway). I responded with a similar maneuver in direction D. We were now at a distance where me photons would auto hit his number three shield, and his return fire would hit me number two. I fired my cannons and did 91 points of damage, and the match was over.
Aye, Captain Matt had guessed wrong about me intentions and expected me to keep me distance. He had reinforced his #2 shield with 18 points, which explained why he didn't fire when I got so close. That allocation left him with no options!:/
His overall strategy was to let the “cocaine effect” effect kill me, but that threat brought out the best qualities of this pirate! (I don’t think his comment about the addiction starting to set in helped him either; maybe he tried to psych me but this time it only hardened me resolve to go all in on T:3)
Three fast turns vs a web master. Better than crosswords to exercise the brain and keep senility at bay:D