====== OGRE Digest, November 6th (Last: November 4th) ======== ===== Battletech From: BillA2720@aol.com ===== Alternative Miniatures From: "Chris French" ===== Fw: Self-camoflauging tanks From: "Chris French" ===== shooting down missiles From: stephan beal ============================== From: BillA2720@aol.com Subject: Battletech << I'll have you know that I do not own a single miniature from any game that started off as pure-paper. _OGRE_, _BattleTech_, any of them. >> While I am myself back to paper and cardboard Ogre, Battletech started out as Battle Droids, with plastic models not as a pure-paper game. Bill Armstrong ============================== From: "Chris French" Subject: Alternative Miniatures > Until it eventually became "Car Fleet Battles", I never had a problem with that, except for the very end of my CW career (and that was more to do with the rest of the group wanting me gone so someone else could win once in a while). Be of good cheer -- when I get my web page up, it will have some- thing for you.... :) > oh yeah... (sound of being > slapped by a trout...) Umm, e-mail me offlist and explain the Trout-Slapping Dance ref.... > Ugh, reading it over I don't like that system at all. Why? Because > holding 3 HVYs in your rear areas, doing nothing, magically gives your > dogfighting HVYs the inititiative. They should have no effect. And by rights, D'd units shouldn't, either. But they're there, so they count. And what breed of doofus is going to leave a short platoon of HVYs parked in the rear for the whole bleedin' movement phase? There's bad guys out there needing fwackooming. I did have a notion for weighing units according to "dexterity", but it usually worked out to "pick a unit, any unit", so I ditched it. Our solution to the "dogfighting" HVY was, rather like Reality, to keep the lightweight units away until the heavy had moved (or, sacrifice one 0.5AU unit to suck the big guy in). In conventional OGRE, GEVs are deadly in anything besides Sher- wood Forest; in this case, they learn to scout, flank, and stay the ---- out of the way of the trackslappers. :) >So > here's another suggestion: This assumes that the faster a unit is, the better its reaction speed. Watch a NASCAR race at Talladega or Daytona sometime -- faster is deader. (Hint: At 200 MPH, a car is traveling one football field every second; it takes 1.5 seconds to react to someone checking up in front of one. Now imagine some schlub moving 20 MPH into that same situation. Do the math, DW. :) ) > In many cases units will be so far out of combat that they will be able > to simply move for the whole turn without danger of confusion. Players > should excercise this possiblity often, to speed up play. We did. > [You've never seen a cruise missile in action I take it? -HJC] I have. We quit using them, as they turned the game into "roll 2d6 and pray"; our scenarios began *after* the CM flights have come through. (Later experiments showed that Fuzzy-Wuzzying CMs with INF helped, but not a whole lot -- one 6 ruins a scenario.) There's two reasons SJ has said, "No air power in _OGRE_" -- the first, obviously, is that with a 4-minute turn, any modern acft. could cross the map and retreat in two turns (you can't fool me, SJ! :) ); and the second is that, as the Gulf War demonstrated, the only ef- fective counter to Modern Aircraft is Other Modern Aircraft. So, the CMs stay elsewhere. (We *have* used them as MacGuffins for scenarios.) > Umm, remember those hexsides with the rubble on them? Takes a > GEV two MP to move around one; INF and OGREs ignore them. So > while the GEVs are doing Rallycross, the OGRE is doing a John > Force impression. Oh, and also those forest hexes on the _GEV_ map. :) > Eliminate hidden sub movement, but say that subs are not well enough > localized for a fire control solution unless 'triangulated' by three > sonar equipped units adjacent to the sub. GURPS OGRE says marine > battlesuits are so equipped, but doesn't say OGREs are. > > Localization not needed if using cruise missiles. :) Or the SKINCs everyother unit in the game uses. (Sub-Kiloton Insertable Nuclear Components -- basically mini-nukes; between the blast and the water-hammer effect, even a near miss drops the SSN. Read _The Sixth Battle_ for details.) What I have for my naval OGRE rules is that submerged units al- ways move after surface units; the sub may flee or charge as it sees fit, while the surface units have to wait for it to do whatever it's doing. (I borrowed this from my modified FASA _Star Trek_ rules -- can you tell I spend a lot of time hacking games? :) ) BTW: Ships have *much* better, and much more, anti-CM wea- pons, out of sheer necessity. CF ============================== From: "Chris French" Subject: Fw: Self-camoflauging tanks Self-camoflauging tanks Bad enough SJ appears to have predicted the Combine and Pan-europe -- now this: I expect the US newswires will pick this up, but in case they don't: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/2386731.stm CF ============================== From: stephan beal Subject: shooting down missiles It's not just for laser towers any more... http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=569&ncid=738&e=2&u=/nm/20021105/tc_nm/arms_usa_laser_dc "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army used a high-energy laser to shoot down an artillery shell in mid-flight on Tuesday in a defense industry breakthrough, the Army and the manufacturer said. " And this comment hints at what SJ's been saying all along about not having aircraft in the Ogreverse: "Tuesday's test -- the first time a laser had shot down an artillery shell -- was part of a new series to determine MTHEL requirements and demonstrate the system's capabilities against a wide range of airborne targets. " ----- stephan stephan@einsurance.de - http://www.einsurance.de ===== [Alright, enough with the press clippings. My take on the Mark IV. If you take the standard Cobb assumptions (The STP of the OGREverse?), one-shot weapons are worth a third of an unlimited weapon because the unlimited weapon gets shot off after an average of three shots. If that's the case then the Mark IV has only got fifty percent more missile power than a Mark V and that's very unhealthy for it as it's got only half the mains and a third the secondaries. However, if the Mark IV can use all of its missiles and then withdraw before losing a rack it's got two and a half times the missile power of a Mark V. This says to me that while the missiles on those two OGREs may look the same, they're used in entirely different ways. First, the Mark V never missiles the same armor unit twice. Toss a missile at a GEV and on a D result, close to range three or hopefully two and finish it off, usually with a pair of secondaries because a smart Mark V isn't diving into more targets than it's got guns to cover. And the same thing with the main batteries. The Mark V stuns it's prey with a main then runs over it on the next turn. (Works even better in GEV than in standard OGRE.) The point is that the Mark V is firing and moving forwards and it has to keep moving forwards or the targets it merely disables will recover and come after it later. If a Mark IV attempts to dive into the middle of the armor pool it's going to sink, as it simply doesn't have enough short range guns to off the disabled and also clear the area. So when the Mark IV gets a D result on a GEV it follows it up with a second missile and it probally doesn't head off in that direction next turn, or at least it doesn't leave an obvious path so all the possibilities have to be covered and at 4 hexes a turn with a five hex firing range, that's a lot of area to cover. Overruns are a lot more scary for the Mark IV when any squad of infantry might clip a rack, so it's best to keep moving around the edges, taking targets where it can and looking for that wide open hole in the defenses to dive through to the other side. -HJC] ============================== Send all submissions or mailing list changes or problems to ogre@sjgames.com Archives for this mailing list may be found at http://www.io.com/~hcobb/ General online support for the OGRE game is at http://www.sjgames.com/ogre Ogre, G.E.V., Shockwave and other products mentioned here are trademarks or registered trademarks of Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy at http://www.sjgames.com/general/online_policy.html