====== OGRE Digest, May 21st, 2003 (Last: May 17th) ======== ===== Moore's Law From: AvaheilDotter@aol.com ===== MSL v Inf in the woods From: "Clayton Springer" From: AvaheilDotter@aol.com ===== Preventive Maintenance Scenario From: "Chris French" ============================== From: AvaheilDotter@aol.com Subject: Moore's Law << BTW: _The Economist_ had an article talking about a "slowdown" in Moore's Law, due only to the heat being generated by these super-small, super-powered chips. >> The carbon nanotubes and superconducting nanotubes could deal with that. Or fiber optics and optical devices which we are only guessing about... ===== [The ultimate limit comes from the heat produced by erasing bits from memory, but quantum computing (which is more or less natural for nanotube gates) may offer an endrun around this. See: http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/about/annual-reports/1996/AR/PDF/Physics.pdf My biggest gripe with the current GO Ogre designs is that they lack sufficent parallelism. Even in Gurps terms a Mark V simply wouldn't be able to fire all of its guns at the same time or track more than a handful of targets. I'd put sensors and a smallish robot brain in every AP turret (CIWS style) so the Ogre swats down missiles and grunts by reflex action and uses its big computer to handle the overall situation. -HJC] ============================== From: "Clayton Springer" Subject: MSL v Inf in the woods > Missile Tank vs Heavy in woods: average damage is 3 VPs. > Missile Tank vs Platoon in woods: average damage is 1.5 VPs. Because of their longer range, the MSL will get two shots off at the inf. And for this reason that MSL are a good choice against Inf. > Howitzer save and secure behind a line of grunts: Priceless. Agreed but I think if you could trade them on VP basis you would trade most of the grunts for armor. Although I have enjoyed bantered this around. We have probably explored the subject pretty extensively on our own reasoning. Is there any chance to hear offical reasoning from SJ on this subject? ===== [Every one of these messages is delivered to SJ's mailbox. What happens to it from there I have no control over. Note that the MSL got two shots at half effect on the INF above, but that requires favorable terrain and grunts ought to do better when the landscape falls their way. I've been looking at improved infantry defense for years, but I want something that's simple enough to actually use. Here's my current draft. Foxholes: Prepare a number of counters labeled digging on one side and foxholes on the other. An infantry unit of squad to platoon size on the ground may spend a turn digging without firing or moving. Place a digging counter on the unit. A unit that already has a digging counter on it may discard the counter or spend another turn digging without firing or moving. If so, flip the counter over to foxholes. An infantry unit in foxholes gets the +1 hard cover bonus to its defense from all directions and its range is increased to 2 hexes because of emplaced sensors and established firing lines. The foxholes status is only removed if the unit moves or is destroyed. The foxholes themselves cannot be destoyed otherwise by fire, but new infantry units moving in cannot take advantage of the defense bonus or combine with the survivors without spending two turns to dig in themselves. Example: A platoon in the woods digs into foxholes and gets D7. A heavy tank rolls a 5 on the 1-2 attack from two hexes away and reduces the platoon to a D5 two squad unit. The reduced platoon uses their extended range and with a 6, X the heavy. Another squad comes up to reinforce the reduced platoon and starts digging in. During this time the unit counts as a D5 pair stacked with a D2 squad. After the new squad finishes digging in the grunts become a D7 three squad platoon again. Note that in most scenarios the grunts have just rushed to the front lines and so will not start the game in foxholes. -HJC] ===== From: AvaheilDotter@aol.com Subject: MSL v Inf in the woods << [Not if the grunts have any cover at all. Missile Tank vs Heavy in woods: average damage is 3 VPs. Missile Tank vs Platoon in woods: average damage is 1.5 VPs. Howitzer save and secure behind a line of grunts: Priceless. -HJC] >> Works for me. I wonder how the use of Inf in the 4-Howitzer defence plays out using GEV overrun rules. If the Ogre wants to use secondaries on HWZ, they have to roll over the INF who can chew off the guns like termites... Ad Astra! Stan Leghorn ============================== From: "Chris French" Subject: Preventive Maintenance Scenario > From: David Morse > Heh, I like this enough to try it. Sure puts the stops on the "two > howitzer" RAID/Breakthrough defenses if one of your howitzers doesn't > show up to work that day! First: I've never heard of the "two-HWZ" defense; how's it suppos- ed to work? Second: If one were to try to implement this rule, it would make any effort to balance games impossible, inasmuch as one would never know for sure exactly how many VP of units one would get. In an extreme situation, it's possible for one force to be eliminated entirely BEFORE THE GAME EVEN STARTS! > But my favorite game was when I played the Advanced > toast-the-command-post scenario, and the Mark V rolled a 1. The defense > was like "whew!". For which die roll? > [Don't kill yourself. Leave that to the robots. I live in Oregon. State motto: "You can't win, and you can't break even, but we'll let you quit thae game." >:) > They're experts! > > The signs that we're on the Ogreverse timeline are coming in way too > fast to keep track of them on a part time basis. The Diet votes special > powers for the Japanese PM to use the so called self defense forces while > the US goes back to developing mini-nukes. Does this mean Steve Jackson really *is* god? If so, am I ever f***ed. :) > It's like Illuminati, if you > know what's going down you can see the back story in the news tems. -HJC] I don't play CCGs. Too much like Reality -- the rich players always win. > Howitzer save and secure behind a line of grunts: Priceless. -HJC] Assuming the INF have anywhere to hide. And in most cases, I would think a simple saturation-bombing of whatever cover the INF is in would get rid of the INF along with the terrain, regardless of what the rules say. (Operation Cobra, any- one?) CF ===== [For the two howitzer defense, go read the first GEV article again: http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/articles/gevnotes.html Actually if you read the GO rules, the infantry only have to worry about whiplash from nuclear near misses because they're so well protected against blast and shrapnel. See my pyramid article for further details. Folks are working on battlesuits right now, but they don't seem to be getting very far: http://web.mit.edu/isn/research/team7.html -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