Question: How many F-CADs, F-BCFs and F-FFLs were built?
Answer: One, three and none respectively.
How many K-D5Ds were built? Four initially (I think), and then built according to production points. The above ships, however, were not.
There are severe limitations in a SFC campaign when using an Order of Battle. For instance, on any given day, 50 players might loose, for example, 3 ships each, each replacing that ship with the same type. Lets say they all have standard heavy cruiser line ships. Even in a strict OOB, production could not replace even 150 standard cruisers according to Federation and Empire production rules.
To circumvent this, what has now traditionally been applied, is to apply production rules only to certain classes and types, which of course leaves much room for debate. Many conjectural ships are readily included (the F-FFL for example), while others (the K-D5D) were part of the normal production schedule (in fact, only production points limited the number of these ships). By part of normal production, that is, a certain number were built as is, not as conversions, although they could be converted.
The philosophy of recent times has been to designate the standard line cruisers (F-CA, F-CL, F-D7, F-D5) or base hulls and then depending upon how 'cheesy' the variants have been received, rate these variants as specialty ships. Classifying these ships into bombardment ships (if you have at least a particulr number of drone racks), carriers (if you have at least a particular number of fighters), etc. has given this more appeal, but only through an ad hoc fashion and is again open to debate.
What is worth more?? 6 drone racks on a Light Cruiser hull or 6 drone racks on a Dreadnought hull? 4 photon torpedoes on a Heavy Cruiser hull or 4 photon torpedoes on a Destroyer hull? Does BPV adequately take these things into consideration?
For the board game, it did. 20 years of playtesting and most of the ships BPVs were based on a per ship basis, not on what systems they had. It was a very synergistic algorithm that produced the BPVs for each ship based on testing in the board game. Not exactly the most precise methodology, but after 20 years, it works.
SFC, on the other hand, does not have 20 years of playtesting benefit, nor do we have a really well defined methodology for testing. Most of the comments made are anecdotal. In a real time environment, playerskill, reflexes etc. also make a huge difference that confounds accurate comparison. We do have the advantage of numbers though, in that we can see which ships players gravitate towards as soon as they become available, drone ships are popular in non-drone races, so are carriers. There is a popular opinion this upsets the balance of the game, and hence the term 'cheese' is applied.
We can see a maxum at work here, players will always pick the best ship they can with the best weapons according to their own playing style. An OOB is not a natural progression of player choice. It must be enforced. The problem though, is that it appears arbitrary. Use of production points does make it more meaningful, when linked to number of owned planets for instance, but this assumes some type of economy construct. The game has a very primitive economy construct, but this really only serves to limit the number and type of ships in the shipyard on any given turn. Not exactly an OOB.
A true implementation of OOB needs to have a well defined economy system with sufficient detail and complexity to make it (at least hypothetically) realistic and from it then, an OOB will be derived naturally. I think this is where we should be headed, based on what we've learnt from servers that have used a rules implementation of an economy.
Topic: GW4 Mod Explanation (Read 4483 times)