Full Thrust Thoughts

I enjoy Full Thrust quite a bit, but there’s a couple of things that I feel that our games over the last few months have been lacking. The first is a lack of reason for the battles. The second is coherence in fleet design.

There are no official ‘book of scenarios’ for Full Thrust. In the majority of games that I’ve played, two or more fleets have turned up, shot each other to pieces, and then we’ve decided on who has won or lost based on who has the most left. From a military point of view, it’s an expensive loss of crew and ships when there’s nothing to be gained.

This also leads a bit into the second point – that there is little coherency to fleet design. FT is very flexible, so fleet designs can be all over the place. Two 1,500 point fleets can be completely unbalanced against each other, and not just because one is over-optimised. With no scenario to guide what a fleet is trying to achieve, you can end up with fleets designs to just slug it out with each other.

There has also always been the fighter-beam-PDS (rock-paper-scissors) issue in Full Thrust as well. A fleet of ‘bubble carriers’ full to the brim with fighters, will wipe the floor with a fleet based around beam (or other ship-to-ship) weapons. A beam heavy fleet on the other hand will annihilate a fleet which has large amounts of PDS (which are only useful against fighters). A fleet with massive amounts of PDS will destroy any fighters before they can do anything.

There have been attempts to fix this by various people, with varying degrees of success and complexity.

Even a small imbalance can turn the tide. With my own designs for the major nations of the Tuffleyverse, I tried to think about who the enemies of each fleet are. But even that doesn’t always help.

House Rules

Firstly then, I’ve been thinking about some house rules to try and balance things. Some of these are detailed here, and will be updated over time as I test them.

Point Defence

One I’ve used for a long time is that PDS (point defence) can be used against ships, but in a limited capacity. They have a range of 6″, and do one point of damage on a 5-6, or on a 6 if the target has one level of shields. They are useless against ships with two levels of shields. They don’t need to use fire control.

This is mostly to allow civilian ships to have some defence against fighters and ships without having to use military level fire control and multiple weapon systems. It also means a fleet heavy on PDS isn’t entirely useless when going up against a fleet with no fighters. The short range and limited damage shouldn’t make them overpowered though.

I’m also considering limiting the number of PDS that can be used against a single fighter flight. A ship with a dozen PDS is invulnerable to a single flight of fighters. Limiting the number of PDS that can be used means fleets with low numbers of fighters can still do some damage against a fleet heavy with PDS.

The limit probably falls between 4 and 6 PDS per fighter flight. 4 PDS means an average damage of about 3, whereas 6 PDS means an average of 4-5. The former will take out half a fighter flight, the latter will come close to annihilating it. I think the former is more reasonable.

Except… heavy fighters only take half damage, so will be taking 1-2 hits from 4 PDS, allowing them to make three or four attacks before being wiped out.

One small modification would be that PDS from area defence would count separately, so a flight could receive four PDS from the target of their attack, plus up to another four from each escort with ADS that is protecting that target. This could encourage the use of escort vessels, which is a bit more interesting than just a single large ship.

Heavy Beams

Another rule I’m playing with came out of our previous game. Should large beam weapons be able to target smaller ships? From a cinematic perspective, it seems reasonable that class 3 or 4 beam weapons (or other anti-ship weapons) should have difficulty targeting small frigates and destroyers. That job should be left to smaller beam weapons.

From an engineering perspective – speed of light weapons are a bit different from classical naval warfare where hitting small, nimble frigates with the largest guns on a battleship is going to be hard. So there’s an argument that this should be an issue.

Also, large weapons already have limitations – they have smaller arcs, and do less damage at close ranges. A single class 4 beam has a MASS of 8. Though it has a maximum range of 48″, at short range (up to 12″) it only does 4D damage. An equivalent mass of class 1 or 2 beams would be doing 8D damage at short range. They also have a 360° or 180° fire arc, whereas a class 4 only has a 60° fire arc.

The massive influence of the large guns of the battleships in the last battle may have been avoidable if the FSE had got into close range quicker (something they were capable of doing). Without re-running the battle with different tactics though, it’s difficult to know.

One possible limitation that could be added is a limit on the size of target a beam can hit:

• Class 2 beams cannot target anything less than 5 MASS.
• Class 3 beams cannot target anything less than 20 MASS.
• Class 4 beams cannot target anything less than 50 MASS.
• Class 5 beams or larger cannot target anything less than 100 MASS.

Again, I’m not certain how much this is needed, or what effect it would have. It would encourage ships to have a range of weapon sizes. A few of the ESU and NSL designs have effectively large spinal mount weapons and little else.

But these ships would probably already struggle in short range engagements against smaller, faster ships. I need to do some testing.

Scenarios

So, as the next step, I’ve started to try to come up with a set of scenarios which can be used to not only give a reason for battle, but also to guide fleet design. For the impatient, I’ve put together an initial draft of these.

Objectives

The first part of any scenario is to define what the broad objectives are. The simplest scenario is to simply turn up and destroy the enemy. This is often an element of most battles, but doesn’t have to be the primary objective.

An objective might be to control a planet. Requiring vessels to get in close to a planet and dominate its orbit space means that a ship can’t just stand back and shoot things with long range weapons. A fleet will be forced to engage in the battle.

Attacking a planet is a similar objective, which might require special equipment (ortillery systems or even landing shuttles) which again requires close engagement.

Maybe it’s an attack on a particular target, such as destroying an enemy fleet carrier or heavy battleship. Or searching an asteroid field for enemy bases or resources. Convoy raiding may require disabling rather than destroying ships.

All of these require something other than standing back and shooting each other.

Fleet Restrictions

Each scenario also puts limitations on the make up of a fleet. The obvious limitation is points value, but they also go into how these points can be spent.

• Are fighters are allowed? If so, how many fighters are to be expected? One fleet having a lot of fighters, and the other none can lead to a big imbalance.
• What sort of fleet is expected? Is it going to be one or two large battleships fighting it out, or a host of smaller ships?

I’ve brought back the old classifications of Escort, Cruiser and Capital ships. Escorts are anything smaller than 50 MASS, Cruisers are from 50 MASS up to 99 MASS and Capital ships are anything of 100 MASS or larger.

Some scenarios may limit a fleet to only Escort vessels, another might put a limit of no more than half points being spent on Capital ships.

A scenario may also require (or heavily recommend) ships with particular capabilities, such as ortillery, advanced sensors or mine clearing.

It’s well known in Full Thrust circles that a single big ship is more capable than a lot of smaller ships of the same mass or points. There are other ways of costing ship designs that take this into account, but I think it’s easier to simply limit what types of ships can be deployed.

Deployment

This is simply how the fleets are initially deployed. Are fighters already launched? Are the ships on the board or coming out of jump? Are reinforcements available later?

If there is any terrain (normally planets or asteroids) then these will need to be detailed as well.

Special Rules

If there are any special rules then they will need to be described. It might be how scanning of targets needs to work, or how planets can be attacked. Anything which needs to be clarified or expanded upon for the particular scenario.

End Game

When does the game end? Is it after a certain period of time (6 turns is probably a reasonable length of time) or when an objective is achieved?

Victory Conditions

What constitutes victory? This feeds into the objectives and helps determines who won.

Rather than simply counting points of ships destroyed, victory points are scored (or lost) for objectives. They may not be the same for both sides.

A scenario where one fleet is trying to destroy an enemy carrier might score +6 points for destroying the carrier, and suffer -1 points for each ship they lose themselves. The defender might gain +6 points for getting their carrier out safely, but lose -1 points for every 3 fighters lost or left behind.

A positive score at the end of the battle is a ‘win’, a negative score is a ‘loss’. The fleet with the highest score is technically the winner, but if both sides are negative then it will have been a victory that was too expensive (maybe the carrier got out, but too many fighters were lost). Likewise, if both sides are positive, then both can spin it as a win back home since objectives were achieved.

A battle where the victor has a positive score and the loser has a negative score would be a decisive victory, where not only were your own objectives achieved, but the cost was acceptable and your opponent was prevented from achieving their objectives.