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Re: submarines (was: Re: Stealth)



On Tue, 12 Apr 2005, Dave Fancella wrote:
On Tuesday 12 April 2005 01:02 pm, Jonathan Koren wrote:
On Mon, 11 Apr 2005, Dave Fancella wrote:

What I'd like to see, and I can almost guarantee Jens saying "no" for
this :) is that the sub's hex should be grayed as a regular movement hex, but if you try to pass through it, then the sub immediately becomes active and you *must* fire on it. Neither player gets the choice.

But the surface ship player does have a choice. He sees the big gaping submarine shaped hole on his scope (because he hasn't actaully detected the sub now), and then he makes the decision to move through the hole, knowing full well that when he the hole will immediately be filled with a submarine and he'll have to shoot it.

Aha, but the point is that they don't see the sub on radar.

They just see that the hex is occupied. As I said, they don't see a sub. They see a sub shaped hole. The sub isn't hidden any more.


Now, we're not getting all anal and dealing with the depth of the sub, we're just assuming that a sub underwater is undetectable unless you're right on top of it.

But by graying out the movement hexes, the submarine IS revealed.

The reason the surface player doesn't have a choice is because he *doesn't* see the sub. So the sub attacks.

The reason the sub player doesn't have a
choice is an arbitrary imposition of game balance, since we're not actually
trying to build a real war simulator here.

I know it's not a real simulator, I'm just think that by graying out the hexes containing hidden submarines (and thus raising a big red flag that there's a sub there), pretty much defeats the purpose of stealth. Stealth is supposed to make a unit sneaky. It's not very sneaky if everytime a player tries to utilize it the gameboard says "Hey look! It's a submarine!".


--
Jonathan Koren World domination? I'll leave that to the jkoren@xxxxxxxxxx religious nuts and Republicans, thank you.
http://www.cs.siu.edu/~jkoren/ -- The Monarch, "Venture Brothers"