Hi guys! I have started yet another rules discussion post, this time to think about scoring battles... Do we want to count holes and award points based on aboves, waterlines, and belows? Do we want to count sinks? How do we want to penalize ramming? Right now the rules have points listed, but that could easily be changed to 30sec to a minute time out or something else...
I know I'm not a member of battlestations, but I would suggest recording holes (aboves, waterlines, and belows) for statistical purposes, even if you don't use the information for scoring. Using the scoring data I have gathered since 2004, I have been able to identify and link trends in shipbuilding to statistical changes in damage rate, distribution, and sink rates. Tracking these statistics have enabled me to make observations about game balance (and suggest rule changes to improve it) with a very high degree of accuracy. Here's one example. The addition of one more battleship to each team might not have a visible effect on the pond, but when torpedo-cruiser damage that day was doubled and casualties rose, I spotted the change very quickly. And when removing that extra battleship per team returned the damage and casualty figures to the way they were, I recommended to the club that the single best way to fix the power imbalance between torpedo-cruisers and capital ships was to build more battleships. It's taken a year or two for people to build ships, but it's having a noticeable improvement on both game balance and fun factor within the WWCC. For ramming, don't forget to consider what to do in case of "friendly fire" rams. I saw two ships sunk at the last battle due to friendly fire rams, and nobody had any idea how to score that.
Carl, Thanks for the insight. That's very practical feedback! As far as friendly rams, I must agree with Yamatoman. A sink is a sink. A sink from friendly fire (or in Halsey's case a typhoon) still means one less ship to battle with! Carl
I'm okay with counting holes for statistical purposes, but the Treaty way of counting sinks for victory appeals to me For friendly rams, a sink is a sink, IMO... what about unfriendly rams and ram sinks?
Well, my two cents is to have an unfriendly ram sink count as a sink against the team that did the ramming. As for an unfriendly ram, maybe count it has half a sink against the team that did the ramming...? Carl
In Treaty we have counting damage listed, but with the option to count sinks only, based on units, or tonnage (if the units are the same for the ships that sank). As battlestations does not have units then perhaps we can look at displacements. Full load tons, or something like that. So far we have not counted damage at any of our events, and it seems to be working out OK. Perhaps at our first event, we can count damage after one battle, and try not counting damage after aother to compare. I think leaving ourselves more options is a good thing. We have not actually had any ships ram sunk that I can recall, but we have had a few damaging rams, and in a few instances the ram penalty resulted in one team winning, because the other team was penalized 100 or 200 points. Not that this is the best way to go about things, but just posting info for thought. Mikey
I think we can wait until we get some battles done to finish that part of the rules After all, we are only accountable to ourselves
