Escorts



   FREELY AVAILABLE ESCORTS











ESCORTS ARE VITAL FOR DOE

With all the (SFB-style) fighers available in DOE, I've found that escorts are going to be absolutely essential for all navies.  We all know that escorts in the past have created lots of controversy and most of us remember why.  I've no desire to go back to THAT flame!

But what to do?  I'm sticking to my plans to take as many rules server-side rather than player-side as possible, so I've taken a different approach than building a complex set of CnC rules.  Rather than restrict access to escorts based upon flagship and rank, I've expanded access to everyone.  I have also added several escorts to every hull class of all three fleets.


I WANT AS FEW PLAYER-SIDE RULES AS POSSIBLE

The key to my solution were the Gorn and Romulan escorts.  Who wants to fly a Gorn and Romulan escorts as a solo ship?  No one with any sense!  Taldren's incomplete coding of the Plasma-D weapons system means that Gorn and Romulan escorts trade off most (if not all) of their heavy firepower to gain escort abilities.  The key to solving the escort "problem" was making Federation escorts work with the same philosophy as the other two fleets.

Thus, all Escort Ship G-racks have been converted to full defensive loads.  In SFB, the G-rack was a single, dual-use missile system that usually carried two reloads of offensive drones and a single reload of defensive drones.  If you expected a lot of defensive work, you could alter this ratio.  Whatever your ratio,  however, you always had to work in *either* offensive or defensive mode for an entire turn.  Taldren eased their modeling by giving Fed and Klingon ships with G-racks two weapons systems instead of one, and thus allowed G-rack ships to perform both funcitons simultaneously.  Taldren's offensive system came with two reloads and their defensive one with a single reload.  I've merged these back into a single system (as in SFB) with a full three defensive loads.

Note again, this is for Escorts Only! So don't get your panties in a knot over the rest of the Fed fleet.

The other change I have made for escorts is deleting things like the Federation NEC (which served on the Fed/Klink border) and instead introducing escorts like the Federation NER, which was the same ship refitted to serve on the Romulan border. 


ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND CHEESE

Now everyone's escorts operate the same, and they are freely available at all times.  They will be very good at their intended purpose and will be generally  poor at any other.

THE ESCORT (NON) RULES:


THE SOLE CnC RULE

Experimentation with this philosophy over the weekend gave results I was pleased with.  It did, however, lead me to the one CnC rule which will be in force during Day of the Eagle.  With SFB-style fighters, I feel the following rule is needed: No player may have more than one carrier of any kind within their fleet.

WHAT IS A CARRIER?

A carrier is any ship capable of carrying fighters, and on the Eastern Front this designation should cause no confusion.  While drogues are puchased in the fighter interface, they are NOT fighters and do not make their ships carriers.  What is a carrier and what is not should be as complicated as a brick, but feel free to toss bricks my way if you are ever feeling confused.  ;)

There.  Now, back to my flameproof bunker.




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Last Updated 3/21/2003