Triplanetary: asymmetry bug wrt Attack/Counterattack 'D' effects

[sgbeal]

This is a carry-over of a discussion on BoardGameGeek:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread...-counterattack

Here's the summary:

The duration of 'D' effects is different for Attacking and Counterattacking due to a rules change made in 3E. Consider this scenario:

It's player 1's turn and one of his ships attacks a ship owned by player 2. Player 2's ship counterattacks and gets a D1 result against player 1's ship. After that combat, that phase of the turn is over and we move into the Resupply phase. With the rules as written, player 1's D1'd ship now recovers, making player 2's counterattack, in effect, useless.

So counterattacks are weaker than an equivalent attack (using the rules as written).

One can, of course, cry out, "no, no, no, the D1 effect does not disappear until player 1's NEXT Resupply phase", but if we do that then counterattacks are more powerful than normal attacks their 'D' effects last one phase longer than the same effect from a normal attack.

i have been told on BGG that the 2E rules specify that 'D' results are reduced in the same phase as they are taken, starting exactly one turn later. That, of course, brings with it bookkeeping headaches, but it is the only approach i can conceive which makes attacks and counterattacks fully symmetric. (That said: i have never played 1E or 2E, so i'm going by what i'm told by another player.)

Edit: apparently this also affects ships which are disabled by an asteroid. To quote Brian McCue (including typo ;)), from the BGG thread links to above:

The issue is that movement comes before combat, so if you are disabled by an asteroid and the effect lasts for a whole turn, then you miss two combat phases, but if you are disabled by combat, yon only miss one.

Thoughts?

[sgbeal]

Signal boost.

This bug in Triplanetary's damage system is what keeps me from playing the game. So far i've found no way to play damage recovery which isn't fundamentally "asymmetric", leading to longer or shorter "D-times" depending on how one gets disabled (via an attack, a counter-attack, or something during the movement phase).

[fwcain]

Looking through the current rules...
http://www.sjgames.com/triplan/2018rules.pdf

Yes, it would appear that the result of "D1" (a one-turn Disable) on an attacking ship, as a result of a counter-attack, is not all that useful, as per your example. Then again, this was a counter-attack (that is, a reaction, and not an initial action).

My recommendation would have been to concentrate the counter-attacker's forces onto a weaker defense, so that you would have had better odds of scoring a more effective result. (FWIW, the "D1" result is available on the Gun Combat Damage table only on the "1:4" odds column. If you had managed to get onto the "1:2" column, you would have increased the chances to score damage, _and_ the minimum results would have been better ["D2" and above].)

Does this make sense? Hope this helps.

Franklin

[sgbeal]

Originally Posted by fwcain

My recommendation would have been to concentrate the counter-attacker's forces onto a weaker defense, so that you would have had better odds of scoring a more effective result. (FWIW, the "D1" result is available on the Gun Combat Damage table only on the "1:4" odds column. If you had managed to get onto the "1:2" column, you would have increased the chances to score damage, _and_ the minimum results would have been better ["D2" and above].)

Does this make sense?

It makes tactical sense, but doesn't address the problem with the rules (other than lessening the chance that it surfaces). On BGG the claim is, from players who've owned all earlier editions, that any D result means that the ship is disabled for that many turns, so a D1 should not (per those players) recover on the same turn.

Since the initial post, my bigger concern is not counterattacks, but damage during the movement phase:

As written (but not, i believe, as intended), if i get a D1 in my movement phase (i smack into an asteroid), i recover completely on that very same turn, missing only one Attack phase. Per the long-time players on BGG, you aren't supposed to recover until the Resupply phase of your NEXT turn. Ergo, ship getting a D1 during its movement phase misses TWO Attack phases, rather than just one. The asymmetry of both approaches (as written and as (i believe) intended) is thoroughly unsatisfying.

According to long-time players quoted in the initial BGG link, damage used to be tracked on a per-phase basis, so that it recovered on a later turn, but in the same phase it was taken. That's the only system i can conceive of which makes all damage, regardless of its timing, equivalent. (Even so, it's not clear to me whether such damage should recover at the start or end of that phase.)

[RogerBW]

Per the 1981 rules, a disabled ship "recovers at the end of the phase corresponding to the one in which it was disabled."

I would extend this for clarity to "the one in which it was most recently disabled". So if in turn 1's combat phase I take a D2, I expect to recover after turn 3's combat phase; if in turn 2's navigation phase I take a further D1, I now expect to recover after turn 4's navigation phase.

[sgbeal]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Per the 1981 rules, a disabled ship "recovers at the end of the phase corresponding to the one in which it was disabled."

I would extend this for clarity to "the one in which it was most recently disabled". So if in turn 1's combat phase I take a D2, I expect to recover after turn 3's combat phase; if in turn 2's navigation phase I take a further D1, I now expect to recover after turn 4's navigation phase.

That seems, to me, to be the only symmetric solution. The 3E changes feel like they were made to reduce the bookkeeping of tracking damage, but then... well, i hate the say this, but they obviously weren't playtested. Had they been, the problems described in this post would have been easily spotted.

The workaround i have in mind is to create some counters labeled "3" and "4" (the two phases in which a ship can be damaged: Movement and Combat). For each point of damage a ship takes, it takes one counter with the current phase number on it. The tokens are kept in the order they're obtained, and only the oldest token is recovered each turn. e.g. if i take D2 in phase 3, D1 in phase 4, and another D1 during the next phase 3, i end up with these tokens, in this order (oldest first): 3, 3, 4, 3. At the end of that 2nd phase 3, i would remove the first "3" token, leaving me with: 3, 4, 3. On the following turn, i'd remove a "3" token at the end of phase 3, leaving me with tokens (4, 3). The next turn, i'd recover (at the end of phase 4) the "4" token, leaving me with a single "3" token.

i haven't yet tested that, but i think it will work reasonably well. It differs only microscopically from 1E and resolves (or seems to) the asymmetry problem with 3E.

The bookkeeping ain't pretty, but the asymmetry of the 3E system hurts to look at :/.

[43Supporter]

Originally Posted by sgbeal

The bookkeeping ain't pretty, but the asymmetry of the 3E system hurts to look at :/.

Who needs tokens, when one can write the data directly onto the gameboard?

[sgbeal]

Originally Posted by 43Supporter

Who needs tokens, when one can write the data directly onto the gameboard?

Old habits die hard :/.

Apropos board: the included board is about 3 inches too wide for all 5 of my tables. i had to make a custom one in Inkscape, scaled down slightly to fit my tables, and had it printed out on poster-sized paper. To make it dry-eraseable i place a transparent tablecloth over it:
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/...0/triplanetary

[43Supporter]

Originally Posted by sgbeal

Old habits die hard :/.

Odd you should phrase it that way.

I was thinking back to the '80s and '90s, and _Car Wars_ -- with a laminated map, one could annotate important details directly onto the game surface (for ex.: When exactly a Flaming Oil slick would burn out; or what CT result a car would have to take in its next move; etc.); and this we borrowed from, of all places, the *original* _Triplanetary_ game (plus the "crayon rail" games)....

So I guess this is an example of "different upbringings" in gaming. :)

[RogerBW]

This gets trickier if you're using the advanced combat system, where you get to choose which of your Ds you remove. You could track the phases in which each D was inflicted, but I think I'd be more inclined to have a "3/4" marker per ship (which gets flipped to the current phase each time the ship takes damage), and at the end of each phase with that number the player gets to remove a D. (With some fiddliness so that you still get a full turn of D effect.)