[Spaceships] I'm closing on nothing, and 4 other confusions.

[weevis]

Thanks mlangsdorf, I appreciate these detailed examples and also the feedback on the flowchart. My point with the chair was to re-enact my initial confusion, probably because I feel (somewhat defensively) that it is not that strange a mistake to make while reading these rules. But who knows, maybe I'm the only one that was confused by this. I'm all set with the gameplay model now.

I do still think (also probably defensively) that some of the things I raised are not very clear. You are justifying the gameplay model and you've done an excellent job. I think I'm stumbling upon what I think are issues with the writing clarity and the naming of things, which led me to have a hard time understanding the gameplay model.

For instance I think my issues with the bonus / "non-bonus" acceleration could have been avoided with some phrasing changes and possibly not using the word "bonus" (which is the word that implied to me that "non-bonus" acceleration was important in the first place).

In the part you responded to I think I was probably struggling with the word "evasive." I'm not saying I have a better word -- you have to call the maneuver choice something in the rules. Still, when I read through these rules the first time I recall thinking about a scenario where ships with big missiles (32cm+) want to stand off at range L vs. beam ships with beams that can't reach that far.

In the paragraph above I called that "stand off" because it feels more comprehensible to me to say that, rather than to "be evasive" at range L. I understand that a ship is harder to hit if it is accelerating. I understand I could just stop my engines or slow them down (hold course). But I'd probably want to keep those engines on and preserve every single point of acceleration bonus I'm entitled to every turn in case the enemy tries to close. "Evasive action" isn't what came to mind for that. So there seemed to be too few options.

So to beat the dead horse, when you say this:

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

if you decide to use all that awesome acceleration, then you need to go somewhere: closer to it or away from it or in a loop, and two of those options are evasive.

I feel like your words "are evasive" would be replaced by "make you harder to hit" if we were just shooting the breeze about about imaginary space battles. You used "evasive" because that's the name of the maneuver in the rules. The first definition of "Evasive" is "to escape." I just looked it up to see if my interpretation was wacky or off-base. "to escape" doesn't fit that well in your sentence with "in a loop." That's probably why it wasn't intuitive to me.

With cover I think the presence of the concept in the rules at all suggested to me that you'd be able to move in relation to it and do something else with it. Since you can use cover while closing as an ambush strategy, I expected cover to come up somewhere else. That's all I'm saying.

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

if your super TL11^ spaceship wants to stay in the vicinity of an asteroid to use it as cover - well, remember, the asteroid is moving pretty fast relative to the sun already

That doesn't seem relevant but maybe I don't see your point. If the gameplay model lets people using a closing maneuver hide behind cover for an ambush, I don't think it is crazy for the reader to expect to see cover show up somewhere else in the movement rules. (Hello Exogorths!) But I think you can't do anything else with it. As a gameplay decision, that's fine. Combat rules need to simplify things. As a reader I didn't think it was ideal.

I think I've got what the rules intended for all of these situations now. Thanks everybody.

mlangsdorf I'll see what I can do with the flowchart edits. Thanks again.

As a minor aside I'll report have a space merchant/pirate campaign and I've been doing playtests with these rules that are 1v1 with lightly-armed freighters. The rules seem to work well and I like them so far. Maybe the ideal usage scenario was lightly armed freighters at TL11^.