OYW Survey

Email regulations should be let up.

(serious quote for the fact 4 have failed, 2 of them had issues.)

@ MS Teams

There's two different things being proposed here. Players with pure aircraft/tank builds being able to field additional aircraft, and fitting more than one aircraft/tank in a MS team's slot. I'm against both.

The three slots system is based on what was observed in the 08th MS Team series. It's a pretty simple set up that reflects the fact that each player is just a small mass of cogs in a massive war. Each team was comprised of three mobile suits and a detector vehicle. Said team did patrols, fought mobile suits, attacked bases head on, and a number of other things.

When a PC choses to deviate from this setup, they cannot be expected to fulfill the same roles. A mobile suit PC with three aircraft has to use different tactics than a mobile suit PC with three mobile suits. It follows that an aircraft PC with three aircraft will need to use different tactics than an aircraft PC with three tanks.

It doesn't seem fair that an aircraft PC with three aircraft will probably lose against a mobile suit PC with three mobile suits but that's expected. They could have spent roughly four times the RP and bought themselves three mobile suits to be comparable but they chose not to. They chose to use three cheap units in their team instead of more expensive ones.

Three slots makes everything fair. Every player can field four units. If they choose to purchase cheap units then that extra RP they save goes towards a cheap vessel so they can field even more cheap units. If they choose to purchase expensive units then they can put up a better fight. It's a simple game mechanic that doesn't need to be changed.

@ SAF Officer Unit

Nothing needs to be changed. The war is currently focused on the ground hence why the SAF doesn't get an exclusive unit for this shop change. When the war shifts, and the shops go to their next iteration, they get an exclusive Gelgoog Commander to balance things out.

Sounds fair to me.

Also I like the idea of allow tank, and airplane groups to field more units. Not that my opinion matters for much. Even in the OYW, pilots did not go in smaller groups, but larger. Like in the second episode of Igloo 2 with the Type 61s, etc.

Edit: As the rules stand now (as I read them), a bunch of PCs grouping together, without a ship, would would not be "grouped" in the event one of them were ambushed, as they are not considered a single unit.

08th MS Team never showed anything besides mobile suit formations which has already been covered and pretty much accepted. It's also repeated in MS Igloo 2 by the Zeeks. The vehicle is given and removed based on the value of a detection unit in the terrain.



By sourcing MS Igloo 2 episode 2 you will see that the Feddies fielded 8 Type 61s against 4 Zakus. They know they can't win in an even fight without using MS against MS so they outnumber their enemy instead. It's a pretty common tactic if you have the resources to do it.

I'm not really sure what we could source for the aircraft so I'll just point out that the Blue Angels fly with 6 planes in the air. Which if you doubled the three MS team slots would match well as it would give a Tin Cod pilot five more Tin Cods to form their flight and one additional slot for a Dish for recon purposes. Also the patrols do break the MS team limit on aircraft so to say it's imba or unfair to others is saying that those patrols need to be adjusted which would make them kind of pointless as they aren't nearly that big of a problem for MS teams after the first part of the game.

Even with additional numbers these MS Teams aren't going to become over powering based on a RP scale. The only ones with really cheap and somewhat decent vehicles are the Earth Federation and those are hold overs. They should have a shit ton of those and be willing to throw them at the Zeeks. It makes sense. On the Zeon side of things two Magellas aren't that much cheaper than a Zaku II J and let's be honest, the Zaku is a lot better.

For infantry, well, at the end of the day you're still shooting at a giant metal man with 7.62 mm and some sort of AT weapon. A giant metal man with anti-personnel systems. I can point you to a battle where 50 people were killed by two Zakus and a couple AAs. Two of those killed were in Dracken Es. So yeah, it's not going to be broken there at all.

This is my thought process on the MS team issue.

First off, MS team sizes have nothing to do with the series.


It's true that in OYW2 when I set up MS teams, I made them 4 units because that's what they are in 08th. However, the reason why I've kept it at 4 is because that is a reasonable number that works.

When I think about increasing it and try to decide if that's realistic, I think of it more from a logistical standpoint than anything else. An MS team shouldn't have more things in it than a small strike team would be able to legitimately maintain inside of enemy territory. MS team sizes can't increase or decrease based on the location the character is in, because that would be overcomplicated, so we have to use enemy territory as a guideline. It seems to me that a single team maintaining a dozen planes or tanks or whatever inside of enemy territory, especially without being immediately found and routed by patrols, is unrealistic. It may also be unrealistic for only four mobile suits to be wandering around inside friendly territory, but 1/2 price services vs. 0 services is supposed to alleviate that.

Further, from a logistical and a maintenance standpoint, it seems to me that tanks, aircraft, and infantry would ALL be harder to maintain than mobile suits. Mobile suits have nuclear reactors which, as far as we know, are self sustaining. We know there's a helium 3 trade, but there's no indication that a mobile suits reactor has to be regularly recharged or someshit. On the flipside, a tank has a gas or a diesel engine, and MORE crew than a mobile suit does. Most aircraft require airfields to land and maintain, and can't stay in the air for long periods of time, although I've gathered that Gundam aircraft have magical capabilities of all being VTOL and being able to stay airborne for entire days at a time. I mean, in order for a plane to take off of a Big Tray or a Dobday it'd more or less have to be VTOL capable. But planes also have gas engines that require regular refueling and maintenance. As for marines, I'm going to guess that getting food for 120 marines in a universe such as 0079 Gundam where there are huge abandoned cities everywhere is more difficult than finding spare parts for mobile suit maintenance and food for four guys.

So that's where I'm coming from when I think about how realistic the sizes are. However, honestly, realism has nothing to do with the number. It's waaaaay more about gameplay concerns to me.



For gameplay, I'm first off concerned that MS teams higher than 4 would be higher than the carrying capacity of some ships. The Medea only holds 4 things, the Jukon only holds 3 and one has to be infantry, the Jukon II holds 6, one has to be infantry and one has to be aircraft, and the Gallop only holds 5 and one has to be infantry. Medeas are super useful because they're cheap and allow paradrop actions, but people don't purchase Gallops or Jukons very often. In fact, we've had posts in the Zeon forums this run arguing that Jukons are useless. I don't think they're useless by any stretch, but making MS teams larger would push them farther in that direction.

A strike team only consisting of fighter aircraft being able to support more aircraft than a single Medea acting as a tanker for fighter aircraft seems silly as hell to me. By the same token, a strike team consisting only of tanks being able to support more tanks than a Gallop that is only carrying tanks seems silly as hell.

Patrol sizes being larger than MS team sizes is sort of a moot point because they're operating in friendly territory and probably SHOULD be bigger than MS teams.



My third point is that I don't think you guys see the advantages of making tactical decisions with your MS teams sometimes. Gray is right, there's no reason why a person playing a Tin Cod can't have an MS team of 3 GMPGTs, so it's not like you can't get brute force if you're going for brute force. However, the Tin Cod player also has the option of having a 4 aircraft team. This gives him two seperate bonuses to evading Patrols (-1 to the roll and naval patrols being unable to roll for them), bonuses when Scouting, and allows them to avoid the "planes can't beat mobile suits" argument by simply gaining altitude if ambushed and not fighting them. Infantry get more scouting bonuses than anybody else, and an infantry player has gigantic advantages when attempting to capture things, since it's highly likely he won't be fighting enemy PCs.

A mobile suit player can't get any of that. Those are all blatant advantages that, if used intelligently, seem to counteract the disadvantage of playing a plane or infantry over something with bigger guns.

I agree that this argument doesn't really apply to tanks though. Tanks kind of suck.

Finally, as for Dans argument about bases having too many infantry, I'm not sure whether or not he's whining about not being able to field enough infantry, or if he's whining about some Dan-notion that Columbus and Himalaya class ships are overpowered. Neither of them have hardly any guns, so I don't see the point. Zeon not having a ship that can carry a zillion aircraft is just a disadvantage of playing Zeon, like how EF don't have a space detector unit. The shops aren't supposed to be perfectly equal.

Anyway, that's what I think.

IIRC, the higher one's VP, the less VP one gains per encounter, so there's already a countermeasure of sorts in place for this kind of thing. It's subtle, but it's worked well so far.

Can we stay on topic, jerkfaces.