The woes of Draco: An interperetive dance.

I think the overarching point of this is it's a game, you win some and you lose some. If you can't handle being outsmarted or just plain losing from time to time, then you really shouldn't play. I know it feels bad when you make a mistake and your side suffers for it, but that is part of the game.

My job is to keep everything consistent so that it is a fair and balanced game, and make sure everybody is having fun. Really, we could have arguments about something like whether or not a Medea should be faster than a Zanzibar ad infinitum. At the end of the day it is just a cartoon.

My job is to make sure that once it is stated that a Medea is faster than a Zanzibar, that it is never suddenly slower than a Zanzibar in a given event, and to balance the cost of the Medea and the Zanzibar to reflect the fact that the Medea is faster. None of these issues are accusations of me doing something one way and then going back on that later. They're just issues of disagreements of petty things like whether or not a Medea should be faster than a Zanzibar, or Draco being all upset because he made a poor battle strategy and was outsmarted like with Feyd, or this recent battle in the Arctic. I want people to have fun, but I can't give Draco special treatment so that he will have fun at the expense of everybody on the other side, just because Draco can't handle having something go wrong now and again.

Why would you make a response like that, really. It is as if you just want negative attention.

Please explain specifically what does not make any sense and I will try to elaborate. I am always willing to explain why things are done the way they are done.

The reason why I need to address these things is because they need to be addressed. It's perfectly fine to wonder why something was done the way it was done, and I do not mind explaining my reasoning on things. If confusing topics are not addressed, then players such as Draco will go around in private saying what they think is wrong about a certain decision, which may be full of assumptions and be just generally incorrect. Other players will inevitably believe them, and if the issues aren't addressed then a few months down the line we have all sorts of people mad about things that they really shouldn't be mad about. I think what's currently going on is a pretty good case in point.

Basically, if you have questions about the outcome of a certain battle, you should bring them up. Even if the battle went in your favor or if you don't really mind it going in a way you don't think is right, if you have an issue, chances are somebody else has the same issue, and they may just keep quiet until they can't stand it anymore. Addressing things like this in the long run is better for everybody.

I did have a pretty sarcastic and mean outlook to the thread, but to be fair, Draco was doing the exact same thing to me. And has been doing so for months. The fact is, he is a whiny and immature brat who cannot stand not getting his way, and thinks he is always right. While he is getting his way he's pretty friendly and has a good comedic wit, but the moment he is not getting his way he starts crying like a three year old. In addition to trying to address the legitimate points that he is making, I am trying to point out that he is being such a baby about it, so that people will not take him seriously.


But let me further explain what is confusing you:

#1: The North America issue doesn't make any sense, but a lot of the RPG movement rules do not make any sense. It doesn't make any sense why every single ship or mobile suit moves at essentially the exact same speed. Things like a submarine being able to move from the Pacific to North America to the Atlantic do not make any sense. Things like the space map being completely linear, and having no seperate sectors for locations on the far side of Earth opposite the moon, do not make any sense. Some of the base locations, such as Odessa being in Central Asia and not Europe, do not make any sense.

However, when you're making a game, any game, you have to sacrifice some realism in order to make the game simple enough to be playable. That is just a fact of game designing.

Because of these simplifications, we've made it such that where you are in a given location is pretty ambiguous, regardless of where you move from. Adding rules that restrict what you are allowed to do in a location because of which direction you moved in from would be incredibly complex, and require the website to remember not only where you are and where you're going, but additionally where you're coming from. There would be seperate specific exceptions for every type of location that would only be relevant to a handful of unit types. So it's really easier for everybody just to take it out. And in the long run, this actually does not cause many issues of believability in actions. It's usually very simple to work around it, both in battle writing and in RPing.

The issue with the oceans and the Feyd battle was one where it really didn't make sense. Draco had Dopps launching out of submarines (which is already pretty weird) and assumed that he couldn't have them magically moved to the Atlantic coast since he moved in from the Pacific. This was the wrong assumption, since there's no rule preventing it. We would have just said he had speeded around the suez canal before he attacked and tried to cut off the enemy escape route.

In fact, if it hadn't been for the rules simplifications allowing him to do that, he would have been forced to leave the Atlantic open, which would have given Feyd an easy way to escape since he would have known the Atlantic would be open. So in this situation the rules were actually helping Draco quite a bit, and he just didn't take advantage of them.


#2: Basically what I think about in regards to the Medea issue, is that you guys don't really realize how many Medeas you have shot down. Draco has shot down 5 or 6 by himself. They keep buying more because they are cheap, but they really do go down very easy, and you guys have destroyed at least twenty of them so far.

The thing about Medeas, is they're basically only useful for increasing the maneuverability of friendly units. They die very easily, they cannot bombard static defenses, and they actually have a smaller hangar capacity than a PC MS team. Their anti-air is horrible without the Revised upgrade, if they are totally unsupported by aircraft they can be downed by just 3 or 4 Dopps.

Gaws on the other hand, are extremely useful attack units. They have big hangar capacities, they can fight air or ground, they can paradrop, they can bombard bases, they can carry mobile armors. They are very versatile and very useful. Their downside is they are brittle and can go down easily to enemy snipers or to massed air battles, so you can't be over-aggressive with them. Early in the game I saw Zeon buy lots of Gaws and be over-aggressive with them, attacking with damaged Gaws or attacking enemy units with snipers without proper ground support. This resulted in a lot of downed Gaws, and rather than come to the conclusion that you weren't using Gaws correctly, you just decided that Gaws were terrible and started only buying Dobdays because they survive longer.

The RP cost of a unit reflects not only how tough it is in a general combat sense, but how useful it is in a tactical sense as well. The perfect example of this is the Gray Phantom. It costs more than 4 Gaws, and has a smaller carrying capacity than 1 Gaw. It's a little bit tougher than a Gaw, in a straight fight 1v1 a Phantom would probably beat a Gaw, but it couldn't beat 2 Gaws, and definitely not 4. However, the reason why it costs so much is because it can both Paradrop AND Orbital Drop, and can move into orbit from any location, regardless of whether or not there is a spaceport. This means a Gray Phantom can pretty much attack any target anywhere on Earth at any time within two updates. Its tactical maneuverability is unparalleled.

In the issues of air power, the Federation has the advantage in air power. Its shop is much better able to put forth massed air power, and it will usually win in the air. It is supposed to. Zeons advantage is in ground power, good tanks and cheap mobile suits. This doesn't mean you will never win an air battle. You have before and I'm sure you will again. It just means that the shops are not designed to be perfectly equal. Each side has advantages in some places and deficiencies in some places, and your job is to figure out what those advantages and disadvantages are, and use them correctly. I can't tell you how to do that though!


#3: The marines being fired out of missiles thing is something we already talked about to death. The thing about that was people didn't understand that in addition to one squad of Marines being used that way, Latooni had 29 additional squads simply doing EVAs to the enemy ship in spacesuits. More than 90% of the marines died before they got to the enemy Gwazine, but that didn't matter because the Gwazine had zero squads of Marines defending it, so it really only took maybe two squads to take over the ship. Since that happened, nobody on either side has forgotten Marines for their ships again. That's part of playing tactically. You have to organize so much stuff in this game, that sometimes you make a mistake and forget something. When you see somebody on the other side making a mistake, you take advantage of that. We wrote the Marines in the missiles thing because at the end of the day, it sounded cool. But it was the other 29 squads in space suits that made the capture possible, even if they weren't doing something quite as cool.


#4: The issues of whether or not I let a player survive is something that I have brought up before and openly said is not exactly fair. You obviously never WANT to kill a player. But you have to kill players, it is part of the game, and sometimes the event necessitates that somebody should die in order to be believable. When you decide that a side is losing badly enough that somebody needs to die, picking who should die is often very difficult. There's a lot of different things I do to decide this.

One of the things I look at is whether or not a characters individual story is finished yet. Some of our players kinda RP by ear and change things as they go, and other players have a set story that they work out before they make the character. Take Cid for example. Cids character design was somebody who wanted to take revenge on the JDEG by destroying a Jupiter Energy Fleet. Every single action that he has made from day 1 of the game has been designed to make him better able to destroy a Jupiter Energy Fleet. He has put a lot of thought into that, and has even worked out in RP how he wants his character to die. His profile is supposed to be a voice recording that was found after Riley was already dead.

Part of the reason for the Serious Injury rule is so that I can give an in-game effect that is similar to death, 7 days damage and a loss in VP, without killing a character and removing their story RP-wise. Both of Nigels miraculous Medea escapes were extremely early in the game. He actually had the very first serious injury, before anybody had died yet. It was in like update 7 or 8. I gave him the serious injury because he had really overextended himself, and because the actual strategy that he sent in would have resulted in him being captured, and I thought an officer capture 2 weeks into the game would have broken things. I think a lot of players have noticed that in cases where one side is totally and completely fucked, I usually give them a little bit of luck in order to give them an out, and continue the game. Otherwise I risk having a bunch of people think they cannot win anymore therefor they should quit. Another good example of that is when I gave Chris ownership of the two Odessa Jukons after the event. There was no reason for me to do that, but I thought it was a good way to keep the game going well in a fair and reasonable way.

So, in short, yes, the choice of who dies and who does not die is not always fair, and the player who dies or the player who fails to kill somebody can often feel like they're getting the short end of the stick. But in reality there's a lot more going on than whether or not I like a character and who I'd like to see die. I hate Patrick Foley. HATE him (sorry BM!). I think he's a neat idea for a character that BM has just completely ruined. But I'm not going to off the guy and force BM to make a new character just because I do not like it. At the same time, I am not going to kill Nigel 2 weeks into the game when his character story that he is working hard on is just getting started, when I can reasonably seriously injure him instead.


Saying that every large Zeon operation has failed is just completely not true. You've destroyed Malta, SEA HQ, Augusta, New York, New Amsterdam, the Blex and Wyatt fleets, crippled the EF Navy at Odessa, you're doing very well. You've had a few operations fail, but EF has had some losses too. By no stretch whatsoever is every Zeon operation failing.

There's two big differences in the Gwazine v. Everest issue.

The first is the relative numbers of crewmen. We've always said that space ships are crewed more like submarines than like surface ships. The concept for crewing submarines is to have as few crew as possible, since you want a ship that can operate in closed conditions for long periods of time. Naval ships do not have that requirement. Because of this, I'm assuming that a Gwazines crew is only a couple hundred people, while an Everests crew is well over a thousand. Plus, the rooms inside the Gwazine are probably very small with few ways in and out, making it easier for a smaller number of Marines to move through the ship securing areas as they go. A spaceship has to be designed so that it's easy to close off damaged areas or areas that are venting atmosphere, and that in turn will make it easy for Marines to move through the ship. It was also 2 Marine squads v. 0, instead of 2v1, iirc.

The second reason, which I explained in the original thread Chris made, is very simple. I probably am not going to let a ship be captured in an event in which your side also loses. In addition to capturing the ship, it probably takes several hours to organize personnel to an extent that the ship becomes usable, and if you do not win the event and force the enemy back, you do not have the kind of time required to do that. This is not going to be a hard rule, for example it's easy to see Hans Bond taking over a Medea during a battle, since it is small and probably has a crew of around 10 people and only needs 1 pilot, (spoilers???), but it is a good thing to keep in mind.



The Odessa paradrop thing was something that I did give to the Federation that wasn't part of the normal rules. These were the circumstances of that.

They had moved a lot of forces in the previous day, and were hoping all the patrols would hit them and be destroyed, so the Medeas could paradrop in the next day uncontested. They didn't, just based on the random die rolls, which was an extremely unlikely event. Then the Medeas got caught by a ground-based patrol that in actuality couldn't do any damage to them at all. Said medeas were carrying five or six Federal PCs.

So what am I supposed to do in that situation? Say that six Federation PCs cannot participate in the month long event specifically because their Medeas got intercepted by a few Zakus that cannot harm them, in a completely random set of events nobody had any real control over? It is not like I let them Paradrop from farther away than normal, and it is not like I secretly changed the patrol rolls in order to let them have more fun. Instead, since we were already using special non-normal event rules with turns etc. for the Odessa event, rather than not let them arrive at all, I let them arrive late. If I had not let them arrive at all, that nameless Zaku patrol that fired some 120mm shells into the air would have been the unsung heroes of the war.

I figured this made sense, since the Odessa event was much larger than usual, lasted much longer than usual, and therefor there should have been much more time for those Medeas to arrive before the battle was over. I didn't tell the EF players this was going to happen till after all their actions were already in, and when they freaked the fuck out and asked if they could have the Medeas come in from a different sector because they were going to be so late, I said no they had to go with their existing strategy. And it ended in them taking a lot of losses in the southern area of the map because they were required to attack with just tanks even though they knew their mobile suits were coming late.

Well. Works for me. I was just curious as to the factors that lead to that. Yeah, I knew it'd be unfair to keep 6 PC's out of an event because of dumb luck of a dice roll.