From: rhodesia@wixer.cactus.org (Felix S. Gallo)
Subject: Re: Hell Peacock
Followup-To: rec.games.netrek
Summary: I haven't responded to a berd posting in a while
Organization: grand double admirals, inc.
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 15:44:42 GMT

Note: I'm not really responding to Berd as often as I am describing
what he means.

hde+@cs.cmu.edu (Herbert Enderton) writes:
>sfd@soda.berkeley.edu (Scott Drellishak) writes:
>
>I think Scott might have a point, but I'm not sure what it is.  It could
>be one or more of the following:
>
>(1) The game designers did not want such prevalent ogging.  So if ogging
>is indeed a very useful tactic (useful in terms of winning the game), then
>the game should be redesigned to make ogging less useful.  [debatable]

In Empire, the grandfather of netrek, this problem is solved in two different
ways:  1) it takes about 4 minutes to get into the enemy space; 2) if there
are enemies in your space, you enter at a point pushed back from your home
planet directly in proportion to their distance from your planet.  In other
words, dying sucks, and those who can stay alive and do well playing Long
Range Recon are rewarded well for their talents.  I've proposed both these
ideas in the past.  Does anyone have an experimental-minded server?

>(2) Regardless of how useful ogging is, we server-gods should tend to avoid
>rewarding oggers via the rank system.  In particular, the 0.8 defense threshold
>is a good idea.  [i disagree; rank should correlate with game-winning ability,
>and it seems correlate better when the defense threshold is removed]

Rank doesn't correlate with anything, since it's a natural reward of one
individual rather than many.  In fact, DI is pronouncedly more available
on the losing side of a game.  If anything, ogging has proven that rank
is meaningless, and so it *should* be.

>[...]

>(5) Dogfighting is more useful than such players profess.  E.g. time you
>spend dogfighting during an INL game is likely to help your team a lot.
>[i disagree UNLESS one includes goals such as protecting a teammate or
>driving defenders off a planet in the scope of `dogfighting']

The important statistic in netrek is time-over-target.  If I get an extra
one second of applied skill, then I have an improved chance of winning a
game.  I find that dogfighting by definition takes a lot longer to achieve
results than ogging, and that the extra time it takes can be crucial.  For
instance, stopping a carrier is very difficult if living is one of one's
secondary goals; escorts can capitalize on one's incomplete application of
strength and force a loss or withdrawal.  For another instance, an enemy
presence in one's space needs to be gotten rid of quickly.  If they are
twenty seconds from my planet after re-entry and I am 5 seconds away, then
I clearly win a big advantage by plastering them and subtracting fifteen
seconds from their time-over-target.  If I were to engage an enemy presence
in my space in a dogfighting mode, I would gamble my getting a kill against
their ability to bring up reinforcements and takers before I succeeded.  In
most real-netrek situations, the defensive side in a dogfight can stage a
slight retreat with very little loss in strategic positioning, causing the
offensive side to waste time and energy attempting to engage a slowly
retreating foe.  Again, in most real-netrek situations, the defensive side
in an ogg must abandon his position or face a very serious immediate threat.
This seems much more positive for the offensive side to me.

>(6) Ogging is easy, in the sense that between equally good players
>in most typical game situations the ogg succeeds.  [hard to define this
>well enough to debate; personally most of my oggs fail, but that's
>probably because i'm usually willing to ogg if i estimate my chance
>of success is better than 20%]

I think most oggs succeed, but don't necessarily result in the death of the
defender.  Just as in football, it's often enough to hurry the quarterback
or delay him, distract him, divert his attention or scare him.  Being 
aggressively pursued by invisible people with enormous guns and no self-
preservation instinct often drives even the most courageous takers back
into their (strategically useless) safe havens.

>(7) Ogging is easy, in the sense that it's easier to learn to og well
>than to learn to dogfight well.  [i am dubious]

I believe this.  It's easier to do things when you're invisible.  Dogfighting
requires that you concentrate on your placement, your weapons, your fuel,
your angle, your speed, your opponent's placement, her weapons, her fuel,
her angle, and her speed.  Ogging merely requires that you concentrate on
your angle, her angle, her speed, your speed, and very briefly your weapons.
More often than not, you don't care how much fuel she has or whether she has
torpedos out, because you only have the one approach shot.

>  -- Red Shirt


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Felix Sebastian Gallo                              rhodesia@wixer.cactus.org
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Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek