From: leonard@mimsy.umd.edu (Leonard Dickens)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: Re: SB vs 6 Captains
Date: 23 Jul 92 14:49:47 GMT
Organization: Universal Export Ltd, Regent's Park, London

Sunscreamer writes:
>[me:]
>>"Equal" lag works strongly in favor of the oggers in a SB ogg
>>situation.  If a good ogger misses a second of play due to lag, he was
>>probably cloaked anyway and therefore not really doing anything.  Even
>>if he was just uncloaking, and the SB smokes him, the rest of his team
>>should be getting the advantage while the SB's weapons are busy.  In
>>contrast, a lost second for the SB will mean at best some lost
>>opportunities to fire torps to try to light up ogger.  At worst, it
>>means literally hundreds of points of damage per ogger.  Think about it.

>But but but, you're assuming that the lagged CAs are dealing well with
>the lag and getting all their torps off.  More likely than not, at least
>it seems in my experience, lag makes me zoom off past the starbase,
>uncloak at the wrong time, fire torps behind the starbase, miss with my
>phasers, and plow into my teammates and die.  The 'window of opportunity'
>you use to kill a starbase is very hard to hit when you're moving in 
>half-inch increments.

I will certainly concede that lag makes ogging much harder.  All fine
and good.  But it is my contention that given lag, most of the inherent
inequalities of the SB ogg situation work more against the SB than the
oggers.  

Here is the first way (pointed out by SpaceAce!:) A cruiser's main
weapon is its torpedoes.  The SB's main weapon (against serious
ogging) is its phaser.  Obviously, lag is much more unkind to phasers
than torps.


>But it's true about the starbase being just one ship and thus having its
>problems magnified.  

Yes.  One-against-many works in favor of the many: it is unlikely they
will all be lagged at once, and even if so, they can take large
advantage of any large inequities between their lag and the SB's,
whereas the opposite is not true.


>I guess it depends on the lag flavor du jour and
>who exactly is getting lag and why.

Any realistic way that lag can be construed as "equal", I suspect I
would opine that the SB has the disadvantage.  Care to bandy about
terms?


>Anyway, when you say above, "even if he was just uncloaking, and the
>SB smokes him, the rest of his team should be getting the advantage
>while the SB's weapons are busy," you're just stating a basic principle
>of ogging.  

Exactly!  When a ship starts to uncloak, it cannot fire.  The SB has
no way to know which (if any) of the uncloaking assailants are
actually lagged, and therefore ignorable.  It may very well "waste"
its time smoking someone who wasn't going to be able to fire anyway.
This is yet another way which the situation is not symmetric which 
works in the oggers' favor.


>I think the fact that the SB will almost certainly have time
>extra during the lag to swivel to his next target, since the mouse moves
>independently of the network, gives the SB a slight advantage assuming
>equal lag on all sides.

One has to wonder what the oggers are doing during all this extra
time.  Shooting, for instance.

The typical outcome of any substantial lag in a combat situation is
death, for any ship.  The oggers can afford it.  The SB cannot.

-Wreck
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek