Looking for the Cherry Pickers
This is Steven Petrick Posting:
One of the things you have to watch for in developing ideas for a game is a tendency for people who want things to "cherry-pick" data that proves their point.
A few cases in point for the Andromedans.
An Andromedan player felt that the firepower of Andromedan satellite ships was too weak. So he did a comparison of an Andromedan destroyer satellite ship versus a galactic power destroyer. He only compared the Andromedan ship to a single galactic power destroyer, and clearly there was a major mis-match between the firepower of the two ships.
If you have not guessed, the galactic power destroyer he was comparing Andromean satellite ships against was the Federation destroyer, at that time (late 1980s early 1990s) the only destroyer that packed firepower equivalent to a heavy cruiser.
Having that minor point made to him, the Andromedan player returned to his task by comparing the Viper to the Klingon E4. In this case he always assumed that the E4 would be able to bring all four of its phaser-2s into arc (incidentally exposing its considerably weaker #2 or #6 shields), but the Viper was never able to centerline the E4, so either its LS or RS phaser-2s would be out of arc when it fired, and the Viper always had to fire on the E4's #1 shield.
The thing of it is, this player also wrote an article conclusively proving that the Andromedan Cobra (as it existed in the late 1980s) could destroy a Klingon D7 in a one-on-one duel without any chance of taking internal damage, and there was literally nothing the Klingon commander could do about it.
One of the things you have to watch for in developing ideas for a game is a tendency for people who want things to "cherry-pick" data that proves their point.
A few cases in point for the Andromedans.
An Andromedan player felt that the firepower of Andromedan satellite ships was too weak. So he did a comparison of an Andromedan destroyer satellite ship versus a galactic power destroyer. He only compared the Andromedan ship to a single galactic power destroyer, and clearly there was a major mis-match between the firepower of the two ships.
If you have not guessed, the galactic power destroyer he was comparing Andromean satellite ships against was the Federation destroyer, at that time (late 1980s early 1990s) the only destroyer that packed firepower equivalent to a heavy cruiser.
Having that minor point made to him, the Andromedan player returned to his task by comparing the Viper to the Klingon E4. In this case he always assumed that the E4 would be able to bring all four of its phaser-2s into arc (incidentally exposing its considerably weaker #2 or #6 shields), but the Viper was never able to centerline the E4, so either its LS or RS phaser-2s would be out of arc when it fired, and the Viper always had to fire on the E4's #1 shield.
The thing of it is, this player also wrote an article conclusively proving that the Andromedan Cobra (as it existed in the late 1980s) could destroy a Klingon D7 in a one-on-one duel without any chance of taking internal damage, and there was literally nothing the Klingon commander could do about it.
posted by Federation Commander at 1:57 PM
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