How about the Regal Hawk?  I believe that is the smaller, firehawk size, equivalent to the Royal Hawk (has on R-torp and 2 F-torps).  I think the existing Firehawk mini would suffice as it comes with parts to make it into a Royal Hawk.

That leaves me with 2 more questions:

1) For flotillas do you apply an IMP>1 to only one of the ships or does each successful impact roll result in one kill?
2) Do apply shield modifying traits when rolling to impact against fighters (such as piercing, ignore shields etc)?

Thanks!
-Tim

I think your method is interesting and reasonable if you have decent sized ships with moderate speeds.  It doesn't work with ships that have a higher engine rating than hull size though.

-Tim

I'm working on something for this now, but I have to confess I have a rather newbie question:

For custom fighter flights with a Defense score greater than 0, do you role one die per hit (to destroy them) or one die per hit multiplied by the IMP attribute of the weapon?  The basic rules (Section 5.3) are quite clear that IMP and DMG are wasted on fighters - just wanted to see if that still applied with Section F.1 in play.

As for determining "the cost" of starship exclusive what I'm doing is comparing cost of a weapon (that doesn't have starship exclusive or fighter exclusive) to a dual mode weapon that has both a starship exclusive and a fighter exclusive portion.  In the fighter exclusive portion I'm not including traits that have no affect on fighters (e.g. DMG greater than 1, extra hull damage, etc).  For the first trial on any weapon I use 0.7 for the starship portion and 0.6 for the fighter portion.  I then manually scale up the starship exclusive modifier until the dual mode weapon costs the same as the base weapon.

For very minor anti ship type traits (say damage 2) the modifiers are close to 0.8.  If you lay it on thicker (say Extra hull damage and DMG 5) it goes up to 0.97.   I'm going to do up a number of scenarios and then formulate a (hopefully) simple equation (no regression type analysis) that reflects it.

That holds true for other modifiers as well though - say "ignore shields" - useless if your opponent doesn't have shields.  But these modifiers can't take that into account - they just have to be priced for what they do in typical circumstances.  Getting screwed because your opponent brought scissors and you brought paper is just part of the fun. 

I like your logic on how you came up with the 0.7 and the 0.6 for starship exclusive and fighter exclusive respectively.  I think though that this pricing only holds true for weapons that have IMP 1, DMG 1 and no "extra hull damage" traits (and conversely anti fighter/area of effect).  As soon as you start adding imp, dmg or hull killing traits, it improves the weapons ability to destroy starships, but does not improve its ability to destroy fighters.  Thus if you were to do the same "dual mode" calculation on them the split would shift.

I'm going to work out one for our group and post it here for everyone to pick apart.

I think the issue that concerns people the most is there are weapon designs that are heavily geared towards starship destruction and they are just grabbing the starship exclusive to reduce the cost (because, why wouldn't you?). 

For a weapon that is [ROF 1, IMP 5, DMG 5, Catastrophic, slow loading] - it should not receive the same discount for starship exclusive as a weapon that is [ROF 5, IMP 1, DMG1, area of effect, increased hits].  The second one is much better against fighter than the first, and losing the ability to fire at fighters is a major tactical limitation - not so for the first one.

I think for the calculation of starship exclusive should be reflective on how much the weapon is really giving up by not being able to fire at fighters.  The idea equation would some how account for everything on the weapon that is a "waste" to use on fighters.  That would be complicated for sure though.  Here's just a sample of what I'm thinking of just considering impact and damage:

Starship exclusive modifier: 0.7 + 0.1 * [(IMP-1)/4] + 0.2 * [(DMG-1)/4]

I agree that the metagame is the largest factor - however most of the other modifiers were very accurately calculated based on probabilities - this one is a bit of a pickle.

-Tim

It would be nice if "Fighter exclusive" included "anti fighter" in its cost.  I don't have any suggestions as to what the final cost would be, but you'd think it wouldn't be MORE expensive that "starship exclusive".

I'd love to get some stats for the seahawks.

While we're on the subject of fighters, another question came up.

Can you use Combat Interception to initiate a dog fight?

I agree, its awesome.  I've been out of Spaceship games for 15 years (used to play SFB) and after trying a couple of systems out this is the one to go forward with.  I love how you can do justice to any genre, practically better than their own games can.  Actually I guess, I lied, because I did play both BFG and the WotC Star Wars one (but they only ever held our interest for a couple of months) - however we will be re-purposing all those minis for use with Starmada.  Looking forward to both reviving some of those genres plus also cross-genre play!

I'm also looking forward to any collaboration between VBAM 2 and Starmada AE!

-Tim

@ madpax

No I guess ammo isn't 100% necessary.  It makes it feel more like missiles.  In BFG you had to use a special "reload" order to launch more fighters or more torps.  Since fighters are finite in Starmada it only felt fitting to limit the number of torps.

Anyway, do you know how plasma torps were costed?  I'd love to see how that was done.
EDIT: Ah, I see that in Romulan Armada the cost is equal to the direct fire portion of the weapon.  So I guess the idea is to come up with an "equivalent" direct fire weapon for costing - which means I guess ammo probably isn't a problem.

@ Nomad

Those are pretty good conversions.  We're wanting to bring the scale up a big since BFG miniatures are on the rather large end of things.  Also we want to make sure they're competative, as some people may be using these as their main fleets.  So we'll likely up their firepower a bit (after all each hit in BFG was 1 hull damage - here 1 hit is only 0.5 hull damage) and make sure the fire arcs overlap a bit better.  Most of the ships in Gothic had similar limitations with fire arcs, but against custom Starmada fleets it will be quite the handicap.  We're gonna go with the ships in spirit and use the BFG stats as a starting point, but we'll break from there to make the ship designs a bit more useful cross genre.

We are going to try Holofields as a combination of countermeasures and stealth.  We'll make sure other "gothic" factions don't have firecontrol - but firecontrol is something the eldar will have to deal with when fighting non-gothic factions.