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mj12games.com/forum → Posts by jwpacker
Thanks for doing this... I would really love to see the default setting become more fleshed-out.
If a fellow were inclined to indulge you in this - what materials are currently canon for the default setting? I saw the timeline in the Nova rules, but is the only other source the Imperial Armada book from SAE? Any reference to this setting in any of the other games?
Well, that's a default setting. Nothing says you can't have a campaign that includes alternative victory conditions that favor captures and perhaps even prejudices destruction - "double VP for capturing the carrier, but only 25% if it is destroyed" - eliminating it from the enemy arsenal is good, but the capture was really important, for example.
cricket wrote:jwpacker wrote:What's the rule for splitting a battery into three or more targets? Say, I have a single battery that should, in reality, consist of six point defense guns?
I would assume that such a battery would be divided into multiple banks to begin with...
I think part of the issue comes from the conversion guide which lumps antifighter batteries into a single TT bank. I think it is much better to split them into as many banks as possible with overlapping arcs.
Erik
Yeah, my ships more often than not resemble the S'ssk - multiple batteries in the same arcs. Couple that with multiple batteries in the same ark, with expendable seekers, and you'll get where my mind usually goes when designing ships.
but is it really "Byzantine" to apply a -2 modifier if splitting fire between two targets?
Counterintuitive? Splitting batteries is counter to how I think of things, I guess.
What's the rule for splitting a battery into three or more targets? Say, I have a single battery that should, in reality, consist of six point defense guns? What's the method for splitting it six ways, to target six flights of fighters, drones and seekers?
Given a large enough target, I like the idea of an easy means of concentrating the fire into a single roll. But again, in my head, it's "concentrating on those star destroyers" not "splitting fire against those stunt fighters"...
This does bring up a minor question.
In our earliest ship designs, a lot of times we were using identical arcs with identical dice on the same weapon line.For example: TT3, TT3, TT3
This would give me three turreted shots at three dice each during the same combat phase.
I was told that "technically" this isn't allowed.
Identical firing arcs on the same weapon line are not allowed.It really should be: TT9, with the rules for splitting dice then being used.
Are you guys currently multiple identical arcs for expendables?
Because I'd think this'd fall under the same restriction.
This is probably my least favorite part of SNE - I want to have the flexibility to target multiple targets without having to go through some manner of byzantine separation math to target two, three, or more bad guys. Yes, concentrated fire makes sense sometimes, but I don't want to build a battleship style vessel that has to point all of it's heavy turrets at the same target all the time.
I really prefer having a certain number of dice assigned to each actual weapon, and being allowed to add them together myself, even if we do use a sliding scale of dice, based on range, ECM, etc.
I learned today that "Long Range Scanners" as ship equiptment has been deleted. :shock:
Is this a temporary or a permanant removal? If so, why. I can live with it being gone if that is for the best.
This new Nova Edition of Starmada looks great.
Yes, it was decided that the math didn't jibe. They might be back in some other form, but at this time have simply been excised from the official rules and the Drydock.
Well, this optional(?) rule would definitely throw another level of complexity, as fleets bring along sufficient scout resources when facing fleets that use ECM, and then find themselves needing to defend them, as they'll be primary targets, and if the fleet has both ECM and escorts, the other side will need even more scouts...
I may be wrong, but if you're going to devote that many points to ships with escort, I don't think your carrier would pack enough offensive punch to eliminate a well rounded force.
A three hull ship with ECM 2 and Stealth 2 (total of -4 to hit), with no other systems or any weapons costs 108 points.
You'd need a really massive fleet to make it work at all, I'm sure. But it is one of those areas that could be exploited by the wrong sort. 
CTS Torpedoes (Acr/Cts) [CD] 6-12-18 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
These DDs will escort the Capital ships and suppliment their firepower with their CRT Torpedoes.
Later I plan to design a DDG with drones.
Have you considered the compromise of making them Skr weapons instead? I made the equivalent of a FFG earlier today and gave it Exp/Skr/Dx2 weapons.
What if the model isn't a ring of escorts around a single battleship with heavy weapons, but instead a ring of unarmed but very difficult to hit/damage escorts, a full six point ring in lockstep with the central *carrier* ship that has no space wasted on defenses or weapons, but as many Carriers as will fit into the hull while still allowing the ship to keep up with her escorts...
Ignore traits concern me. Are 'halving' traits not an acceptable compromise?
For some, it might be.
For others, not so much.
How about the compromise: "Ignores Armor, Stopped by Shields" where if the ship has even "on a six" shields, the weapon is useless. But if the ship has no shields, it ignores armor (but not ECM) when it hits, going straight to hull boxes?
Oh, and regardless of how you feel about this idea, in my world, Ignores Shields would be mutually exclusive with Ignores Armor and Ignores ECM. I'm not looking for be-all, end-all weapons. I'm just hoping to model some traits from other games.
I've had the rules for less than 48 hours, and I'm already tweaking...
The new rules assume a minimum size of three for hulls - but that appears to be an artifact of the rules - if you don't have at least three hull, you can't split it into three sections, for Damaged, Crippled and Destroyed. Makes sense, when you think about it.
But then, to me, it opens up an opportunity. What if we use HS 1 and 2 for different sized "fighters" - most probably of the Independent variety? A HS 1 fighter is destroyed on the first hull hit. An HS2 gets damaged on the first hull it, but skips right over crippled to destroyed on the second. That would let you have some very distinctive fighters, with different weapon systems, that can fight in a much more homogenous way with the rest of the ships in the game.
If you want to carry them, well, we'd have to figure that out. They're 60 and 147 SUs a piece, at TL0 (and let's not talk about what happens when TLs rise in the new system) so we'd probably be looking at maybe 70 and 170 SU each to be held in a hangar, maybe?
But if you add a hyperdrive, a HS 1 fighter could make a very nice little X-wing with a little more individuality than a chit with some fighter symbols on it where individual fighters don't even get noticed when they're killed, the flight just gets damaged as a whole.
Thoughts?
I think I'm less concerned with any savings going on, than I am with the objective "betterness" of a c9 weapon compared to a normal range 6 weapon for roughly the same cost. The C9 never endures a -1 penalty, and gets the +1 for short range 50% farther out...
Working on my own variant Starmada: NE ship design spreadsheet, and I come to the moral quandary - when to round, and by what method? It it enough to say that a ship's Thrust Factor is 11.6, or do I need to say 11.5990923? And do you always round up to the next highest tenth of an SU when determining sizes?
What do you think makes the most sense?
Nomad wrote:So, uh... noticed a little weirdness with some weapon pricing.
Weird. This never came up before, even though the effect was present in the Admiralty Edition:
1) One [AC], one [BD] weapon in a battery with RNG 2-4-6, ROF 1, ACC 5+, IMP 1, DMG 1. Thrust 6. SUs = 12. ORAT = 24.0.
2) One [AC], one [BD] weapon in a battery with RNG 3-6-9, ROF 1, ACC 5+, IMP 1, DMG 1 (Carronade). Thrust 6. SUs = 12.6. ORAT = 21.0.
Suggestions?
Maybe Carronade needs to be 0 at short range and -1 out to medium, with no long range? It did always seem like a strange thing that the weapon lost range penalties.
diddimus wrote:Also I don't get why it's harder to hit the seekers with the various traits. I'm guessing this is a points issue rather than a realism one.
Without those penalties, players would shy away from making their seeker weapons triple damage (for example), since it takes just as much defensive firepower to eliminate a "standard" attack die as a "triple damage" attack die.
And "accurate" weapons might be more agile, and able to withstand counter-fire. And double and triple damage and repeating might represent multiple warheads that get whittled down. There's a cinematic reason that can be pressed into service for anything! 
Good, at least I understood something from the rulebook...:)
Another tool for you to use - the chart on pg.45, of all the Armor/Hull pairings? Note the patterns there. If you multiply the hull by X, and the armor by X, you'll see the same value appear. Thus the value at Armor1/Hull3 is repeated at Armor2/Hull6, Armor3/Hull9, etc. So if you want an armor multiplier for a Hull 30 ship, with Armor 12, find the value for a Hull 15 ship with Armor 6 and it'll be the same.
You might be able to use that to extrapolate out on the chart and avoid too much reliance on the unnatural log functions on your calculator.
This sounds like it will make the game more complicated. Even in StarFleetBattles, which was Very Complicated, shields protected a ship from all types of attacks. Starmada needs to keep shields like. But to accomodate those who like the more complicated version of shields, the three types, perhaps these could be an optional rule...
First, yes, every rule I propose should be optional, or a house rule.
Second, SFB was more complicated in that it had faceted defenses, which the Nova edition lacks (currently) so there's a give and take...
My Traveller group seriously considered the idea of using Starmada to resolve High Guard-type battles, but it never came to fruition.
That you have a Traveller group makes me more than a little jealous.
I think it could work well with Traveller, to depict naval actions (probably less so for small-scale stuff like piracy with a single corsair and a free trader) and would be fine alongside a military-based game. Any ideas on how you'd have the characters impacting the game? Or what sort of scales you'd be looking at for Traveller ships?
I had begun considering this while Nova was still in the design phases, and decided to wait until it was released to start asking about tie-ins.
We all love to blow up some spaceships. It's especially fun when those fleets stick around from battle to battle, in campaigns, and you start to build stories about heroic crews that survive the length of the war. So wouldn't it be fun if you could then pick up their stories on a more personal level?
What I'm getting at is this: has anyone ever adapted Starmada to work with an existing Roleplaying Game rules set, or designed a light-weight (or not so light-weight) RPG around Starmada?
jwpacker wrote:On a related tangent, I know there's no way to do it - the math would contain too many variables - but it would be lovely if one could make defenses more effective against particular kinds of attacks (Shields on a 4-6, 3-6 versus lasers, 5-6 versus particle beams, for example). But that's going to have to be done on an individual game universe basis, I suspect, if at all.
This is not unlike the shields used in the Starmada X/VBAM book where a ship has three shield strengths and each is used to defend against attack by Kinetic, Energy or Ballistic weapons. I tried this in Nova to see if it would work using an avarage of the three for calculating the cost and making a note in the weapon name for the type of attack it makes, obviously Lasers get an [E].
Then when hit by a laser the "E shield" save is used. When shields take damage it is to all three at the same time (treated as one for taking damage).
You'll calling upon history with the game that I lack. I'll have to see if I can lay hands on a copy of X and see how adaptable that is, because it sounds like an elegant solution to what I thought would be a thorny problem. I guess it only really gets nuts if you are trying to balance fleets and one of them only uses kinetic attacks, and the other has shields against all three types...
On thinking about this, why would you select a ship in the Combat Phase if it has no targets?
Unless I'm missing something, that seems like it'd be a wasted pick.
Kevin
It's less about that than saying "I have nineteen ships and fighter flights on the board. Only three of them are in range to shoot, and they're the monster behemoths. They will all go first, destroying as many enemies as possible, and the other sixteen will 'go' afterwards..."
Given that interpretation, I agree - it makes sense to only include ships that have a legitimate target, even if the target is just a seeking weapon targeted on another ship.
jwpacker wrote:Every one of them winds up damaging the armor, while what I'm looking for is an attack that simply does damage to the hull without taking armor into account at all.
Would this not cause the same problems as "ignores shields" did in SAE?
Not if, in your particular universe, ships tended towards a mix of shields, armor and ECM as defenses, opposed to only one or two of them. A ship hit with an "Ignores Armor" weapon might not be hit due to superior ECM, or deflect that attack with their shields. And ships with superior shields or ECM, but lacking Armor at all, wouldn't be unduly impacted even if it did get through. (Edited to add: this was why I disliked the "shields can mean any sort of defense..." line from SAE - I wanted that level of control over what defenses stopped what...)
On a related tangent, I know there's no way to do it - the math would contain too many variables - but it would be lovely if one could make defenses more effective against particular kinds of attacks (Shields on a 4-6, 3-6 versus lasers, 5-6 versus particle beams, for example). But that's going to have to be done on an individual game universe basis, I suspect, if at all.
jwpacker wrote:So far, unless I've missed something, the only thing I feel like was missing was customization rules for fighters/fighter flights and drones - I think I'll miss the old system here more than anywhere else.
I was hoping the fighter traits would suffice -- are there things the old system did that the six traits on p.15 don't cover?
More than anything for me, granularity. I liked being able to have flights of a single drone or enormous packs of fighters, and to have a finder grain on damage to those large flights. Not sure why, exactly, but it was a favorite of mine when it came to creating ships and fleets. But then, I'm also the first guy to pounce on drone-firing ships in SFB.
Also, while we do have Piercing for reducing the effectiveness of Shields, there's no equivalent to reduce the effectiveness of armor or ECM (except the ECCM optional rules, but that's not a weapon feature). I'd also like to see the equivalent of the old Ignores Shields, and Ignores Armor would be useful for modeling meson weapons from Traveller, but would have to be a pretty darned high multiplier, I think, to be allowed.
I was toying with the inclusion of a "halves armor" kinda thing, where every hit checks off two armor boxes...
This solution is helpful in keeping armor from being seen as too powerful compared to shields or ECM, which have counters. But neither this, nor Nomad and Marauder's ideas really do what I was thinking of. Every one of them winds up damaging the armor, while what I'm looking for is an attack that simply does damage to the hull without taking armor into account at all. And I don't want to make it better against armor by means of increasing the BAS, or you're basically saying "It's better against ECM because it's better against anything!" which seems to be missing the spirit of the discussion.
None of these are deal-breakers by any means. Just some optional rules to consider for the future, and to debate what one can do with what we already have. Hell, I've yet to field a single Nova ship yet, so I can't honestly tell you anything about how it'll play out!
I, too, am generally pleased with the changes. There are optional rules aplenty to modify them to suit most any need. So far, unless I've missed something, the only thing I feel like was missing was customization rules for fighters/fighter flights and drones - I think I'll miss the old system here more than anywhere else.
Also, while we do have Piercing for reducing the effectiveness of Shields, there's no equivalent to reduce the effectiveness of armor or ECM (except the ECCM optional rules, but that's not a weapon feature). I'd also like to see the equivalent of the old Ignores Shields, and Ignores Armor would be useful for modeling meson weapons from Traveller, but would have to be a pretty darned high multiplier, I think, to be allowed.
mj12games.com/forum → Posts by jwpacker
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