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underling wrote:Based on our play-testing of the initiative based activation sequence, I'd prefer to see option 2.
Allowing fighters to react to capital ships during movement seems logical, while at the same time having them resolve their combat at the same time as the capital ships also seems logical.
Even with an outnumbering mechanic for activation, I don't think I'd allow fighter flights to bump up the number of activations a force has. In my opinion all of the capital ships should be moving at roughly the same time, without the benefit of being able to delay that movement because of fighters.
Kevin
On the one hand, inflation activation is bad, and using fighters to delay your moves may be unrealistic (inasmuch as things can be unrealistic in a starship game 
). On the other, it does create an interesting choice - if you move your fighters first to delay your capital ship moves, then any offensive capabilities your fighters had are likely wasted since their range of 1 can probably be avoided. If you move your capital ships first to delay your fighter moves so that they can be brought to bear against actual targets, then your capital ships will likely be in worse positions both for firing and defense. So... it does introduce an extra tactical wrinkle not present with move-after fighters.
Option 3. I feel that making fighters consistent with ships is a worthwhile simplification of the game (removal of fighter phase), and also discourages fleets comprised strictly of fighters (since if you have a fleet of almost entirely fighters, some of your fighters will very likely not end up in shooting range if they move alternating with ships). As for initiative systems, I'm not sure how that's a concern... The standard "If I outnumber you 2 to 1, I move 2, then you move one, and then we repeat" solution seems like it would work without the need for a per-unit initiative system.
Whoa - that sounds like a pretty neat / simple / campaign system. I hadn't been following the TrakMada books because I know basically nothing about the setting, but that kind of campaign structure is rather tempting in its containedness (as opposed to map-based campaigns, where you might fight a hundred battles and still have no winner).
madpax wrote:Also, Carronade is useful to design a weapon without a long range penalty. I don't talk math or SU or ORAT, but a range 12 weapon fires with a penalty at range 9-12. A range 18 carronade weapon would have the same range, but with better hit probability, as it has a longer short range and no long range.
Marc
I used to do this on my Chaos fleet; you can get the same max range with no long range penalty at just a slight SU cost compared to that range with a long-range penalty. You suffer against Stealth, though, since you can only fire at them at half of your range rather than 2/3, and there is an SU cost. Still, "Long 12s" (Carronade 18s) plus Fire Control for Directed Damage all the time was pretty nice... It got to the point where the group started calling Directed Damage "John's Rule" after me.
Starmada: The Waiting
Vandervecken wrote:Enpeze, If you think VBAM is to big, I shudder to think of what you'd think of Starfire, hehehe.
I know I'm not Enpeze, but... I found VBAM to be at what seemed to be a viable level of complexity. The trouble was that I could not for the life of me get the rest of my group to fight their way through the books, and in previous instances of "Hey, you know the rules, tell us as we go," things have gone horribly terribly wrong... So that kinda rules it out for us.
Enpeze wrote:A campaign system would be fine. A little bit more complex like Sovereign Stars, but not nearly as complex like vbam. (which is insane IMO) Things I would like to see in a campaign system are:
-Single ship management
-Supply - each ship costs supply points in order to regulate the number of ships a player can sustain and to prevent building up excessive stacks
-spionage system
-economy system which is a little mit more than just collecting resources each turn
-ground forces
-operational command and control subsystem
-different technologies
What I dont need
-ship crew experience (IMO the scale doesnt fit)
thanks for listening.
Hm. I think I agree with you mostly. We addressed supply with the "You can't repair or re-arm small craft except at your own production centers", and limited task force / stack max sizes based on the quality of their commander. Espionage is always tricky - implementation really depends on how much data is available on enemy ship locations to start with. Our economy had resourcing, production, and infrastructure on each planet, so it might be about the complexity you're after. We didn't hit ground forces... kinda assumed that if you had space superiority, you could bombard enemy ground units into submission (though given how well that has been working out in recent American wars...). Not sure what you mean by operational C&C; could you clarify / provide an example of the type of thing you're after? We did do tech, and I agree that ship crew experience is just a bit too detailed / fiddly, especially when you have a full imperial fleet of ships... Also thanks for reviving this thread; I had hoped someone would .
warrenss2 wrote:Got a question...
Are we going to have more hull available in this new edition?
I would love to make huge-monstrous-leviathan-type ships.
What comes to mind are things like the Doomsday Machine, Borg cube, Deathstar, etc...
I'd also like to be able to have battles between Star Trek & Battlestar Galactica & Star Wars & Honor Harrington & Starfire & etc...
I've always have felt limited by the lack of the upper hull boxes. This made ships of different sci-fi universes restrictive to the scale of their said universe.
Umm... the Shipyard supports up to 30ish for AE, and I'm pretty sure you could hack it to higher if you really wanted to. Likewise, the rules of AE themselves don't impose a max hull size; it's just that most tools for aiding shipbuilding do. You could easily build ships of arbitrary size for AE, as long as you did it by hand...
madpax wrote:Personnaly, I do not have that problem as I play with friends that are usually noobies, playing with my minis, and I keep the rules at a minimum. We use existing universes, especially SFU (even if I reworked the ship display sheets). Strikers IMHO should be reserved to bombers or fighter-bombers, ie those fighters with part or all of their weapons expendables. For example, they have missiles and an autocannon. The first time they shoot with missiles, as strikers, then revert to fighters and shoot with the cannon.
I feel it's sad to ban things just because you exploited something to the max, but I understand, that's life. 
Marc
Yeah... I hate banning things too, but the folks at my college are dirty exploiters (self included)... And that would be a pretty dood idea, really - all strikers have to be a second mode of a dual-mode fighter squadron. I don't think we're going to play AE again before the new edition comes out, though, so probably moot, but I'll have to remember it in case we do.
Erp... Wrong subforum again 
This belongs on the Admiralty Edition Basin; Starmada X is an older version.
On the plus side, nice looking ships. My roommate's quite the Stargate fan; I'll have to link him here and see what he thinks. And yeah, my experiments with shieldless ships were... entertaining. I went with no shields and put Ignores Shields on all of their weapons, so their opponents were deprived of theirs as well. Very much a "blaze of glory" fleet. In the past when we've fielded Regenerators, they tended to end up defanged rather than destroyed. It's a fun / annoying way to deny the enemy VP, but may not be worth the extra price from a ship-design standpoint.
underling wrote:Currently, I believe fighter movement is mixed in with ship movement.
For example, Force A has five ships and four fighter flights. It has nine "things" to move.
Force B has six ships. It has six "things" to move.
When a force selects one thing to move, either a ship or fighter flight can be selected.
Once everything has moved, combat is then resolved in much the same manner.
Force A will have nine "things" to shoot, while Force B will have six "things" to shoot.
In the standard rules, everything is sequential, so if something is eliminated before it can shoot, then it doesn't get to shoot.
Kevin
Yesss... just as suspected. This edition is going to be awesome.
BeowulfJB wrote:I guess with the new vwesion of Starmada coming just around the corner, this discussion could become irrelevant.
Yeah. I get the feeling that since this is one of the longest-standing / most discussed complaints with AE, it may be a priority fix. I have a suspicion that they'll do it by rolling fighter firing into standard firing (ie, move ships, move fighters, then alternate activating a unit, firing all its stuff, and applying damage immediately), but no real evidence.
I thought it came up that in the next iteration, Stealth now works like ECM / Countermeasures (generates negative column shifts), except that it isn't damaged by crippling... Don't know if that's still the case, but if it is, then escort stealth ranging is not a problem.
I think blocking LOS for both makes a lot of sense, actually. To block off a piece of space as big as a hex, it'd have to throw up some serious ECM, which might reasonably be expected to mung friendly fire as well. Plus, with alternating movement, this isn't that huge a problem - you just move your escorts last to the places best for you and worst for enemy. Would be a mess with pre-plotted movement, but that's OK.
In short: I like it! Now just need to find out what Scout does...
Yeah, that would probably be optimal (and scalable!). Runs into trouble with classifying old posts that weren't bucketed into one of those subforums on creation, but if nobody minds a long, unclassified archive, then it's probably the way to go.
Ah, sorry. Figure of speech; nobody issues credit cards to students anymore d:
I too eagerly await the answer to this question, credit card in hand...
I must agree that light ships in AE are mostly useful for spending the last couple of points you have left after buying heavies, in most scenarios, and even that use is attenuated if you allow independent fighters at 55 points a squadron. However, the (generally) higher speed of small, escorty ships can be more useful in scenarios like Patrol and Breakout, where you want to get them across the board (either just off the enemy edge for Breakout, or to and from the enemy forces in Breakout, where optimal attacker strategy is to sit at their board edge and wait).
BeowulfJB wrote:I never used seekers; they are too inflexible. I prefer the slightly more expensive Strikers. The ability to move them as you want is very useful/ They ae similiar to the predator drones the US Military uses in Afghanastan. Make them speed 15, accuracy 3+, give it halves shields and damage 3. These strikers will be brutal and devestating...
Strikers are more effective than seekers or even fighters... 8-)
Urgh, yeah... Strikers are very, very good in AE. They came to dominate the game in our group (on super-high engines carriers, since engines and carrier capacity don't interact cost-wise...) until we banned them but kept seekers legal. People tried switching to seekers, but found them ineffective (too easy to predict location and thereby put in AF killzones), and so we saw the rise of big-gun fleets again. It was interesting, and our gradual initial development (from big-gun fleets to fighters and guns to just strikers) was eerily similar to history. I don't see people banning strikers IRL any time soon, though...
cricket wrote:Yes. Dual-mode weapons will continue to be supported -- in fact, they will be improved, in that the different modes will now be allowed different range values.
Ooh, that is good news! Won't have to stick Carronade on half of my modes now...
Eh, the only thing that forked in the SX -> SAE transition was the Basin... There's not really a precedent, and things worked out OK last time.
I have successfully used Paint.net for some modifications to the standard Starmada markers, as well as the creation of tokens for D&D. It is free and fairly quick to learn.
OldnGrey wrote:BeowulfJB wrote:Here is an idea: Rename "Fire Control" "Advanced Fire Control", Since all ships have fire control, the advanced version of this should have a different name. :idea:
How do you know?
Might be some poor ... sitting on a barrel going "Left, Left, a bit more..."
My poor Anteatman gunners just stick their backsides out and hope for the best!
Paul
The other example that springs to mind is the Orks from 40k... not much for the aiming, those ones.
Similar question to Stealth - is Fire Control going to continue to exist? Negate a negative column shift from anything other than the bank arc modifier, maybe?
underling wrote:Now that being said, it's been a little frustrating for us trying to design ships that rely solely on speed and maneuvering for defense, similar to the Eldar in Battlefleet Gothic. We've found that once the thrust gets up around six or so, going much beyond that will be really somewhat of a "diminishing return of investment."
But it's also my understanding that's the way the game is now, so this isn't any new limitation or change from the current system.
To be fair, alternating / non-plotted movement as 'core' introduces the possibility of a double-move trait (kinda like Grumm pivots, except for a second move), much like the Eldar have in BFG. Expensive? Certainly. But it's now a lot more viable than it was under pre-plotted. I was also thinking that high ECM scores might more-or-less simulate the holofields in a better way than CM + Stealth did. I found that my Eldar conversions in AE got shafted royally until I started putting Cloaking on them, and then they became a viable fleet.
Ah, excellent. That's something of a relief. Are fighters going to work more-or-less similarly to how they work in AE, then?
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