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mj12games.com/forum → Posts by diddimus
I think I may have answered my own question. Damage Control...
If we use damage control then I won't have to change anything. The Vorlons/Shadows will be able to repair weapons. Also It means I can drop a house rule for my Shadows and get them back to official rules. 8-)
Hi,
I've recently created both Vorlons and Shadows for my B5 system. I playtested a single Vorlon cruiser Vs 3 WhiteStars last night. The game went pretty much as I expected, the WhiteStars won by destroying all my wepaons. How do I fix this?
In my conversion the Vorlons have 2 sets of duel weapons (to represent the firing options they had in B5Wars), but they only have 4 in total.
First set = [AB] [AB]
Second set = [ABC] [ABD]
The weapon damage is: 1:V 2: W 3:0 4:0 5:0 6:0
Because the Vorlon ship has 5 sheilds the WS's didn't get many shots through but in 3 turns all 4 weapons were gone. The rest of the ship wasn't too bad. About 1/2 hull, 1/2 engines and full shields. The Whitestars lost 1 ship. If it wasn't for the weapon loss it would have been a closer game.
My issue is that on the larger Vorlon ships this will be even worse, I'll end up with no weapons on an otherwise healthy ship. If I increase the number of weapons the damage table increases too, so it's more likely to lose weapons.
Any ideas?
Also, regeneration seems pointless except in a campaign. It seems more likely to lose either all weapons/engines before I lose all my hull.
Talking about twin arrays in particular? ....... What kind of ranges are you looking at on the Centauri heavy weapons?
Erik
Yep 
The ranges for their lasers come out as the same as Minbari at 15 so yeah they are great. The matter cannons come out at 9, so not too bad.
However, looking through some of the B5 wars ships I saw some with a pretty small selection of main weapons, or even 1 I remember (an assault ship) had nothing but Twin Arrays.
We'll see how it goes, and I'd love to keep the ranges as they are as for everything else they seem right.
So I'm moving on to converting ships other than Earth and Minbari now and I'm doing Centauri, they have some really short weapons which mean they become range 3 in my version.
Has anyone played with many range 3 weapons? In the tests we've done so far, the ships rarely get this close, but obviously they have had longer range.
I'm concerned that range 3 won't have much of an effect and may result in the Centauri being out matched in most games.
Any advice/experience with this?
Thanks for the clarification, but I've just realised my mistake. I thought it said that each battery can only fire once per game, but it says "game turn". I thought it was stupid. :oops:
Due to my mistake I did come up with that solution for firing all at once though so 'every cloud' and all that...
I'm creating my first weapon with ammo. I was surprised how the rules work for this, even though it weirdly fits exactly what I needed in the end
I'm after a torpedo battery that has 6 shots but can fire all in one turn. The ammo rules seem to suggest I create it as:
[AB][AB][AB][AB][AB][AB]
Ammo 6
I've done it like this because each weapon can only fire once per game.
However how do you represent a single weapon with ammo that can only fire once per turn?
We tested the reduced engine sizes last night and it was a great success. The WiteStar at engines 9 still felt like they should with plenty of options for movement. However if you're not careful you do get into a bit of bother. Once you make a mistake you've generally had it, as the WS is pretty weak. This is exctly what we want.
I'm happy with the engine calculation for my conversions now.
Lone Gunman wrote:Just a question on the conversion of the Whitestar. Why does it have stealth? Is it based on the one from B5 Wars, which was never able to power the jammer and the neutron laser at the same time? Perhaps simply removing stealth may help a bit. Call me a heretic, but using a jammer against a foe (mainly shadows, but later vorlons too) which both simply ignored it according to B5W makes no sense to me.
It should have Stealth as the Jammer works against the vast majority of races, and First One races will have to have some offsetting advantage. You can justify its use pretty simply I think...even in B5Wars you could shoot the NL, then shut it down in favor of the Jammer while running in to strafe with the Molecular Pulsars. There are also examples of Trekmada ships that have all of the systems available in FC/SFB even though they couldn't power them all at once in the original game.
Just my opinion of course,
Erik
Thanks for another view on this. I'm tending to lean your way on this. I'm going to first test the speed changes and then make a decision on stealth. I think I'd rather avoid taking into account power issues that were present in B5Wars as that's adding complexity. I'll read up on the B5 wars rules and decide then, but I think I'd rather keep all the tech available on a ship and not go into minute details.
Just a question on the conversion of the Whitestar. Why does it have stealth? Is it based on the one from B5 Wars, which was never able to power the jammer and the neutron laser at the same time? Perhaps simply removing stealth may help a bit. Call me a heretic, but using a jammer against a foe (mainly shadows, but later vorlons too) which both simply ignored it according to B5W makes no sense to me.
Oh, I didn't realise that. I just saw it had a jammer and gave it stealth. I used to own B5 wars but never played it properly due to it taking so long. I've read some of the rules recently for the conversions but not everything.
I'll take off stealth in that case, cheers!
From what I remember of the television program, your WhiteStars are doing pretty much what they are supposed to be doing. The ones in Babylon 5 always dashed around, firing at long range, and then running away before their enemies could retaliate. In other words, they were intended to be used for guerrilla warfare.
You should be proud that you design matches this so well. As for the performance of the Hyperions, other than the hanger for a Starfury squadron, they seemed mostly to fight at short range.
From the conversions for WhiteStars that I have seen, the ship has little more defence against fighters than another fighter would. How well did the WhiteStar fare against a Starfury squadron?
I haven't done fighters yet, so when I do the hyperion points will go up to meet the WS. I think this will help, but as it stand they should still stand a chance.
Thanks for the responses. I am happy with how the conversions are going so far, but I do need to have a game where a 400 point ship stands an equal chance against another 400 point ship.
I've changed the engine calc now and the Hyperion has gone down to 3 and the Whitestar down to 9. It's still a 3-1 ratio but the WS will now have less options. Pivoting 3 still costs 2 (due to overthrusters) but now it's 2 from 9 instead of 13. It's still the fastest ship I've converted so far, and will still perform as expected but at least the Hyperions have a chance. 1 on 1, maybe not but that won't happen often.
The points are now about 360 for WS and 300 for the Hyperion so they are coming more in line with B5 Wars points ratios (they were almost the same in B5 Wars).
I'll let you know how the next test goes.
We played our first game testing out my conversion for the B5 WhiteStar VS Earth Hyperions ships. There was a big issue with the WS high engines compared to the Earth's low engines. It was pretty much impossible to hit the WS once my friend had worked out out he could use them.
The WS have engines of 13 with overthrusters, stealth and a long range weapon.
The Hyperions have 4 engines.
The WS could simply move away, pivot round and fire, the Hyperions could not get in range. The points are 400 for a WS and 320 for a Hyperion. They should be pretty similar.
We are simply going to change the formulas for working out engine rating so everything comes down by a percentage, the WS will come down the most. However has anyone else experienced this?
Thanks. Actually these were pretty cheap to make in the long run, but I did have most of the materials already.
The dice were about £12 for 50 which I split with a friend. I had 2 sided tape, sticky back plastic and some spare photo paper already. If you have to buy all this though it's probably less than £5, thin cheap photo paper is better anyway to lower the profile of the stickers.
We had another game testing out B5 again last night and a player who has only played once before never even asked what meant what on the dice, he just picked it up!
Hi,
I have a rules question on increased hits. Do you reroll 6's to determine if you get a higher score?
We played last night and we tried this out, but it seemed far too powerful. If the answer is no, what happens when you need a 7 to hit and you get a 9, does that count as extra hits?
One of my players suggested we create some dice to make it easier to remember what numbers meant what damage etc. So I got to it and here's the result, (see attachment because my Skydrive image didn't seem to load).
I've created 50. It took about 5 days to do them all, but if you are interested in doing some yourself, here's what I did:
[list=2]My wife and I designed the image in photoshop - Each red H means a hull hit, then the symbols represent the area hit.[/list]
[list=3]Print the images on photopaper (normal paper doesn't get good enough quality).[/list]
[list=4]Cover the pages in sticky back plastic because the photo paper is easily damaged.[/list]
[list=5]Stick them on with double sided tape.[/list]
They were a lot of work but I really like how they've turned out, and they make it far easier to read the dice especially for new players.
Just a quick update. We should be playing our first test game tomorrow with my converted ships. I'm really happy how it's turning out. The only thing I think needs some tweaking might be the costs. The Sharlin for example works out at 1500 points whereas the Hyperion is only about 350. A Nova is 500. I'm thinking of changing the formulas ever so slightly to reduce the bigger ships down. The Sharlin has 18 hull and I think 4 sheilds. Reducing everything down a bit will probably make it more likely to see play.
The game we are playing tomorrow will be 2 Sharlins and 9 Hyperions. Probably not far off what it would have been like on the Battle of the Line, but I'd rather get more Sharlins on the table.
We'll see how it goes. Thanks for everyone's help getting me this far. I'll post my conversion rules and ship stats once I'm done.
I've been creating ships from my conversions lately and for the Shadow Cruiser I've noticed you can add Regeneration twice! It adds a massive amount of points for the second one (about 600 I think), so it now totals about 1800. But I'm going to use it to allow them to repair all systems with the same regen rules as for hull.
Also as far as the slicer beam goes I've added 3 weapons and divided the total damage by 3, which is the limit where it's still only has 1 space on the damage chart. I'm not sure about fire-linked yet as I don't like the idea of rolling 1 dice to hit, so I'm keeping them separate for now.
Some interesting idea Brother Jim.
There is one problem with Regen, it only protects the hull. When you have ships like the Shadows with one weapon you end up with a very expensive ship that can't fire pretty soon.
One idea I had was using the general repair rules but only allow the ancient races to do it. Just decrease the points for them for each scenario. Basically you could say it costs 20% of their fleet points to have the repair ability.
I'm having trouble deciding how to represent the Shadows in B5 and I realised that it's quite hard to represent ancient races in Starmada at all.
There are lots of options for weapons so that you can make really devistrating weapons for your ancient race, but defensively there's not much, or am I missing it?
Specifically I'm trying to represent the energy duffusers that the Shadows use. These store energy instead of it damaging a ship and then bleed it off. The only way to kill them is to overwhelm the diffusers. My first thought was to have really high shields, but the builder won't let me have above 5. Way not have Shields 6 or 7 where you have to roll again on the chart to hit numbers higher than 6?
My other idea is to simply invent something, as the Shadows are so different to everyone else. That's where I realised that almost every Sci-fi show has ancient races with advanced tech, but I think they'd struggle to be represented in Starmada. Is this an oppertunity to do a suppliment?
A long time ago Richard Bax wrote up a nice article on converting B5Wars to Fleet Action in the Babcom webzine. Fleet Action actually makes a really nice jumping off point for Starmada because of the scale involved so I have used a slightly modified version of the hull formula he had in the article. It is pretty good at rendering progression of Hull as ships get larger in B5Wars terms. As an example you get the following Hull ratings for EA ships: Warlock: 15, Omega: 14, Nova: 13, Hyperion: 12, Oracle: 11, Olympus: 7, Artemis: 6, Tethys: 2. The Same method gives a hull of 6 for a Demos and 18 for a Sharlin.
Cheers,
Erik
Ooh, is there anywhere to get this? Might save me some time counting boxes
Thanks for your replies. In the midst of writing quite a long reply I started scribbling again and I think I've got it!!
I realised that what mattered is what it takes to kill a ship. I ended up getting to values I thought made sense with the ships I'm using as examples and then realised that Agents of Gaming probably designed the ships with some formula in mind in the first place which is why it seems to work. Here's the formula:
Average the minimum and maximum amount of damage needed to kill a ship through 1 hex side! E.g:
Sharlin
Primary = 80
Port + Starboard = 96
Forward = 70
Aft = 70
Min = 70 + 80 = 150
Max = 96 + 80 = 176
AVG = 163 = Hull 16
Demos
Pr = 30
F = 50
A = 46
Min = 46 + 30 = 76
Max = 50 + 30 = 80
AVG = 78= Hull 8
Others work out at:
WhiteStar = hull 5
Hyperion = hull 11
Anyone who knows B5 probably agrees this looks about right.
A flaw would seem to be that the Demos would be the same if it also had Port and Starboard of similar values, as all you use is the min/max. However as stated above I think AoG designed the ships with the total needed to kill ships in mind so I'm hoping this works out.
I will keep you posted.
I'm trying to convert B5 wars to Starmada. I'm coming up with formulas for weapons, hull, sheilds and movement. I'm a bit stuck on hull because I can't get my head round an issue. Hopefully someone with more maths skills than me can figure this out (in fact maybe just some common sense is needed).
So I'm converting all the B5W structure points to hull. I'm taking the average of all the side values, adding it to the primary and using that for hull. Like so:
Sharlin
Primary = 80
Port + Starboard = 96
Forward = 70
Aft = 70
Average of all the sides + Primary = 96+96+70+70 / 4 = 83 + 80 = 163
Divide this by 10 to get the hull: 163 / 10 = 16 Hull
This is working out pretty good so far, except some ships don't have Port and Starboard ratings. Some only have a Primary. The primary only ones I can deal with because they have 0, but I'm not sure how to work out the Forward, Aft, Primary ones.
E.g. Demos
Pr = 30
F = 50
A = 46
If I divide by 4 it is the same as the White star which only has a Primary of 48. This doesn't seem right as the Demos has more structure to get through. If I divide by 2 it seems too high as it's like a ship with all 4 sides with the same values.
So what do I do, what am I missing? It's driving me crazy!! :evil:
Well in the actual show there are examples of reinforcements arriving via hyperspace during a battle. You could also use "jumping in" for the To the Rescue scenario from the rulebook.
Erik
Yes, so I'm going to handle this on a scenario by scenario basis, rather than having to put it as a point cost to all ships. The forces with reinforcements available will be adjusted for the benefit of having suprise attacks available.
An simple example would be a planetary assault scenario:
Defender 1000 points on board
Attacker 400 points on board, 400 points in hyperspace.
I've no idea about points yet, but you get the general idea.
Ok, so I think I've sorted "jumping out". I've mulled over what I posted and I'm going with that until playtesting shows otherwise.
However, back on to my original post, "jumpin in". I've been thinking about this more, and one option is to simply handle it via the scenarios rather than on particular ships. Most encounters won't allow jumping in, as you'll be meeting in space with your fleet and nothing will be available to come in afterwards. Therefore I don't want to increase point costs for something that is not used. For scenarios where it is allowed, such as amushing, planetary assault etc.. then the points allocated to the attackers can be modified to acount for jumping in.
ACTA did something similar. Most scenarios did not allow keeping forces off the board. I think this also fits B5 as I don't think you can detect enemies from hyperspace, you just jump to a certain point.
Anyone see any flaws with this?
Since it is Starmada and everything is truncated or at least scaled for simplicity and playability maybe the best option is allowing ships within a certain distance (1 or 2 hexes?) to enter the jump point when it is created. The vortex would be placed anywhere up to 6 hexes from the creating ship. Hmm, depending on the scale you intend to use, you could use a size 1 minefield template to represent the vortex and any ships in or adjacent to the point can jump, something like that. Until the shadows come along and disrupt your jump point that is
Cheers,
Erik
My idea is to use something similar to ACTA combined with the charge rules from Starmada. First thoughts are:
Once charged you place a jump point within 4 hexes of arc AB of your ship (not sure if they have to be opened forward in B5).
Then ships can move through it via the 3 sides it's facing.
At the end of the movement phase where the opening ship goes through, it closes.
I think I might reduce the time it takes to open, and there some other details to flesh out but this is the general idea. The problem is balance and points values. Not every ship has a jump engine, which is why it needs to be balanced.
mj12games.com/forum → Posts by diddimus
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