I agree.  This whole system stinks if how all of you are saying it works is the way it will be, IMO.  It stinks of "magic".  Fighters should be able to break off from escort duty to take another action in a following turn.  Doing so means that they possible lost one turn of action.  They would also not be escorting any more and lose a turn of action if their escorted ship went faster than the fighters can move on their own (have to also account for slow fighters), or is destroyed.

Rearm?  What different armament would they have?  Normal fighters intercept fighters as is, even if they were originally sent out to attack ships.

You're over complicating a simple ability for fighters.  Let them use their action in the fighter phase  to say they're escorting, it gives them a bonus (interrupting the fighter sequence of play as they can intercept during the enemy's fighter action), and a slight detriment if they break off from the escort duty (turn loss).

What about fast fighters?  Might be better to word it such that is cannot move faster than any escorting fighters can go, else it loses the escort  and the fighters do not move thus losing a turn of movement and/or activities.

Yes, you do want to limit the movement of the escorted ships.  Otherwise it's easily abused.  I have a speed 20, hull 2 ship.  I'll bring in  carriers to have many fighter flights (I could even make them slow fighters to make them cheaper), have them escort the lone speed 20 ship using 40 movement points into the enemy fleet (doubling engines), and suddenly the enemy has to deal with massive numbers of fighters while the enemy carrier(s) won't be even in spinal mount range (and it's moving away).  The enemy ships would have a turn of fire upon the fighters, but at that movement rate I could probably have picked a good place to move to that the enemy might not have many weapons facing it.

Not everyone has "anime" spinal mounts.  I have many miniatures from Star Trek, mostly from the Star Fleet Battles game.   Name me one "anime" spinal mount, or anything that closely resembled it, in that universe, particularly from any of the major races (no monsters, please).  Now ST has very few fighters (I think one DS9 space battle had some in it) so that's not a good example.  But I don't recall any such SM in Star Wars (the Death Star's ray doesn't count as it isn't quick enough to fire at fighters), B5 (I got a few miniatures from this series, also), or Battlestar Galactica, all of which are heavy fighter dependent.  Seems to me that in those shows what is shown as AFB shoots down the fighters BEFORE the fighters attack.

Some of us design ships according to what we think represents particular races.

A 2+ damage weapon should kill a heavy fighter.  You don't "roll" damage against a fighter since it doesn't have a damage track.

:arrow:  Or that the damage they do takes effect immediately (that reminds me..question later) so that shields could be weakened and some weapons lost before ship to ship combat takes place.

Does immediately mean with EACH fighter flight that attacks, or at the end of the Fighter Phase?

Thanks for the information.  But, does a Q hit damage only one teleporter, or 1D6 teleporters?  Because if it's one for one, then they're too cheap as Q hits.  Usually its my hyperdrive that gets damaged and repaired often  but now it never gets damaged at all (until the ship blows up, anyway).  1D6 seems excessive for teleporter losses, perhaps 1D3 are lost per Q hit?

Since it came up in a recent battle...

We're trying a house rule on Anti-Fighter Batteries: they roll to hit, needing 6+ to do one point of damage, before the attacking fighters roll to hit.  The number of dice you get is equal to your undamaged hull.  Any fighters that are destroyed do not get to make the attack.

The reasoning is that bigger hulls will have more "AA" guns, especially since they allocate more space for AFB than smaller hulled-ships.  It was a last minute idea, so we haven't had a chance to try it out; but then most of our ship designs don't have AFB because they are not cost-effective.

(some time to think passes   :?  )

Hmm, this doesn't work when you move and attack with one flight at a time.  We had been moving all the flights and making one big attack.  An option to the above house rule could be that the target ship could choose to fire just some of his AA guns and save some in reserve.  The target ship has "hull" amount of anti-fighter weapons to shoot at attacking fighters per fighter phase (they could also be used to shoot at attacking drones).

Another idea came to me: bigger hull ships increase the chance of a fighter being destroyed based on the fighter attack roll.  So instead of just a 1, a fighter takes a hit on a roll of 2, or even a 3 on very large ships.  I looked at a commonly used chart (i.e., the explosion size chart) but that is too excessive.  Perhaps this might do?  Hull size/roll that destroys a fighter: 1-8/1, 9-24/2, 25+/3.

-------------------------------------------

Btw, does an attacking heavy fighter that rolls a 1 becomes destroyed or just takes 1 point of damage if the target ship has operational AFB?

Don't get me started about the Stealth Generator, an overpowered system.  It should not be as written, but instead add one to the To Hit modifier of ships attacking it (or -1 to the die, whatever the way the rules are).  Right now I see that every ship I design from now on will have it.

IMO, movement is too slow which makes the SG overpowered.

Btw, the super ship with the Extra Crew Casualties weapons had SG.  I was not happy when our largest ship was half dead before we got to fire a shot.  Then he reversed (and don't get me started on THAT) so again he could fire without us firing a shot in return.  Sound tactics, and I applaud the player for that, but I boo the game system.  Too many cheesy combinations are possible, especially with the "tech" system (his super ship was +8 in techs).  But I digress...

Glen

I'm not big into fighters, also.  I personally think that space combat, if it ever occurs, is going to be more like submarine combat, not the WW2-like surface/carrier stuff seen on sci-fi shows (or portrayed in several spaceship-combat miniatures games  :roll: ).  But since we'll never see that in real life any time soon, it's all speculation.

I also don't want to have to guess at what I'm facing and bring the right mix in one-off battles.  If I guess wrong I would then have to turn and run and say "You win."  It accomplishes nothing but wasting time.  But that's going to be the nature of any generic/design-your-own combat game like Starmada.

Back to the topic, I think that the combination of "Extra Crew Casualties" and "No Hull Damage" makes the ECC too cheap.  It's almost a given to add in NHD, since any hull damage done by an ECC-weapon is going to just wipe out a crew-damaged hull box anyway so in effect has no meaning (except against Spinal Mount or Shockwave equipped ships).  Maybe the two should not be combined?  Or, increase the ECC cost and then a designer can make it cheaper by using NHD to bring it down to the 2.0 modifier for ECC (which seems reasonable compared to the "Extra Hull Damage modifier).