There is an "area effect" weapon trait.

I've never been quite sure what would be needed for "rules" about stationary installations. Wouldn't it make sense just to design a ship without engines? Or are there other things that would make sense?

In the Compendium there were some rules for space stations, but I wasn't really happy with them as they had the feel of "rules for the sake of rules". What do people see the need to model when it comes to installations that isn't already in the game?

Maaaaybe...

By "torpedo" do you mean "seeking"?

If so, the answer is "yes".

Cross-post from Star-Ranger.com:

Well, for obvious reasons I don't want to give it all up, but I can give you some general thoughts:

First, and most importantly, there was an error in how fighters were point-costed in Starmada X -- not a huge one, but one I can't believe I missed. :oops:  So that's been fixed, and in consequence, the balance issues that some players have experienced should sort themselves out (basically, those who usually have fighters on either side of a battle -- like me -- didn't see a problem, but when playing a fighter-heavy force against one without any fighters, there were some concerns about how to defend oneself).

Secondly, fighters can now be entirely customized from the ground up. Not quite in the manner of starships, although pretty close. As mentioned in the promo blurb, I've computed the number of different possibilities at close to 500,000 -- and there are already some more options that have started percolating in my brain.

The core game should be instantly recognizable to current players. Some changes in how damage is resolved, mainly to avoid abuses and balance the game better.

Other changes are more in the way of streamlining, plus some additions (a very few subtractions).

Absolutely!

Yeah, a lot of things have been slowed down recently. Apparently, marriage has a way of doing that...

Anyway, there are Big Things coming soon, and after that Iron Stars is next on the list -- along with Grand Fleets, and ARES, and and and and...

Not bad. It certainly won't unbalance games -- if anything, the costs you list are a tad high.

My hesitation is that this encourages "one-upsmanship" -- if you have secondary shielding, I'll just add a weapon that "ignores secondary shielding". At some point, it has to stop...

Hi!

The difficulty here is in figuring out conceptually what one point of damage "means". Starmada has been designed with the assumption that one damage point is defined as the amount of weapon power needed to eliminate (on average) one-half of a hull point.

Systems (i.e., non-hull) damage is treated as incidental to this process. The damage track is built with the presumption that 50% of the ship's capabilities should be gone (again, on average) once the last hull point is eliminated. Thus, a ship with more "stuff" per hull hit will lose more "stuff" each time the damage die is rolled, because the rate of loss has to be higher to reach this desired 50% threshold.

Make sense?

(Also, note that, in general, larger ships have less "stuff" on the damage track -- so your last statement [a weapon is more powerful against larger ships] is reversed in practice... weapons do "more damage" against smaller ships, because their systems are packed more tightly in the hull.)

You might want to hang on to your nickels and dimes a little while longer...

Well, the short answer would be, if the rules only say that launch bays work for fighters, then they don't work for drones, battle sats, etc.

The longer (and probably more acceptable) answer is that a more expansive view of launch bays won't unbalance the game, so why not?

As with all things Starmada, just as long as all players agree, you can do whatever you want.

I say all four!

One idea that might be of use here is to rip off Iron Stars:

Freighters have a point cost associated with them; however, this is only relevant for victory point (VP) purposes--e.g., if a medium freighter is destroyed, it awards 100 VPs to the opposing side. When totaling a side's overall point cost at the start of a pick-up game (i.e., not using a pre-designed scenario), freighters are not counted; in fact, each freighter included on a side decreases the fleet's point cost by 50.
For example, a fleet of 650 points that includes three freighters would only cost 500 when balancing sides.
In this way, although a fleet with freighters to protect will have more combat punch, it will also have more VPs to give away.

I think I understand the question -- but I'm not sure I understand the need... :?:

You could in theory set a number of SUs and then "reverse engineer" the number of hull points. Since SUs = HULL * 10 * (HULL + 9), then...

S = 10H^2 + 90H
S/10 = H^2 + 9H
S/10 + 4.5^2 = H^2 + 9H + 4.5^2
S/10 + 20.25 = (H + 4.5)^2*
(S/10 + 20.25)^0.5 = H + 4.5
H = (S/10 + 20.25)^0.5 - 4.5

A rather cumbersome equation, but it gives the right answers...

500 SUs = ~4 Hull (3.88 )
1000 SUs = ~6 Hull (6.47)
1500 SUs = ~9 Hull (8.55)
2000 SUs = ~10 Hull (10.34)
2500 SUs = ~12 Hull (11.94)

The rounding is really irrelevant, since the number of hull points is a prime factor in the Combat Rating -- so if you round up, but I round down, and Jim rounds to the nearest integer, we'll still have balanced ships because the point costs will be appropriate to our chosen method.

*The magic of the binomial equation!