Welcome to the new Majestic Twelve Games Forum!

2017-03-16 01:02:59

mj12games wrote:

Damage resolution is governed by the four tracks on the card: Hull, Engine, Weapons, and Shields.
When the Hull track is completely marked off, the ship goes boom. (Like in every other version of the game.)
The Engine and Shield tracks indicate the loss of speed and defenses, respectively. (Like in Admiralty.)
The Weapons track is new: the number on the track indicates how many individual weapons remain operational. As these boxes are checked off, the ship must eliminate the appropriate number of weapons. For example, when the Coronation BC checks off two weapons boxes, it must lose five weapons (17 - 12). Equipment (indicated by damage bubbles) are considered "weapons" for this purpose. The numbers in parentheses are "loss limits" and prevent players from choosing all of the weakest weapons first.

Cool. Enough detail that system loss matters, but not enough to bog the game down.

2017-03-15 21:46:51

Will there be any kind of options for a more complex damage system? Not talking too detailed here -but more than just, essentially, the 4 systems + hull in Nova?

2014-07-04 13:18:40

Interesting idea. I could see some fun use of it in a campaign setting where players had to mind logistical requirements, possibly creating the chance for ships to go into battle half fueled or something.

In individual scenarios I'd be concerned that it's just keeping track of stuff for no real reason, as I'd assume any ship going into combat would be sufficiently fueled for a typical battle. Still, with ships and a setting specifically designed to use this mechanic I think it could add another interesting dimension to battles.

2013-12-05 02:17:11

BeowulfJB wrote:

I think what Gaming Glenn is getting at is that this damage allocation idea seems as complex as the SFB DAC...

Truth be told the system is SFB is pretty simple.. roll on a chart, find the system on the SSD, mark off. It just takes forever, and the more damage a ship takes, the longer it takes to find the boxes you need to mark off. It also wouldn't work for a game like Starmada given the potential number of unique weapon systems. While there are of course exceptions, essentially every ship in SFB only has 3 weapon systems (primary, heavy, and seeking -seldom you'll see a mix of more than one type of weapon of each category on a ship).

I've used the system in my first iteration here before in a game I was prototyping.. I like the visual representation of damage boring it's way through the ship but it doesn't work well in practice unless you have very strict templates, which of course would not work at all for Starmada.

Blacklancer99 wrote:

In principle I like the second version much better than the first. I feel like a damage system like this would add a considerable amount of spice to Starmada combat that has become very, well, vague, for lack of a better word. I think that it falls well below the really complex, detailed diagrams used by some other games and that's a good thing for a game like Starmada. The basic design of the damage allocation system also opens up the possibility of some intriguing additions that could be made to weapons and even the design of systems...thinking along the lines of some of the things that AOG had in B5Wars, yet vastly simplified for Starmada-style play.
Just my thoughts,
Erik

I agree. I still wonder if there's ways to streamline it. I wouldn't mind finding a way to shoot and allocate damage in a single die-roll, but I don't think that's realistic, not unless we re-work the way weapons cause damage.

Below is a conversion from one of my smaller ships to this system:

Using the x5 multiplier, this gives us 10 armour and 30 hull, which I distributed as such:

And systems I allocated to the following slots:

On a smaller ship like this you resolve each point of damage with a single die roll, since you don't need to roll to see which group gets damaged.

I did however realize two things when I made this diagram that I should have picked up before:

1) I stated in my other post that I give each individual weapon a slot allocation. This will potentially cause two problems: First, as we can see on this ship, the port and starboard turrets have no "Damaged" status as they're destroyed outright with only one slot for each bank. The compromise is to go back to 2 slots per bank only, but I don't really like that as it will take the same amount of damage to knock out a bank with 10 weapons as a bank with 2 weapons. Still looking for a good compromise here.

2) I stated in my previous post this system was limited to an SNE hull size of 43. That's actually incorrect, it's not limited at all. You just need to add yet another group each time your multiplied hull goes above a multiple of 36. This is still problematic for very large ships as you could end up rolling three or four dice per point of damage to see where it lands. I don't like that. Basically this system would likely work best with smaller groups of ships in the 50-350 point range. I wouldn't try to do a fleet battle with massive ships using this system.

Variations?

I was thinking about some other ways to speed up, modify, or otherwise make the system work better or be more interesting. Instead of one slot per weapon, you might elect to make individual weapons or banks take up more slots based on their weapon traits. It stands to reason that a [Dx2+Dx3] weapon would be a lot larger than a [Prc] weapon. Alternatively you could increase the amount of slots required based on how many base attack dice are rolled for the bank. This could also have the effect of making it impossible to put very, very powerful weapons on very small ships (no more glass cannons blowing away a DN in one shot). As long as any changes or restrictions are applied consistently across the board it shouldn't effect balance.

I might also be tempted to modify how damage is applied, so it's applied on a per-weapon basis rather than a per-damage-point basis, just to speed up damage allocation.

2013-12-04 20:21:55

GamingGlen wrote:

No no no.. not another DAC (SFB's Damage Allocation Chart).
Use the Admiralty edition damage system. I prefer AE over NE except for the movement rules, and a few weapon traits could use the NE version (like Repeating).

... neither of the concepts above has any remote similarity to SFB's damage allocation system.

2013-12-04 01:58:15

(I typed this up and then hit back might have missed something on the re-type)

This is attempt #2 at creating a more detailed damage allocation system. I'll shamelessly admit it's pretty close to the one used in Battletech.

It doesn't visually show the damage like the diagram above does, but it's easier to convert, easier to use, and most importantly, you can exact the number of hull and armour boxes, unlike the diagram system. Placement of the systems within the hull doesn't matter near as much either so this one should be vastly easier to balance. Also, this one uses only our good 'ol numbered cube. No polyhedral dice. Importantly, you can make this system consistent

The basic concept with this system is everything fits into a “slot”. Each single weapon is one slot (and can still be arranged into batteries), cargo is one slot per 50 points of cargo, ECM and engines are one slot per non-zero number on the SNE ship display, etc. Shields are done slightly different, see below.

The ship is divided into 6 locations -one corresponding for each hexside. We'll call them Front, Port Front, Port Aft, Aft, Starboard Aft, and Starboard Front.

Again, we're going to use our multiple of 5 and the Starsail cruiser above for our base.

8 armour and 14 hull boxes gives us 40 armour points and 70 hull slots. These can be distributed at the shipwright's discretion around each of the six locations. The number of hull points assigned to a location equals the amount of “slots” to put systems in.

For this example we're going to use the following distribution (armour / hull):

This gives us 12 system slots in each aspect except aft, where we have 10. Now we assign our systems to these slots:

(I've reduced the amount of shield boxes. Now, each slot simply increases the shields by 1 die number. So 2 shield slots means “5+”, 3 means “4+”, etc. Each time one is destroyed is equivalent to knocking off a shield die icon. A ship with “2+” shield strength will have 5 shield slots. This was done because, on smaller ships, there physically isn't enough slots to incorporate everything. You could get around this by increasing the multiple, from 5 to 6, for example).

As before all the armour in a given location must be blown through before any direct hull damage is done.

So how does this work? For example, two points of damage are scored through the “front.” Two dice are rolled for each point of damage (you could use two different colours and roll them both at once). The first indicates the group, and the second indicates the actual system hit. Let's say our first result was “3” and “2”. A “3” tells us it's the first group (1-3), and the “2” tells us the hit took out a Shield Projector. The second set was a “6” and a “4”, telling us the second group (4-6) and a hull slot.

It works the same for every direction. In the case of shots hitting the aft section, because we only have 10 slots, a result of 4-5 or 4-6 just means re-roll the second die until you get 1, 2, 3 or 4.

If you rolled a slot that was already destroyed you would just re-roll it.

The beauty of this system is even though you're rolling 2 dice the results are independent so the probabilities are identical. It doesn't matter what order you place systems in. All that matters is how much armour you have and keeping your damaged sides away from enemy fire .

When all system slots are destroyed in a given section, you could either transfer the damage to another section or apply it to a “superstructure” damage track (which might be equivalent to the ship's original hull rating, 14 in this case). When the superstructure damage track is destroyed, so is the ship. This would make it even more critical to keep damaged sections of the ship away from enemy fire.

Another advantage to this system is all the values from SNE and weapon traits, etc. can be directly applied. No need to do any other type of conversion. This system can be used for any ship in SNE with a hull value between 1 and 43 (for a range of 5-215 slots). Anything larger than 43 hull wouldn't directly apply, as you're limited to 36 slots per location.

Like the diagram system, this system will significantly increase the resilience of starships. Combat will take longer and you're far more likely to have a ship crippled and combat ineffective than destroyed. You can still take out a ship with a big enough salvo, however. The Starsail + superstructure concept used in this example would only take 34 points of damage through any one of the front or side arcs to destroy outright, even though the ship is capable of taking a total of 124 points of damage. Again this makes positioning and facing far more critical than it is in normal SNE combat.

Any thoughts/suggestions/criticisms welcome.

2013-12-03 19:44:50

cricket wrote:

The only thing I'm a bit hesitant about is the multiple die types. I've used it for some games (Iron Stars) but Starmada has always been a d6-only system. It feels ... weird ... to have different dice only for damage resolution.

I agree completely. The issue I've run into here is that (one of) Starmada's greatest strengths -essentially unlimited ship designs- is also the biggest problem. Other games that use similar damage systems to what I've MacGyver'd together (like Leviathan and Crimson Skies) put some more restrictive limitations on what players can do. In Leviathan there's only 10 columns, and all damage is applied top-down. Crimson Skies has 30 columns (10 for each left wing, fuse, and right wing), and damage is applied either from the front or back which allows many more rows.

The problem with mine is I'm trying to allow specific damage to be applied from all sides, and using dice that creates obvious limitations. A previous version I worked out when I was still tying to make my own unique system used all D6s, dividing the rows and columns into groups. The end results were actually good but the system was just ridiculous as it required up to 3 independent die rolls per single point of damage. Slowed the game down WAY too much. As a rule if I'm rolling the dice more than I did in Star Fleet Battles I've got a severe problem

I'm still playing around with the grids and dice to see if I can come up with something better.

2013-12-03 18:35:51

So I've been toying with the idea of making an alternate and much more detailed damage allocation system for SNE. This is going to be a somewhat wordy post as I'm not great at explaining these things, but I would definitely appreciate thoughts and feedback.

This is very much just in the conceptual phase, and is designed to fit directly into my own fiction, so I don't know quite how well it will translate into other settings for SNE; the main problem would be the size of the ships. For my designs the largest ships are around 350 points, with most cruisers sitting in the 250-300 range, while the smallest ships are in the 40 point range. If you had ships in the 500+ range conversion would be problematic.

There are 3 main things I took into consideration creating this system:

1 - My fiction has directional shields.

2 - I wanted to significantly increase the detail of the damage ships take, beyond the "roll a die and mark off 1 shield box". For example, with my new system, it's completely possible for a ship to lose the entirety of its front shields in a single salvo. Unlikely, but possible.

3 - I wanted to mimic directional damage, so positioning in combat becomes very important. In stock SNE relative positions don't really matter too much. With this system they do. This greatly increases the usefulness of fast and maneuverable escort ships.*

*[size=85]This also factors into my fiction, as huge fleet battles are incredibly rare and skirmished between small cruiser patrol groups are the norm.[/size]

So I'll get right to it: Below is the damage allocation diagram for a 287-point cruiser. This ship has 14 hull and 8 armour, Thrust 3, no ECM, and shields of F3, P4, S4, A5.

Above is the normal SNE Ship Display for the cruiser. Below is my new damage allocation diagram.

How the diagram works:

This diagram probably bears some similarity for anyone who's played Renegade Legion: Leviathan, and indeed I took a good chunk of inspiration from that (and Crimson Skies).

Think of the diagram as a top-down abstraction of the ship, with the front pointed "up". The diagram represents everything on the SNE Ship Display in greater detail (the SNE Ship Displays are made first, then I convert to this diagram). It does not replace the SNE Ship Display, that display still has important information needed. My diagram is simply to increase the detail of damage allocation.

First thing's first: Damage will be applied from the direction the shots came from: front, port, starboard, or aft.

Surrounding all 4 sides of the ship is a level of armour. This must be blown through in its entirety for any given side before any damage is applied to the hull. This means you can take hull damage if, for example, all your front armour is gone even if you have armour on other sides, provided the shots originate from the front arc. This armour can be distributed as the shipwright sees fit, but the total is taken directly from the SNE Data Sheet.

The number of shield boxes on the diagram is provided by the number of shield dice icons on the shield track from the SNE Ship Display. The front shields of my cruiser has shield dice 3-4-4-5-6, so I have 5 "Front Shield" boxes on the diagram. Each one that is destroyed is functionally the same as marking off one shield die icon (directional shields mean that instead of 5 shield die icons, my Ship Displays have 20, thus requiring 20 shield boxes on the diagram). You can see here this also makes it possible to completely knock out shields protecting a given direction.

The number of thrust, weapon, and ECM boxes are taken from the number of "non-zero" boxes on the SNE Ship Display (except this ship has no ECM, thus no ECM boxes). Destroying one box on the diagram is functionally similar to destroying one box on the SNE display.

Weapons are a bit confusing so I'll do my best to explain. Each weapon bank in SNE has only two damage levels: "Damaged" and "Destroyed", regardless of how many physical weapons are in the bank. This is problematic to represent more detailed without the need of re-calculating the number of attack dice as individual weapons take damage. I've tried to reach a compromise in the diagram. Each individual weapon is still represented, but grouped so that we can abstract the the detail to the SNE level.

The turrets in this case are easy, there's two per bank. This means we only need 2 boxes per bank on the diagram. The first hit on the bank results in a "damaged" state for the bank, and the second box destroys that bank.

The Laser Clusters are more problematic, since their's only two banks and each consists of four weapons. Ideally I don't want to do only 2 boxes per bank as there are physically more weapons. The compromise is to combine boxes into groups. On the diagram you can see that each bank has 4 boxes and they're grouped into two groups each (the dark gray boxes). The premise is that both boxes of a group have to be destroyed to result in the "damaged" status. When the second group is destroyed, the bank is destroyed.

Other ship systems such as hyperdrive and cargo are represented by individual boxes as per SNE (hyperdrive is one box, cargo is one box per 50 points, etc). I've abstracted "munitions" down to 3 boxes, since 1/3 are destroyed at a time as per SNE. Not sure if I like that or not.

The light gray boxes are just hull boxes. They represent superstructure, non-critical systems and the like where the ship can takes damage without loss of significant systems (functionally identical to the hull boxes on the SNE Ship Display)

How Damage Allocation Works:

IMO this is the cool part . The numbers along the tops and sides of the diagram represent where the damage physically hits the ship. Damage allocation requires more than just six-sided dice. I've made provisions for the full range -d3, d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20 (though 20 is insane and won't likely be used, unless on a starbase). Some people might not like this because now you need unique dice to allocate damage, but using multiples of sixers (like 2d6 to generate numbers between 2 and 12) screws with the number distribution (results cluster around the center of the range with the outer numbers coming up rarely**).

A quick example of how this works: The cruiser has no front armour left and takes 1 point of damage from the front. A roll is made on a d8 to see which column the damage gets applied to. It comes up "5". The "Front Shield" box in column 5 is marked off. This means the front shield track has taken 1 point of damage, and the front shields are now operating at level "4+" instead of "3+" (as per the SNE Display above). If the ship took two or three or more points of damage, you'd roll 1d8 for each point, marking off the next undamaged box in the appropriate column. If a "5" came up again a second front shield box would be destroyed.

In the diagram below we scored 5 points of damage to the front of the ship, with rolls of 1, 3, 5,5 and 6.

The hits in columns 1, 3 and 6 all hit gray "hull" boxes, resulting in no system loss. Two successive hits in column 5 however have destroyed 2 shield boxes.

On the next turn the ship takes another 3 hits through the front. The results are 5, 7 and 8:

The result of "8" hits hull, with no more effects. "7" hits another shield box, reducing the front shields to "5+", and the hit on column 5 is applied to the next undamaged box, which is again, a gray hull box.

When damage is taken from the sides the application is identical, except you go across the rows instead of up or down the columns.

Weapons with Dx2 and Dx3 traits:

Whereas in SNE these weapons simply cause more damage, in this system their damage is allocated differently. The roll to hit is done the same, but instead of multiplying the damage and rolling for each point on the allocation diagram, you roll once for each hit and apply the entirety of that hit along the same column or row.

For example, the ship takes a hit on the port side from a Dx3 weapon. Normally a single hit with a Dx3 weapon would mean multiply the damage by 3 and technically score 3 hits. In this system you score 1 hit that marks off 3 boxes on the single row (we'll assume the damage allocation roll was a 5 on 1d10):

This single hit has bored into the side of the ship, damaging the port turret bank and knocking out a shield box. The third point hit gray hull. Two more successive Dx3 hits to the same spot would blow a hole clean through the hull!

I haven't played around much with how the different traits would apply damage (Cts and Prx would both apply differently to the diagram), but this gives a lot more options for how different loadouts apply.

[size=85]** This may be more realistic, as we can assume gunners aim for centre mass and thus will hit more often toward the centre of their target's profile, however it becomes problematic when arranging systems on the damage allocation diagram.[/size]

How conversion works:

I'll straight up admit there's a bit of pixie dust and unicorn blood involved in the conversion from SNE to this system. You can get the diagrams close, but they'll never be as near mathematically accurate as SNE's system. In the quick number-O-magic I did I came up with errors of between 5%-10% in the number of hull boxes. There's other factors to take into consideration too, but I'll get into that.

The first two considerations are that you have to represent the systems using far more boxes, and those systems have to be represented on a grid with a number of rows and columns that neatly fall within a die range. So basically, your grid has to be one of the following:

For the initial conversion, I took the number of hull boxes on the SNE display and multiplied by 5. This gave me a starting point. The cruiser above has 14 hull boxes, which results in 70. I used an 8x10 grid for 80 boxes instead of 6x12 for 72. 6x12 looked funny, though in an actual prototype of this system it would be the far better version to use (3% error instead of 13%, which is a little high -though the smaller grid would result in a far more cramped allocation diagram).

The shape of the grid does matter, but I prefer to keep them pointy as oppose to fat, unless the ship it represents is also fat.

For armour I did a straight x5 multiplier and rounded to the nearest whole number. In this case 8x5 = 40, so that gave me 40 armour to distribute around the diagram. The Starsail has an armoured prow so I chose to put a huge chunk there and sacrifice it elsewhere.

As for placement of the actual systems on the box, that's more or less up to your judgment, but the placement significantly impacts how the ship performs. Clustering the systems toward the outside of the hull means that systems will go down quickly upon taking damage, but might represent a civilian ship where ease of access for maintenance is priority. A stand-off ship with heavy weapons might cluster them toward the interior of the diagram, meaning it will be able to take quite a few hits before losing systems, but those systems will start to drop very fast once the hull has be blown through. For most warships the best compromise is probably spread the systems out around the hull.

With this system one can maintain a degree of consistency between the relative power of the designs, however it isn't perfect and it is quite possible to make two warships of similar point value perform VERY different. This isn't necessarily a disadvantage but care must be taken. And like I said, it isn't perfect and you won't be able to achieve the same kind of mathematical perfection between designs inherent in SNE.

For my own ship in this diagram, I followed the placement of the systems on the model I built of it.

I've only done a few conversions so far of ships straight from my SNE Ship Displays. I haven't specifically re-worked any of them yet for this kind of damage allocation system. As I said it's really in the early phase and I just started toying with it. It will certainly make maneuvering far more important and, IMO, opens up a lot of options for SNE without overly complicating anything. It increases the amount of die rolls so will slow down combat a bit.

A secondary effect is that ships -especially the larger ones- will be far more survivable and are far more likely to be crippled and become "combat ineffective" rather than be destroyed outright.

For my universe setting all of the above fits in well with the fiction. Battles are rarely fought between fleets and salvaging (or stealing!) hulks after a battle is common.

I think this system has some nice advantages -it really emphasizes the importance of maneuvering and positioning, makes smaller vessels far more deadly to larger ones, and overall just expands the tactical options available to players. Simply closing into range and slugging it out won't work out so well anymore. I don't think it will effect overall balance too much as long as the creation of the damage allocation diagrams is done carefully. Like I've said several times this is really an early concept.

If anyone has any opinions, comments, suggestions, or criticisms I'd love to hear them.</r>

2013-12-01 18:57:05

MajorTom wrote:

I'd like to see a series of supplements that showcase and even enhance the flexibility of the system by introducing a few homebrew settings with very different motiffs. So maybe like a hard sci-fi setting set during a colonial war between Earth and the inner worlds against the belters and the Jovian moons. Maybe you could introduce new rules for limited delta-vee, solar flares as in-game events, intership computer hacking as a new form of attack, etc.
Then you could do a full-on space opera supplement with rules for psionic crews, unobtanium shielding, warp missiles, and other such implausibilities.
One other thing I'd really like is a set campaign system for linking multiple scenerios together into a branching narrative. If there is a single official campaign system you could even run organized events, allow player groups to register to different factions and then the results of the various tournament events help guide the development of the game world.

I wasn't going to publicly post this yet as it's kind of an ongoing project, but I've created something along the lines of what you describe:

Warfleet: New Era (the website is very much a work in progress, forgive the occasional references to "old" data that was copied from the previous website).

I've constructed LEGO models of all of the starships, which will also be used to create the box-models for play. Basic starships descriptions are here

So far I'm working on shield and damage allocation modifications. Their are shield arcs that have different strengths, with the ability to destroy shields in specific arcs. It's also possible to make targeted attacks and completely disable ship subsystems like engines and weapons without destroying the ship. As boarding is possible in the Warfleet universe (and some scenarios revolve around boarding a ship) I'm looking into modifying the Starmada system so it can be used to perform boarding actions. I've also toyed with the idea of planetary ground combat.

Not all the fiction I've written is up on the website yet. I have a lengthy piece written on the use of Auxiliary Cruisers (armed merchant raiders) during the War of Independence, which goes into a lot more detail on hyperspace travel, how transfer of goods works from deep-space freighters to local supply ships, and why (and how) piracy is so rampant.

I've divided the technology levels into 4 distinct levels: Pre-war, Early-War, Late-War, and Post-War. Briefly:

Pre-War: Involves technology and starships that entered service prior to the war of 2272. These include older ships and older weapons. This is the most common technology base for civilian craft. Newer "pre war" ships are still quite effective against earl-war tech. The oldest pre-war ships generally don't even use laser technology, and are hopelessly outclassed.

Early-War: Ships and technology available in the 2272-2275 (ish) timeframe. The majority of military ships available in Warfleet fall into this category. Even ships in this timeframe gradually improve, and a ship design from 2275 will likely outperform a ship from 2272.

Late-War: This is where we start to see some more interesting technology -drastically improved ECM/ECCM capabilities, better shielding, more maneuverable ships, and some new experimental technologies like Light Attack Craft (very, very small starships that are carried by a tender. The closest my fiction gets to fighters/bombers).

Post-War: Introduction of new designs of ships and new weapons, particularly as a result of research done in the Aldebaran system: FLAK cannons, proton beam cannons, more deadly Light Attack Craft, etc. Ships of the post-war era are distinctly more powerful. Still trying to figure this one out; SAE had weapon options that would work well for the beam cannons I had planned.. SNE not so much.

Sorry, kind of went off on a long description there. I'm hoping to create a completely unique universe that, while it uses Starmada as a base, very much has it's own unique feel, both in fiction and in gameplay.

Once of my biggest complaints about Nova while working on this fiction is the lack of a way to track ammunition expenditure. In my initial draft nearly all of the ships relied heavily on ballistic and ordinance weapons. I could add a system in to do it, but I'm a numbertard so balancing it would be very difficult.

2013-06-16 02:01:09

Absolutely, if I ever get around to doing them

2013-06-14 12:39:57

If I was doing a direct conversion of BFG ships I might be tempted to do that (especially with BFG escorts -they had ONE hit point!). Funny enough, I realised yesterday I forgot a weapon trait on one of my weapons.. which meant redoing my entire fleet and resulted in ships being 1-3 hull larger anyway. Funny, that.

2013-06-12 13:19:50

I was aiming for a more BFG-sized feel with mine (BFG had cruisers 8 HP, escorts had 1, BBs had 12) and I wanted to significantly restrict the weapons on the hulls so one-shotting is kept to a minimum. Cruisers are sitting around 250 points, escorts around 50, with most ships somewhere in between. Having said that I'm fairly unfamiliar with the Starmada system (I originally designed my game using my own system, but it was too clunky) so it may not work out as well in practise. I should really stop designing ships and go playtest more

2013-06-11 23:37:25

It's actually not a weapon trait, it's simply an alternate type of attack you can make at any time. Most of the ships in my alternate universe are very small by most people's standards (25 hull would be a large ship, frigates are 5-8 hull). So by making this type of attack you're likely going to prolong the amount of time it takes to destroy a ship over a straightforward attack.

But, like I said, the rule hasn't been playtested yet, so it's all conjecture at the moment.

2013-06-11 01:37:20

BeowulfJB wrote:

Sounds interesting. It seems that it is just as easy to score an engine or weapon hit on a huge 60 hull ship as on a 20 hull ship. Just an observation. Perhaps the larger the ship, the more 6s have to berolled to do the critical weapon or engine hit.
:idea: This process could also be used to try to score an ECM or shield hit if the target has either of these.

Indeed, you could really play with it to create some interesting dynamics (ECM systems, for example, should be significantly harder to hit than engines).

2013-06-10 23:56:57

<copy/paste from my supplement manual>
--------------------
Crippling Shot

Starships can (broadly) target specific systems on an enemy ship. This tactic is most often used by raiders to cripple potential prey that they can't convince to surrender outright.

-A crippling shot can only be made at close or medium range.
-A crippling shot can target one of Weapons, ECM, Shields, or Thrust.
-A crippling shot suffers an additional -2 attack modifier.
-A crippling shot attacking a ship's engines (thrust) can only be made through the target's AA (4-8) arc.

Resolve the attack as normal. Any [5] not stopped by the target's shields does damage as per the Effects of Damage rules. If any of the attack dice rolled came up [6], mark off one box on the targeted system, regardless of the amount of [6]s that were rolled. Any additional [6]s that were rolled score damage as normal.

Example:
A ship targets an enemy vessel's engines using a Crippling Shot.
After applying all modifiers, it rolls five attack dice, coming up with [2],[4],[5],
[6],[6]. The defending ship makes a shield roll and does not stop any hits.
Two of the three hits are applied as normal damage. Because at least one of
the attack dice was a [6], one hit is directly applied to the target's Thrust
system.
--------------------

I'm still creating the supplement material so I haven't playtested the rule yet. If it proves too effective I may make it so even a roll of [5] misses, or increase the modifier to -3, etc. The idea though is that a crippling shot can only knock off 1 box per attack, so you shouldn't be able to blow off a ship's engines in a single salvo. I should probably add something about weapon restrictions as well, so only direct-fire weapons can do it or some such.

2013-06-09 20:24:03

This posed a bit of a problem for me with my current setting. I've written some custom rules that revolve around crippling starships. Basically the rules allow you to make an "aimed shot" specifically at the Weapons, ECM, Shield, or Engine subsystems at greatly increased difficulty in an attempt to disable a ship for boarding or capture. Pirates and raiders factor heavily into my storyline so a way to cripple a ship without outright destroying it was pretty vital (you know, assuming the poor merchantmen didn't just surrender )

2013-04-11 16:07:09

FreeSpace & FreeSpace 2 (the best space combat sims ever made, IMO) used a similar inverted class designation.

Destroyers were the largest ships*, being around 2Km in length. They were called "destroyers" because they carried so much firepower they simply destroyed anything in their path. The only threats to them were other destroyers (and bombers).

Corvettes were the next largest. Smaller and faster than destroyers, but almost as though and very heavily armed. Within FreeSpace canon they were designed to combat the powerful Shivan cruisers, and were basically meant to be able to kill anything that wasn't a destroyer.

Cruisers were actually the smallest capital ships in FS canon and although most were around the same size they varied widely in speed, armour, and firepower. The most powerful Shivan cruisers could threaten a destroyer, whereas the weakest Terran cruiser could be killed by a single well piloted fighter, despite the fact that both were around the same physical size.**

*There were 3 ships larger than destroyers -a Shivan superdestroyer, which was nearly invulnerable and very heavily armed, a terran Juggernaught 5 times larger than the superdestroyer and designed specifically to counter them, and a Shivan juggernaught which is the most powerful ship in FS canon.

**The strength, small size, and lack of variation is quite possibly artificial, imposed by the technical limitations of computers of the time (1998/1999), but explained nicely in FS canon.

I've worked on converting FS designs to Starmada, but it's very difficult considering destroyers are significantly more powerful than most cruisers. Cruisers end up getting a significant "buff" while destroyers are likewise "nerfed". It's also hard to convert with Starmada's broken fighters since FreeSpace is very heavy on fighter combat. (As an aside, also had the same problem trying to convert Star Wars ships to Starmada.. hard making a CR90 and an ISD in the same game -true to scale- where the ISD can't one-shot almost anything...especially when it carries 60 starfighters)

2013-04-09 15:04:54

Another interesting class designation I found while looking through some BFG literature. The Dauntless-class light cruiser was referred to as a "scout cruiser". Larger than a frigate or destroyer and capable to taking on anything smaller or equal sized, and outrunning anything larger. Functionally similar to a CL I guess, but I thought it was a cool designation.

2013-04-09 02:36:47

That's a decent size. From what I've been reading around here it looks like my ships are "small", relatively speaking, but I think that works well into my timeline as it takes place somewhat "earlier" than most space operas. I think that gives my universe lots of room for ships to grow as I add more technology and ship types, without having to worry too much about hull creep.

2013-04-08 18:33:55

Maybe a bit late, but I'll add it anyway

These are essentially the designations I'm using in my upcoming Starmada universe setting. They are not set-in-stone and revolve more around the role of the ship rather than its physical size.

By order in the fleet list:
Gunboat - A lightly armed police ship intended for nothing more than local system patrol.

Corvette - Fast, inexpensive and lightly armed patrol ship. Designed for pirate interdiction (pirates play heavily in my setting) and convoy escort. Should operate in packs. Usually employed by militias or corporations.

Frigate - Generally the smallest Navy ships. Used for convoy escort, patrol, and system interdiction. Hyperspace coils are too small to use for effective scouting.

Destroyer - Smallest ship used in fleet actions. Destroyers in my universe are usually specialized to fill specific roles, such as escort, skirmishing, or scouting. Also generally the smallest ship capable of operating independently.

Light Cruiser - Most common Navy warship. Offers the best compromise between cost-to-operate, weapons, defenses, and speed. Various models exist to fill different roles.

Cruiser - Standard Navy warship. A Navy patrol group is usually made up of a cruiser with several light cruisers and various amounts of smaller escort ships. In battle a cruiser is suppose to dish out and absorb damage, and specifically keep the attention of the enemy cruisers off the light cruisers (while they chew apart the hostile forces). Cruiser are generally the largest Navy ships used outside of wartime.

Battlecruiser/Heavy Cruiser - Essentially an upgunned cruiser, usually with more protection and armament. Somewhat more rare because of the cost in both material and logistics. Not designed to fill a particular role, more to counter the increasing number of cruisers. Not generally deployed outside of wartime.

Grand Cruiser/Stardreadnaught - Experimental starships designed to bring overwhelming, decisive firepower to a battle. About 50% larger than a cruiser. At the current point in my timeline none have been deployed in active duty, though several prototypes exist. Warships of this size have not been built due mostly to the cost and logistical requirements.

Other Designations:

Raider - Small, fast starship used mostly by pirates. Heavily armed for their size. Usually very weak hulls as their maintenance and build quality is highly suspect.

Warcruiser - General designation given to any ship with firepower comparable to a Navy fleet warship.

Escort - General designation given to any ship designed primarily for convoy protection.

System Monitor - Usually a small ship (can be purpose built but often a conversion) that is slow but very heavily armed. Designed to defend static locations like space stations. Doesn't often have a hyperdrive to cut down on used mass. In battle a system monitor is considered "successful" if it manages to get its weapons fire off before being blown to bits.

That's basically where most of my designations fit. They're based more around role rather than size, so it's possible to have a "destroyer" that's equivalent to light cruiser tonnage, for example.

(if anyone is wondering about size, my cruisers sit at 16-18 hull, 7-8 armour, and a speed between 3-5)

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1 Reply by kalnaren 2017-03-16 01:02:59

Re: Starmada: Unity Rulebook (78 replies, posted in Starmada)

2 Reply by kalnaren 2017-03-15 21:46:51

Re: Starmada: Unity Rulebook (78 replies, posted in Starmada)

3 Reply by kalnaren 2014-07-04 13:18:40

Re: Fuel Points? (1 replies, posted in Starmada)

4 Reply by kalnaren 2013-12-05 02:17:11

Re: New SNE Damage System Concept (8 replies, posted in Starmada)

5 Reply by kalnaren 2013-12-04 20:21:55

Re: New SNE Damage System Concept (8 replies, posted in Starmada)

6 Reply by kalnaren 2013-12-04 01:58:15

Re: New SNE Damage System Concept (8 replies, posted in Starmada)

7 Reply by kalnaren 2013-12-03 19:44:50

Re: New SNE Damage System Concept (8 replies, posted in Starmada)

8 Topic by kalnaren 2013-12-03 18:35:51

Topic: New SNE Damage System Concept (8 replies, posted in Starmada)

9 Reply by kalnaren 2013-12-01 18:57:05

Re: Anything new coming down the pipeline for Nova? (9 replies, posted in Starmada)

10 Reply by kalnaren 2013-06-16 02:01:09

Re: Traits (21 replies, posted in Starmada)

11 Reply by kalnaren 2013-06-14 12:39:57

Re: Traits (21 replies, posted in Starmada)

12 Reply by kalnaren 2013-06-12 13:19:50

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13 Reply by kalnaren 2013-06-11 23:37:25

Re: Traits (21 replies, posted in Starmada)

14 Reply by kalnaren 2013-06-11 01:37:20

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15 Reply by kalnaren 2013-06-10 23:56:57

Re: Traits (21 replies, posted in Starmada)

16 Reply by kalnaren 2013-06-09 20:24:03

Re: Traits (21 replies, posted in Starmada)

17 Reply by kalnaren 2013-04-11 16:07:09

Re: Ship Classes (18 replies, posted in Starmada)

18 Reply by kalnaren 2013-04-09 15:04:54

Re: Ship Classes (18 replies, posted in Starmada)

19 Reply by kalnaren 2013-04-09 02:36:47

Re: Ship Classes (18 replies, posted in Starmada)

20 Reply by kalnaren 2013-04-08 18:33:55

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