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mj12games.com/forum → Posts by Cepheus
Generally looks good. Is blockade runner right? It is almost impossible to do and creates some very silly ships.
You could make the weapon Piercing (or non piercing if it is bad at penetrating shields)
AUX System: Streamlining for 100SU?
Smaller ships are probably not going to need it since they should have enough thrust. Since it doesn't directly effect game play in Starmada itself (only VBAM) I would put it in as an AUX system.
That too is interesting that you play a slightly smaller game with 2 players per side. Probably makes it easier to manage. We were doing 5K a side with one player each. It was overwhelming. What size mat do you play on? I just ordered a pair of the hotzmats Dan suggested in the book. We played our test game on a single chessex mat which was way too crowded.
we had 5000 per side
What do you like about playing larger scale games. How many points are those destroyers? I don't see how you are getting to 9000 points a side with that mix of ships. Any info appreciated.
one fleet had a big carrier, a heavy cruiser, a light cruiser, a destroyer, frigate, and 20 fighters
The other had a battleship, 2 battle cruisers, 2 cruisers, 2 destroyers, 2 frigates and 19 fighters
I was trying to test out as wide an array of the ships as possible so it was weighted toward the high end, but not super heavily. It is not like it was just three battleships going and another three battleships.
I am necroing this thread because it is important to a discussion we are having in our gaming group. I ran the first play test of our ships (which basically run from 7 to 20 Hull) over the weekend and was SHOCKED at how annoying the big ships were. I have proposed we "micronize" our fleets by halving the ship sized (by SU so a 20 becomes a 12) and scaling down our weapons ranges significantly so we can fit on a standard hotzmat/starmada game board and use the standard scenarios. If anyone has any further comments on why high or low hull scale ships are better I would love to hear them.
My points from our game this weekend were:
1) Big ships are very complicated to run. Our game took almost 5 hours and we got through only 5 turns. The fact that there were 39 fighter flights and 14 capital ships on the table hurt as well.
2) When we hit things damage rarely had an effect. Since there are so many damage boxes before your ship starts to degrade in Engine or Shields, shots felt like they had virtually no effect. Even weapons were so spread out that you would be lucky to tag one battery, we had several instances where a shot would score a 5 or a 6 where those would be blank boxes so have no effect.
3) The board felt really crowded. I personally like the regular sized board as it fits on a kitchen table instead of needing to go down to a games store to play on a big table. But with that many fighters and ships there was barely room to move with out running in to someone else. I think we should micronize and then use the scenarios in the main book and/or write our own.
Basically the big ships took away from the fun factor of the game, there were no dramatic "YOU SUNK MY BATTLESHIP" moments and game play was agonizingly slow.
The others in my group have yet to play test so I am trying not to be too forceful with this until they experience the pain themsleves, but from my point of view Dan is correct, ships should be smaller and more purposeful. Go figure, he designed the game and he knows how it plays. 
Thanks those were the guestimates I was using as well.... and for assault I was guessing 80 Transport and 40 Cargo, while You get 1 Military Supply point per 100 SU of Cargo, so 1000 Cargo = Supply (1) Sound right to you?
Obviously cargo has to designated for each individual use so for instance if you had a ship that was Cargo 300 Hospital 100 It would be Supply (1), Hospital Ship, not Supply (3) Hospital Ship
:shock:
That is where I thought it was but I need an engineering degree to figure out the excel sheet
Can you just give me the formula you used to create scout(1) Scout(2), command and hospital to start with?
What yahoo group are we talking about. Can you link please?
If it makes you feel any better here in suburban Boston we still have 6 foot plus snow banks everywhere, not to mention the 30 foot one in the market parking lot, and are expecting another foot in the next two days. 
Snowiest December on record for us. Fortunately we too are pretty good about cleaning up after it so should not be too big a deal.
This has become a discussion in our universe too. I think it is an important distinction. You really do not want things designed a DDGs to become effectively CVLs. I would lean to the side of 'fighters' vs "seekers/Strikers" instead of specific type of plane. The only question in my mind is how does that effect boarding pods. Should they be considered fighters for this purpose or missiles? :? If you sub divide in to the three categories, I guess that works itself out.
Question. Does the numeric +2 etc for pivot effect the required thrust for the following turn? I do not think it does since it does not say anything about the current speed (like side slip does) but want to make sure as it is number. Similarly what about roll?
Firefly is my favorite scifi. Hope you like it. The show was much better than the movie however. Much more interesting character development.
I just updated the file. I had some errors on the T battery data card.
I never say "Xmas"....
I was celebrating the "Futurama" Holiday. 
"Fry learns how Christmas has changed and remained the same over the last 1000 years when a Robot Santa terrorizes New New York"
Wait a minute...
We're not all of the MJ-12 religion?
Kevin Clause
He he. I sure has heck proselytize about Starmada at my LGS.
Well being someone of another religion who did not have much to do on Xmas Eve I have a present to quote Weird Al for "all the good gentile girls and good gentile boys".
This includes all items in this thread up to this post. I think I got it all right but wanted to have a few folks review it before I submitted it officially to Dan.
Have at
(goes back to his Weird Al Christmas carol)
"Merry Christmas to all.... Now you're all gonna DIE!" - The Night Santa went Crazy, W.A. Yankovich
I just created a 1.2 version of this file with all the corrections noted in this thread since Dan's last post EXCEPT the extra batteries for adding the extra batteries. I see if I can decode that this evening. Any suggestions on battery names. I think V and W are to visually similar and may cause confusion so was considering using S and T for "Spinal" and "Turrets" respectively. Thoughts?
I got home to find the print copy of the S:AE book I bought in error sitting on my door step and all I have to say is WOW. It feels like a real game to me now instead of just some guy named Dan's crazy ramblings. :Lol: Great job on the book. The cover looks amazing in glossy.
I would represent interceptor with increased ROF or simply increasing their ATT. Perhaps increase the ATT to 3+ but then give it no hull damage effectively making your anti figher a 4+, and your anti ship 5+ as normal, but much less likely to kill a ship. Could also be done with non piercing as most fighters do not have DEF.
That is similar to the scale we are using, but the TL is also kind of high (the race I am planning is one of the lower tech races and its total TL is 9 on the 5 point scale). We are using extended range so some weapons have range 30 and thus are longer ranged than the size of the standard board.
Update: I just "micronized" the ship down to a size 8 with 600 SU (effectively 16 gunships and 16 fighers forming 8 Flights) pretty easily. It seems to work nicely. Will try it with some of my normal gun armed ships too.
Well, there's your first problem -- what are you doing with 32 flights of fighters?
Tell me about it. On some levels I think our collective universe is way too over powered for a fun game. This ship is supposed to be one of the "big" carriers in the game. The trick will be to convince my fellow designers that miniaturizing the universe is a good idea. I might start that process.
Also there are two fighter types for this fleet. One is an escort fighter that comes out to 50 SU and the other is a gunship that comes out to 100 SU so more likely there will be about 24 actual on table flights. Still quite a lot. :?
From your play what do you consider a "big" ship. Size 10? Our "big boys" are set to 20 which was the max of the old excel file. I am thinking that if we shrink down our ships to be in line with your examples it might be a more fun and playable universe. Do you have any thoughts or advice on this issue?
As to the explanation, all very interesting and informative. Thanks.
I believe it is 0, but look to dan to confirm. You basically just spent your turn 2 to over come the inertia of your ship and bring the bow about.
mj12games.com/forum → Posts by Cepheus
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