• From: Denver, CO
  • Registered: 2005-03-27
  • Posts: 3,575

Re: Damage track?

themattcurtis wrote:

It becomes more of a natural result of a ship being pounded on, than OOPS, the first time a shell lands, your BB blows up.

Except that hull damage itself is the natural result of being pounded on... smile

And Jutland (and HMS Hood in 1941) showed that it was entirely possible for a BB or BC to explode on the first hit (or an early hit).

I'm not sold on the idea of crits, but if they are implemented, I'm certainly not in favor of getting rid of special equipment damage to make room for them.

Daniel Kast
Majestic Twelve Games
cricket@mj12games.com

mj12games's Website

  • Registered: 2005-03-28
  • Posts: 379

Re: Damage track?

Then don't include them.   big_smile

Tracking item losses and critical hits just sounds like a lot of paperwork.

  • Registered: 2022-11-16
  • Posts: 516

Re: Damage track?

You guys are making this way too hard.
:wink:
A very simple fix, which would not involve any bookkeeping at all would be the following:
All ships have two chances for a critical hit.
At the 1/3 hull damage hit (rounding up) and the 2/3 hull damage hit (again rounding up) a ship checks for a critical hit.
This critical hit check involves rolling a d20. On a 11+, a critical hit has been sustained, and the critical hit chart is consulted.
This means that each ship will check twice, assuming that the ship has at least three hull damage hit locations.

For example, a ten hull ship will check for crits on the fourth and eighth hull hits.
A three hull ship would check on both the first and second hull hits.

No extra bookwork has to be done, and the hull damage circle at each crit location can simply be replaced with a "c".
Note that if the above crit roll doesn't produce as many crits as you'd like, simply change the d20 roll. Or change the number of occurances of that roll. Maybe at 25%, 50%, and 75% damage.
It's really not that hard.
Kevin

  • Registered: 2005-03-30
  • Posts: 272

Re: Damage track?

themattcurtis wrote:

and the crickets chirp....

Anyway, Kevin's sending his critical hit chart and I'm going to use it in conjunction with the stuff mentioned above.  Friends are going to help me playtest criticals this weekend with the following fleets:

Regia Marina
Dante Alighieri class battleship (new design for upcoming book)
Tomaso Albinoni class heavy cruiser
Guitonne d'Arezzo class cruiser
Masolino (d'Arezzo class)

Royal Navy Ether Squadron
Cornwallis class battleship
Gauntlet class battlecruiser
Southam class cruiser
Anglesey (Southam class)
x4 British FACs

I'll post the results for anyone interested in how it affected play.

The Italians named a battleship class after a poet???  Will the next book include the epic clash between the Dante and HMES Lord Tennyson?   :wink:

Love to see a battle report for IS, though.   Any battle report...

Rich

  • Registered: 2005-03-28
  • Posts: 379

Re: Damage track?

The Italians had a real life BB named after a poet -- the Dante.  Just like a lot of other games, though, I couldn't come up with original names for every hull.

Almost all of  me Italian designs, though, are named after poets, artists, philosophers, etc.....

Matt
PS -- really, the Italians named a lot of their ships after historical personalities.  This guy had a BB named after him Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour

Giulio Cesare was a real life battleship named after Juilus Cesare

So I had precedent  big_smile

  • Registered: 2022-11-15
  • Posts: 1,424

Re: Damage track?

underling wrote:

You guys are making this way too hard.
:wink:
A very simple fix, which would not involve any bookkeeping at all would be the following:

All ships have two chances for a critical hit.

At the 1/3 hull damage hit (rounding up) and the 2/3 hull damage hit (again rounding up) a ship checks for a critical hit.

This critical hit check involves rolling a d20. On a 11+, a critical hit has been sustained, and the critical hit chart is consulted.

This means that each ship will check twice, assuming that the ship has at least three hull damage hit locations.

For example, a ten hull ship will check for crits on the fourth and eighth hull hits. A three hull ship would check on both the first and second hull hits.

No extra bookwork has to be done, and the hull damage circle at each crit location can simply be replaced with a "c".

Note that if the above crit roll doesn't produce as many crits as you'd like, simply change the d20 roll. Or change the number of occurances of that roll. Maybe at 25%, 50%, and 75% damage.
It's really not that hard.
Kevin

Or...borrow something from SFB, it Kevin's is more likely to give you a crit than you'd like:

Same basic idea, but each time you hit the 'crit spot' on the hull track, you mark off another track - the toughness track. Each 'toughness space' (they actually call them 'excess damage' in SFB) has a cost, and represents the ship's basic toughness and compartmentalisation.

Once all the toughness hits are gone - THEN roll on the crit chart.

If you run out of toughness before running out of hull crits, EVERY hull crit after that runs a chance of doing critical damage (ie - roll on the critical hit chart every hull crit hit after expending toughness).

German's in WW1 were much more compartmentalized then their British counterparts than the British, and it shows in how hard they were to sink at Jutland compared to British ships. Yes, the Armor was thicker, but not THAT much thicker. They didn't have the magazine explosion problems that the Brits had due to their better flash suppression/containment.

You could make the frequency of the hull crits inversely proportional to toughness, to represent more fragile ships - even if they have heavier armor:

Toughness of one = hull crits every 10%
Toughness of two = hull crits every 20%
Toughness of three = hull crits every 30%
Toughness of four = hull crits every 40%
Toughness of five = hull crits every 50%

  • Registered: 2006-05-07
  • Posts: 36

Re: Damage track?

I don't find the dice rolling tedious, since I think it adds suspense to the game, but if someone wants an alternate idea,

make a damage deck. Use plastic cards with the damage sections written on them. Put in twice the number of each section into the deck. So if there's 12 hull, make 24 hull cards. When damage is taken, shuffle the deck and draw X cards. Dealing out X cards is faster than rolling and consulting X dice.


Back again,

Frigatesfan.