How about rules for differentiating between civilian and military hulled ships? I've played a couple of scenarios where a big lumbering 10 Hull freighter with decent shields and basically a pop-gun holds off a small fast raider because the raider has only a few hull. Even a massive 20 Hull freighter should fear a true warship, no matter what its size.

In our local campaign, we have ruled that civilian ships are cheaper to build but if you take a hull hit, you lose two hull boxes. This is to reflect not only the fact that they're not designed for battle, shouldn't be there and have less redundancy etc.. I would have no idea how to figure a point value for that one though.

1) Variable levels of ECM/ECCM. You could add an ECM II or even ECM III to the game or an EWS II, etc. I'm sure they would be expensive but could be useful.

It is an idea, though would have to be particularly expensive to keep it from being totally game breaking. It is kind of unfortunate in that regard that Starmada is based on a D6 instead of D10, as D10 would allow for more wiggle-room on abilities. This is certainly something to consider, though. Similarly, you could introduce generational Cloaking Devices, too.

2) Additional fighter strengths. Currently you get heavy, which takes extra damage to kill, and plain, which is....plain. Maybe light could be added to reflect more primitive fighters. Similarly more speed options would be useful. Slow, Real Slow, Real Fast, etc. While on the subject of fighters, add on some options for increased PEN as well. Or again, more primitive fighters that do not halve Shields?

I have been working on a laundry list of new fighter abilities, as this is the one area of the game that I think is really lacking. Here are a few of the more common ones on my list:

Light - For every 2 hits against a Light flight, a third fighter is killed.

Ultralight - Every hit kills 2 fighters.

Super Heavy - Haven't decided exactly how I want to handle this, but probably 3-4 hits per fighter.

Screening - Each fighter counts as two for purposes of screening.

Armor Plating - same as ship equipment. Could just be a pain in the butt, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.

Speed (X) - instead of Fast/Slow, just provide an operator to determine the Speed of the fighter, so that it can be anything. I have been using (Speed  - 10) * .1 up to this point.

ROF/PEN/DMG - Breaking these out for fighters would be good, too. I have been tempted to, at their core, treat fighters like weapon systems with whatever extra modifiers as desired and using that as a partial basis for pointing them. That would make handling them a bit easier, I think: a weapon with a given range (speed) and special abilities. However, I still like the fairly limited range of fighters, so the range brackets would be different.

The list could go on an on. Since I am playing mostly from a campaign perspective, it helps to open up fighter abilities a bit more.

3) I've seen someone else propose a system similar to aArmor Plating or Redundant Shields but designed to protect Engines. I like that. I can Armor my gun batteries even but not my engines?

I have used this before, and added it to my own sheet. It is an obvious ability, given that you can have armor plating effects for Hull, Shields, and Weapons already. Add Armored Internals for Special Equipment, and you would be set

        How about rules for differentiating between civilian and military hulled ships? I've played a couple of scenarios where a big lumbering 10 Hull freighter with decent shields and basically a pop-gun holds off a small fast raider because the raider has only a few hull. Even a massive 20 Hull freighter should fear a true warship, no matter what its size.

Easiest thing I can think of would be to add a fourth Hull hit to '6', representing the shoddier construction of civilian starships. That would increase the chance that the ship would be destroyed.

The other thing that should be done more often than it is would be to have civilian starships be one tech level lower than the current military standard in each category. That would force civilian ships to be less efficient, and you would more often see freighters with less "extras" onboard compared to comparably equipped military craft.

-Tyrel

My preference would be 1d6 hull boxes per hull hit (like some special equipment does). The question then becomes "how much cheaper?"

VBAM; the Starmada Edition already has a way to portray Scouts. Equip a ship with 1x EWS, 1x ECM, 1x LR Sensors and 10x Science Labs. It can be quite an SU hog. More powerful scouts have additional 10x Science Labs, 1x ECM and 1x LR Sensor per channel. So a Scout(3) would have 1xEWS, 3xECM, 3x LR Sensor and 30x Science Lab. I think during combat they can loan out their EM to other ships.

Opps, you are correct. Scratch the ECM part. See what happens when you post too late at night.

Armor Plating ( X )

As a low-cost, low-tech alternative for increasing the staying power of a starship, several developers have opted for extra layers of reinforced material to protect their designs from harm.

Whenever a ship with armor plating ( X ) takes a hull hit, roll a dice: if the result is  ( 7 – X ) or higher, the hit has no effect on the hull.

SU Cost: + (10 x ( 6 / ( 6 – X ) – 1 )%
ORat: -
Drat: x ( 6 / ( 6 – X ))
Hit?: No

Note: The current Armor Plating is equivalent to Armor Plating (2) which gives:

SU Cost: + (10 x ( 6 / ( 6 – 2 ) – 1 )% or +5%
ORat: -
Drat: x (6 / ( 6 – 2 )) or x1.5
Hit?: No

This is consistent with the current rules.

We are playtesting the above two generational equiment pieces in our group. The highest levels of the two take up like 50% of the ship so I cannot see anyone actually using them.

Wow... the ECM(X) and Armor(X) ideas seem interesting. I'll wait for playtest data before endorsing them wholeheartedly, tho...

Electronic Warfare System ( X )

The electronic warfare system (EWS) represents a suite of sensor equipment that can counteract many obstacles to obtaining a firing solution. A starship equipped with EWS (X ) may ignore negative modifiers to each of its to-hit rolls up to X, except for the modifier for long range.

This means for example that a ship with EWS ( X ) may ignore X levels of a target's ECM ( X ), the penalty for attacking a target with a failed cloak, or any other to-hit penalties totaling X or less. For example: A starship equipped with EWS ( 2 ) may negate up to 2 to-hit negatives when firing on an opponent equipped with ECM ( 3 ), resulting in a total to-hit modifier of -1.

SU Cost: + (10 x ( 6 / ( 5 – X ) – 1 )%
ORat: -
DRat: x (6 / ( 6 – X ))
Hit?: Yes

Note: The current Electronic Warfare System is equivalent to Electronic Warfare System (1) which gives:

SU Cost: + (10 x ( 6 / ( 5 – 1 ) – 1 )% or +5%
ORat: -
Drat: x (6 / ( 6 – 1 )) or x1.2
Hit?: Yes

This is consistent with the current rules.

I started looking into the generational defenses after noticing how hard it was to increase the DRat of a ship. There are tons of offensive equipment and weaponry add ons but not too many defensive.

We've been experimenting with some other ideas as well.... we broke out PDS, Shield, and Armor rolls, and put them against specific die......

PDS is rolled against the to hit dice.... Then PEN is rolled against shields as normal, and then we roll armor against each damage die. ..... So, if I was fired on by a weapon that was 3/2/2.... and 2 shots hit, I would roll a PDS against each die.... let's say one gets through, he rolls those 2 die against my shields, and both penetrate, I would then roll 4 die and each 5 or 6 would remove a damage die.....

We also are only allowing the players to use 2 defense systems per ship (and pushing for all the ships in the fleet to be the same). This actually allows us to simulate ships from movies and tv series..... For example, if your ships were modeled off the B5 earth fleet, you would get PDS and armor.  We found that this allows the smaller ships to truly contribute to the fight, at least more than just sucking up damage in the first few turns while our capital ships slug it out..... although right now, we are also contemplating giving armor a 50/50 chance of protecting, using the same 1-3-5 roll as PDS. Since the highest number of dice used in shooting are invariably the damage dice (all the multipliers end there... a 3/3/3 weapon can possible result in 27 damage die) it works, even with armor only costing 5% of the total SU.

Finally, we are also only allowing each die of damage to actually harm one item... for example, I roll a hit that is HEQ on the chart.... I would roll an extra die and 1-2 is the H hit, 3-4 is the E, and 5-6 is the Q....

It does add a number of extra dice rolls, but also allows us to play interesting battles with smaller fleets, and scenarios where the fleets don't have to be perfectly even to be fair.

Finally, fighters no longer halve shields.... instead, they can ignore PDS, as they can fly in under the flak guns (or what have you) and drones auto penetrate shields (as torpedoes). Armor is proof against everything, so all the components of the ship get the benefit of that extra protection on the outside of the hull.

The only thing we are looking at right now is heavier drones.... A class, same as current, B class do 2 damage, but cost 1.5 times normal, and C class... double cost and 3 damage.

On fighters, you have to designate whether your wings are interceptor or bomber wings.... interceptors don't have the weapons to damage capital ship hulls, but are really good at knocking out torpedoes and bombers, and doing other damage (engines, shield generators, and turrets), and bombers can damage capital ship hulls, but usually do not fair that well against interceptors.

This is all still experimental, and we've only just finished laying it out on paper and trying a couple of quick battles to see how it works.... As we playtest it more, we'll definitely let everyone know how it works.

John

P.S. With the new torpedoes, we have pretty much eliminated the expendable weapons, but it doesn't yet seem to be a problem.

Variable Hull Strengths

While peering into Dan's wonderful formulas that govern how ships are put together in Starmada, I began wondering why couldn't we have ships that were harder to destroy by manipulating how many H hits appeared on the damage track. Under rule A.3.2 Assigning Hits to the Damage Chart it simply states "assign an "H" to the 1, 3, and 5 slots." Couldn't you simulate a stronger or weaker hull by having more or fewer "H"s show up? A civilian freighter might have 6 Hs on its damage track.

The number of Hs on the damage track is accounted for in the DRat calculation ( rule A.2.2 ) by multiplying the Hull Points by 2. This means it takes, on average, two hits to destroy one hull box and equals 3 Hs on the damage track ( 3 / 6 = 2 ). So the desired number of Hs on the damage track can be used by replacing that x2 with the appropriate number below:

Strength    Hs    DRat mod    H location
Super        1    x6.0        1
Strong        2    x3.0        1, 4
Average        3    x2.0        1, 3, 5
Weak        4    x1.5        1, 2, 4, 5
Fragile        5    x1.2        1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Civilian    6    x1.0        1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

To compare the results, I have included a couple of designs:

Average Class Cruiser of the Conjectural Confederation   ( 187 )
Mass: 88.7 KmT, Crew: 315, TL:   E:0  W:0  D:0  Q:0
Hull: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Engines: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Defenses: K: 2 1 | E: 2 1 | B: 2 1
[α] Mass Driver [4/8/12, 3+ 1/1/1, Kinetic, Extra Hull Damage]
AB, AC, BD
[β] Laser Cannon [3/6/9, 3+ 2/1/1, Energy]
AB, ACE, BDF
Hyperdrive [O], Anti-Fighter Batteries [O], Electronic Countermeasures [O], Security Team [OOOOO], Sunbursts [OOOOO]
1[HQ], 2[EQ], 3[Hα], 4[Eβ], 5[H], 6[D]

Designed with a standard strength hull ( 3 Hs on the Damage Track ), the above design has an ORat of 561.0 and a DRat of 62.4, resulting in the ComRat of 187. After an average of twelve hits on its damage track, a vessel of this class will be destroyed. Compare this with an identical ship below, designed with a strong hull ( only 2 Hs on the Damage Track ).

Strong Class Cruiser of the Conjectural Confederation   ( 210 )
Mass: 88.7 KmT, Crew: 315, TL:   E:0  W:0  D:0  Q:0
Hull: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Engines: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Defenses: K: 2 1 | E: 2 1 | B: 2 1
[α] Mass Driver [4/8/12, 3+ 1/1/1, Kinetic, Extra Hull Damage]
AB, AC, BD
[β] Laser Cannon [3/6/9, 3+ 2/1/1, Energy]
AB, ACE, BDF
Hyperdrive [O], Anti-Fighter Batteries [O], Electronic Countermeasures [O], Security Team [OOOOO], Sunbursts [OOOOO]
1[HQ], 2[Eα], 3[Eβ], 4[H], 5[D], 6[Q]

This design has the exact same ORat of 561.0 but the DRat is now 78.6, giving the ORat of 210. A vessel of this class requires an average of eighteen hits on its damage track before it is destroyed. This is keeping in line with the following design, again a standard strength hull ( 3 Hs on the damage track ), a hull size 9 design also needing eighteen hits on average to destroy. The class below could have additional systems but for comparison purposes with the above designs has been give only the exact same systems.

Unfilled Class Battlecruiser of the Conjectural Confederation   ( 214 )
Mass: 137.1 KmT, Crew: 423, TL:   E:0  W:0  D:0  Q:0
Hull: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Engines: 6 5 4 3 2 1
Defenses: K: 2 1 | E: 2 1 | B: 2 1
[α] Mass Driver [4/8/12, 3+ 1/1/1, Kinetic, Extra Hull Damage]
AB, AC, BD
[β] Laser Cannon [3/6/9, 3+ 2/1/1, Energy]
AB, ACE, BDF
Hyperdrive [O], Anti-Fighter Batteries [O], Electronic Countermeasures [O], Security Team [OOOOO], Sunbursts [OOOOO]
1[HQ], 2[EQ], 3[Hα], 4[Eβ], 5[H], 6[D]

Note: This will break down in ship designs that have too few systems to place on the damage track. So if you have a fifteen hull size design with Super hull strength ( only 1 H on the damage track ) and no weapons only tons of special equipment ( say its a carrier ) it will normally fill in blank spots on the damage track with additional Hs. This will defeat the purpose of having super hull strength and you should watch your design and make it only Strong or average so that you do not pay an inordinate amount of points for the ship.