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mj12games.com/forum → Starmada → House Rules
Ok, with the inherent customizationability(?) of Starmada, it is inevitable that people start making up their own rules or tweaking xisting ones to add additional flavor. This is a good thing in my book, My gaming group already has a few optional rules and most likely we will continue to churn out new ones as the opportunity presents itself. I want to hear what new rules you guys use and get your opinions on mine.
Ok, House Rule #1
Firing into a Dogfight.
Any weapon that can engage fighters normally may be fired into an active dogfight. If doing so, resolve attacks normally and for each successful hit, roll a d6, on a roll of 1 or 2, the hit is applied against the friendly flight, resolve impact/damage normally. If a roll of 3 or higher, resolve the hits against the opposing flight.
The reason we decided to use a simple 3+ instead of trying to do it based on the relative numbers is to represent the fact that you ARE aiming at the bad guys, so it should be at least slightly more likely that you wull hit them, even if there are fewer of them.
House Rule #2
Disengaging from Dogfights
If a flight engaged in a dogfight wishes to, it may disengage from an initiated dogfight by moving up to two hexes away, it may move no further than that nor can it make an attack in that turn. The opposing flight may opt to make a free attack against the disengaging flight with no modifiers if it has not already been activated, but doing so counts as it's action for the turn. If the opposing flight does not make the attack, it may take it's turn as normal when it does become activated.
This one is still in the experimental stage and has not actually been used in play. It is designed so that it is pretty hard to get away from a dogfight (the other flight can simply re-initiate, either immediately or on it's next turn) But it allows some room for other flights or supporting ships to help it out.
House Rule #3
Anti-Fighter Batteries
Anti-FIghter Batteries may attack any flight that comes within their range DURING THE FIGHTER PHASE. Anti-Fighter Batteries may preempt any action by a flight with an attack of their own (works like combat interception). These attacks are resolved and damage is applied immediately. Individual batteries are fired allocated seperately. For example; a ship with 6 AFB is attacked by a striker flight, the starship player elects to fire 2 AFB at the fighter flight and save the other four for other possible threats later in the phase. AFB may no longer fire at starships, even if they are within range during the fighter phase. In addition, a ship is limited in the number of AFB it may purchase during construction, it may only have no more than 1 AFB per hull point.
This is another rule that has not been extensively tested yet, I realize that this makes AFB's much more powerful, perhaps too powerful, but I just like the idea of flights having to dodge a wall of flak before they can launch torpedoes or strafe or whatever. Very cool image.
Anti-Fighter Batteries
Anti-FIghter Batteries may attack any flight that comes within their range DURING THE FIGHTER PHASE. Anti-Fighter Batteries may preempt any action by a flight with an attack of their own (works like combat interception). These attacks are resolved and damage is applied immediately. Individual batteries are fired allocated seperately. For example; a ship with 6 AFB is attacked by a striker flight, the starship player elects to fire 2 AFB at the fighter flight and save the other four for other possible threats later in the phase. AFB may no longer fire at starships, even if they are within range during the fighter phase. In addition, a ship is limited in the number of AFB it may purchase during construction, it may only have no more than 1 AFB per hull point.
Actually, given that you can add defense to fighters it's not as potent as we'd like. Though we're using a similar rule. We've found that by allowing them used as an "interrupt" they can mitigate some of the damage of incoming fighter attacks, but never completely stop it.
The main house rule we're using here, is we ditched starmada's movement system completely. We're using a hexless vectored thrust system. The majority of the players down at my local store preferred Full Thrust's movement, but didn't like the rest of the rules much. Starmada seems to be catching on rather quickly with that minor adaption.
We considered some similar pre-emptive strike rules, but never really implemented them. Our current solution is longer-range anti-fighter weapons (per standard weapon construction rules, as opposed to just giving AFBs range) combined with uniformly low fighter speeds and flight sizes (and when I say low, I mean illegally low - speed 4, size 1, that type of thing). When bombers only have speed 4, a range 3 weapon has a reasonable chance of getting a shot in as they close, and small flight sizes mean that anti-fighter weapons that hit actually hurt (whereas with standard speeds and flight sizes, you need ranges in the teens and lots of RoF to put a dent in incoming fighters). Also, Point Defense is handy.
Other than that, we've put a cap on weapon ranges and allowed ranges that aren't congruent to 0 mod 3. That's about all on the HR front from my group...
MadSeason and I tried a series of games that had weapons limited to range 12 and Fighters limited to speed 12, and found the games more enjoyable than simply lobbing long range shots across a board. Also, our experience has showed that "layered" minefields, dedicated escorts, and fighters on intercept missions are the best way to deal with fighters before they can ream your ships. The only use I can really see for AFBs it to pick off those pesky fighters that try to sit in your blind spot after they have launched their main strike and peck you to death.
Erik
"layered" minefields, dedicated escorts, and fighters on intercept missions
That's true, CAP is quite good, especially if you allow flights to initiate a dogfight instead of making an attack coming off a CAP activation (though I don't think we ever got an answer as to whether that's actually legal or not). Have had some success with dedicated anti-fighter escorts, and haven't gotten to use minefields yet.
Blacklancer99 wrote:"layered" minefields, dedicated escorts, and fighters on intercept missions
That's true, CAP is quite good, especially if you allow flights to initiate a dogfight instead of making an attack coming off a CAP activation (though I don't think we ever got an answer as to whether that's actually legal or not). Have had some success with dedicated anti-fighter escorts, and haven't gotten to use minefields yet.
we also had a question as to whether or not it was legal or not to initiate a dogfight off CAP. I used it first in our campaign, so therefore I was the possible cheater 
But from my perspective it seemed perfectly reasonable.
Minefields are useful if you can get them in a place where the enemy fighters are forced to cross them or move where they can get shot at by the escorts. Moving the fighters through minefields usually means losing a couple along the way (if the fields are "in depth" that can be worse) and is usually a better option than flying where escorts can cut them up.
Erik
Initiating a dogfight on CAP is perfectly legal (assuming both options are in use).
Initiating a dogfight on CAP is perfectly legal (assuming both options are in use).
Coool... nice reminder about the options, though. Sometimes we forget that we don't need all the options all the time.
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