• Registered: 2011-06-11
  • Posts: 110

Topic: Ancient Races

I'm having trouble deciding how to represent the Shadows in B5 and I realised that it's quite hard to represent ancient races in Starmada at all. 

There are lots of options for weapons so that you can make really devistrating weapons for your ancient race, but defensively there's not much, or am I missing it? 

Specifically I'm trying to represent the energy duffusers that the Shadows use.  These store energy instead of it damaging a ship and then bleed it off.  The only way to kill them is to overwhelm the diffusers.  My first thought was to have really high shields, but the builder won't let me have above 5.  Way not have Shields 6 or 7 where you have to roll again on the chart to hit numbers higher than 6?

My other idea is to simply invent something, as the Shadows are so different to everyone else.  That's where I realised that almost every Sci-fi show has ancient races with advanced tech, but I think they'd struggle to be represented in Starmada.  Is this an oppertunity to do a suppliment?

  • Registered: 2005-03-28
  • Posts: 101

Re: Ancient Races

I used Regeneration. Other "living" ships from B5 did not appear to "heal" during a fight, which is what Regen is.
The Cloaking device represents the ability to Phase into and out of Hyperspace. The Cargo is not actually cargo, but the only way I could get the sheet to calculate the Cloak being better than normal. When Cloaking the ship can not hit mines or asteroids as it is only partially in this reality.
The Multi Phased Cutter 1 through 4 (only goes to 2 on this ship) was an attempt to put the extremely powerful and flexible rules from B5 FA into Starmada terms.

Name:               
Type: DESTROYER A-class SHADOW MEDIUM (1313)               
Hull: 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1                
Engines: [TL5] 7 7 6 6 5 5 4 4 3 3 2 2 1                                
Shields: [TL5] 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1                                
               
Weapons: [TL5] 1:[V] 2:[W] 3:[] 4:[] 5:[] 6:[]               
Battery V: Heavy Phasing Pulse Cannon, 4/8/12, 1/3+/3/2, Anti-Fighter; Increased Hits; Halves Shields               
               
[AC] [BD]                
Battery W: Mode1: Multi Phased Cutter 1, 5/10/15, 3/3+/1/1, Anti-Fighter               
Mode2: Multi Phased Cutter 2, 5/10/15, 3/3+/2/2,                
[ACE] [BDF]                
#N/A               
               
               
#N/A               
               
               
#N/A               
               
               
Special: [TL5] Hyperdrive; Cloaking Device; Cargo (282); Regeneration; Countermeasures; Fire Control; Anti-Fighter Batteries (5)               
Fighters: [TL5]

  • Registered: 2010-01-07
  • Posts: 35

Re: Ancient Races

Regen is also a decent way to model any kind of power absorbtion defense - black globes, Andromedan PA panels, and maybe these energy diffuser things - where a ship can soak up damage for a while but falls apart quick (or explodes) when the capacitor is finally overloaded.  Just think of "hull" as being "capacitor space remaining" instead and your regenration becomes the amount of energy bled out of the batteries that round.  The ship's actual hull strength is kind of meaningless, since most ships with this kind of defense pop like soap bubbles when you finally overfill them - usually with some "leak" damage bleeding through beforehand, which covers the gradual degradation of weapons/shields/movement as well.

  • Registered: 2011-06-11
  • Posts: 110

Re: Ancient Races

Some interesting idea Brother Jim. 

There is one problem with Regen, it only protects the hull.  When you have ships like the Shadows with one weapon you end up with a very expensive ship that can't fire pretty soon.

One idea I had was using the general repair rules but only allow the ancient races to do it.  Just decrease the points for them for each scenario.  Basically you could say it costs 20% of their fleet points to have the repair ability.

  • Registered: 2010-01-07
  • Posts: 35

Re: Ancient Races

Perhaps stop treating the Ancient ubergun as a single wepon, then?  Buy as many of them as you want/need/can fit, give the a home penalty trait that prevents them from firing at multiple targets (or did that one finally show up in a supplement somewhere? - I can remember arguing about including it as early as Compendium), and call it a single weapon that degrades with damage rather than an all-or-nothing megacannon.  Bit like the mid-period spinal mounts, without all the weird quirks.

  • Registered: 2005-03-29
  • Posts: 859

Re: Ancient Races

Well, with the Fire-Linked you could create a slicer beam in several pieces and give them Fire-Linked, which also works as the slicer beam was said to be able to split fire in B5W. The main issue for conversions is the Vorlon Lightning Cannon, which increases in range too much for 'carronade' to imitate.

  • Registered: 2005-03-28
  • Posts: 101

Re: Ancient Races

OOOOOH!!   I didn't think about Fire-Linked!!! That would work perfectly for the Multi-Phased Cutter (which I do give the ships multiples of).

Thanks

  • Registered: 2011-06-11
  • Posts: 110

Re: Ancient Races

I've been creating ships from my conversions lately and for the Shadow Cruiser I've noticed you can add Regeneration twice!  It adds a massive amount of points for the second one (about 600 I think), so it now totals about 1800.  But I'm going to use it to allow them to repair all systems with the same regen rules as for hull.

Also as far as the slicer beam goes I've added 3 weapons and divided the total damage by 3, which is the limit where it's still only has 1 space on the damage chart.  I'm not sure about fire-linked yet as I don't like the idea of rolling 1 dice to hit, so I'm keeping them separate for now.