Agreed; I was surprised that that didn't appear in the rules, as it seemed a decent idea (though there were weird breakpoints at 2:1 vs 2:1 - 1).

That was something I threw into a late draft, but it really had no playtesting behind it. I think it's easy enough to implement without being part of the actual rules if players think it would be useful.

The fighter customization is pretty limited, yeah...  just the six traits on the bottom of page 15 / top of page 16.  A lot of the cheese in AE, though, was from killer strikers, which relied heavily on being able to combine lots of small craft traits and speed 15, so this seems a reasonable reaction.  It's easier to expand systems by adding traits than it is to go "Hey guys, we goofed on X-trait, don't use it."

Well, Fire Control helps against ECM, and Catastrophic certainly seems like a valid counter to Armor...  .  Also, one viable 'weapon level' counter to ECM is to increase the Base Attack Strength of the weapon; if you double it, then you effectively ignore two levels of ECM.  And extra hits against un-ECM'd targets to boot!

As for Ignores...  frankly, they're one of the things I'm happiest didn't make it into Nova.  The extra shieldbreaking traits in the Rules Annex were one of the places AE went really wrong - they rendered shields basically an inviable defense, especially when put on fast strikers or high-Acc weapons, which moved the game even more towards a quick-draw style of combat ("Whoever shoots first wins").  The increased variety and availability of defenses in Nova (and lack of easy, total-circumvention counters like Ignores) suggests that perhaps one of the design goals was to move away from that type of gameplay.

More than anything for me, granularity. I liked being able to have flights of a single drone or enormous packs of fighters, and to have a finder grain on damage to those large flights. Not sure why, exactly, but it was a favorite of mine when it came to creating ships and fleets. But then, I'm also the first guy to pounce on drone-firing ships in SFB.

This solution is helpful in keeping armor from being seen as too powerful compared to shields or ECM, which have counters. But neither this, nor Nomad and Marauder's ideas really do what I was thinking of. Every one of them winds up damaging the armor, while what I'm looking for is an attack that simply does damage to the hull without taking armor into account at all. And I don't want to make it better against armor by means of increasing the BAS, or you're basically saying "It's better against ECM because it's better against anything!" which seems to be missing the spirit of the discussion.

None of these are deal-breakers by any means. Just some optional rules to consider for the future, and to debate what one can do with what we already have. Hell, I've yet to field a single Nova ship yet, so I can't honestly tell you anything about how it'll play out!

Not if, in your particular universe, ships tended towards a mix of shields, armor and ECM as defenses, opposed to only one or two of them. A ship hit with an "Ignores Armor" weapon might not be hit due to superior ECM, or deflect that attack with their shields. And ships with superior shields or ECM, but lacking Armor at all, wouldn't be unduly impacted even if it did get through. (Edited to add: this was why I disliked the "shields can mean any sort of defense..." line from SAE - I wanted that level of control over what defenses stopped what...)

On a related tangent, I know there's no way to do it - the math would contain too many variables - but it would be lovely if one could make defenses more effective against particular kinds of attacks (Shields on a 4-6, 3-6 versus lasers, 5-6 versus particle beams, for example). But that's going to have to be done on an individual game universe basis, I suspect, if at all.

This is why our group has basically done away with the official rules for fighters.
We've decided to use the "Seeker" trait on a weapon that's representing fighters.
It works for us, and keeps the number of maneuvering elements manageable.

On thinking about this, why would you select a ship in the Combat Phase if it has no targets?
Unless I'm missing something, that seems like it'd be a wasted pick.
Kevin

You'll calling upon history with the game that I lack. I'll have to see if I can lay hands on a copy of X and see how adaptable that is, because it sounds like an elegant solution to what I thought would be a thorny problem. I guess it only really gets nuts if you are trying to balance fleets and one of them only uses kinetic attacks, and the other has shields against all three types...

First, yes, every rule I propose should be optional, or a house rule.

Second, SFB was more complicated in that it had faceted defenses, which the Nova edition lacks (currently) so there's a give and take...

Not really complicated, you just need to know the type of Attack the weapon makes to determine which save number is used. This was setting specific for the Starmada X /VBAM crossover book.
A ship for this setting could look like this (updated from an SAE design I used).Note the Porcupine has a [B] but not a Ballistic trait, think all range torpedo with a BOOM finish.

Paul
[attachment=0]BK Terran Catfish Mk3.png[/attachment]

Yes.

Another tool for you to use - the chart on pg.45, of all the Armor/Hull pairings? Note the patterns there. If you multiply the hull by X, and the armor by X, you'll see the same value appear. Thus the value at Armor1/Hull3 is repeated at Armor2/Hull6, Armor3/Hull9, etc. So if you want an armor multiplier for a Hull 30 ship, with Armor 12, find the value for a Hull 15 ship with Armor 6 and it'll be the same.

You might be able to use that to extrapolate out on the chart and avoid too much reliance on the unnatural log functions on your calculator.

On a related note, although I didn't use "ignore shield" traits I did like the varying piercing traits.  I was planning on giving most of my B5 ships either 1 or 2 shields to represent interceptors and then give all the laser weapons piercing+2 to ignore them.  However piercing has now changed!  I can't now ignore even the lowest level of shields! 

I'm probably going to still do this but it just won't feel as good as it could have.