tweaking crits, fighters and SSDs

[kashre]

So we were playing some Full Thrust over the weekend for the sake of nostalgia, and I got to thinking about some of the quibbles I have about CBF and how there are some bits in FT which I feel work a little better.

Now don't get me wrong, I still think that CBF is the superior product, especially for competitive games with home-brew factions... but there are a couple of things that bother me a bit.

First, critical hits seem undervalued... 9 out of 10 times a ship is almost 100% combat effective when it loses it's last hull and dies. FT deals with it with threshold rolls that generally see most of the equipment trashed on a ship before it's last hull is gone. I wanted to have something kind of like that for CBF, so my idea was to have a critical roll every X number of hull hits that are taken. We're going to playtest with 6 the first time and see how it feels.

Second, after many, many games, almost all of them with home-built factions using shields, we have found that fighters seem very weak for their tonnage value. That's not to say they can't be used effectively, but they're very difficult to use, especially when you could just get a couple more direct fire weapons on your ship. I know that one route to increasing fighter effectiveness is to just use non-shielded factions, especially with lower armor... but I want them to be more all-around effective.

So the idea we're going to try here is giving fighters an anti-shipping range of 2. For those hexes which are on the line between two different shields, they will default to the rearmost shield. That means that you could get 2 squadrons striking the front, 3 striking the sides, or 4 striking the back. I think this will still keep them from being overpowered, bit give you options to put a lot more hurt on a specific ship.

Lastly, while playing FT I was reminded again of how cool it is to have a little picture of your ship with icons on it for an SSD rather than just a spreadsheet printout, efficient though that may be. I have seen some of the icon based SSDs for generic factions around this sight, but they're a little busy for my taste, and I realized I didn't need to have all the text replaced, just most of it. So I whipped up some stuff which turned out to be kind of a bastardized mashup of SFB, Full Thrust, and B5 Wars SSDs:


Soooo... am I going to break something with the fighter and crit changes?

[robertthedamned]

I like the crit idea, I too am finding that a lot of ships are still very functional when they go down, especially battleline ships. I like your idea of relating it to damage done to the ship.

I can't really comment on the fighters as I've not used them yet (doing mostly star trek games at the moment) but I can't see it making them massively overpowered. I think just giving them a bit of range so they can stack up and attack shields together sounds pretty reasonable.

[toaster]

Nice SSDs but don't you find the shield and hull boxes get a little out of hand with large capital ships?

Robert

[kashre]

well we haven't used them yet. I'm not really concerned about the hull boxes, since you only have to mark them once and they're in rows of 10 for easy counting...

Shield boxes might be a little much. I was going for a system that required writing no numbers except for speed, but regenerating shields might require a lot of erasing and re-marking. If it's too much I'll change them to larger boxes to right current shield level in instead.

[fastgit]

Love the crit idea... and the fighter idea is worth a series of games... The SSDs look cool, and I agree that bigger boxes (1 for each arc) are the way to go for shields.

[coldsteel]

Has anybody tried the critical hit idea? I like the idea. We played 1 game using a crit roll for every 6 hits. Had some impact on small ships but seriously degraded larger ones. For the next game, I am going to tweak this to every 8 hits for BC and larger.

[kashre]

I haven't had a chance to try it out because we've beenslowly cycling through all our other games while we get back to CBF...

When we do it I we're going to have a crit every 1/6th of the ships hits so larger ships wont take more crits than smaller ones. If that's not enough I might add modifers that are added to the crit rolls for the later crits.

[kashre]

So I finally got to test out the latest version of my SSD (which I was very happy with) and the crits and fighter house rules we were working on.

AAR is here:
www.steeldreadnought.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=aar&action=display&thread=856

Fighters:
1> Strike Fighters have a range of 2 when firing at ships.
2> If a fighter squadron is on the line between two shields it hits the rearmost shield.
3> The defending ship can allocate it's PD dice to any fighter attacking it regardless of the range the attack is coming at.

This allowed us to get four fighter squadrons hitting the rear shield of a single ship at once when it was left undefended. It was not nearly as powerful as an alpha strike from a BC of the same size as my carrier would have been, but it was way more effective than the weak sauce results you get when you can only put a single squadron on each. Effectiveness is much higher against lighter ships where the majority of hits will penetrate light armor. Also, I think this would be pretty OP in a setting with no shields, as you could pretty easily get 9-12 squadrons all hitting one ship at one time and it would be Full Thrust all over again.

Crits:

1> Each ship has 6 "hull crits" spread evenly throughout it's hull boxes.
2> The first hull crit is a straight roll, but each subsequent one has a cumulative +1 applied to it, so that the 6th crit is rolled at +5.
3> Because the higher bonuses at the end of the hull track make reactor hits much more likely, when a hull crit results in a reactor crit rather than exploding immediately the player has the chance to repair it in the damage control phase. If this repair roll fails, then the ship explodes. This also applies to reactor crits from a second engine, if they come from a hull crit.

This was a pretty major change to the way the game works out. We did it because crits have always seemed undervalued to me in this game... 90% of my ships are 90%+ combat effective when they lose their last hull point. Using this system, every ship still had 5-7 un-repaired critical hits on it when it died, making it seem like the damage was actually taking a toll on systems. It also produced a LOT more reactor crits. Out of I think 11 ships that died in our playtest game, three of them died to reactor crits, all of them rolled from hull crits which we failed to repair.

The one concern I have is that on small ship that have few spaces between the hull crits and only one or two hardpoints, lots of empty hardpoint crits that do extra damage pop up. If it's a weapon with a sizable hull damage value, like ASGMs or Plasma Torps, then you can get a cascade of crits where one crit does enough damage to cause another crit and so on. Still, that might not be THAT bad. Thematically I'm not concerned with a giant missile that hits a little destroyer and cracks it in half... and small ships are already discouraged by the system through fleet limits and capital ships always firing first. We'll probably leave it in place for the campaign and see how it turns out.

[hamilton]

I have done something similar to what you're suggesting (additional damage at each increment of Hull/6), but instead of a general crit I backported structural damage from MvM:

www.steeldreadnought.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=cb&thread=747&page=1

It has worked out well, but I still haven't tested it in a large battle, just some 1v1.

[coldsteel]

Ran another game yesterday using the critical hit for every 6 hull hits. They loved the new rule and I was very satisfied with the result.

2 original series battlestars and an Odysseus against 2 Type II and a Sword base ships and 4 Harbingers. The game saw the debut of the Odysseus using a Prometheus model by Ravenstar. The size of it scared the cylons and they made the mistake of throwing everything they had it. The AV 10 shrugged off a lot of punishment, while the Viper wing was exterminated. Meanwhile, the neglected older battlestars got in close and sandwiched 1 base ship at point blank range. The cylons turned their attention to the older battlestars, but it was too late. The additional critical hits had no real impact on the smaller ships, while were pivotal for the larger ones. 1 base ship accumulated 6 structural failures and the player was afraid to change course until all 3 battlestars surrounded him. He didn't make it. The cylons managed to hit the same fighter bay on 1 battlestar 5 times. The game looked like a complete rout of the cylons until the end of the last turn. During missile movement, one original battlestar with several un-repaired PD hits went down to 2 ASGMs. The cylons surrounded the Odysseus with 6 heavy raiders in a desperate attempt to take it by boarding as their last base ship was shredded by her heavy rail guns. The gamble paid off when 3 heavy raiders got through and took the ship by boarding. The cylons won, even though they lost all their base ships and 1 Harbinger. Since the cylons almost ignored the older battlestars both their Viper wings were still intact. The surviving battlestar got away, but had to leave the other Viper wing to their fate.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to record the damage each ship took to post here for review. I have settled on ship designs I am happy with for most of my miniatures, so I have been producing the SSDs on 5x8 cards, laminating them and recording damage with dry erase markers. Saves a lot of paper and ink. The gamers were so helpful in cleaning up, someone erased all the SSDs.

A side note: almost all my games are away from home, so I store my miniatures in Plano storage trays. Each tray has a specific unit or type of vehicle/ship. I have a large carrying case that the trays fit in. All related fighters go into the same try with the parent ship and the appropriate SSD cards go on top before closing the lid. Gaming aids and reference sheets all go into a smaller container that fits in the top of the carrier along with a container of dice. When it is time for a game, I simply grab the appropriate trays and hit the road. I can now put together a game in a number of periods in just a few minutes.