Colonial Battlefleet Babylon 5

[kashre]

Hrm, I would be interested in seeing your weapon tables, although I definitely think we are going in different directions. I'm hesitating to even use D8s, much less add all of that other stuff.

So if fighters are using D4s for dogfights and most anti-fighter weapons are d4s, what sort of defence rating are you giving your fighters?

Us, we finally got around to play testing my original versions of the Omega and Hyperion... 2 Omegas pretty handily wiped out four hyperions, mainly because the Hyperions split up then lost every single initiative role so two of them were out of position ever time. Also, fighters are NASTY in a low-armor-no-shield environment. Even interceptors...

Lessons learned: Using Turbo-Lasers for for Heavy Laser which seems to be the main damage-inducing heavy weapon for Omegas is pretty underwhelming when there are no shields involved. 4 hull damage isn't much. So for round two I doubled their mass, damage, and they do two crits on a penetration.

Also, d6 fighter killer weapons suck unless you have really high firecon... I think we're going to house rule that weapons with the fighter killer role automatically hit on a natural max role, even if their target number would normally be unreachable.

Here's my revised ships.

[valthonis]

I haven't gotten to the fighters for a profile value yet, obviously it will probably be fairly low to provide a chance at a hit with Anti-Fighter weapons.

Should have the weapon chart completed this week.

Considering what to do with things like Earth Interceptors and similar weapons. Mostly used to intercept and block incoming shots. Not sure if the level of detail is high enough in CB to warrant it.

[TheDreadnought]

Seemed like intecerceptors from what I saw were used to shoot down missiles. . . i.e. point defense.

They talk about it in the dialogue. . . but the graphics make it look more like they are shooting down laser bolts. . . but you can't see all that clearly so maybe you are just seeing the drive systems on the missiles and the warheads themselves are too dark to see.

[toaster]

From the fluf interceptors work against pulse fire but not beam fire, given that personal weapons are plasma based it makes sense for the same tech to be applied to starship weapons and would be a good match for the visual of a bolt of energy traveling through space. Interceptors would then be simply the breaking up of the incoming plasma bolt with PDS fire, either plasma or slug thrower tech would be effective.

The powerful slicing beams used as heavy weapons by earth and narn ships and as primary weapons by Mimbari and Shadows is more likely to be laser based (lets just ignore the imposibility of a laser being visible in space since it looks so cool).

Robert

[valthonis]

Correct, the interceptor/guardian array/particle impeder/interdictor/plasma web/etc all have the functionality to intercept incoming, non-laser, shots.

Perhaps something interesting like a X number of interceptors per and each one can intercept a single shot per turn, non-laser. But by 'intercepting' maybe they impose a -1 to the shot's range?

So if you're sitting at a range of 4 from the enemy ship, they fire two autocannons, you declare the intercept before dice rolls. You dice to apply both of your interceptors to the autocannons. The opponent rolls a 3 and a 4 after figuring in FC. The 3 already misses, but the 4 is reduced to a 3 and thus missing the ship.

[coldsteel]

kashre, can you post your latest SSDs? I am having trouble figuring out your visual displays. I want to run a couple games that are different than just cylons vs colonials and EA are the only other ships I have painted up right now. You are a whole lot better at building ships than I am.

[woody]

Where is the link for the SSD's, I might be being a bit thick but I can not find them.

[toaster]

I was thinking a bit more about stating up B5 ships and I was wondering about using ion cannon to simulate the Mimbari jammers, a silly idea? Lets take another look.

The only ships with shields (energy dissipating organic hulls) are those that are immune to Mimbari jammers anyhow (Shadows, Vorlons and Whitestars). Using the ion cannon rules means that the Mimbari player has to actively work to suppress opponents lock on and make decisions about which threats to engage with their limited jamming ability giving both sides more decision points, this means both players feel more involved and you don't get the non-mimbari player throwing their toys out of the cot because of the special rule that means he can't hit the mimbari. It also means that pour out lots of shots and hope some hit weapons (ie autonomous) aren't affected by jamming just as you would expect.

What do you think, slap some ion cannon on the mimbari ships with the name changed to directed jamming array?

Robert

[TheDreadnought]

Actually sounds pretty good to me.

Alternately, you could just give the Mimbari ships the scout role benefit that says ships shooting at them do not get their fire control bonus.

[fastgit]

May 12, 2011 8:59:29 GMT -5 TheDreadnought said:

Alternately, you could just give the Mimbari ships the scout role benefit that says ships shooting at them do not get their fire control bonus.

Nice. Elegant. I like this interpretation. They wouldn't necessarily be Scouts, however... correct? Perhaps this could be interpreted as a faction bonus?

[toaster]

Sounds like a faction bonus, to me it just seems to weak for how effective the Mimbari jammers were suposed to be I want something more effective but not game killing hence my ion cannon thoughts.

Robert

[TheDreadnought]

The ion cannon is a good idea, don't get me wrong. Just throwing out options.

Maybe even just a fixed penalty. That way ships with better fire control aren't as affected by it. Like a flat +5 to range or something?

[toaster]

Been thinking about this a bit more and I think the best idea is both, no firecon to represent general jamming as a faction benefit and a few ion cannon on some of the bigger ships to provide that focused soft kill ability.

While on the subject I had a few other thoughts about faction benefits

Narn; SD Torps as energy mines without needing QM Tech, and tenacious- they get +1 imitative if they lost the imitative on the previous turn (because when you hit a narn he comes right back at you.

Centari; Pack hunters- they may take 3 escorts per capital and 2 per CA.

League of Non-Aligned Worlds: Lower tech and -1 imitative due to multiple commands but +15% tonnage because there's a lot of them.

Earth Force; Kashre interceptors idea is good to go.

First Ones (including Vorlons and Shadows); Tech 5 across the board and +3 imitative but -15% tonnage because they are few in number.

So what do you all think?

I've roughed out a range of pulse and beam weapons plus fighter stats and I've started modding a shipbuilder file to include them, hopefully I should have something to post next week.

Robert

[daniel]

What about target size as it relates to getting hit? It's a big deal in B-5 and irrelevant in CB. To me that's a problem. Was looking at doing the Orieni-Centauri War, where it's *really* hard to hit the smaller Orieni escorts...

[toaster]

Hard to hit escorts are covered by the scout rule (no bonus for firecon). I don't recall much comment on the show about target size so I think what your trying to do is match another games assumptions about space combat, sometimes your better off going back to the source material and starting with a clean sheet of paper.

Robert

[fastgit]

The White Stars were small... but they were difficult to damage because they were agile. Right? They're just about the only ships I remember as being tough to hit (outside of the Minbari cloaking ability, that is).

[daniel]

I was going by the B-5 Wars rules where size does matter...

[TheDreadnought]

Yeah, I think what Toaster was getting at is that there's no point in the series where people are talking about how hard a ship is to hit because its small. We don't see that reflected on the screen either.

White Stars were about the only ship that *might* have dodged something, but that's a function of maneuverability rather than size.

So small size=hard to hit is a creation of the B-5 Wars rules. . . not necessarily the Babylon 5 universe. If you want to recreate Babylon 5 space battles, it might be better to start with what you see on the screen. . . rather than simply re-writing somebody else's rules interpretation of how it works. That's a problem I know a lot of Starfleet Battles/Fed Com players struggle with whenever they are trying out a new Star Trek game.

So. . . all that said. . . if you really want to incorporate size into the targeting solution formula, it seems the easiest thing to do would be to replace the FC bonus with the target's size.