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[Iron Sky]

It's a tricky issue. Basically, a ship's relative power cna only really be determined by extensive playtesting (the biggest weakness of an exception based system, where anything goes). George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry weren't using a universal TV point-buy handbook when they designed their ships; the just decided "this would be cool" and did it.

So designing a ship means deciding what you want it to do, designing the stat block for it, and playtesting it as much as possible. It means we can't have a ship construction manual or anything, unfortunately.

I've noticed the balance difficulties in my 4e game since I'm making all custom monsters. I created my own custom "point-buy" system for making them and simplified a few things, but each power is its own rule...

I guess that's also the advantage of exception-based design: you're never limited by the rules when you have a cool idea of what a ship should do.

What do you mean by double width?

I mean that front is the arc going through the hex directly in front of the ship, back is the hex behind, and starboard and port are the two hexes to the right and two hexes to the left.

That, of course, only works when a ship is a single hex in size. I could see difficulties figuring out the firing arcs of a 20-hex Star Destroyer...

Maybe have a green lines on the outer-most hex intersections on each ship to delineate where each ship's arcs are split?

Well, if some members of a squadron change to a different speed to the rest, they've effectively split into two squadrons. A squadron has a single set of actions - you don't control the individual ships.

Well, here's a scenario:

Viper squadrons A and B started out with 10 ships each. Each lost 5 in a couple passes of a Battlestar, so they move together and want to merge into a single squadron. Squadron A has used 2 charges of its turbo, B hasn't used any. How many does the new squadron C that's left when they've merged have?

I am of the opinion that the smaller the ship (and thus, the more of them you are likely to have), the less limited-use powers they should have, for the same reason that most minions in 4e have 1 or maybe 2 powers and Solos have 4-10. You are, of course, perfectly entitled to hold a different opinion on the matter.

I haven't fully decided. At the moment I like the idea of the player in question handing his stat card over to the player who captured his ship. The ship, however, is at crippled status due to a skeleton crew consisting of a boarding party. that player could then attempt "repairs" by adding more crew.

That sounds pretty solid on its own. Personally, I think taking out another player's ship without killing it outright AND getting another ship in your fleet (or at least another target to distract the enemy) is enough, with out complicating things by trying to restore the ship to maximum functionality.



A simple rule for tractor beams would be: make an attack roll against the target ship. If it hits, it drags the target ship a number of hexes equal to the difference between their two sizes (or d4 or some other die amount if you don't want people to have to take the time to bust out the scale chart).

Glad I spotted this thread, got the creative juice flowing for the latest ruleset I'm working on!