"SPACE FIGHT!" Starship combat boardgame

[Alex319]

If his power doesn't work with a BC on board, the BC can give him another activation but to no avail. As far as I can tell, that addresses your original concern exactly? I also figured - there's only one person in command of a ship. You can't have a captain and an admiral shouting out orders.

The way it's worded now, the target of the SA's ability is the one that can't have a BC on board. A ship with both an SA and a BC can still give out two AP boosts, it's just neither of them can be on the ship that the SA and BC are both on.

Also, another thing - it might be worth reducing the AP cost of shields a bit, now that each shield activation only protects one arc, not all four arcs.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Here's a question: do you guys think that a good design goal would be to (at a much later date) have a system which allows people to build their own ships? Or, in a campaign mode, salvage systems from a captured ship?

If so, the ship designs at this stage would need a certain level of standardization - I was thinking that each entry is a system/component which can be selected and added to a ship.

If that's the case, each item needs to be given a name and added to a master list. For example, we know the Feration Cruiser's phasers do X damage, have Y range, and cost Z action points to use, so we give that a name like "Federation Phaser Mk. I" and add it to a master list. Another ship using the same phaser type will have the same stats in its phaser entry, whereas a ship using the "Federation Phaser Mk. II" would have different stats. Equally, the Spartan Scout uses a "Spartan Cloaking Device Mk. I", and so on.

The salvaging idea sounds interesting, in general, but I am not sure I would really boil it down to components.

I think it might be better to have something like a "thematic" guideline for each race. It fits better in the exception based design model. Instead of trying to identify individual components and systems, consider the general ability related to a system as one aspect and its "value" for a ship. That will guide your cost. If you use it based on components, you probably end up with a kind of "simulation" system for spacecrafts.

So, you don't think of Spartan Cloaking Device Mark 2, but of "Cloaking Device for a ship with the following size and other properties".
Salvaging a ship gets you access to salvage points or something like that, and access to its unique "thematic" abilities.

If you salvage Colonial starfighters, their "theme" might be something like "Tactical FTL" and "180° turns once per round". A 180° turn is worth a certain number of points for any given ship, so if you salvage enough points, you can install it on a ship.

 

[Morrus]

We had a long, long playtest session yesterday (all day!) - here's what we concluded:

- AP total changing from damage or repairs should not take effect until next turn
- Aura damage must apply at the very start of the turn prior to actions or movement
- Remember to reduce those shield costs
- Launched fighters placed next to carrier immediately, but should not act at all until next round
- Adding a +2 bonus to hit from the rear totally changes fighter combat dynamics for the better
- There should be a +2 bonus to hit a stationary ship
- Fighters are way too powerful - impossible to hit. Adjustments to hit probabilities needed. Adding agility to attack rolls seesm to work perfectly.
- Heroes in their current form have no effect on the game whatsoever.
- The biggest issue: user interface. How to record all the info? Small speed counters on the ships created a horribly messy and cluttered game map, especially with lots of fighters. Tracking HP and shields and readied actions and sensor locks all gets messy and players forget things a LOT. Need a really good user interface for all this stuff.

 

[Morrus]

Given some of the interface difficulties we encountered, I'm proposing a new trial stat card layout. The card now has areas to record changing information.

This means, of course, that every ship will need a card, rather than one for each type. A player launching 10 squadrons will have a lot of cards lying around, something I wanted to avoid.

This can clearly be improved further - it's just a start.

 

[Morrus]

I'm now no longer totally sold on the way shields work.

Mechanically, they're just fine. Interface-wise, they're a pain - you have to adjust each of four shields every time you have a turn, and on a stat card that's gonna get messy real quick even if you have the world's best eraser.

I wonder if there's another way to handle it? Perhaps a binary system based on damage reduction - reduces X off each shot, and the shield's either up or down. Then you're not having to count off damage absorbed by each shield and then delete them all the following turn.

That doesn't allow for the "shields down to 30%!" scenario, of course, which is a shame. It does, however, allow for "intensify the forward shields!" by allowing an action whereby you get 50% more DR in one shield at a cost of half DR in the other three (or something).

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

IRRC, Star Wars Saga shields worked this way: They gave DR (typically in increments of 5), but if you broke through the DR, the shield rating dropped. Maybe that's a way to handle variable shield strength without having to track damage continously. Of course, you still have to track some amount of information on shield strength.

Regarding "exception based design" for shields:
In the game series "Independence War", shields worked a little differently than this. The shields could only protect against certain angles of attacks - typically the most likely to attack the ship at any point, as determined by the computer. The shield could be penetrated if multiple enemies attacked the same shield area, or if you had just enough firepower (to penetrate it, or have a higher rate of fire to overwhelm the shield). Small ships typically had only one shield generator, leaving some areas unprotectd, more advanced one (like the ship the player was flying in the first game) had two. In this game, being "flanked" when you had two shields was actually better than having your enemies all on the same side. (But having them in the back was bad, since the area around the engine exhaust had to be left unprotected).

 

[Morrus]

IRRC, Star Wars Saga shields worked this way: They gave DR (typically in increments of 5), but if you broke through the DR, the shield rating dropped. Maybe that's a way to handle variable shield strength without having to track damage continously. Of course, you still have to track some amount of information on shield strength.

I'm not sure that's any easier on the interface front.

 

[Elephant]

I think the goals of having a system that's simple and quick for a large number of ships *and* being able to model single-ship details like "intensify forward shields", "full power to the death ray", and "shields down to 30%" are largely incompatible. For the fine-grained detail of the latter, you need to manage lots of details for each ship. For the speed and simplicity of the former, you need to keep things as abstract as possible.

A naval minis game I've played uses stat cards, sort of (really it's just a photocopied sheet with about a dozen different ship stats on it, and you mark up the section corresponding to the ship you actually have). It works well, but the gameplay moves slowly -- maybe one turn per hour with 4-6 players.

 

[Morrus]

I think the goals of having a system that's simple and quick for a large number of ships *and* being able to model single-ship details like "intensify forward shields", "full power to the death ray", and "shields down to 30%" are largely incompatible. For the fine-grained detail of the latter, you need to manage lots of details for each ship. For the speed and simplicity of the former, you need to keep things as abstract as possible.

I refuse to say "can't be done"! I'm going to try my darndest!

So, we have a shields proposal:

• Shields have a rating which applies like damage reduction. Excess damage applies to the ship as normal.
• Damage absorbed by the damage reduction comes off the shield's "hit points" (for want of a better word)
• Shield goes down completely when shield's hit points reach zero
• Shield's hit points can be restored with repair rolls
• A mechanism to intensify one specific shield

 

[Morrus]

On another note, I just discovered that printing the counters on card, laminating and then cutting out with a craft knife produces gorgeous results!

You can't tell from the crappy photo below (done on my phone), but those counters are thick and glossy.

I've just ordered a pack of magnetic printer paper. I have some experimental ideas regarding magnetic counters and the like. Also for the stat cards with magnetic counters moving to indicate speed, shields, and the like.