So you mean you think that if you move into an aura on your turn, you shouldn't take damage? Which means that if a bomber can go all the way through the aura zone, over the target ship, and out the other end in one turn it shouldn't take any damage? Interesting. What problems did the current way cause?
That makes sense. Probably the best way to do that would be to say that the fighters get placed immediately *before* the carrier in initiative order (so you have to go all the way around before you get to the fighters.) Another advantage of that is that it means the initiative order doesn't keep getting more and more complicated.
Of course, then everyone would just move at speed 1 if they didn't really want to move much. But I don't see any harm from this rule change.
Interesting. It still seems like capital ships would have a very hard time hitting fighters with anything except auras.
Why did this happen? Was it too hard to get the heroes onto the ships they needed to affect? Were the heroes' powers not powerful enough? Were the heroes too easy to get rid of by hero removal effects or by being blown up?
Maybe one thing that might make it work better is to get rid of the whole "heroes having turns" thing and just give them (beefed up) passive abilities. For example:
Bold Captain - +3 to all attack rolls
Legendary Engineer - Repair rolls auto-succeed
Plucky Pilot - +4 defense and attack rolls on Medium or smaller ships
and so on.
It might help to know what factions you were playing with and what kind of heroes you were using. The heroes seems to be of highly varying levels of power.
Let's compare this game with D+D, which we've all had experience keeping track of. HP is just like in D+D, and shields are mechanically the same as temporary hit points (where activating shields is the power that gives you the temporary hit points).
As for speed counters - one idea would be to get rid of the whole thrust/speed mechanic altogether and just say each ship has a top speed, and they can move up to that speed each turn.
Readied actions are one thing that's more complicated (and often tend to cause problems even in D+D). Maybe one way of stopping lots of readied actions is to change some of the mechanics that tend to require readied actions. The main times it seems like readied actions would come into play is as follows:
1. Taking a fighter out as it launches from a carrier. In the current system this requires a readied action because if the enemy fighter rolls initiative and lands in between the enemy carrier and your ship, it will get to act before you. But if you use my idea then that won't be a problem because the fighter has to wait the full time around before it can act.
2. Manipulating shield timing. For example suppose I have two ships A and B, the opponent has ship X, the initiative order is X, A, B. Suppose that X has a 10 HP/round shield, and A and B each have a 10 damage weapon. If A misses then it's useless for B to fire because even if it hits it will get absorbed and the shield will go up to full next round. But if B readies until after X goes, then I'll get 3 shots total at him in one shield cycle. I'll talk about alternative shield systems in my next post.
3. Killing an enemy that moves into my range and then moves out in one turn. If you use the movement idea I mentioned above it might be harder to go really fast and thus less reason to use this.
Sensor locks are also a harder thing to keep track of because it's a "binary relation" - i.e. it's not a property of one ship (like HP or speed) it's a relation between two ships (A has a sensor lock on B). So if you put the counter or mark on A, for example, the counter has to say "has a sensor lock on B" and thus have a way of identifying B. One way to fix this is to effectively give all ships the Colonial Support Vessel's power of giving their friends sensor lock benefits - so you just have to mark ship B as "sensor locked" and don't have to worry about which of side A's ships marked it. Thematically you can assume that all the ships are transmitting sensor data to each other, so even if something happens to one ship's sensors the other ships can "pick up the trail." Then you could also have ways that a ship can "shake off" the sensor lock. The idea of "a particular ship focusing all its sensor resources to target one thing" could be modeled by the "spend APs to get attack bonuses" idea that you had mentioned before.
As for the "lots of fighters" issue - if there are lots of fighters we'll need to keep them simple. Some of the ideas I've put up above help in that direction, but it might be worth having some special rules or design guidelines just for fighters to keep them simple. For example, say that the only systems they have are weapons - that way the only thing you'll ever need to keep track of is hit points on them, and don't give them any of the things that make it harder to keep track of, like shields or special powers.
Also, IIRC, there already exists a collectible miniatures game that simulates Star Wars space battles (I think it was by WotC, I don't know - I saw it in a game store once and don't remember anything else about it). If you can find that it might be worth looking in it for ideas.
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And by the way, did boarding combat every get used during your playtest and if so, how did it go? My impression on reading the boarding combat rules is that it gives significant advantage to the defender, because the defender gets to attack with all of their combat units as soon as the attackers come on board, while the attacker usually has to get combat units on one at a time - and unlike with just blasting the ship to bits (where each step down the damage track gives progressive effects) with boarding combat there's no negative effect until the ship is captured.
