Burger said:
Don't worry, I nailed that one to the wall straight away
A New Universe for ACTA's
- Thread starter godsgopher
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Don't worry, I nailed that one to the wall straight away
I'm more interested in how ACTA:SF will handle cloaking and tactical warp.
Cloaking differs from Stealth in that a cloaked ship is truly invisible and can sneak behind you without you noticing. A stealth ship can't - you can see it and turn to face it, you just have trouble locking weapons onto it.
On screen, FTL combat seemed to be rare. (The "Picard Manoeuvre", introduced in TNG, would probably not work against a ship designed for FTL combat and definitely wouldn't work in FTL combat.) That aside, ranges will have to be a lot longer than in previous forms of ACTA, otherwise battles will be very short and consist of the captain saying "Open fire - oops, too late" as the ships whiz past each other before anyone can press a firing button. It means the game table will have to represent a star system, not the vicinity of a planet, which at the least means the rule disallowing more than one planet on the table goes out of the window. Another possibility might be to do for warp speed combat what B5:ACTA did for hyperspace combat, which is to write special rules for it but make most battles sublight speed. (What happens if you fire an energy weapon while you're going at warp speed - do you run into your own phaser blast? )
Cloaking differs from Stealth in that a cloaked ship is truly invisible and can sneak behind you without you noticing. A stealth ship can't - you can see it and turn to face it, you just have trouble locking weapons onto it.
On screen, FTL combat seemed to be rare. (The "Picard Manoeuvre", introduced in TNG, would probably not work against a ship designed for FTL combat and definitely wouldn't work in FTL combat.
) That aside, ranges will have to be a lot longer than in previous forms of ACTA, otherwise battles will be very short and consist of the captain saying "Open fire - oops, too late" as the ships whiz past each other before anyone can press a firing button. It means the game table will have to represent a star system, not the vicinity of a planet, which at the least means the rule disallowing more than one planet on the table goes out of the window. Another possibility might be to do for warp speed combat what B5:ACTA did for hyperspace combat, which is to write special rules for it but make most battles sublight speed. (What happens if you fire an energy weapon while you're going at warp speed - do you run into your own phaser blast? )msprange said:Burger said:
Don't worry, I nailed that one to the wall straight away
Your system your rules but, you may want to play around with the 'Fast Load Plasma" Rules. If I am reading this right Slow Load is every other turn And Very Slow is every 3rd turn right? If that the case you can use the Slow Load Rules to Load a Light Plasma F in a Heavy Plasma Launcher. And if for some reason you do not fire it allow it to become a full strength Heavy Torpedoe (Type G,S or R) on the thrid turn.
Either way I look foreward to what you come up with.
AdrianH said:On screen, FTL combat seemed to be rare. (The "Picard Manoeuvre", introduced in TNG, would probably not work against a ship designed for FTL combat and definitely wouldn't work in FTL combat.
Actually in TOS and the SFU all combat takes place at Tatical Warp Speed it was in later series that they went back and said all combat was sublight. Thus all weapons in SFU are also Warpcapable firing. But once again that is really a background thing as long as you are playing SFU ships on Ships you can assume it is Warp Speed . IF you mix Fleets it will require a change in technobable to say that the ships are all fighting at Sublight.
Iron Domokun
Mongoose
Simple answers: TOS had battles happening at warp speed, so battles happen at warp. Canon from later Trek is ignored as outside the license. Fastest speed you can do in combat is ~30 times the speed of light, if you go faster than that you have "disengaged by acceleration" and left the battle.
Even within that, scale is wacky. It's eight light-minutes from Earth to the Sun on average, so if a typical battle lasts five to eight minutes, a ship moving at a typical battle speed of 20c could move through a good chunk of the entire solar system in that time. If you assume that each turn is lasting 1/30th of a second, distance scale becomes more reasonable but the time scale is insane...
It's all because of data published in the original source materials that the SFU is derived from, which ADB, Inc. is obliged to stick to. I don't think about it too hard, my brain hurts enough as it is.
Even within that, scale is wacky. It's eight light-minutes from Earth to the Sun on average, so if a typical battle lasts five to eight minutes, a ship moving at a typical battle speed of 20c could move through a good chunk of the entire solar system in that time. If you assume that each turn is lasting 1/30th of a second, distance scale becomes more reasonable but the time scale is insane...
It's all because of data published in the original source materials that the SFU is derived from, which ADB, Inc. is obliged to stick to. I don't think about it too hard, my brain hurts enough as it is.
Well you could do that - but ACTA normally tries to avoid bookeeping as much as possible.
Would it not be easiest to have quick firing Plasma torps (which I guess are lower damage) every turn but having different damages at different ranges to simulate the nature of the weapon and the heavier Plasma Torps slow loading and varing numbers of AD / damage at range to distinguish them.
Very Slow-Loading has not so far been used in ACTA (IIRC) and has inheritant issues with the way the game flows:
Those being:
Speed of the combat - two turns of not firing a primary weapon is a very long time.
Alpha Strike potential
Tracking - one one or two ships its ok but have 8-10 ships and the odd player who "misrembers" things - not something we have to deal with these days it is true ........... but they do sometimes come up.
All in all I think these things have to be looked at as "do they add to the feel/enjoyment of the game, whilst not causing issues with the system" - if not - stick them in - if so keep them out.
@ Adrian - I wouldn't be surpised if Stealth = Cloaking
Tactical Warp - form other posters it seems that msot SFU battles take place at Warp - I guess this removes the cool rules for terrain for the most part?
Would it not be easiest to have quick firing Plasma torps (which I guess are lower damage) every turn but having different damages at different ranges to simulate the nature of the weapon and the heavier Plasma Torps slow loading and varing numbers of AD / damage at range to distinguish them.
Very Slow-Loading has not so far been used in ACTA (IIRC) and has inheritant issues with the way the game flows:
Those being:
Speed of the combat - two turns of not firing a primary weapon is a very long time.
Alpha Strike potential
Tracking - one one or two ships its ok but have 8-10 ships and the odd player who "misrembers" things - not something we have to deal with these days it is true ........... but they do sometimes come up.
All in all I think these things have to be looked at as "do they add to the feel/enjoyment of the game, whilst not causing issues with the system" - if not - stick them in - if so keep them out.
@ Adrian - I wouldn't be surpised if Stealth = Cloaking
Tactical Warp - form other posters it seems that msot SFU battles take place at Warp - I guess this removes the cool rules for terrain for the most part?
Excellent!msprange said:Don't worry, I nailed that one to the wall straight away
Wrong, Slow-Loading is every other turn and there is no such thing as very slow loading. For weapons with extremely long reload times (e-mines on a G'Quan for example) there is One-Shot which is self-explanatory; the time taken to reload is considered longer than the actual battle will last, therefore it's not worth worrying about.Rambler said:
In CTA, missile and (in 1st ed) energy mine variants are chosen at the start of a battle, not on a turn-by-turn basis. ACTA is about quick action, not book-keeping. Flexibility and "realism" is sacrificed for simplicity and speed. I don't want to keep track of how many turns it is since it fired... that kind of thing is fine if you only have 1 or 2 ships but if you have 10, each one with multiple weapon systems, in multiple arcs, some of which may have fired and some may not? And don't even start on what happens if you split your AD's!Rambler said:
Da Boss said:
As I said, the problem with simply using Stealth as Cloak is that you can't sneak up behind the enemy ship because he can see you and turn to face you. Maybe allow cloaked ships to move after uncloaked ships?
Tactical Warp doesn't necessarily remove the terrain rules, it just changes them. The table no longer represents the vicinity of a planet, it represents the whole star system, which means the rule allowing only one planet on the table no longer applies. Failing the CQ to enter an asteroid field at warp speed equals instant destruction! :twisted: Slingshots and orbits round planets won't work at warp speed. And if the table represents a whole system then there can be a new terrain type, the star. (I know the films are outside SFU's realm, nevertheless doing a slingshot round a star at warp speed could have amusing effects. :lol
If it was me, I'd make cloaking something more akin to ACTA 2E hyperspace rules - that is, it's not something you can repeatedly switch on or off in a game but allows you to drop in a ship (or a squadron) on an enemy's flank or rear - essentially using the romulan's sneakyness to balance out the klingon's manouvrability or starfleets more 360' weaponry.
One can make them a 'flight time' weapon without too much trouble - the torpedo rules from Victory At Sea are rather nice.
well even in fedcom you know where a cloaked ship is.
I dont like stealth for cloaking as its too much all or nothing whereas if you knew a cloaked ship was there you would shotgun space hoping for the hit. nobody at this point could "see" through cloaks so thats all they could do and for me stealth doesnt cut it to represent this technology
I dont like stealth for cloaking as its too much all or nothing whereas if you knew a cloaked ship was there you would shotgun space hoping for the hit. nobody at this point could "see" through cloaks so thats all they could do and for me stealth doesnt cut it to represent this technology
Iain McGhee
Mongoose
And if I recall correctly, cloaked ships can't use shields so if you do spot them they're going to get hammered pretty badly.
Pure speculation of course, but I think it could be that you can't fire on cloaked vessels at all, except as they phase in/out (by then using the existing stealth rules ?).
Perhaps with some exceptions to this, maybe something along the lines of a sensor sweep Special Action with a high difficulty to get the general area and then taking a large reduction in attack dice (half ?) to represent "shotgunning", proximity warheads etc.
I was thinking along the same lines as Locarno24 regarding cloaking, but only as a special Romulan deployment rule. You'll still want to be able to cloak during the game, especially if you're using an old tub like the early Bird of Prey which is pretty useless while it's reloading it's plasma torpedo (wonder if it'll have special rules regarding loading since it has barely enough power to charge it up to full power, especially under cloak ?).
Pure speculation of course, but I think it could be that you can't fire on cloaked vessels at all, except as they phase in/out (by then using the existing stealth rules ?).
Perhaps with some exceptions to this, maybe something along the lines of a sensor sweep Special Action with a high difficulty to get the general area and then taking a large reduction in attack dice (half ?) to represent "shotgunning", proximity warheads etc.
I was thinking along the same lines as Locarno24 regarding cloaking, but only as a special Romulan deployment rule. You'll still want to be able to cloak during the game, especially if you're using an old tub like the early Bird of Prey which is pretty useless while it's reloading it's plasma torpedo (wonder if it'll have special rules regarding loading since it has barely enough power to charge it up to full power, especially under cloak ?).
We had a long chat about Stealth at the recent B5 ACTA tournament
a few alternatives arose (some of which have been discussed before):
If you make the check you can fire as normal, failure means one of the these
1) you fire but loose any weapon traits (ie no SAP, AP etc)
2) You fire but re-roll any hits
3) Stealth Ships Hull becomes 6
4) increase range
Stealth/ cloaking is as ever, a tricky one to both get right and make it fun!
a few alternatives arose (some of which have been discussed before):
If you make the check you can fire as normal, failure means one of the these
1) you fire but loose any weapon traits (ie no SAP, AP etc)
2) You fire but re-roll any hits
3) Stealth Ships Hull becomes 6
4) increase range
Stealth/ cloaking is as ever, a tricky one to both get right and make it fun!
Weak, LOL...Da Boss said:
I'd be happy with any of the above as long as the ships were balanced with that in mind. You couldn't just, for example change to these stealth rules in ACTA. Minbari would need extra damage points to make up for it. But in a new game where it all needs balancing anyway - go for it.
SFU ships have shields while cloaked, the one time in ToS that the Enterprise used a cloak they tied it into their shield systems as a stop gap. Other than that no shields while cloaked is something added into/defined in later Trek.
Note that the Orions can have a limited number of cloaks as well.
Note that the Orions can have a limited number of cloaks as well.
well my suggestion is on phase in/out you shoot them with half AD but hit normally, on fully cloaked you half AD and only hit target on a 6.
the phase in/out could be swapped to full AD hitting on 6s instead if people would like that way.
peoples thoughts on this way?
the phase in/out could be swapped to full AD hitting on 6s instead if people would like that way.
peoples thoughts on this way?
I don't like this "only hit on 6" thing. That is no penalty if your hull is 6 anyway. It penalizes AP/SAP weapons against hull 6 I guess but then it penalizes SAP against hull 4 a whole lot. It seems like a penalty that affects different ships in different ways - therefore not a good solution.
katadder said:
Thats sounds interesting - I take it no mini-beams / beams in ST then as that would complicate!
As I understand hull is very low this time round so perhaps always hitting on 6's would work well? Its simple enough - do weapon traits / scouting re-rolls / concentrate still apply?
You could have it that a succesful scouting roll drops the target by 1 as does a previous ship firing on the claoked vessel - the whole "target that explosion and fire"
So it would be:
De-Cloaking / Cloaking ship
Full AD, 6's to hit
If scouted or Fired on 5's to hit
if both 4's to hit
Cloaked ship
1/2 AD, 6's to hit
If scouted or Fired on 5's to hit
if both 4's to hit
I might nick it for my own projects if its not used....have a coupel fo new races for B5 to finish stating up
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