ACTA - I want, I hate, lets adjust
- Thread starter Da Boss
- Start date
I think stealth should be all or nothing - either you got a weapons lock and can fire at the ship, or you didn't. Maybe create a new SA, "Manual fire", requiring CQ at least 9; if you succeed you can fire at a ship without a target lock.
Another alternative; make stealth checks for each weapon system, not for the whole ship. Different weapon systems have different tracking systems, so one might get a lock while another doesn't.
Or allow a ship which declared attacks on a stealth ship and failed to break stealth to pick one alternative target - if you can't see the ship you wanted to attack, try another one. Maybe make that require a CQ check as well if it would ruin stealth too much otherwise.
Another alternative; make stealth checks for each weapon system, not for the whole ship. Different weapon systems have different tracking systems, so one might get a lock while another doesn't.
Or allow a ship which declared attacks on a stealth ship and failed to break stealth to pick one alternative target - if you can't see the ship you wanted to attack, try another one. Maybe make that require a CQ check as well if it would ruin stealth too much otherwise.
l33tpenguin
Mongoose
AdrianH said:
If you fail a stealth roll, you should be able to pick another target. A ships sensor suite and weapons can handle tracking anything out there, provided they can see through each ships stealth. If one target can't be locked, it makes no sense why a second one can't be selected. If you are playing paint ball and someone is hiding behind a tree, do you ignore the other 3 guys running across open ground just because you can't shoot at the guy behind the tree?
No. 1 Bear
Mongoose
Stealth and Boresight. Should a ship be able to boresight a ship. Say an omega move into a position thats boresighted a sharlin on the table. And then not be able to target it to shoot at it even though the rules of being boresighted kinda make out that you can hit it.
Wouldn't it be easier to move stealth to the movement phase. Make it so that you could maybe have to break stealth for you to be able to see the ship.
Represent it on table with a marker that moves as said ship. But the identity is hidden until they fire or are spotted. So a Mimbari fleet would look very interesting in Initial deployment.
Wouldn't it be easier to move stealth to the movement phase. Make it so that you could maybe have to break stealth for you to be able to see the ship.
Represent it on table with a marker that moves as said ship. But the identity is hidden until they fire or are spotted. So a Mimbari fleet would look very interesting in Initial deployment.
Stealth is a very complicated thing, is it you can't see it or is it just giving false readings so you think you can see. I've always thought Minbari Stealth is more jamming than actual Stealth as the EA ships could detect the Stealth emissions but couldn't get a lock. Running silent is more you can't see me. Just my impressions
I'd prefer that there was to hit rolls & then armour saves rather just the straight hull score. A Stealthed ship might have huge modifier to hit. No rolls needed, just hope you get a crit that knocks out or decreases the stealths modifiereg A Sharlin might be 3+ to hit but 6+ in brackets showing the stealth abilities. If a score is 7 or more you will need a 6 followed by either a 2+ or 4+ depending on how you want to do it.
Crits might have a secondary effects in some of them reducing abiliites like Stealth or GEG or interceptors.
With the boresight thing, i'd prefer the 1/2 AD if it in the forward arc if you didn't have it lined up.
I liked the idea of bigger ships having more DC rolls a turn & take out permanent crits & the no DC one as well.
My preference would be ballistic weapons having more range & beams less. I go by the theory that beams diffuse over distance making them less effective. If you are talking B5 you generally see ballistic weapon opened up before beams. Not really an issue though.
I'd prefer that there was to hit rolls & then armour saves rather just the straight hull score. A Stealthed ship might have huge modifier to hit. No rolls needed, just hope you get a crit that knocks out or decreases the stealths modifiereg A Sharlin might be 3+ to hit but 6+ in brackets showing the stealth abilities. If a score is 7 or more you will need a 6 followed by either a 2+ or 4+ depending on how you want to do it.
Crits might have a secondary effects in some of them reducing abiliites like Stealth or GEG or interceptors.
With the boresight thing, i'd prefer the 1/2 AD if it in the forward arc if you didn't have it lined up.
I liked the idea of bigger ships having more DC rolls a turn & take out permanent crits & the no DC one as well.
My preference would be ballistic weapons having more range & beams less. I go by the theory that beams diffuse over distance making them less effective. If you are talking B5 you generally see ballistic weapon opened up before beams. Not really an issue though.
I don't like the idea of yet another dice roll for each attack. You already need to roll to hit, then to see whether it was bulkhead/normal/critical, and possibly stealth or dodge as well.Target said:
What might work is to account for the armour on the bulkhead/normal/critical roll. Armour is irrelevant to your chances of hitting a target but very relevant to what that hit achieves. You have about as much chance of hitting a vehicle with a grenade as you have of hitting it with a baseball but only one of them is likely to do significant damage.
Another possibility for boresight, borrowed this time from "Power Projection" (which itself is based on something else, but it was "Power Projection I saw
): instead of being a pure straight line, boresight is a narrow arc. Maybe have both versions depending on whether the weapon is flexible mounts on both sides of the ship which can only both hit a target exactly straight ahead, or a weapon fixed to the hull of the ship (e.g. spinal mounts in "Traveller", which is what "Power Projection" depicts).As for DC, the idea of large ships having more DC rolls makes sense (a larger engineering crew means more repair teams). If you don't like permanent crits, perhaps make them harder to repair - a vital systems crit needs two DC rolls, either spread over successive turns or using two of the larger ship's pool of DC.
I'm not so sure of that, and anyway, if ballistic weapons were more effective then the Minbari, Vorlons and Shadows wouldn't have abandoned them. Ballistic rounds move more slowly, so maybe make them harder to hit but able to do full damage at long range. Beams move at the speed of light but diffuse, so make them easier to hit but do less damage at long range. Tie this into my suggestion above to make armour a modifier to damage; range counts as a modifier to hit with ballistic weapons and to damage with beams. Missiles ignore both modifiers but all missiles need to pass a Stealth check; everyone has some sort of ECM which can jam a missile's guidance system at close range even if it can't jam a sensor lock at longer range.
l33tpenguin
Mongoose
I've seen the idea of a narrow (like 15 degree) forward arc for boresight brought up before. I think the biggest problem with it is a small arc is hard to judge, even if it would make a good solution.
We've used a special action to handle boresights (because I don't really like the 'snap shot' 1/2 AD special action). It has the advantage of 1: helping against init sinking, 2: working well for ANY ship and any weapon arc and 3: helps boresight greatly. And the name sounds better, IMO, than 'track that target'
Bring to bear: Requirements: ship must able to make at least 1 turn using this special action, a ship brings its weapons to bear against a specific target. Making a contested crew check, if the ship making the special action wins the roll, they may reserve one turn to be used immediately after the target ship has moved. When using this special action, the declaring player must use the remaining turn to attempt to bring the target ship into the weapons arc.
So, it would work like thus: Player 1's ship declares 'Bring to Bear' against one of Player 2's ships. Both players roll a check. Player 1 wins. Player 1 moves his ship like normal, except he saves one of his turns. movement continues as normal. Once player 2 moves the target ship, player 1 then uses the last turn to attempt to bring the target ship into arc.
I've found this to be a smooth solution that handles the items above well and is semi realistic, as it indicates a specific ship is tracking the actions of another ship. It is balanced nicely by 1: being an opposed crew check and 2: the target ship has the opportunity to still move itself out of arc, if it is fast enough.
We've found its flexible in that it doesn't only benefit boresight weapons.
Also, it makes things a little more realistic. I hate it, especially when I'm heavily out sunk, to see all my ships end up pointing in the wrong direction and away from any good targets. For a game to be simulating something that would take place in a real time environment, there needs to be some way of better controlling how ships move.
Along the same lines, what do you guys think of having a separate 'turning' phase? Any ship is allowed to save a turn to be used at the end of the movement phase after all ships have been moved. This slows down the game a little bit, but is MUCH more realistic in regards to ships actually pointing in a sensible direction. It would also really put a dent in init sinking.
We've used a special action to handle boresights (because I don't really like the 'snap shot' 1/2 AD special action). It has the advantage of 1: helping against init sinking, 2: working well for ANY ship and any weapon arc and 3: helps boresight greatly. And the name sounds better, IMO, than 'track that target'
Bring to bear: Requirements: ship must able to make at least 1 turn using this special action, a ship brings its weapons to bear against a specific target. Making a contested crew check, if the ship making the special action wins the roll, they may reserve one turn to be used immediately after the target ship has moved. When using this special action, the declaring player must use the remaining turn to attempt to bring the target ship into the weapons arc.
So, it would work like thus: Player 1's ship declares 'Bring to Bear' against one of Player 2's ships. Both players roll a check. Player 1 wins. Player 1 moves his ship like normal, except he saves one of his turns. movement continues as normal. Once player 2 moves the target ship, player 1 then uses the last turn to attempt to bring the target ship into arc.
I've found this to be a smooth solution that handles the items above well and is semi realistic, as it indicates a specific ship is tracking the actions of another ship. It is balanced nicely by 1: being an opposed crew check and 2: the target ship has the opportunity to still move itself out of arc, if it is fast enough.
We've found its flexible in that it doesn't only benefit boresight weapons.
Also, it makes things a little more realistic. I hate it, especially when I'm heavily out sunk, to see all my ships end up pointing in the wrong direction and away from any good targets. For a game to be simulating something that would take place in a real time environment, there needs to be some way of better controlling how ships move.
Along the same lines, what do you guys think of having a separate 'turning' phase? Any ship is allowed to save a turn to be used at the end of the movement phase after all ships have been moved. This slows down the game a little bit, but is MUCH more realistic in regards to ships actually pointing in a sensible direction. It would also really put a dent in init sinking.
No. 1 Bear
Mongoose
I can only see that working if it required a CQ check of say 9 or 10.
l33tpenguin
Mongoose
Lifegiver said:
Not completely. If you know a ship can only make a 45 degree turn, you only need to move your ships to 46 degrees outside that ships centerline during the movement phase. Then the ship will be incapable of making the last turn to use its boresight. It is still MUCH easier to use forward arc weapons, as under the same situation, it would require you to move your ships out from 90 degrees of the centerline.
And why should boresight be so overly disadvantaged? To be honest, giving every ship the option to save one of their turns till after all ships moves still keeps the playing field even, as ships with other arc weapons can use theirs more effectively. Turrets are actually made slightly less advantageous by this.
And why is it so bad? How much sense does it make when I move my ship and turn it, only to have you move your ship in completely the opposite direction? A commander doesn't point at a map and say 'Go here!' and then trudge along as his opponent moves off to the other side. True, we are playing a table top game, it can't reflect real life and real time. But we can do things to make it reflect better.
Especially at extreme ranges, it shouldn't be as hard as it is currently to get a boresight weapon to hit the target the player wants. At max range, it should be easy for big, slow ships to keep their main weapons trained on small fast ships, its not till they get into close quarters do the advantages of fast agile ships really come into play.
No. 1 Bear said:
Its an opposed CQ check. Which means it is pitting one crew against the other crew. Which makes sense since it is one ship trying to manuver to give an advantage against another ship.
Try it out in your next game and tell me what you think. I find it REALLY helps with initiative sinking and makes the game flow more realistically.
angelus2000
Mongoose
Burger said:
I have to admit, this an awesome idea and beautifully simple as well.
If I'm understanding this right, it looks like less crits would possibly be generated per attack, but if a crit result did come about, it would be a more severe result then? In other words, instead of creating say a 1-2, 2-1, and 3-4 from a single attack, the new crit would be X-3, X being the location roll?
How would Precise work then? Given the odds of getting a crit are roughly doubled with Precise, it could a be given that each crit would be much more severe compared to a vanilla weapon, right?
Hmm, seems like a good idea. As far as game flow goes it might actually cut down on the huge amount of crits the big ships might accrue through a game (How many -2AD or -1 speed crits have you seen piled on a War ship?), would reduce the chance of a Raid or lower ship getting the 6-6 or something easily nasty, and would do a great deal to enhance the appeal of taking those big ships with usually more AD or Weapons traits (and thus more chance of the crits being devastating).
How well has this mechanic actually worked in practice during the BSG games?
I can only see one potential problem, and that's beams vs non-beam power becoming unbalanced again. With a runaway beam hit which is easily possible, I'm worried about Beams being the only weapons that can get crits. Too much swing from one to the other.
Also, it seems like it would make the "Redundancy" fan trait rather.... redundant. With no more boatloads of small crits being accrued (which is what Redundancy was supposed to help with), no more real need to nullify crits, although it's still a great fluffy rule I'd still use.
Actually, fluff wise, I think it makes a huge deal of sense. Those Shadow and Vorlon beams could quite possibly generate X-6 results with every shot, along with some of the Drahk and Minbari weapons. It would make beams quite a bit potentially nastier, but create a great deal more variance in their damage potential (good solid hit verses grazing hits for example).
"Power Projection" had an easy solution to that - a template ring which you put over the ship. As the template is a ring, when you put it down the ship miniature does not get in the way. Alternatively, when you mark the ship's stand with the usual fore/aft/port/starboard arcs, mark the narrow arc as well. Maybe do both, use the marks on the stand to line up the template, then use the larger diameter template to more accurately check arcs when firing.l33tpenguin said:
This is pretty much what I'd have liked "Track That Target" to be, as it has the advantage that a boresight weapon can't target a ship which would be impossible to track. Compare with the current TTT, in which you can turn 45 degrees port, then attack something up to another 45 degrees to port which could never have been in your boresight.
The intentional downside of this is that you must turn to follow the target; if your turn of 45 degrees still doesn't bring the target into line, tough, you shouldn't have tried to track something that fast.
That pretty much makes it impossible to outmanoeuvre a ship to evade its more powerful fire arcs. It also makes "Track That Target" and Drazi "Start Attack Run" pointless. And, given that I've seen numerous games fail to finish because time ran out (including some at a tournament), anything which slows down the game even more is not good.
l33tpenguin said:
Well, many "ship hunters" like the WS depend on flanking other ships. Your proposals would make theese ships nearly obsolete, because they do not stand front weapons for long. The advantage of boresight weapons is being much stronger than others, I think this should came at the cost of some significant disadvantage as well. The principle of ini sinking somehow destroyed the game, I think Target´s suggestion is a very good compromise between firepower and flexibility.
l33tpenguin
Mongoose
angelus2000 said:
I have to agree here, that is a wonderful way of working crits. I really like it! It does cut down on the number of crits you see in game, which is good, and also ensures that smaller ships aren't dealing out massive 6-6 crits. Sorry, I don't think fighter flights should be dealing 6-6s. It also makes those big guns on heavier ships MUCH more appealing, and beams even more so, since typically you don't split AD from a beam, where you often might with a non-beam.
And, as much as I've been supportive of Redundancy, this is a very simple solution. I would say even a better one for solving the problem of games being ruined by crits.
Just curious, does a double or triple damage weapon score 2-3 crits per crit rolled? What happens if a weapon scores 7+ crits? do you end up with two crits from the same weapon? Like, a weapon scoring 10 causing a X-6 and an X-4? That would make sense to me.
Then use templates, lined up with the normal 90 degree marks. Tournaments can either provide templates which everyone must use, inspect and approve templates brought by players, or only allow one template on each table which both players must use.hiffano said:Burger said:
yeah, well, we know what people can be like in Tournaments
Partly because I played it once in a demo at a convention and have not seen it since. Partly because it's difficult to play if nobody I know has heard of it. And partly because it's not B5.
The website appears to be here:
http://www.powerprojection.net/
Out of three books, one is currently out of print, one is only available in the US, and in the site's own words one "is under development and will hopefully be released in 2007". Any site which refers to 2007 in the future tense is not a good sign. :lol:
l33tpenguin
Mongoose
AdrianH said:This is pretty much what I'd have liked "Track That Target" to be, as it has the advantage that a boresight weapon can't target a ship which would be impossible to track. Compare with the current TTT, in which you can turn 45 degrees port, then attack something up to another 45 degrees to port which could never have been in your boresight.l33tpenguin said:
The intentional downside of this is that you must turn to follow the target; if your turn of 45 degrees still doesn't bring the target into line, tough, you shouldn't have tried to track something that fast.
I think this plays into part of the realism. Player 1 declares the Special action Bring to Bear for Ship A, targeting Player 2's Ship B, designating the forward arc of Ship 1 to come to bear on Ship 2. Player 1 moves Ship A and saves 1 turn. Player 2 now has a choice. He knows Ship 2 is being actively tracked by Ship 2. It might *not* be his best move to move Ship 2 completely out of Ship 1's arc of fire. So, a faster ship *might* be able to get out of the arc, but it's a choice the player makes. Move to a position that isn't really where he wanted to be, or move where he wanted and risk an attack. It creates a great tactical decision.
Bring to Bear could be used to force a player to move in a specific way, a major part of a strategic plan is forcing an opponent to move where you want them to. Having a way to focus your big guns on a specific target is a nice bit of intimidation to prompt that move. The down side is it also forces your ship to turn in that same direction, possibly allowing your opponent the opportunity to position you.
Look at it in a real time situation. If you are trying to aim at a target, even if they are managing to stay just a head of your aim, you are still following them with your cross hairs in the hopes that they might slow down or turn just right in order for you to get your shot. Forcing the ship taking the SA to turn in order to bring their arc onto their target ensures that the SA is used to engage that target, and not just to save a turn for later.
Lifegiver said:
I don't think it would. These 'ship hunters' are still fast, agile ships, most with additional defenses to allow them to survive getting into range. And, they should be threatened by ships at extream range loaded with heavy weapons when they have a lot of ground to cover. But 'Bring to Bear' can also help these ship hunters as well.
I played a game at war level, I was playing Shadows. I had a pack of 8 Scouts I was using as said 'ship hunters' Only I was out sunk rather heavily. I watched helplessly for several turns as I would try to position my group of scouts in different directions in order to cover EVERY possible position that one of my opponents War level ships *MIGHT* have moved into. More often than not, I would get 1 scout in arc to attack, 2 if I was lucky. Sometimes none at all could fire. I was VERY frustrated with this encounter. It didn't make logical sense that a single larger, slower ship would be able to out maneuver a group of some of the most agile ships in the game.
