ACTA - SF Errata

[Iapologisedon4chan]

(except if loaded up with drones, and they can be evaded or shot down).

Two or three can be shot down. Maybe even 4. If your lucky 5, really lucky and have a ship built up of Ph-3, Tractors and ADD 6. But EIGHT!?

The real problems with the Sal isn't it's high toughness so much, it's it's capacity to mount 8 drones, which is far in excess of any ship in the game.

The Sparrowhawk at 20pts more also has lots of damage - 30/10 - and loads of guns plus the cloak

Not that much more, it's just the phasers it gets are spread out over a lot of different arcs so it looks like it has more weapons.

Again though it's not it's standard loadout that is the problem, it's the fact that you can use it as an 8 AD Droneboat that's puts anything the Kzinti have to shame for 150pts. The high toughness only compounds this issue, as it allows it to hang back, weather fire and basically kill anything smaller than a heavy cruiser a turn.

 

[Iron Domokun]

It shouldn't have 8 drone racks, six at most (and that's at the cost of mounting no other heavy weapons). Although even six is a problem.

 

[Da Boss]

Again though it's not it's standard loadout that is the problem, it's the fact that you can use it as an 8 AD Droneboat that's puts anything the Kzinti have to shame for 150pts. The high toughness only compounds this issue, as it allows it to hang back, weather fire and basically kill anything smaller than a heavy cruiser a turn.

It might well be overpowered with 8 drones - sounds like the easy fix is to say that if your heavy weapon mount is a drone then it only has 1AD - which fits with the 6 that Iron says SFU one should have. Maybe put it upto 175pts as well. Howeevr thats gut reaction with no testing............ which of course means very little

The SparrowHawk looks to me an absolute beast of a ship for its points, but again not played against it, so its only looking at numbers of plasmas against my Klingons.

 

[billclo]

As I recall from my SFB days, didn't the Salvage Cruiser have to pay victory points for the ability to fire more than 3 drones, and pay even more for the ability to fire 6? I don't know if 8 drones is even doable.

8 Drones does sound out of line though.

The scariest drone firing unit I can recall is the Kzin Battletug, with 18 drone racks - but it's only allowed to fire 12 a turn, thank God.

 

[Iron Domokun]

I think they paid more for an OAKDISC system. That would let them control 12 drones at once, but I don't know if it affected the number that could be launched. In FC, it can launch at most six per turn, and can only control six at once.

 

[Iapologisedon4chan]

Aha. I think I found out what happened. I went and hunted down the SSD for the SAL on ADB's website. : http://www.starfleetgames.com/federation/Commanders%20Circle/documents/Communique-66.pdf

(It's on page 6)

As you can clearly see the SAL was only supposed to have one 2 AD option bank, not the two that it's mistakenly gotten in the book. That's a clear conversion error that can easily fixed. A 6 Drone machine at 150 still seems unbalanced. It's almost the same as having a ship that can fire a Plasma-R with a range of 36" without needing to ever reload it, but 6 at least doesn't seem quite so overpowered compared to the unprecedented eight.

 

[Iron Domokun]

Oh Kayyyy... major problems with that link, Iapologisedon4chan. If that's a link to a pirated version of the SAL SSD, that's absolutely forbidden. However, it says the file name is "lacieheart.rar" and googling Lacie Heart tells me she's a porn star :shock: So I really don't know what's going on there.

A legitimate, downloadable copy of the Federation Commander ship card, which is in all the relevant particulars the same as the SFB SSD, can be found at this link to ADB's Commander's Circle site: http://www.starfleetgames.com/feder...eorginazation/FC_Orion_Salvage_cruiser_SQ.PNG

 

[GalagaGalaxian]

Copy Paste error?

 

[Iapologisedon4chan]

Copy Paste error?

A massive one. Here: http://www.starfleetgames.com/federation/Commanders%20Circle/documents/Communique-66.pdf

I got this STRAIGHT off the Amarrillo's website, free to download, as are all the Communiques.

 

[starbreaker]

I think they paid more for an OAKDISC system. That would let them control 12 drones at once, but I don't know if it affected the number that could be launched. In FC, it can launch at most six per turn, and can only control six at once.

Pretty sure OAKDISC was required to launch more than 4/turn, but it has been a while and my books are long gone. I also have dim memories of a SAL hull with six baked-in drone boxes, but they were those weird drone racks you generally only see on bases - three magazines (and a box for each) with a single launcher drawing from them that's magically indestructible until the last magazine goes. That may be a delusion, or something bizarre from the old TFG days. If there's a modern "drone bombardment" SAL variant in SFB it may explain where this 8-drone thing is coming from, but it probably still isn't right.

If they really used just hull and cargo boxes for determining total damage in ACTA this whole game is toast. More likely they did a proper total box count, but then failed to modify the crippled rating to reflect the fact that different hulls retain different amounts of combat capability after a given amount of damage. Cargo makes you harder to destroy outright, but it doesn't provide much padding to weapons and engines, which is why freighters are so easy to defang and halt with small volleys in SFB. A freighter might deserve the same total damage as a frigate with an equal box count, but it ought to go crippled much sooner in ACTA terms.

 

[Nomad]

The other Orion ship's option mounts are limited to 1 AD. Looks like that should be standard across all Orions (except for plasmas).

In the SFU, almost all drone armed ships are limited to six in flight at one time. There are a handful of ships with the ability to control twelve, but with drones being one turn weapons in ACTA:SF that's not too relevant.

In any case, I don't think drones are all that powerful in ACTA. They're nuisance weapons that force you opponent to tie up phasers and drones, and put ships on defensive fire rather than more aggressive SAs. Few if any drones will actually *hit* anything, and 1d6 damage each isn't a calamity. Even the Kzinti have too look at other methods of actually killing enemy ships.

 

[Sgt_G]

All: When looking at the FedCmdr ship card, don't forget that weapons marked "A" & "B" are what's known as "option mounts", meaning that (SELECTED PRIOR TO GAME START) these can be whatever the Orion player wants them to be. The Salv have four drone racks marked "W / X/ Y/ Z" and could have two more racks in the nose. Or it could have four drone racks and two photons, or a pair of disruptors, or plasma-F tubes, or one photon and one disuptor, or a fifth drone rack and a plasma-F torp.

Iron Domokun -- No fears, if it's on the StarFleetGames web page, it's a free download posted by ADB themselves. Pop over there and look around, and you'll find a TON of stuff available. I would suspect that as time goes on, maybe they'll post stuff for ACTA:SF as well.

 

[Jean]

Sgt_G, all is well.

Iapologisedon4chan fixed his pasting error. Iron Domokun is very aware of ADB's gaming sites and what we offer. He does a lot of outreach to our communities of players -- all while keeping things on the light side.

Jean

 

[Sgt_G]

Yeah, I see now that he was being humorious in pointing out the error. If I had paid attention sooner, I would have seen that .... and perhaps a whole lot more. ;-)

 

[Iron Domokun]

In FC, the "drone" option mounts in the wings can hold: Phaser-1 (left side or right side arcs), drone rack (standard rack), fed style hybrid drone rack, anti-drone, plasma-F torpedo, or plasma-D torpedo. So nothing with lots of punch (in FC at least), but very flexible.

 

[starbreaker]

In FC, the "drone" option mounts in the wings can hold: Phaser-1 (left side or right side arcs), drone rack (standard rack), fed style hybrid drone rack, anti-drone, plasma-F torpedo, or plasma-D torpedo. So nothing with lots of punch (in FC at least), but very flexible.

Did Mongoose skip on the alphabet soup designations for drone racks but keep them for plasma? Type A and Type G racks are still in my lexicon, and I haven't played SFB in ten years.

 

[Iain McGhee]

Pretty much. A drone is a drone is a drone in ACTA (so far). You've got G-racks, via a special rule for the Federation, but all the other current ones are identical. It'd be easy enough for them to alter traits to approximate heavy drone racks, fast launch racks etc simply by altering the weapon's stat line for a particular ship (might see something like this for the specialised drone ships, but I doubt we'll have the option to swap out racks and drones any time soon, if ever).

Plasma launchers are a different matter since they need to keep their designations for F- and D- racks since they have functions not available to the rest (carronades and defensive fire respectively, although the latter's not in yet). Doesn't really matter for G-, S- and R- torpedoes.

 

[Rambler]

starbreaker - Iain pretty much covered it. Just like Federation Commander there is one main drone rack that everyone uses and they all fire the same Type 1 Drone no building options for drone loadouts. Feds get a special rule that allows them to use a drone rack as a antidrone trait but it has a price to pay if you use it. One more tidbit on drones racks used as drone racks they never run out of drones so you never need to reload them.

The big differance is that now all seeking weapons, be they drones or plasmas, are now instant fire weapons systems. If a drone is shot at you it will automatically hits unless you planned ahead of time to evade it, shoot it down, or tractor it as a last line of defence.

Plasmas are also auto instant hit weapons like drones but will lose damage the farther away your target is so the alphabet soup had to stay with them to track how much damge the bleed out before they hit you. Plasma Fs will not hit a target at max range and even big plasmas shrink a lot at range.

 

[Iapologisedon4chan]

Pretty much. A drone is a drone is a drone in ACTA (so far). You've got G-racks, via a special rule for the Federation, but all the other current ones are identical. It'd be easy enough for them to alter traits to approximate heavy drone racks, fast launch racks etc simply by altering the weapon's stat line for a particular ship (might see something like this for the specialised drone ships, but I doubt we'll have the option to swap out racks and drones any time soon, if ever).

That sounds somewhat like the specialized missile racks that Earth Forces got in B5. So definitely there's precedent for there to be special drone racks that players can swap out their standard Drones for in this.

 

[SonOfOrder]

Couple of questions that I could do with some clarification on.

Federation drone racks as anti-drone devices. What exactly happens when you roll a 1? Do you lose the use of 1 AD of drones or do you have to lose all your ammunition (on a Kirov say, so 4 times) before you totally lose the ability to fire offensive drones. Alternately is a single ADD roll of one sufficient to render your drone hard point worthless?

Secondly, Tractor Beams. So I can't target a cloaked vessel, but what happens if I have a Romulan locked in a Tractor beam, and he tries to cloak ? RAW there is nothing to stop this, but presumably he still can't move, even when he decloaks again, unless it passes a roll to break away. Perhaps turning on your cloak should break tractor beam locks? Whilest on the subject of tractors, does a lock prevent turning on the spot?

Thirdly, a question a question for the die hard SFB/FC guys. The Ortega class 713 USS Robert Mugabe? Seriously? I don't want to get too political on a wargaming board, but perhaps this ship designation should have been quietly dropped.

Thanks guys.