An idea for redundancy

[Target]

A way to work out a redundancy score.
take the first number of the ship damage score and add 1. not the best way to describe it so here's an example.
A Vorchan becomes 2 ( 19 )+1
A Hyperion becomes 3 ( 28 ) +1
A Haven becomes 1 (08 ) +1
A Ka Bin Tak becomes 19 (180 )+1
When a critical is scored roll d6 & this is what you take off your score , normaly this would the location roll. If you don't have enough eg a 6 is rolled & you only have 4 redundancy left the critical becomes 2 & d6 for area. Effectively instead of taking a vital crit your redundancy score makes it a engine crit.
Thought this would be nice simple way to do it & would show ships with superior damage score can take more.
What do you guys think?

 

[l33tpenguin]

A way to work out a redundancy score.
take the first number of the ship damage score and add 1. not the best way to describe it so here's an example.
A Vorchan becomes 2 ( 19 )+1
A Hyperion becomes 3 (28) +1
A Haven becomes 1 (08) +1
A Ka Bin Tak becomes 19 (180)+1
When a critical is scored roll d6 & this is what you take off your score , normaly this would the location roll. If you don't have enough eg a 6 is rolled & you only have 4 redundancy left the critical becomes 2 & d6 for area. Effectively instead of taking a vital crit your redundancy score makes it a engine crit.
Thought this would be nice simple way to do it & would show ships with superior damage score can take more.
What do you guys think?

The easier math is to make the score equal to 1/10 the damage value of the ship rounded up I know, new math.

I'm not sure if I like the idea, however. While I agree that heavier ships should weather crits better, you would have to inflict at a minimum 3 crits on the KBT before you see a crit. If the opponent was having a REALLY bad day, it could be as many as 19...

This is my personal opinion, but I'd rather see redundancy as a score, similar to hull or stealth, that the attacker rolled against each time they critted.

 

[Target]

yes 1/10 is far better, Havens don't deserve a redundancy.
If you were having a bad day & needed 19 crits to get through a Ka Bin Taks redundancy i'd suggest you probably had lost already.

 

[l33tpenguin]

yes 1/10 is far better, Havens don't deserve a redundancy.
If you were having a bad day & needed 19 crits to get through a Ka Bin Taks redundancy i'd suggest you probably had lost already.

This is true well, the average is going to be 5-7 crits before the redundancy is gone.

 

[Target]

Yes , bring on the the swarm. Im in a Ka Bin tak the biggest baddest ship in the Galaxy. :twisted:

 

[nekomata fuyu]

I'm also of the opinion that Redundancy (or Superstructure, or <insert name here> - it doesn't necessarily have to be redundant systems stopping the crits) should be treated in a similar way to Stealth, but stopping individual crits rather than stopping a ship from opening fire at all.
To extend on this idea, I also think that just as there's a special action for increasing Stealth (or giving it to a ship without Stealth), there should be a special action to give a ship Redundancy. This special action should be called Close Blast Doors, and would hopefully stop the complaints which the current CBD order gives

(Yeah, I know I brought this up recently, but the rollback ate it, etc, etc)

 

[l33tpenguin]

I'm also of the opinion that Redundancy (or Superstructure, or <insert name here> - it doesn't necessarily have to be redundant systems stopping the crits) should be treated in a similar way to Stealth, but stopping individual crits rather than stopping a ship from opening fire at all.
To extend on this idea, I also think that just as there's a special action for increasing Stealth (or giving it to a ship without Stealth), there should be a special action to give a ship Redundancy. This special action should be called Close Blast Doors, and would hopefully stop the complaints which the current CBD order gives

(Yeah, I know I brought this up recently, but the rollback ate it, etc, etc)

De'ja'vous ... I think I posted right after you last time on the same thing... of course, my constant voice on the subject is because I believe the game needs something like this. I hate seeing heavy ships get turned into worthless scraps of metal when they still have half their damage scores left just because they were critted. "oh great, my KBT is an init sink since it can't do anything... woo hoo' Its like paying a war point for an init sink, since you only get half the value of the ship as far as its usefulness.

And, like you say, it would work perfectly with CBD. Just change CBD to give a ship 2 redundancy (or +1 if the ship already has redundancy), while halving all AD. Ta da! a nicely balanced special action that lowers a ships chance to be critted (but not substantially) and while imparing its ability to fire.

Over all, this sort of a chance would lessen the crit happy enviroment that seems to be plaguing ACtA.

 

[Target]

Your idea for redundancy would work but you would need to go through all of the fleet list & decide who gets what. The reason i went the way i did for my idea is it could used with ships straight away without having to rebalance the ships as the ships are supposely balnced already with narn ships being more resilent by having more hits.
The Ka Bin Tak is really tough hence the 180 hits hence it's redudndancy/whatever we call it would really high. Ships with stealth,dodge & other defensive traits tend to have lower damage scores & would need a lower score to show the complexity of the ship & harder to repair after a significant of battle damage.
A problem people could have with rolling to stop the crit is become quite luck dependant, bit like stealth which some people have issues instead of having as wearing down the ship by damaging it.
A lot of people when this idea was first thought as far as i could recollect.
Raid 1 crit ignored
Battle 2
War 4
Armagedon 5
My idea ends a similar numbers except the ships could asorb lots of little crits or 1 big one. And gives a bit more of a bonus to ships with more damage scores. Having a redundancy trait means you are stuck withthe d6 which harder to balance.

 

[l33tpenguin]

This is something I really wish I had a group to try out, because I would write up redundancy ratings in a heart beat. Balance wouldn't be that difficult to achieve, imo.

The *majority* of ships would have the same score as other ships at their PL. There would be exceptions to this, of course, some races, as a whole, would have higher scores (narn, pakmara). Its doubtful I'd give any race significatly lower overall scores. Certain ships would have lower, some higher.

Starting at Raid, the average score would increase per level. Raid an average score of 1 (some ships with 2, some with none) through Armageddon with an average score of 4. The K'B'T would probably have a score of 5, possibly 6. Meaning that any crit against it would require a confrimation roll of 5+ or 6 to cause a critical effect. Otherwise it would just do damage as usual.

This means that the average Battle level ship will take 1/3 less crits than a scirmish level ship and a War level ship would take 1/2 the crits of a skrimish ship. This would make larger ships weather crits FAR better and give them some appeal over smaller ones.

 

[Target]

My only real issue is that the score doesn't get worn down with battle damage not till you crippled any way where the trait might stay , i guess that you could state that it automatically goes. It doesn't degrade not matter how many times you are hit.
There is a bit of difference even among raid ships.
Whitstars crits easily, small & highly advanced (1)
Hyperion , run of mill (3)
Nova, lots of guns pretty tough (4)
T'Loth a sponge (7)
Explorer (14) spongebob squarepants but will get crewed out.
A 6 crit becomes a 5 on whitestar where a Hyperion becomes a 3 & T'loth asorbs & still can take another. I'd prefer this way as it shows that ships can only carry so much stuff or have so many back systems. If it's based off their hits directly it shows directly how tough they are. The Hull score is supposely a reflection of Armour,ECM & how hard it is to hit due speed & maneverability. Dodge is a extra protection
The d6 is a little harder to balance than you think , remember 5+ dodge whitestars then it was 3+ & now 4+. Although it's not it the same league of dodge.
Edit : It's the Battle level ships that don't vary much but then ships like the G'Quan probably should have more hits & also they are generally Hull 6 instead of 5 which cuts down a lot of hits & hence crits.

 

[Chernobyl]

Not a bad idea, worth developing further. Question: would redundancy reduce as I cause damage?

under this idea, if I do 20 damage to the KBT withough getting a crit, have I reduced its redundancy by 2?

 

[Target]

Suppose you could reduce the redundancy as you do damage, if people think it's not too much record keeping. Might be a reason Narn use e-mines, to soften the ships up for the big hits hence no crits from e-mines.

 

[Clanger]

As Hull is meant to represent armour of the ship. Why not figure that into the crit redundancy.

Hull 4 or less no modifier
Hull 5 1 crit redundancy
Hull 6 2 crit redundancy

Then do the same with priority

Patrol 0 crit redundancy
Skirmish 1 crit redundancy
Raid 2 crit redundancy
Battle 3 crit redundancy
War 4 crit redundancy
Armageddon 5 crit redundancy

Adding these 2 modifiers would give you total crit redundancy. With this total this is how much per battle that a ship can reduce the crit location by. When the crit redundancy is used it is marked off.So if you have a crit redundancy of 4 you can reduce 4 crit rolls by 4, 1 crit by 4 etc as long as the total use does not exceed the total.

Please note this is not per crit but a total - to the battles crit rolls.



I think it would save record keeping and keep things easy.

 

[dag'karlove]

Yes , bring on the the swarm. Im in a Ka Bin tak the biggest baddest ship in the Galaxy. :twisted:

Spoken like a true warrior.

 

[Triggy]

With all of these ideas - the one thing to beware of is unbalancing the ships. Although the principle of "tougher" ships having greater redundancy scores is great, this gives them a "free" bonus over ships that aren't as tough and would need to be considered in gameplay balance.

 

[Foxmeister]

I agree it would need to be looked at carefully, but given that larger ships almost invariably fall prey to swarm fleets, I think that something is required to make the larger ships more resilient.

Regards,

Dave

 

[Scipio]

It's probably been mentioned before but I would like crits to work like this.

Roll on the attack table and calculate damage normally and check the damage off from the ship but don't check for crits until after writing off the damage from the hit.

If the ship after the damage calculation has more than half of its damage left none of the hits will crit. Precise weapons crits if any of the attack table rolls were a 6.

If the ship has equal or less than half the damage left normal weapons crits if any of the attack table rolls were a 6 and precise weapons if any of the attack table rolls were a 5+.

That would make it much harder for low priority ships to "crit out" a big ship before the big ship at least gets to show how big and cool it is.
It would also show that ships are much more at risk for catastrophic failures after they have taken a pounding.

A possible variant could be that if the ship has more than half damage left it gets _one_ crit if more than one 6 is rolled on the attack table.
That would show that more powerful weapons have bigger chance to score crits than less powerful ones.

 

[Target]

With all of these ideas - the one thing to beware of is unbalancing the ships. Although the principle of "tougher" ships having greater redundancy scores is great, this gives them a "free" bonus over ships that aren't as tough and would need to be considered in gameplay balance.

These numbers are very similar to the redundancy rules (ours based off crew score ) & it's works real well so i'd say it wouldn't really put many spanner in the works. Ships without interceptors/defensive traits tend to have less hits which means they don't take as many crits. With a quick look through the fleet lists most ships have round the same scores so it seems it benefits mainly the bigger ships which is the idea.
I actually think some higher level ships might need so more added to their scores-not the KBT
Armagedon 9-18 Nerron-KBT
War 5-9 Mankaht-Bin Tak
Battle 4-7 Liati-Shrutaa
Raid 3-14 Hyperion-Explorer (3-7) T'Loth
Skirmish 1-4 Darkhawk-T'Rakk
Patrol 0-2 Haven-Sleekhawk
All the Whitestars type ships have 2 due to dodge & AA & firepower
Im guessing the upiing from 5-6 in hull accounts for the slight difference between raid & battle.