Close Blast Doors and Activate Defence Grid...

[Jim?]

This special action seems slightly overpowered, to be honest... especially for ships with either a big gun and a second batch of poor secondaries, or when ships are closing and you only have one long ranged weapon in range.

I think that it also slows the game down to a remarkable extent, I've seen 30+ dice being rolled to stop damage/crew loss rather frequently and if your opponent doesn't have many dice, it can take what seems like an age.

I was wondering if it would be a good idea to adapt it slightly to a non-dice based S/A, for example something like this:-

Close Blast Doors and Activate Defence Grid:
Your ship ignores every 5th point of damage and crew loss per weapon system attack this turn.

Example 1:
A G'Quan open fire at a Primus with it's port side batteries, the Primus has closed it's blast doors.

The Light Pulse cannon hit once, and after rolling on the hit table, it is a solid hit that causes one point of damage.

The Light Ion cannon hit 3 times, and after rolling on the damage table one bulkhead hit, one solid hit and a critical hit are recorded. The Narn player is lucky, and an additional 4 points of damage and crew are caused by the crit, a total of 6 damage and crew in total. One point is removed from this due to the blast doors, and 5 points of damage is caused by this attack.

Example 2:
A Sharkaan fires it's Improved Neutron Laser at a G'Vrahn that has closed it's blast doors, causing 6 hits.

After consulting the attack table, 4 solid hits and two critical hits are caused, dealing a total of 29 points of damage and 32 crew damage. The special action reduces this by (29/5=5) damage and (32/5=6) crew, and the Narn player ticks off 24 points of damage and 26 crew from the G'Vrahn.

Obviously this cuts the effect of CBD to a great extent (less than 1/5 of damage taken is blocked, rather than 1/3 on average), while still keeping it useful as a S/A. If you want to make it slightly more powerful, apply it to damage taken per turn, rather than per weapon system.

Thoughts?

 

[H]

little too much book keeping in my opinion, however I do think CBD needs more of a negative aspect. Ships like the Whitestars and Demos that are already at the top of their power brackets can use it extremelt effectively. You could in throtu allow CBD to give a Geg style effect perhaps, although this could result in underpowering it.

 

[Banichi]

I don't think the game would suffer at all if CBDs was scrubed. It really slows the game, and like Hiffano says, it seems taylored to make certain ships that much better. At least it needs a much bigger downside, or needs a passed crew quality test to be used.

 

[Court Jester]

A ship that goes on CBD cannot fire but reduces incoming hull and crew damage by a third rounding down (min 1).

 

[skavendan]

I don't think the game would suffer at all if CBDs was scrubed. It really slows the game, and like Hiffano says, it seems taylored to make certain ships that much better. At least it needs a much bigger downside, or needs a passed crew quality test to be used.

I agree it's used far too often.

 

[Lord David the Denied]

Change CBD from "only fire one weapon" to "half all AD on all weapons." That way no matter how many or how weapons you have you can still fire but only at half effect. Seems fair to me.

 

[skavendan]

Change CBD from "only fire one weapon" to "half all AD on all weapons." That way no matter how many or how weapons you have you can still fire but only at half effect. Seems fair to me.

That would work but am not sure I want to see a blue star on CBD!

 

[l33tpenguin]

Change CBD from "only fire one weapon" to "half all AD on all weapons." That way no matter how many or how weapons you have you can still fire but only at half effect. Seems fair to me.

That would work but am not sure I want to see a blue star on CBD!

Half AD and have a list of ships that cannot do CBD. I mean, it seems doubtful, based on show evidence, that the White Star has blast doors. Marcus would still be alive if the WS had blast doors and had them closed...

 

[H]

he'd be more alive if CC had told JMS she was buggering off a few weeks sooner!!

 

[Iain McGhee]

Limiting the ship types that can perform CBD would be pretty unfair if you had one side that could CBD with most of his ships and one that couldn't, never mind the balancing issues. Low PL ships often need it to survive high PL battles and if you're fighting a high-tech race with lots of long-range Precise weapons (the Minbari for example) it can be the only way you can survive the early stages of a battle when the fleets are closing range. Some ships seem designed to use it (those mounting a long-range beam or missile system and shorter ranged (or less capable)secondaries e.g. Omegas and many Drazi ships) and I'd think that the damage and crew stats of those were chosen with that in mind. And just because a ship can't literally close blast doors (and I'd bet that few actually have some sort of B5-style defence grid either) doesn't mean that they aren't capable of something that has the same effect, even if it's just putting on enviroment suits and assigning non-critical crewmen as extra damage control crews or redirecting all available power to self-repair systems or whatever.

 

[lastbesthope]

Marcus would still be alive if the WS had blast doors and had them closed...

Indeed, but maybe they had them and he just ddn't have them closed.

LBH

 

[Lord David the Denied]

If we're going to try to be realistic (who cares about realism, it's all made up! *sigh*) then any ship in combat is already cleared for action, blast doors closed, environment suits on and damage control parties standing by.

Anyway. If my suggestion isn't acceptable to the general populace, just remove the SA. It's not strictly needed.

 

[l33tpenguin]

he'd be more alive if CC had told JMS she was buggering off a few weeks sooner!!

I'm still not sure what the true story on all that was. I've heard multiple versions. I was just rather (happily) surprised about what I found while flipping through a certain pictorial in a certain magazine back in '99

Limiting the ship types that can perform CBD would be pretty unfair if you had one side that could CBD with most of his ships and one that couldn't, never mind the balancing issues. Low PL ships often need it to survive high PL battles and if you're fighting a high-tech race with lots of long-range Precise weapons (the Minbari for example) it can be the only way you can survive the early stages of a battle when the fleets are closing range. Some ships seem designed to use it (those mounting a long-range beam or missile system and shorter ranged (or less capable)secondaries e.g. Omegas and many Drazi ships) and I'd think that the damage and crew stats of those were chosen with that in mind. And just because a ship can't literally close blast doors (and I'd bet that few actually have some sort of B5-style defence grid either) doesn't mean that they aren't capable of something that has the same effect, even if it's just putting on enviroment suits and assigning non-critical crewmen as extra damage control crews or redirecting all available power to self-repair systems or whatever.

Understandable. However, the idea was set forth specifically as a balancing issue. It has already been stated that CBD is *overpowered* on certain ships. eliminating access to this ability in ones that it is reasonable for, removes (or at least adjusts) the imbalance.

 

[CZuschlag]

I don't want to remove it, just tone it down some.

I think we can agree that the firepower environment got increased between Revised and 2nd Edition. I would hazard to speculate that this was done in part because of balance with the upgraded Close Blast Doors special action. Fine enough, I don't think we want to mess with the amount of maneouvering the game has (if anything, I would want to increase it, make games longer, and so forth), as that would cause a fundamental reassment of the values of turning rates, turreted weapons, side guns vs. forward guns .... the list goes on and on. But....

.... the fact remains that, just like CAF used to be, Close Blast Doors (CBD) is the single most powerful special action in the game. Entire games are won and lost by it. It's just so MUCH. And it's not just that specialized ships can leverage it --- it's used by almost everything with over 1 gun onboard. So, if we don't want to meddle with the firepower rates to change the manouver relationshiop, and don't want to mess with the entire balance of all the other special actions, what DO we want to do?

I do support the idea of half guns. This just makes a lot of sense. However, that is just from a logisitics standpoint --- everyone will still use it, there instead will just be new power ships in the game (Drakh Light Raiders will still get a die, that Nova or pak'ma'ra Gunship in the center of the board will just refuse to die, and so on.

So help me, I loved the turning restrictions in the previous generations under CBD. The biggest worst argument against it was the boresight ships, because you could be reduced to zero turns this way, and that was crippling. Given that, may I suggest the new penalties when under CBD:

1). You can only fire half your weapon systems, rounding up.
2). You lose 1 turn when under CBD, to a minimum of 1/45 (big ships get something cool to help against weenie ship fleets, they won't eat the penalty.)
3). You lose Agile (Light Raiders, Blue Stars, and Whitestars, this is aimed right at you!)
4). Vree lose access to SM under CBD

And, because the boresight-dependent Drazi get hit by this a little hard

5). Drazi ignore penalties 2, 3 above as a special rule. This is a special racial ability (like Narn never surrendering to Centauri); it still functions in Mixed League fleets, but does not apply to Drazi hulls in other races' service (like the pak'ma'ra Warbird).

Whew! That's a lot of typing.

 

[Ripple]

The half AD solution is the most flexible for producing a consistent reduction.

It would handle current and future designs fairly well. The only sticking point would be single die weapons, specifically single die beams being usually good enough if the can still roll up. Even so I would tend to say round up.

The geg like solutions will be too weak or too strong depending on how you do it (ten percent of damage, by pl... do interceptors matter, shields?)...

The one point in x amounts won't fly due to being too complicated for folks who don't even like tracking damage and crew.

Ripple

 

[GhostRecon]

Why not also slap on that if you CBD! you can't use an SA in the next turn, as your crew try to sort things out again?

 

[Lord David the Denied]

It needs to be kept simple. Half AD is simple. It makes sense. Support this for an official change in the promised ACtA support to come...

 

[Target]

I like the half AD idea but i would change the save being 5+ to make the type of hit roll 1-2 bulkhead & 6 still a crit & 1 bulkhead & 6 a crit for precise. No more rolling lots of dice for hull damage & then crew damage. Far quicker & less complicated.

 

[Greg Smith]

I like the half AD idea but i would change the save being 5+ to make the type of hit roll 1-2 bulkhead & 6 still a crit & 1 bulkhead & 6 a crit for precise. No more rolling lots of dice for hull damage & then crew damage. Far quicker & less complicated.

Now that is a good idea.

 

[LaranosTZ]

I like the half AD idea but i would change the save being 5+ to make the type of hit roll 1-2 bulkhead & 6 still a crit & 1 bulkhead & 6 a crit for precise. No more rolling lots of dice for hull damage & then crew damage. Far quicker & less complicated.

Now that is a good idea.

Hmmm, I like this idea, however, one of the other things I've heard people complain is that crits can throw a game too far one way or another on a single lucky crit. Maybe just have CBD just give you a -1 on your damage roll...so when on CBD impossible to crit unless you have a precise weapon, then give it something like 1/2 AD, round down for all weapons.