Critical Damage

[Nerhesi]

Hello gents,

Just wanted to pull this apart from the previous thread. It would seem that there is some concern of about the lack of critical damage with the new system. Testing shows that craft are taking significantly less critical hits which really down-plays the engineer's contribution.

If we take a look at a 40 hull free trader, requiring an effect of 6+ to do critical damage isn't very rare, but when it happens, you're taking a good chunk of the hull too. Add to this the regular hits which are doing hull damage, and what this translates into is that most ships will take no more than 1 or 2 Sev 1 critical hits before being destroyed. Therein lies the problem. Compare this to before where you could have systems being hit and jury-rigged fairly often...

A gent in another thread mentioned a possible middle ground of having criticals result from the damage taken, not the effect. Therefore, for every X points of damage dealt (after armour), you take a sev X crit.

I'm not sure if the magic number is 5 (total maximum of 8 sev levels of crit for a free trader - still a big improvement over the barely 1-2 now) or so... If you consider 8 levels of critical hit severity spread over the ships systems.. this is still a far cry from what it used to be. Unless you get extremely lucky, you'll never destroy a single system.

You would probably need to scale this for capital ships, maybe like per 5 damage per spacecraft and per 20 for capital ships or so.

 

[Samcollins]

In the battles I have run using the rules I've seen 1 to 2 critical hits on 40 ton ships. With 6 categories for each I agree there is not much system damage happening. I see no reason for 6 effect to be a marker for a critical hit. Effect is already adding to damage. So it seems the real marker for a critical hit should be damage sustained. This is sort of arbitrary and untested, but I like 4.

 

[Nerhesi]

In the battles I have run using the rules I've seen 1 to 2 critical hits on 40 ton ships. With 6 categories for each I agree there is not much system damage happening. I see no reason for 6 effect to be a marker for a critical hit. Effect is already adding to damage. So it seems the real marker for a critical hit should be damage sustained. This is sort of arbitrary and untested, but I like 4.

Well I like 5!!! haha - actually - to be a bit less arbitrary, we could simply make it a % of the total hull points.

You can still keep the effect of 6+ for crits, but the regular damage based crit would be the more realistic indication of getting system damage before you simply break-appart

 

[Samcollins]

That's right, I think that's mainly my objection to it. It's not that getting a 6+ is all that difficult under the new system. It is the fact that after getting two or three rounds of them, you've already taken out most of the hull. So you might have had a chance to do a severity 1 or 2 to a system or two, then suddenly the ship blows up. I'm stating the obvious but I'm sure there's an easy fix. To some maybe it ain't even broke. But I like busy engineers.

 

[Samcollins]

I think that in addition to an effect 6 hit causing a critical hit, a critical hit should also be rolled for every 10 PTS of damage inflicted, regardless of the effect when hit. Simple, easy. And round up, so say 11 pts. Would be a severity 2 critical. If the hit was effect 6, then it would be severity 3.

Also, the spare parts to fix hull points seems broken. Try .1 tons of spare pts to repair hull damage.

 

[Rikki Tikki Traveller]

That might now work for larger ships.

Are you saying that a Dreadnaught with 10,000 hull should roll a Critical Hit every time it gets 10 points of damage? A Tigress would laugh at 10 points of damage, but a Scout/Courier sure wouldn't.

Maybe it needs to be: Roll a Critical Hit whenever a ship takes more than 10% (5% whatever) of its Current (or original?) Hull Point value in damage from a single attack (not necessarily a single weapon since I am assuming that Barrages are still around).

Also, for Capital Ships, you will have different Sections (if per MGT1), so the rule should be modified for damage to each Section that exceeds 10% of Hull.

 

[Bense]

I'm not sure a +6 margin of success is all that rare anyway. If you close to Medium range your beam lasers are going to be rolling at a +4 modifier. If you have a reasonably skilled Gunner (say Gunner (Turrets)-2) a Critical Hit is pretty easy to achieve; you only need to roll an 8.
Add a sensor lock (for Boon), a Fire Control program, and slightly more skill and it starts to become very easy to get a critical hit with a beam laser.

 

[Nerhesi]

But you still need to penetrate. So even if beam lasers hit with a +6, you have to make sure that 1D6+2+effect (triple beam) still penetrates.

I don't disagree that there will be good hits in general (fire control, skill, augments, lining up the shot by the pilot, etc) - but +6, getting a 14+ isn't going to be the norm. Especially with a good pilot who is busing thrust to dodge, evade software, and range penalties

 

[Bense]

If you get an effect of +6 you're going to have at least 7 damage, 9 with a triple beam laser turret, and max out at 15 with a triple turret. No ship in the book has an armor rating above 4.
That's a severity 1 or 2 critical hit against any ship in the book.

There aren't any range penalties for beam lasers - if you're beyond medium range you're also out of range and closer is a bonus. Dodge gives a -Pilot skill, so that could do wonders if you have a good pilot. Evade only gives a -1, so it will help but not by much. So the best defenses against beam lasers are:
1) Don't close to Medium range
2) Use sandcasters
3) Have a really good pilot and have him save Thrust to dodge with
4) Have a heavily-armored hull
5) Use an Evade program

Other weapons are less accurate, so you have a worse chance to do a critical, but when they do they will do much more severe hits. A triple missile turret will do severity 2-4 hits on any ship in the book if it can get the 6+ margin.

 

[Nerhesi]

If you get an effect of +6 you're going to have at least 7 damage, 9 with a triple beam laser turret, and max out at 15 with a triple turret. No ship in the book has an armor rating above 4.
That's a severity 1 or 2 critical hit against any ship in the book.

Armour will obviously be above 4 as high-guard comes out, but that wont suddenly change the system.

. Effect of +6 hits is happening amidst other less impressive hits, all of which are doing hull. Even if you take a 2 armour ship with just beam lasers firing at each other, and using your example, that minimum 7-15 damage will also means massive damage to most of the Core ships, the 200 ton ships will be dead before their 4th sev 1/sev2 because they're out of hull!

Other weapons are less accurate, so you have a worse chance to do a critical, but when they do they will do much more severe hits. A triple missile turret will do severity 2-4 hits on any ship in the book if it can get the 6+ margin.

Yes, yes it may. However, regardless of how well it hits, it will probably do a massive amount of damage to the ship anyways. If it does hit well, you've been crit! Not that it matters because you've probably just lost half your hull on a 200 tonner too

So while triple beam lasers may be able to crit a bit more often against lower armour targets (and with Reflec still being a viable option it will be less damaging as well), the fact stands that crits are not the norm, but occur only in specific scenarios now (high rolls, low armour targets hovering at short/medium range without dog fighting or either leaving that range, AND while using beam turrets etc)