Critical Hits...a new idea?

Hi

Just had an idea about critical hits and the way they work. It seems that most of the problems here spring from the fact that swarming big ships with lots of little ones has the potential for way more crits, and therefore leads to people not taking big ships, which leads to swarm fleets.

Heres my idea
Potential Critical Affirmation
the larger the ship (in corrispondence to the relative size of ships attacking it) the more protection from critical system damage it recieves from attacks by smaller ships due to sheer mass proportion.

each ship has a critical threshold based on its relative priority level. When any ship fires at another ship, a potential for a critical hit is scored when a 6 is achieved on a damage roll (5 for precice) same as always. However, instead of that 6 scoring a critical automatically, it must be rerolled in an attempt to beat the opposing ships critical threshold.
thresholds go:
target 6 if the target ship is 5 priority levels higher
target 5 if the target ship is 4 priority levels higher
target 4 if the target ship is 3 priority levels higher
target 3 if the target ship is 2 priority levels higher
target 2 if the target ship is 1 priority level higher
automatic critical if the ship is same or lower priority level

example: a hermes class transport fires its standard anti ship missiles at an primus class battlecruiser. They are super ap so they need 4s to beat the hull score of 6. Lets say for shats and giggles both dice hit. No interceptors so hermes rolls two dice for damage and rolls a 2 and 5, naturally doing 2 damage. The missiles are precise so the roll of 5 scores a potential critical hit. Since the primus is 3 priority levels higher than the hermes the one dice that caused a potential critical must be rerolled with a target of 4 in order to actually cause a critical hit. If the roll is failed however, an extra damage point is caused to account for the crack in the hull that was caused/exploited by the potential critical. This is modified by weapon traits such as double and triple damage. So if the hermes goes on to score a 2 on the potential critical affirmation roll, then no critical is rolled for but an additional 1 point of damage is done, bringing the total damage to 3.

basically the bigger the ship the more protection it gains from crits form smaller ships and if the ship is smaller, its the same deal as before.

feel free to rip this one to shreds

mario[/b][/i]
 
Very close to my own proposal, except that in mine crit "protection" started at Target 2+PLs over Attacker (e.g. Skirmish Attacker/Battle Target 4+ crit confirmation, going up 1 per Target PL).

Whilst I still like the idea, many were unhappy because they felt that the hull that a weapon was mounted on should have no bearing on the weapons ability to crit. It's an argument I can certainly respect, but personally I was happy with the abstraction.

Regards,

Dave
 
personally I think the new FAP breakdowns will solve the swarm problem, the crits work just fine for me. I don't feel there needs any modification to the crit system

The FAP changes are simple, effective and balanced in my view. I like the crits as is, they add a lot of spice to the game. Smaller ships are at a natural disadvantage in firepower and range, will usually have several of them in bad shape before they even get to fire at the big guns.
 
an interesting idea but I dont like.
a pulse cannon is a pulse cannon wether mounted on a warlock or a chronos. the differance in firepower weight is done via AD, more AD on bigger ships and more AD gives more hits = more chance of crits.
why would a pulse cannon on a warlock have more chance of critting than one on a chronos?
this would only work if every weapon no matter what its mounted on had the same AD. basically the same weapon but then weight of fire come through size rather than AD.
 
In some ways I agree... in some I don't.

Ranges and speed are such that it is very unlikely that small ships will lose more than one turn of fire against the big guns, so I don't see that being the balancing factor.

I sometimes have trouble with the idea of a pulse canon is a pulse canon. I keep thinking along the lines of a real world armor. If you can deflect a bullet, you usually can deflect lots and lots of bullets, and you need to go to a bigger gun to get through... not just throw more of the same. For game play purposes I can see leaving it as is... but while the a pulse is a pulse works well for the gun... it makes armor seem fairly silly. Battleship plate should shrug off small weapons... but here it's armor is armor as well... Chronos or Warlock.

All that said I think it's too big a change in some ways... and a pain to think about mid game.

Ripple
 
well armour can be abstracted out as a combination of hull/damage. the hull is the toughness of the plates, the damage is how long those plates stand upto destruction.
hull has also been used to describe how hard a target is to hit along with toughness in the case of fighters. as I am certain every capital ship in the game is tougher than 6 star furies.
 
It's the issue with how far you want to abstract stuff. When it's hard to picture what's happening, you lose some of the show feeling, some of the sci-fi rather than pure fantasy feeling.

Ripple
 
I totally see the counter argument and it makes sense that higher damage score acconts for the proposed "mass" factor i suggested, and i too do not have a problem with the critical hit table as it stands...that being said (dare i switch the focus of this topic) the Octurion. One of my favourite ships, its so cool, i have two, and have been know to on occasion buy up to take this ship, however it seems that as soon as the ship gets shot at it dies. I dont think i have ever taken the ship and not have it die by turn two. Two major examples that stick out in my head, last game i played a victory sliced an octurion in half in one turn, 90 or so damage from 11 hits and 6 criticals form the improved neutron laser. Also a few weeks ago the octuron went down to a squadron of blue stars that pelted it for two tuns. This really sucks and its mostly due to crits (lucky as they seem to be all too often) And its not just the octurion ive noticed, its a few other war choices, the white star carrier, the bin tak. Now compare these ships to the likes of the sharlin, or the warlock or even the brikiri one with the beam.

War ships come in two varieties, crap and amazing. There are no decent war ships, no middle of the road. I really want war ships re looked at and i was wondering if there was anyone out there that felt the same way.

By the way, i will continue to field the Octurion, even if it does not recieve a boost because it feels so bad arse, and i love the way it looks and plays.
 
I tend to agree with the basic statement about war ships. Definitely a all or nothing field there, and all too often shattered very suddenly.

Not sure on the exact solution right now... but we need one.

Ripple
 
A idea i came up with last night was to have a look at te FAP Table and link that with critical.
A example of what I'm talking about:
Take a Battleship against a skirmish for instance. Looking at the FAP table shows that we get 4 skirmish ships for one battle ship.
In this case a skirmish ship would need to score 4 crits in one round of fire with all its weapons in order to score one crit on a battleship.
A raid ship firing at a Battleship would need 2 crits in total, battle against battle would work just the way it is now.
Battle against skirmish the other way round would score a crit following the normal rules scoring a crit with every 6.
With this system i think the weapon load out of the smaller ships could stay the way it is.
 
SolarMacharious said:
War ships come in two varieties, crap and amazing. There are no decent war ships, no middle of the road. I really want war ships re looked at and i was wondering if there was anyone out there that felt the same way.

my group has found the same thing

amazing-usually hunter killer varities, mostly forward point guns, usually fast and agile

crap-what we like to refer to as Ship of the LIne, all round fire power, lumbering

we were trying to come up with a rule that would allow the ships of the line to compete with the hunters and be a valid choice

we were toying with the idea of a battery barrage

using multiple ships of the line you could degrade an opponents hull over the course of a turn, there by making it easier for each succesive Ship of the line to hit the opponent

we ran into a few problems, first classifying each ship into respective rolls, second figuring out what would be the qualifier for a battery barrage that would degrade hull

after this thought filling the sky with lead also came up, used to degrade dodge

in anycase were trying
 
Ike said:
SolarMacharious said:
War ships come in two varieties, crap and amazing. There are no decent war ships, no middle of the road. I really want war ships re looked at and i was wondering if there was anyone out there that felt the same way.

my group has found the same thing

lol just realized something,

why werent you there on wednesday, you could of joined our interesting discussion, though I do believe most of it happened on the drive home

EDIT:right nevermind your in germany right now. get back home the Narn want to Centauri blood
 
Hey I have a fantastic new idea get rid of precise! o no wait that makes the game far more balanced since you roll ones and get bulk heads.
 
I take again the opportunity to post my idea, last time it was ignored but I would really like the hear what others think about it.

"A idea i came up with last night was to have a look at te FAP Table and link that with critical.
A example of what I'm talking about:
Take a Battleship against a skirmish for instance. Looking at the FAP table shows that we get 4 skirmish ships for one battle ship.
In this case a skirmish ship would need to score 4 crits in one round of fire with all its weapons in order to score one crit on a battleship.

A raid ship firing at a Battleship would need 2 crits in total, battle against battle would work just the way it is now.

Battle against skirmish the other way round would score a crit following the normal rules scoring a crit with every 6.

With this system i think the weapon load out of the smaller ships could stay the way it is."
 
I'm in the club that is against Crit protection based on FAP. Why should a 1AD pulse cannon on a skirmish level ship vs. a 1AD pulse cannon on a war level ship score differently when hitting the same target hull? AD and traits are what determines the strenght of a weapon, not the ship it is mounted on.

Also, what about a war level ship hitting a skirmish? Should it be 8x more likely to score a crit? If not, why, since a skirmish ship is 8x less likely.

Ha.. this would actually rock, since you would see everyone bringing their largest ships to the table! :P
 
Its not so much the strength of the weapon that is different but the resilience of the target. So I ask you why should a Battle ship take a crit as easy as a skirmish ship?
This is a idea which makes bigger ships more resilient. Of course it is not very realistic in the B5 game rules environment but it is just as unrealistic as warships having the same weapons as patrol ships just more. You see it's perfectly fitting into the current system.

It does not need additional book keeping, or extra dice rolles. It could be simply added as a rule and wouldn't need a major review of the ship stats.

Also, what about a war level ship hitting a skirmish? Should it be 8x more likely to score a crit? If not, why, since a skirmish ship is 8x less likely.
Battle against skirmish the other way round would score a crit following the normal rules scoring a crit with every 6.
That should actually answer your question.

The other possibility however is to rebalanced every priority level to each other, and of course every ship within the priority levels to each other.
 
SolarMacharious said:
War ships come in two varieties, crap and amazing. There are no decent war ships, no middle of the road. I really want war ships re looked at and i was wondering if there was anyone out there that felt the same way.
.

Well, write down the best War choices, then the worst, and everything in the middle is in the middle :D

Where would you put the Poseidon? By the way, if TD,P Beam gets a runaway roll.. well any ship will feel like crap.
 
I personally would prefer simply to "tinker" with the FAP values. Be much easier to do than re design ships or add extra rules to the crit system. The changes to the FAP in P&P should be a good step in the right direction. After that's come out we can mull over it and use it for a while. Then decide if we want to make small ships cheaper or more expensive until we find the right balance. For example, in a battle scenario you can get 8 patrol currently. P&P will change that to 5. After that we can change it to 6 or 4 if it seems appropriate, or keep it at 5.
 
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