Diceless ACTA
- Thread starter Burger
- Start date
GhostRecon
Mongoose
I think the significant issue here is the relative "ease" with which you get criticals that can rapidly unbalance a game...
In a very recent example, I was playing my friend's Narn against him, while was using my Crusade EA... (Primarily as a "technology demonstrator" as I was trying to show him that T'rakks might be a decent alternative to Thentus'... sadly, they're not. Especially against Crusade EA. Though I did show him the strengths of the G'quonth...)
It was a 5 point battle, wherein I took:
8 T'rakk
2 Dag'kar
1 G'quonth
And he had:
2 Marathon
2 Apollo Bombardment
4 Chronos
The T'rakks did essentially no damage, at most around 10 to an Apollo (The G'quonth and Dag'kars, by comparison, wiped out a Marathon, all four Chronos, and crippled another Marathon enough for the tidal wave of Narn to board and capture it). By comparison, the Apollos were the best contenders, simply because they doled out a massive amount of crits per salvo... one T'rakk was crippled by a salvo of 8 Standard Missiles, three of which were crits, one becoming a vital systems crit.
He ultimately resigned because I had reduced him to 2 Apollos, and I had left 7 T'rakks that were looking like Swiss Cheese (And a few drifting away to boot) and a Dag'Kar and G'quonth that were pretty much untouched...
...And really, there are two key factors as to why I won: One, I had so many initiative sinks that it was -impossible- for him to boresight the ships that he -should- have, -wanted- to, and -needed- to boresight, namely my Dag'kars and G'quonths (I even moved one first, at one point, just so he could). By comparison, I had so many initiative sinks I could always boresight my G'quonth on whatever ship I so desired that was within arc. Two, despite the absolutely horrendous amount of critical damage my T'rakks were taking (Which was the absolute inverse of the complete lack of damage they were doing, though they were depleting one or two interceptor dice with their entire combined firepower) the T'rakks had enough damage to soak it all up and keep chugging.
Still, the amount of crits those Apollos did was absolutely amazing. Every salvo did at least two, and usually more. Only the pure number of damage on those T'rakks let them survive. If they were anything with even 5 or 10 points less, I'd have lost at least 5 ships in turn 2 alone. In fact, in the next turn or so while my T'rakks were trying to heel around and bring the Apollos back into forward arc, I can be sure my Dag'kar and G'quonth would've faced heavy missile barrages by the Apollos, and the pure damage and debilitating nature of criticals could very easily have turned the entire game, with a few good dice rolls (As others have pointed out). Fortunately, my opponent gave into despair and dropped out.
The ultimate issues are, I think, the problems of boresight in relation to initiative sinks, and the ease and crippling nature of critical hits, especially with precise weapons. 8 AD of Standard Missile by far outweighed the full frontal firepower of a Marathon with boresight, just by the pure damage the crits did. Some solution, I think, needs to be found to make criticals harder to get or the heavily crippling nature of criticals made harder to get. And boresight needs something to make it less crippled by initiative sinks.
In a very recent example, I was playing my friend's Narn against him, while was using my Crusade EA... (Primarily as a "technology demonstrator" as I was trying to show him that T'rakks might be a decent alternative to Thentus'... sadly, they're not. Especially against Crusade EA. Though I did show him the strengths of the G'quonth...)
It was a 5 point battle, wherein I took:
8 T'rakk
2 Dag'kar
1 G'quonth
And he had:
2 Marathon
2 Apollo Bombardment
4 Chronos
The T'rakks did essentially no damage, at most around 10 to an Apollo (The G'quonth and Dag'kars, by comparison, wiped out a Marathon, all four Chronos, and crippled another Marathon enough for the tidal wave of Narn to board and capture it). By comparison, the Apollos were the best contenders, simply because they doled out a massive amount of crits per salvo... one T'rakk was crippled by a salvo of 8 Standard Missiles, three of which were crits, one becoming a vital systems crit.
He ultimately resigned because I had reduced him to 2 Apollos, and I had left 7 T'rakks that were looking like Swiss Cheese (And a few drifting away to boot) and a Dag'Kar and G'quonth that were pretty much untouched...
...And really, there are two key factors as to why I won: One, I had so many initiative sinks that it was -impossible- for him to boresight the ships that he -should- have, -wanted- to, and -needed- to boresight, namely my Dag'kars and G'quonths (I even moved one first, at one point, just so he could). By comparison, I had so many initiative sinks I could always boresight my G'quonth on whatever ship I so desired that was within arc. Two, despite the absolutely horrendous amount of critical damage my T'rakks were taking (Which was the absolute inverse of the complete lack of damage they were doing, though they were depleting one or two interceptor dice with their entire combined firepower) the T'rakks had enough damage to soak it all up and keep chugging.
Still, the amount of crits those Apollos did was absolutely amazing. Every salvo did at least two, and usually more. Only the pure number of damage on those T'rakks let them survive. If they were anything with even 5 or 10 points less, I'd have lost at least 5 ships in turn 2 alone. In fact, in the next turn or so while my T'rakks were trying to heel around and bring the Apollos back into forward arc, I can be sure my Dag'kar and G'quonth would've faced heavy missile barrages by the Apollos, and the pure damage and debilitating nature of criticals could very easily have turned the entire game, with a few good dice rolls (As others have pointed out). Fortunately, my opponent gave into despair and dropped out.
The ultimate issues are, I think, the problems of boresight in relation to initiative sinks, and the ease and crippling nature of critical hits, especially with precise weapons. 8 AD of Standard Missile by far outweighed the full frontal firepower of a Marathon with boresight, just by the pure damage the crits did. Some solution, I think, needs to be found to make criticals harder to get or the heavily crippling nature of criticals made harder to get. And boresight needs something to make it less crippled by initiative sinks.
Not that it has any relation to ACTA but there is a Diceless game I can think of: Napoleon's Triumph , and its predecessor Bonaparte at Marengo.
What you're going for is something more abstract like just sheer numbers of x beat y or the rock-paper-scissors method where x ship beats y ship but y ship beats z ship and z ship beats x ship.
j.,
What you're going for is something more abstract like just sheer numbers of x beat y or the rock-paper-scissors method where x ship beats y ship but y ship beats z ship and z ship beats x ship.
j.,
The tendancy for the uber-critical-hit is one of the oft-criticised bits of ACTA - that and Boresighted guns - whilst a purely stats based game would be interesting, it also ought to be a lot simpler.
For reference, I like the EA Sourcebook game (based off Full Thrust) precisely because it's next to impossible to do the big critical (because you have to do enough damage to pass a damage threshold (i.e. 1/4 of the total hull integrity) before systems drop out, but if you really, really hammer a ship (take out half the damage in one go) you've got pretty good odds of blowing it do bits with chain reaction damage. As you should.
I find pre-written orders slow the game down immensely. ACTA initiative on movement would work, but I personally like the B5Wars/Adeptus Titanicus II version, where ship's initiative comes up in a sensible order based on manouvrability, regardless of numbers. The 'simultaneous shooting' seems quite nice as well.
Simplification's pretty obvious; For instance, a broadside from a decent sized warship can put out ten damage....but if there's no random variation, why shouldn't that be 'one' chunk of damage in a simplified game? Small ships, as noted, should go down the first time they get hit.
I'd like some very, very minimal randomness in it, to be honest, but I can see why you might not. A simplified game would also allow a much larger fleet; say a battle group of 10-20 ships as a normal game (more or less a chess set, in fact!) than if using the normal half dozen or so in a call to arms; where the lack of randomness woud make it feel a bit..stale..to my mind
For reference, I like the EA Sourcebook game (based off Full Thrust) precisely because it's next to impossible to do the big critical (because you have to do enough damage to pass a damage threshold (i.e. 1/4 of the total hull integrity) before systems drop out, but if you really, really hammer a ship (take out half the damage in one go) you've got pretty good odds of blowing it do bits with chain reaction damage. As you should.
I find pre-written orders slow the game down immensely. ACTA initiative on movement would work, but I personally like the B5Wars/Adeptus Titanicus II version, where ship's initiative comes up in a sensible order based on manouvrability, regardless of numbers. The 'simultaneous shooting' seems quite nice as well.
Simplification's pretty obvious; For instance, a broadside from a decent sized warship can put out ten damage....but if there's no random variation, why shouldn't that be 'one' chunk of damage in a simplified game? Small ships, as noted, should go down the first time they get hit.
I'd like some very, very minimal randomness in it, to be honest, but I can see why you might not. A simplified game would also allow a much larger fleet; say a battle group of 10-20 ships as a normal game (more or less a chess set, in fact!) than if using the normal half dozen or so in a call to arms; where the lack of randomness woud make it feel a bit..stale..to my mind
Burger said:
Ho ho... vectors, eh? Want to give Mayday a try?
The big problem with vectors in Traveller is that you have to exercise a lot of self-control to keep ships from sailing off the edge of the table... or have rules that help you do that.
Someone did make a good point, that most good, solid hits tend to finish off the target. I'll have to think about this...
locarno24 said:
I think (but don't know) that Full Thrust is stats-based, right?
I know for a fact that High Guard is completely stats-based, but has extremely abstract 'movement' concepts, and its main slowness is in the superabundance of weapon batteries.
Mayday and its kin are not only stats-based, but also vector-based, but the only reason they're not slow as molasses is because it's more or less a fight between small ships with few weapons and no armor rules.
Vectors can be assumed but be ignorable much of the time by doubling the turn length and assuming half of the turn's acceleration is normally used in countering imputed momentum.
Therefore, vectors mainly come into play in the only two important places:
(1) breakoff / pursuit
(2) world-gravity-assisted high-velocity turns
Traveller's Book 2 did this using ruler and vectors. It didn't have a rule for handling momentum, though, so getting the hang of it is real art.
Locutus9956
Mongoose
Full thrust is still dice based for weapons fire, but the way it works makes it far less luck dependant than ACTA and relies much more on how you plan your orders out.
