Dumb question

[katadder]

would need more than one stat, you have to balance every weapons AD and DD. and also balance some ships to hit and armour stats. alot of work for this minor change.
also not all shots hit in ACTA, if you miss you miss, however pretty much every time a ship gets hit in B5 it is damaged in some way, space is alot less forgiving than sitting on top of an ocean so therefore only need the to hit roll with associated traits, which as we all know works too.

 

[Taran]

On the other hand, the Large/Lumbering ships have massive armour and you're less likely to damage them at all.

On the other hand, adding it to-hit rolls on top of everything else, you're talking about an additional 10-20 pages of rules.
Because now you need base rolls to hit, modifiers for range, speed of target, speed of attacker, anything in between the target and attacker.
Then STrength of weapon and how you check to see if the weapon is strong enough to pierce the armour in that location/arc...

Or, instead of the second half of the above, you could make like CBT and just add armour points on top of the damage points and no crits until you get through the armour (unless you have AP or SAP)...

Utter rubbish. Does Victory at Sea have twenty pages of rules covering the to-hit mechanic? I very much doubt it. MGP could lift the rules wholesale from VaS and tweak them to fit the setting, an hour's work for Matt or one of the other designers and a few weeks' playtesting and you're away.

I wouldn't know. ACTA is the first Mongoose product I have played. I am basing my statements on my experience with the 10 other systems I have used. And, honestly, GW and FASA are the only ones to get it really right in my opinion. ACTA, however, has the not insignificant advantage of being very similar but far simpler.

 

[Triggy]

It's not that big a change. Weapons get one extra stat and a few extra traits, ships get one extra stat each. A page of extra rules. Obviously it's a job for a new edition of the game, but it should have been done when 2nd ed was. VaS was there to prove the concept and no one with eyes can argue that every shot fired on screen hits its target.

The rules are in place in VaS, they just need adapting, it's not like VaS is a different system anyway, it was lifted almost wholesale from ACtA anyway.

It's an enormous change as Burger and katadder have pointed out! It really would require rebalancing every ship in the game with a lead-time of the best part of a year.

Not to mention, the game (IMO) wouldn't benefit from the change and although some people would like this to happen, just as many would not like this to happen.

 

[Target]

I had always thought the hull score kinda included armour, ecm & how difficult of a target it was.
Dodge & Stealth just represented the extra layers of defense ships had.
I wouldn't mind if we had to hit rolls & to penetrate/wound rolls but then we would be playing space warhammer.

 

[Da Boss]

I like the game mechanics for firing as it is - but that does not mean an unoffical mod would not be of interest to some I expect?

 

[Triggy]

I had always thought the hull score kinda included armour, ecm & how difficult of a target it was.
Dodge & Stealth just represented the extra layers of defense ships had.
I wouldn't mind if we had to hit rolls & to penetrate/wound rolls but then we would be playing space warhammer.

This is correct.