Escorts, Carriers, Fighters Pt 1: Escorts - UNOFFICIAL

[Ben2]

Hi guys

I've been working on some carriers, escorts and fighters, which are totally unofficial. The earliest we will see ACTA fighters will be 2013, and apart from Hydrans, there are no fighters in Federation Commander at the moment. I asked Matt about it, and I can post some things on the forum as long as I make it clear that they aren't official, which they aren't.

I'll post escorts first, as those are the things most people want to try out now, with the profusion of drone fleets about.

New Traits

Aegis: The ship may contribute phasers, drones and anti-drones to the Defensive Fire of any friendly ship within range and arc of the weapons. Anti-drones have a range of 4” when used in this way.As always each weapon may only be used once per turn and may be used to conduct Defensive Fire or attack enemy ships as normal.

Addition to Anti Drone Trait

Anti drones may be fired at fighter and shuttles within 4" of a ship with the anti-drone trait. As these are larger and tougher targets than drones, when an anti-drone is fired at it rolls to hit on a 4+. If a 1 is rolled to hit then the anti-drone runs out of ammunition as normal, and a result of a 2 or 3 means the anti-drone has missed the target.
If a ship with an Anti-Drone value greater than 1 fires at a shuttle or fighter, it may opt to roll up to as many dice as it's anti-drone value. However each dice roll of a 1 will reduce the anti-drone value as normal.

Limited Aegis: Some ships do not have all their weapons tied to aegis fire control systems. If a ship has Limited Aegis then it will list the systems able to benefit from the Aegis trait, for example the ph-3s and ADD on a Klingon D5 cruiser.

Errata

The following ships gain the Limited Aegis: ph-3, ADD trait.

D5, D5W.

FAQ - What about Plasma-D racks?

Plasma-Ds firing in ADD mode are treated in all ways as ADDs, so can be fired as ADDs to defend targets within 4". As noted in the errata, if a plasma-D rack is used as an ADD it will need to be reloaded before it can be used again.

New Variants - The escort ships provided are all variants of ships in the basic rulebook.

As the formatting is lost in posting ship stats on the forum, I have attached a word document with a variety of escort ships.

The word document attached contains 4 escorts for Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Gorn, 3 for the Kzinti and 1 for the Tholians. I have given rough points values for each, and said what the escort is a variant of so you know which model to use. I have copied the armaments for the ships on the SFB SSDs, and have not changed the basic stats from the rulebook unless there is a change in the data that the stats were taken from, ie number of boarding parties or shuttles etc.

Designers Notes

Escorts and Fighters/Carriers are two separate issues in ACTA. Escorts will certainly be added to the game, Fighters/Carriers for all races are a possibility.

The fighter rules I will be adding are not dissimilar to those in ACTA: Noble Armada, where fighters easily balance with ships, and are not in any way game breaking. ACTA: Star Fleet is a quick paced and fun game of starship combat, and the addition of fighters should not turn it into a game consisting of CVAs and some attendant smaller carriers sitting outside of weapons range of each other and trading fighter strikes until someone blows up. Ideally fighter rules will add a little more flavour for people who like fighters, but fighterless fleets are not at a disadvantage.

I will give you guys a couple of days to digest the escorts file, which will also give me time to write the fighter rules out in neat.

This is unofficial.

The escorts file is version 1 of the document, and has best guess point values. If you use them in a game and feel the points value is wrong, post a battle report and tell us about it.

Have fun guys.

I've now created an index page containing all the files.

http://actauncut.wordpress.com/index/

 

[Da Boss]

Excellent work thanks much appreciated

 

[SneakyPete]

Not meaning to rain on the parade but this is supposed to be a fast paced game, which i can't see wiht fighters littering the field, and if it does not involve just the iconic capital ships I am not interested... but that's me. If I want carriers and fighters I will dig up a WWII sim.

 

[Myrm]

Huh? ACtA in all its expressions has handled fighters admirably fast. In our B5 games once we had gone past the training game to teach players the rules and then put fighters down I cannot think of a game that ran with less that a dozen fighters. Even with 3 big carriers on table (50 odd fighters) the game did not slow down unacceptably - we'd have had more time sunk by adding 4-6 small escort vessels. Wings tend to move in big groups, dogfights are rapidly run as single dice each, attacks on ships can be rolled en masse.

You might not be able to see it working, but I will counter with the fact that I have seen it under an ACtA so suggest that the reality of previous expressions indicates it can work. Whether it does or not will depend entirely on how they choose to do it of course, but the structure for this working well exists.

I understand if a player wants to stick to just capital ships - its the ol' WWI v WWII split and I fall either side of the line dependant upon mood. I certainly understand if players have a worry about fighters given how hard it could get in SFB - but this is ACtA which DOES do fighters well.

This crops up quite often and always there's doom and gloom about what fighters will do to the game and how it must wreck it from people looking theoretically. I plead with you all who look at these topics from that theoretical standpoint - will people please start believing those of us experienced with the ACtA system when we say it has the capacity to handle this sort of thing if done properly and has the history of having done it properly.

 

[Renny]

Nice work there. I gather these are unofficial rules

We're still getting our heads round the basic game but hopefully we'll give these a go at some point.

 

[Halfbat]

What are Phaser-G's?

 

[Ben2]

What are Phaser-G's?

Phaser-Gs are gatling phaser-3s used by the Hydrans, Lyran Democratic Republic and the Federation. It's a ph-3 with 4 shots basically.

 

[Myrm]

Phaser Gatlings - essentially a Phaser 3 that can fire 4 times in a single turn in SFB, this allows it to engage multiple targets at multiple different times and gives a lot of flexibility and at short range if all 4 pulses are fired at once - can do serious damage.

They were a favoured weapon initially of the Hydrans in most time period, they subsequently were found on a number of fighters and escorts of some other races as the SFU timeline evolved

 

[tneva82]

Not meaning to rain on the parade but this is supposed to be a fast paced game, which i can't see wiht fighters littering the field, and if it does not involve just the iconic capital ships I am not interested... but that's me. If I want carriers and fighters I will dig up a WWII sim.

Have you played any other ACTA variants? Fighters in ACTA have so far been:

a) quick to play. Even if amount of fighters on field are approaching 100 markers...
b) hardly broken. In NA if anything they have been underwhelming so even fears of them being broken has little basis on evidence...

Now the "I prefer capital ships over fighters" is valid but then again each to his own. Better for there to be choices for both camps. That way both sides can be happy Just 'cause there's fighters doesn't mean you have to use them. Doubtful Mongoose will add "1+ carriers" requirement for fleet construction. That sort of money grabbing strategy when releasing supplement is more appropriate for certain big miniature company

 

[Ben2]

What I'm trying to do is have a situation where fighters are a nice addition to the game where people who like them can use them, but they aren't so good that you have to use fighters or you will get creamed.

Looking back over the escorts, the Fed having an escort frigate specifically to shoot down plasma torpedoes is pretty nasty. I think 120 points might be a better cost for it (making it cost as much as a DW) but I'd like to see someone use it before I update it.

I don't want to have a situation where there are Fed fleets with 5 escort frigates (Romulan border version) simply nailing every plasma torpedo a Gorn or Romulan fleet fires.

Also with escorts you are starting to have frigates with 4 dice of drones.

Spotted one error, the AF5 and K5D have 3 dice of aft phaser-2s, not the 2 dice I've put in the document, I have now corrected this in my master copy. When I've got some feedback on the rest (and hopefully some people taking the ships for a spin and spotting any other accidental errors) I'll upload a version 2.

If people spot any more errors, feel free to point this out.

 

[Myrm]

One way of making escorts rare is to give them an escort tag that means that they can only be bought if there is a ship with the Fleet Carrier stat (ie SFU True Carrier, leaving out minor carriers like the Hydrans and casual carriers) or a DN in the fleet - and thenat a rate of N per qualifying ship - it cuts the numbers down heavily.

 

[Da Boss]

Not meaning to rain on the parade but this is supposed to be a fast paced game, which i can't see wiht fighters littering the field, and if it does not involve just the iconic capital ships I am not interested... but that's me. If I want carriers and fighters I will dig up a WWII sim.

As others have said - fighters won't slow the game down IF they are as simply implemented as in previous incarnations of the game.

The thing that IMO presently slows the game is the SF defensive fire rule.

I must admit I am not keen on how prevelant the drone wepaon seesm to be across half the fleets given its power in ACTA.

However I don't understand the idea of having escorts only with carriers - whats the logic behind that?

Looking at the individual ships in the file (do they have class names by the way?) at first reading:

The Escort Cruiser is ok
The Escort Frigate/s is much better than the standard Burke - I would increase it by at least 20pts
The new Escort cruiser having 5 drones is very nasty

E4 - I'd keep at the same cost as the standard E4
The AF5 is much better than the standard F5 - I'd add another 10pts to make it 120pts
AD5 i'd make about 170pts its a superb support ship for a squadron

I'd make the Romulan ships at least the same cost as the primary ship they are based on.

 

[McKickaha]

Not meaning to rain on the parade but this is supposed to be a fast paced game, which i can't see wiht fighters littering the field, and if it does not involve just the iconic capital ships I am not interested... but that's me. If I want carriers and fighters I will dig up a WWII sim.

As others have said - fighters won't slow the game down IF they are as simply implemented as in previous incarnations of the game.

The thing that IMO presently slows the game is the SF defensive fire rule.

I must admit I am not keen on how prevelant the drone wepaon seesm to be across half the fleets given its power in ACTA. However I don't understand the idea of having escorts only with carriers - whats the logic behind that?

Have to agree that escorts should not require the presence of a carriers. As for drones, as the owner of a D6 on the receiving end of a 17 drone barrage yesterday have to agree with your sentiments here as well DB

 

[Ben2]

In SFB carriers are normally formed into carrier groups of 1 carrier and up to 4 escorts. Carriers often sacrifice some weapons, often defensive weapons, in order to make room for fighters. As most carriers that matter (ie Fed, Klingon, Kzinti) launch fighters carrying huge numbers of drones. Often games turn into carrier duels, as carriers can simply reload the racks on fighters and just spam colossal numbers of drones.

This is a situation I specifically want to avoid.

When facing drone races there is a pretty good argument for including escorts without carriers, and I think this is done sometimes in SFB.

You do get some escorts turning up in squadrons of normal ships, and allowing escorts to be purchased separately duplicates that. If there are escort ships so effective that it's a no brainer to replace all standard ships with the escort version (the Skyhawk-B for example just takes a standard Skyhawk and adds two plasma-D racks to it, with the only sacrifice on the SFB ship being a loss of battery capacity) then some measure will be necessary to prevent players simply not taking the non-escort versions.

I want to get some feedback before imposing limits, though I'd lean towards something like a 1 in 3 (ie you have 3 frigates, one of which can be an escort).

 

[Da Boss]

Sounds like the problem is with the carriers/fighters in SFB rather than the escorts?

One of the balancing things in other ACTA is the relative short range of the fighter weapons - I would suggets that keeping this will help alot?

Regarding ships that are better than the base ship - well thats a case of simply adding points on - the Skyhawk you describe maybe add +10/20 pts?

 

[Ben2]

Yeah, in SFB drone equipped fighters have tremendous stand off firepower.

I'm experimenting with reducing the range of stand-off fighter weapons to 6" (so fighter disruptors, ph-2s, photons, etc have a max range of 6") but have also thought about 8" (fits with ph-1 killzone, range bracket for plasmas, etc).

I'll try and type the fighter rules out neat and come out with Fed, Klingon and Romulan basic fighters today so people can play with them at the weekend.

 

[Da Boss]

Alot will depend on how difficult it is for ships to kill fighters? Do they shields etc?

If they don't have a "dodge score", just the -1 to hit then thats going to make a big difference.

In terms of range I would put most weapons at the Ageis range with a few "long ranged bombers" at longer to allow some degree of stand off firing - but thats just looking at what works for previous versions.

 

[Ben2]

Alot will depend on how difficult it is for ships to kill fighters? Do they shields etc?

If they don't have a "dodge score", just the -1 to hit then thats going to make a big difference.

In terms of range I would put most weapons at the Ageis range with a few "long ranged bombers" at longer to allow some degree of stand off firing - but thats just looking at what works for previous versions.

I've included a dodge score, but more fighters will have 1 or 2 damage points. If fighters are wiping out everything they come up against I'll lower the dodge score or remove it.

 

[Da Boss]

If you are having a dodge score def drop the -1 to hit I think.

As I read the rules at present if you fire a drone at a shuttle within 18" its an autokill?

Also if some fighters have drones can they use them as anti-drones?

 

[Ben2]

If you are having a dodge score def drop the -1 to hit I think.

As I read the rules at present if you fire a drone at a shuttle within 18" its an autokill?

Also if some fighters have drones can they use them as anti-drones?

Yes, exchanging their drones for incoming drones on a 1 for 1 basis.

I'm also adding a rule where a flight of fighters can 'escort' a ship, meaning that they can use their weapons to add to the defensive fire of that ship.

So while fighters can add lots more drones to a fleets offensive firepower it means fighters can contribute to the defensive fire of a ship.

Regarding the -1 to hit and dodge, I'm reducing the dodge scores by one to take into account the -1 to hit. Statistically it doesn't make that big a difference.

I hope to finish the rules and post them today along with some carriers and fighters so people can try them out. Once we start seeing batreps I'm fine with changing things to streamline rules, make things play quicker, improve the balance, etc.