Escorts, Carriers, Fighters Pt 1: Escorts - UNOFFICIAL

[Da Boss]

All sounds good - look forward to reading it

I do know that ADB did not like shuttle escorting ships......but it makes huge sense to me.

My only initial concern with having to track the drones fired defensively or offensively - It would be perhaps better to have fighter have the ability to fire in one mode or the other and not both?

Can/should fighter weapons effect plasma torpedoes?

Combining the effect of the -1 to hit and dodge makes sense.

Another thought is to have the short range anti-fighter weapons like phaser Gs have the old accurate trait and ignore dodge?

 

[billclo]

One that concerns me is that most drone armed fighters have a small number of drones. I realize that in ACTA:SF there are no drone reloads or need to reload racks in order to reduce record-keeping/speed up the game. But given the ability of a fighter squadron of 12 fighters to spam out 24 drones a turn, never needing to reload, that's way too powerful. Just stick several squadrons 18" back from a target, and spam 72 drones at it each turn. Just sick.

At least if they had ammo that had to be checked off, there would be less of that kind of thing going on.

 

[Rambler]

Bill in FC BoM fighters are limited to firing one drone a turn and if i rember right they cut the endurance down to one turn so in ACTA they will probably have a range around 12". I doubt they will beable to launch more or farther in ACTASF.

 

[Da Boss]

Yeah drone are an issue - other things to consider:

Do fighters count towards the maximum number of vessels that can target a given ship per turn? If so does each fighter base count as one ship?Again as we have discussed previously its pretty easy to use flights of fighters to represent mutiple fighters - works perfectly well in previous versions (*)

Range - you could have fighter drones being able to hit at 12" but having to roll to
hit over 6".

Dogfight - Hopefully this is retained from previous versions so you can go after enemy fighters with your own - also helps makes different fighter types unique and represents any "dogfight drones"

(*) Before SFB get too upset about "dumbing down" their game - As far as I understand from posters here fighters have come close to breaking SFB to a greater or lesser extent - so much so they are hardly in FC? We don't want to make the same mistake in ACTA - lets try and use what we KNOW actually works

 

[Myrm]

One that concerns me is that most drone armed fighters have a small number of drones.
At least if they had ammo that had to be checked off, there would be less of that kind of thing going on.

You can cut down on the number of drones by abstracting fighters to a group or abstracting drones to a steady rate of fire - and adjusting the AD of the drones to the fire rate.
Assume the group has enough for a game of 12 turns for continuous fire adjusting for scenario, drone loss thats already abstracted etc - so a four drone fighter in a group of 3 has 12 drones - enough for 1AD per turn for even a big game. A two drone fighter type would have 6 drones amongst the group and be given Slow Loading (an every other turn automatic trait from B5 ACtA) to slow the fire rate. Equally ranges can be used to take this sort of abstraction into account.
This abstraction kind of takes into account drone control limits and similar issues, you could write in a bit of doctrine there. Yes, it does make many assumptions and average things out but in a fleet scale game thats not a bad thing, and it keeps things easy.

If you want to complicate things a bit you could have an Alpha strike option - give more AD for giving up the weapon system - tempt players not to stand off, require an entire squadron to do this together to reduce book keeping if you want.

There's ways to play this down, and yes it does play to averages and even play rather than boom bust options - but as I say, in a fleet action with doctrinal requirements and orders from the carrier I see no problem with doing that for ease of play, and while it won;t represent every form of play in SFB, it will represent a form of play for fighters and do it under the KISS philosophy

 

[Myrm]

(*) Before SFB get too upset about "dumbing down" their game - As far as I understand from posters here fighters have come close to breaking SFB to a greater or lesser extent

They don't break the game so much as the players. Its as much time and effort running a small ship as running a 6 vessel fighter flight - what you save in energy allocation you lose in all that movement and tracking on the table. Its too frequent that players want to run the carrier, its 2 escorts and the whole fighter wing - which I always thought was utterly impracticable. I'd have one player run the fighter and one the ships (and if I had enough players, more than one player on the ships perhaps). I mean when an impulse appears its bad enough to have to move your 12 fighters but if you split the fighters up and have 5 different speeds in the wing (possible for various reasons) its a nightmare in tracking. And firing time, well think entire fleet of Kzinti opening up on an enemy fleet with no ADDs but all successfully on IDF....lots of dice rolling. However in SFB an alpha strike from a big ship or two was as much work.

I have done plenty of games with fighters in SFB (yes I like Hydrans) and they were balanced AND playable but at a potentially HUGE (did I say HUUUUUGE) cost in player time - more players helped but still that was the issue. When playing 3 Hydran fighters on a cruiser duel, no problem - when playing a starbase assault again, it wasnt so much of an obvious problem because frankly you'd be playing for the entire weekend anyway but you would be spending lots of time on the fighters. However a fighter wing around with a couple of cruisers was a steaming mire of horribleness.

What MUST be avoided is that much of a time sink appearing in ACtA because it is the antithesis of what ACtA should be - and there's enough mechanisms around to do that. The essential change I would want to use as my yardstick would be 'can a player run his carrier, escorts and fighters all as one without needing someone to run the fighters'. If the answer is leaning to NO, then the port to ACtA has failed.

 

[tneva82]

One that concerns me is that most drone armed fighters have a small number of drones. I realize that in ACTA:SF there are no drone reloads or need to reload racks in order to reduce record-keeping/speed up the game. But given the ability of a fighter squadron of 12 fighters to spam out 24 drones a turn, never needing to reload, that's way too powerful. Just stick several squadrons 18" back from a target, and spam 72 drones at it each turn. Just sick.

At least if they had ammo that had to be checked off, there would be less of that kind of thing going on.

Why you think though there's certainly no reload?

Noble armada has one-shot reloadable fighter weapons. That's where main ship harming punch comes from. Once launched fighters need to embark onto a carrier and reload before relaunch.

 

[Da Boss]

Cool - I like alot of your ideas and have high hopes that Ben can implement fighter rules for ACTA very well for the reasons we have all said (as long as they stay pretty abstract)

 

[Ben2]

Each flight of fighters counts as a ship for the purposes of drone attacks.

I've added an additional mechanic whereby fighters operate in flights. The number of fighters in a flight then becomes important because it places a ceiling on the number of drones they can throw. If a squadron of 12 is divided into flights of 4, then a ship only has to deal with 12 fighters of drones. If squadrons of 12 are divided into flights of 6 then a ship could end up catching 18 fighters worth of drones.

Since carriers can carry 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 18 or 24 fighters flight size of 3, 4, 5 and 6 seem to be the way to go, particularly as some big carriers have 18 of one type and 6 of another.

Range - was thinking of 6 or 8 inches. I want fighters to have to get close to their targets. ^" means they need to come into ph-3 range.

Dogfight is in, I'm currently writing the Dogfight section. Dogfight drones are subsumed into dogfight and won't be separately tracked.

For the SFB crowd, I'm trying to keep the flavour of SFB fighter combat while ditching all the paperwork. I don't know how many people have played a CVA duel in SFB, but the profusion of counters (fighters, drone, T-bombs, etc) that start ending up on the table makes it time consuming.

However this means that you can actually game the big carrier duels in the SFB background in an afternoon if we convert it to retain the flavour and get the balance right.

However ACTA:SF is a game of starships and I'd be quite happy to leave fighters out completely if it looked like they'd come to dominate the game.

Yeah drone are an issue - other things to consider:

Do fighters count towards the maximum number of vessels that can target a given ship per turn? If so does each fighter base count as one ship?Again as we have discussed previously its pretty easy to use flights of fighters to represent mutiple fighters - works perfectly well in previous versions (*)

Range - you could have fighter drones being able to hit at 12" but having to roll to
hit over 6".

Dogfight - Hopefully this is retained from previous versions so you can go after enemy fighters with your own - also helps makes different fighter types unique and represents any "dogfight drones"

(*) Before SFB get too upset about "dumbing down" their game - As far as I understand from posters here fighters have come close to breaking SFB to a greater or lesser extent - so much so they are hardly in FC? We don't want to make the same mistake in ACTA - lets try and use what we KNOW actually works

 

[billclo]

One that concerns me is that most drone armed fighters have a small number of drones. I realize that in ACTA:SF there are no drone reloads or need to reload racks in order to reduce record-keeping/speed up the game. But given the ability of a fighter squadron of 12 fighters to spam out 24 drones a turn, never needing to reload, that's way too powerful. Just stick several squadrons 18" back from a target, and spam 72 drones at it each turn. Just sick.

At least if they had ammo that had to be checked off, there would be less of that kind of thing going on.

Why you think though there's certainly no reload?

Noble armada has one-shot reloadable fighter weapons. That's where main ship harming punch comes from. Once launched fighters need to embark onto a carrier and reload before relaunch.

Well I am not familiar with NA, so thanks for mentioning that. I could definitely see that being useful for the Hydrans and their Fusion beams.

Something as simple as 2 single shot drone weapons per fighter would probably work well for most fighters.

 

[tneva82]

Well I am not familiar with NA, so thanks for mentioning that. I could definitely see that being useful for the Hydrans and their Fusion beams.

Yeh the fighters there have one-shot guns so precedence for reloadable fighter weapons is set. And from the NA there's evidence it doesn't slow down the game that much.

Another option to limit their power is to reduce AD on the principle they have limited supply as already mentioned. 1AD of drone's ain't that bad. Especially if you pay the points for it. 6AD fighter drone looks impressive. Until you factor in point cost

 

[Ben2]

One that concerns me is that most drone armed fighters have a small number of drones. I realize that in ACTA:SF there are no drone reloads or need to reload racks in order to reduce record-keeping/speed up the game. But given the ability of a fighter squadron of 12 fighters to spam out 24 drones a turn, never needing to reload, that's way too powerful. Just stick several squadrons 18" back from a target, and spam 72 drones at it each turn. Just sick.

At least if they had ammo that had to be checked off, there would be less of that kind of thing going on.

Why you think though there's certainly no reload?

Noble armada has one-shot reloadable fighter weapons. That's where main ship harming punch comes from. Once launched fighters need to embark onto a carrier and reload before relaunch.

Fighters are reloadable in ACTA.

I'll probably create some pdf sheets of the fighters in illustrator, but I'll finish writing the fighter rules.

I'll put the rules up, then do a quick set of test fighter and carrier stats and put them up so people can test them, and then do some ship + fighter sheet pdfs.

 

[tneva82]

I'll put the rules up, then do a quick set of test fighter and carrier stats and put them up so people can test them, and then do some ship + fighter sheet pdfs.

Good. Doom-sayers can get to actually test them and see it's not going to be end of the world with game slowing down to hell

 

[Ben2]

The fighter rules have now been posted in their own thread. I will go and make myself some dinner, and then do some carriers and a version 2 of the escorts, and then reply to any posts I missed.

 

[AdmiralGrafSpee]

Great job Ben2. Now we just need some minis!

-Tim

 

[Ben2]

Great job Ben2. Now we just need some minis!

-Tim

ADB do have fighter minis for some fighters. They also do shuttle minis a little larger than the Mongoose ones.

 

[firekite]

i can not access the file, is the link dead or have you removed the file ?

 

[Ben2]

OK

I realised what a pain in the ass it is to follow the links I've put in.

So I've created an index page with all the files on.

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

I will update the opening post as well.

I had a bad day today (collapsed while I was getting tests at the hospital) so another day completely wasted. I've got very little to do for the rest of the week (which is going to wind me up no end) so I'm going to try and do it then. I'm still signed off work for another 12 days, and I'll probably get signed off until after I get an MRI in July, but I've gone from being out of the house 16 hours a day to literally doing nothing apart from posting on the internet a bit.

I need to do something to keep my mind active so I'll work on this.

Feedback gratefully received. Has anyone tried any of these out yet?

And I'm doing all of this under the influence of prescription medication, so if you spot a mistake, or something that doesn't make sense, do point it out so I can correct it.

 

[billclo]

Speaking of implementing fighters. It'll be really interesting to see how Hydran fighters work out.

This picture is an older one converted to reflect Federation Commander, rather than SFB, but it's still indicative of how powerful Hydran fighters are. It was put up at the SFU BBS today.

3 Stinger-2 fighters close to range 0, fire gatling phasers and fusion beams against a D7...the result:

:shock: :shock: :mrgreen:

 

[AdmiralGrafSpee]

Speaking of implementing fighters. It'll be really interesting to see how Hydran fighters work out.

This picture is an older one converted to reflect Federation Commander, rather than SFB, but it's still indicative of how powerful Hydran fighters are. It was put up at the SFU BBS today.

3 Stinger-2 fighters close to range 0, fire gatling phasers and fusion beams against a D7...the result:

:shock: :shock: :mrgreen:

I remember the old SFB one - it was quite humerous at the time especially since there was an anti-drug add out at the same time that was a parody of (i.e. this is your brain on drugs):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Your_Brain_on_Drugs

But anyway, would be great to have fighters in ACTA, but hopefully they will not be that powerful! Now granted the point is to shoot them down before they get to range 0! But in ACTA depending on how the initiative goes you might NOT be able to shoot them down in time.

-Tim