Evaluate my house rule: High Penetration

jwpacker

Mongoose
This is a new ship-mounted weapon upgrade:

High Penetration (Double Upgrade): High Penetration weapons are better at breaching armor, and grant +1 damage per die, not to exceed the number of armor points the target is carrying. For example, a High Penetration Pulse Laser would do 2d6+2 damage to a ship with two or more points of armor protection, but only 2d6+1 damage to a ship with one point of armor, and the base 2d6 damage to a ship without any armor at all. This has no effect on black globe generators, nuclear dampers or meson screens. High Penetration may not be added to defensive screens as it has no effect. Meson weapons gain no benefit from this upgrade as they already bypass armor entirely.

So... out of control? must-have upgrade that everyone will take on every weapon? Needs to be a triple upgrade, only available three tech levels after the introduction of the weapon?

ETA: Just re-read the armor piercing rules for handguns, and could have probably used the same language there, about "ignoring one point per die" and saved myself some verbiage.
 
Sounds reasonable, but why not just use the Semi-Armour Piercing and Full Armour Piercing rules from CSC and treat those as upgrades?

Semi-Armour Piercing [SAP]: (Single Upgrade) - Ignores the number of points of armour equal to half the number of dice they roll for damage.

Armour Piercing [AP]: (Double Upgrade) - Ignores a number of points of armour equal to the number of dice they roll for damage.

I think you get the same effect as what you were trying to do, but since this method does it by ignoring points of armour rather than adding damage, it is a bit cleaner when dealing with low-armour ships.

Just a thought.

BTW: There could theoretically be a THIRD options:

Super Armour-Piercing [Super-AP]: (Triple Upgrade) - Ignores a number of points of armour equal to double the number of dice they roll for damage.

Personally, I think that one might unbalance the game too much, especially for Barbette and Bay weapons since it would mean that a Particle Beam Large Bay (TL-8, so at TL-11 it gets a triple upgrade) which does 9d6 damage could ignore 18 points of armour, which is more than any ship can have (armour being limited by TL). That is WAY to Powerful. I'm not even sure that Armour Piercing (ignoring 9 points of armour) might be too overpowering.

You would really have to play with the rules IN COMBAT to see where to draw the line.
 
Yeah, after I read the armor piercing rules again, I realized I'd reinvented the wheel when it came to the ship version.

I agree that super (or higher) AP is probably unbalancing, what with ships limited to 15 points of armor anyway. And that even with normal AP, you'd need to re-evaluate armor on pretty much every pre-designed ship in the book (not that you shouldn't already be doing so - what on earth were they thinking, making battleships with 6 armor??) as well.

I'll have to playtest it some. Might be that semi-armor piercing is sufficient, might be that I need to limit it to laser and missile weapons only.
 
Sounds reasonable, but why not just use the Semi-Armour Piercing and Full Armour Piercing rules from CSC and treat those as upgrades?
If you look at Universe of Babylon 5, quite a few ship-to-ship weapons were those same properties.
 
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