Exploding ships and cumulative damage
- Thread starter polemarch
- Start date
Iain McGhee
Mongoose
Burger:
Adrift ships move at half their original speed, no matter what crits they had when they were made adrift.[/quote]
That's incorrect. I asked about this on Rulesmasters a while back and Matt Sprange stated that you half the speed and then reduce the speed by any relevant critical results. I originally thought it was played as you said, perhaps representing thrust due to ammo and fuel explosions or weapon impacts.
As far as adrift ships go, I remove any below 0 damage from the table but leave the others as they can still be boarded or caught in explosions and be destroyed (possibly causing another explosion). I allow ships that have become adrift due to crew loss but still with a positive hull score to be fired on (to prevent the enemy from recovering them) as I believe that only ships that have had to roll for adrift/burnt out/explodes are immune from further damage.
Adrift ships move at half their original speed, no matter what crits they had when they were made adrift.[/quote]
That's incorrect. I asked about this on Rulesmasters a while back and Matt Sprange stated that you half the speed and then reduce the speed by any relevant critical results. I originally thought it was played as you said, perhaps representing thrust due to ammo and fuel explosions or weapon impacts.
As far as adrift ships go, I remove any below 0 damage from the table but leave the others as they can still be boarded or caught in explosions and be destroyed (possibly causing another explosion). I allow ships that have become adrift due to crew loss but still with a positive hull score to be fired on (to prevent the enemy from recovering them) as I believe that only ships that have had to roll for adrift/burnt out/explodes are immune from further damage.
CZuschlag
Mongoose
I don't see where it really adds much value to keep these hulks floating about. If you want to introduce something navigational, you could consider including a debris template of some sort that persists during the fight -- an interesting idea, actually, in the case of extreme explosions (hmm) -- but drifting ships of speeds that we need to track of because of the persistence of critical effects sounds like a lot of overhead and number-tracking for something that most players just take off the darn board anyways.
Drifting ships should only be left on the board in one case -- no crew, damage points still remaining. This may be relevant in campaigns; as owners may be able to retreive some functional ghost ships (as pointed out, I see, in retrospect, by Mr. McGhee). But that's about it.
As to bigger explosions ... that feels like a problem. You would be tempting several fleets to base entire tactics on this if it gets out of hand; combine this with the massive squadrons currently permitted for some crazy reason and you could go crit-trawling on a massive scale. It wouldn't be too difficult for some races to get to the ludicrous damage necessary -- sets of Saggis (broadside with Flash or Heavies), the Solarhawk (on "hot" turns), and the Rohric (if Mass Drivers on speculative fire are able to connect) are fairly cheap ships that can, at ranges of 10" plus, easily create 20+ points of damage against lightly-hulled ships. The Shantavi is a more expensive option. This would already only serve to further promote the problematic I-Fire-You-Fire-What's-Left phenomenon that we are already heading towards with these unfortunate 6-squadron Armageddon rule. That's a Warhammer phenomenon that I can well do without.
Drifting ships should only be left on the board in one case -- no crew, damage points still remaining. This may be relevant in campaigns; as owners may be able to retreive some functional ghost ships (as pointed out, I see, in retrospect, by Mr. McGhee). But that's about it.
As to bigger explosions ... that feels like a problem. You would be tempting several fleets to base entire tactics on this if it gets out of hand; combine this with the massive squadrons currently permitted for some crazy reason and you could go crit-trawling on a massive scale. It wouldn't be too difficult for some races to get to the ludicrous damage necessary -- sets of Saggis (broadside with Flash or Heavies), the Solarhawk (on "hot" turns), and the Rohric (if Mass Drivers on speculative fire are able to connect) are fairly cheap ships that can, at ranges of 10" plus, easily create 20+ points of damage against lightly-hulled ships. The Shantavi is a more expensive option. This would already only serve to further promote the problematic I-Fire-You-Fire-What's-Left phenomenon that we are already heading towards with these unfortunate 6-squadron Armageddon rule. That's a Warhammer phenomenon that I can well do without.
Had our first game of -15 becoming AP,DD 5", produced quite spectacular results when ships have gathered round a planet to unload troops. Didn't help that we keeped on rolling 6's in our crits. It was kinda the game where if you didn't roll a 6 in a crit roll you were dissapointed. Lesson to be learned don't orbit a planet while heavily damaged, it tight formation with lots of other ships when a Bin Tak wants join you but can't because there is no room. Bin Tak make room. The resulting series of explosions ( hillarious since my ship wasn't hit) took out 5 ships. Other than that it looks that it will work fine. We began to think instead of dividing hits by 2 for size of explosion, 3 might be a good idea. That means only some of bigger ships will reach the 10AD thresholds.
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