High Guard Update - Comments Needed!

1. You can assign a total of ten percent of the guarded ship's tonnage to spaceships in the close escort role, playing goal keeper.

2. I don't recall quite which book it was, but there's also a programme that coordinates defence.
 
MongooseMatt said:
Let us hear what you think!
A comprehensive (all in one place) rule-system for missile and torpedo combat that includes rules for stealth (and stealth missiles), missile defences, missile (swarm) tactics (cf. Naval book), remote-operating missiles (i. e. terminal guidance phase is not handled by launching vessel), as well as all the missile and torpedo variants so far covered in other supplements, so I don't have to look across ca. 10 publications for all the rules.
 
paltrysum said:
Having played Brilliant Lances some years ago, I do think vector-based games are cool, but they take an exorbitant amount of time and take away from what Traveller purports to be: a TTRPG, not a strategy game.
I absolutely second that. I've used vector based rules for BattleTech space combat (optional rules found in Strategic Operations) and it is playable with 2 vs. 2 units per side, but it's a lot of paperwork do be done. One needs to know exactly how much thrust goes into which vector and, especially if one side wishes to escape combat, the initial speed (V0) needs to be known as well. Also, you cannot do all the calculations needed for accurate tactics in your head, so playability suffers heavily without proper electronics support: the minimum needed would be an app for use on smartphones or PCs that lets you calculate various moves and compare them to each other in advance in order to plan accordingly e. g. as pirates, corsairs or free-traders running for j-point.

Without that, it becomes just another form of hand-waving, but with endless paperwork.
 
There are two very simple vector based games that require no electronic support and have not needed it for over forty years...

Triplanetary and Mayday
 
Condottiere said:
Unless I'm thinking of Trillion Credit, there's a computer programme that coordinates defence between various ships.

You might be thinking of TCS. I had a look. P.24 has Point Defence Network, that allows several ships to combine their point defense resources. It’s not a computer program though, it’s an internal component.

The end result is similar to what the Point Defence program in High guard (p.64) does, except PD needs to run on each ship that wants to defend others, rather than having a central component in one of the ships. Plus it consumes only computing power, not tonnage.
 
Point defence is an evolving discipline, since you can have lasers or missiles act as such, and I think the latest was the ten percent tonnage close escort option.

I'm still trying to figure out if I can include dirtside weapon systems for that role.
 
Heheh



hgian.png
 
well, this is not High Guard specific, or rules related, but the thing that irks me the most with Mongoose Traveller products is that the pdf versions are horribly unoptimized and run very badly on a tablet, by far the worst of any publisher's pdf's I have used. I have a bunch of physical traveller books, which are wonderful, and the pdf's work alright on my PC (gaming PC with a lot of horsepower) but primarily I read pdf's on my iPad (a very fast one year old iPad Pro, one of the fastest tablets available) and with 3-5 seconds to load each page, it's completely impractical for use. I have loads of other roleplaying pdf's on my tablet as well, including many that have just as much, or more graphical complexity, and they all run well. The prices charged for these products are well into the premium range, it needs to run better.

So that's my feedback, please, please spend some time making pdf's that display quickly on a tablet. :)
 
middenface said:

Freakin' awesome, as always.

Have to say tho, I kind of expected a new cover to illustrate the actual High Guard maneuver... you know, a few shuttles skimming down in the gas giant atmosphere while that beautiful beastie in the foreground watches over them...

Still, great work!
 
Looks great, Ian. Maybe Matt will commission the “opposite view” of the original cover: ships refueling in the murky atmosphere of a gas giant while Gazelles can be seen on high guard, above.
 
A bit late to the discussion here, but clarification of crits for large ships would definitely be appreciated. Of course, depending on the rule changes, the current issue may not be relevant, but at this point, it seems to me that the "Critical Hits on Large Ships" rules are vague enough to lead to confusion.

How I would interpret the rules is that you use them for ships with more than 1,000 hull points, based on "Severity of a critical hit is based on 1% increments of the ship's hull value (minimum 10 points of damage)." I would also say that the 1% figure is the minimum damage that must be inflicted for a critical hit. In which case, it is
impossible
to crit a ship of greater than ~28,000 tons (standard hull, no reinforced or light hull), as that would have 14,000 hull points and the large fusion bay can only do 140 points of damage on a max damage roll. But if only 10 points of damage are necessary for a severity 1 crit, then installing large numbers of large bays allows you to go fishing for criticals with that nice +4 bonus. I'm just not sure what was
with these rules, so it's difficult to know which interpretation is correct.
 
Just thinking aloud. The recent release of 2300AD, using the MGT2 rule-set, bring back the old GDW 2300AD Star Cruiser game as advanced space combat rules.
 
Must have for me is the return for Naval Character generation. The expanded creation process for naval characters added so much to the game for me (same for Army and Airforce in Mercenary). The Classic Traveller High Guard with its super detailed assignments and branch layouts really made great character backgrounds. Battle, strikes, siege, shore duty, and special assignments. Command and staff assignments. Attaches. Cross-training. So much depth for building backgrounds. I miss that more than anything else from the old days.

The 2008 High Guard streamlined version was good too and I could live with that. Some combination of both versions updated to 2E would be fabulous. The only thing that seemed a little off in both versions, but better handled in 2008, was the Gunnery branch. I always thought it could easily be folded into the Line/Crewman or Technical branch.

So, Naval Character Generation is at the top of my list. BTW, why was it removed from the most recent version?
 
I miss the year-by-year detailed generation too, but in those days, you got one career and out. Hard to say which is better.
I think they avoided adding back in character generation to avoid the rat-hole of having to do detailed generation for every career across a dozen supplements that happened in version 1, but that's just my conjecture. I just wish Zero-G was still a skill and not part of Athletics(DEX) or a convoluted workaround in Profession in the Companion. Battledress skill, however, I can live without. On the other hand, Scrounger and Belter are important enough to be skills, but I'm way off topic now...
 
In my game I expanded the term Events table to D66 and added those mission assignments back in, along with appropriate skills and opportunities for medals. For all the careers actually. Also added a few choices in the skill tables so Medic and Engineer aren’t so devilishly hard to come by.

Oh, and yeah I brought back Zero G as a discrete skill :wink: Too specialized to me to be subsumed into Athletics.
 
Unfortunately, High Guard is not the place for new skills. Perhaps submit a piece for the next Companion. :wink:
 
Back
Top