Idear for swarm fleet "problem"

[Burger]

Yep they're in the clutter-free resource thread.

One difference is that splitting 2 levels down gets you 3 ships not 4, and splitting 3 levels down gets you 6 instead of 8. This made swarm fleets weaker because they have less ships. The other major difference is you can "skip" levels, so you could split 1 Armageddon point into 1 War, 1 Battle and 3 Skirmish.

 

[The Hobbybox]

A simple solution to the CBD and Pak problems raised would be to say that armour is external to the ship and therefore anything internal is not affected by it, including crew loss.

The idea being that you have to strip the armour first, then you can kill crew, cause crits, etc.

Once armour is stripped, everything behaves normally.

 

[Burger]

Its nothing to do with crew loss. The issue is that armour reducing damage rather than hits has major practical difficulties. You have to either roll damage dice individually, or in clumps, and re-roll more dpeending on the outcomes of those dice, to see whether the armour has been depleted or not.

 

[katadder]

what you could do is if a single weapon causes enough damage to get through the armour then any crits within that hit count as crits. takes away the having to keep track of dice etc. simplifies it and basically means you have cracked the armour with tht hit so can cause the crits.
would mean armour isnt as good as shields but then when is it ever - shields stop the hits getting to a ship, armour is part of it so the impacts can transfer when its nearly out.

 

[Burger]

Yeah - guess that could work actually. Seems a bit unnatural though. If you have 10 armour left and I do 11 damage including 3 crits then your 10 armour does absolutely nothing to protect you, and my 3 crits go through as normal...

 

[The Hobbybox]

Burger,
I'm thinking of 'armour' as actual armour. I'm not thinking of it reducing damage or number of hits.

It's simply a shell on the outside of the ship protecting the squishy bits inside.

To fully outline my thoughts armour would work as follows.

1. It's an additional set of damage tracks on the 'Damage' profile of the ship.
2. It takes damage (be it DD, TD, etc) as normal.
3. Whilst the ship still has armour it cannot take crew loss, or sustain crits.
4. Once the armour is gone, the ship takes damage/crew loss and crits as the rules are now.
5. If a hit takes the ship into 'normal' damage then roll the hit as normal to see if a crit occurs.

Basically armour here works very much as it does in Classic Battletech.

 

[Burger]

Not familiar with CBT I'm afraid.

Lets say you have 15 armor left and are on Close Blast Doors, and get hit with 20 double damage hits. What do you do next?

 

[H]

Burger,
I'm thinking of 'armour' as actual armour. I'm not thinking of it reducing damage or number of hits.

It's simply a shell on the outside of the ship protecting the squishy bits inside.

To fully outline my thoughts armour would work as follows.

1. It's an additional set of damage tracks on the 'Damage' profile of the ship.
2. It takes damage (be it DD, TD, etc) as normal.
3. Whilst the ship still has armour it cannot take crew loss, or sustain crits.
4. Once the armour is gone, the ship takes damage/crew loss and crits as the rules are now.
5. If a hit takes the ship into 'normal' damage then roll the hit as normal to see if a crit occurs.

Basically armour here works very much as it does in Classic Battletech.

to do as you suggest. you can change the existing damage tracks..

so currently we have for example 32/10 the 10 being it's crippled threshold . it could become 32/8/10. the 8 being within the 32 as the amount of damage that is "armour" where no crits or crew loss occur. of course this would require balancin but is not difficult in theory at least

 

[Lord David the Denied]

Not familiar with CBT I'm afraid.

Lets say you have 15 armor left and are on Close Blast Doors, and get hit with 20 double damage hits. What do you do next?

30 damage, 15 crew loss and roll hit locations for ten of the hits, then CBD save against all damage/crew as normal.

 

[Burger]

Not familiar with CBT I'm afraid.

Lets say you have 15 armor left and are on Close Blast Doors, and get hit with 20 double damage hits. What do you do next?

30 damage, 15 crew loss and roll hit locations for ten of the hits, then CBD save against all damage/crew as normal.

OK now I'm totally confused, or maybe being blonde for the day!!! Why 30 damage? Is that damage to armour or to the ship's normal damage track? Why 15 crew loss? Why roll hit locations for 10 of the hits? Please explain step by step, I would like to understand properly because at the moment it is just a big mess of cnfusion for me.

 

[katadder]

yeah that confused me too.

 

[Lord David the Denied]

30 damage, 15 crew loss and roll hit locations for ten of the hits, then CBD save against all damage/crew as normal.

OK now I'm totally confused, or maybe being blonde for the day!!! Why 30 damage? Is that damage to armour or to the ship's normal damage track? Why 15 crew loss? Why roll hit locations for 10 of the hits? Please explain step by step, I would like to understand properly because at the moment it is just a big mess of cnfusion for me.[/quote]

Actually I cocked my maths up. Must keep calculator handy. My brain is aching from doing supergluing without the window open, so I'll have to leave this for a while... :?

 

[Methos5000]

I suppose I should bring this up being an ISA player an all, but what about ISA and Vorlon or any ship with self repair for that matter?

If we go with the idea of it negating crew damage and crits until the armor is gone, does Self-Repair fix damaged armor? If not and armor is part of the normal damage track for these ships, wouldn't they need more damage to compensate for some of their damage being unrepairable?

Conversely if they can repair armor would Whitestars need a reduction in overall damage to reflect the fact that they have limited invulnerability to crit and crew loss?

Armor seems to work okay on ships without self repair, even on Vorlons and Shadows since there is no crew to worry about, but when you start bringing Whitestars or Psi Corp Hunters into the equation things start getting a little blurry.

How would armor work against AA would the damage be cut in half then applied to AA or would AA not even factor in until the armor is gone? If its the former then ships with AA would probably need a smaller percentage of its damage track in armor to reflect the fact that the damage is being reduced before being applied to armor. If its the latter then ships with AA need more damage since AA if being negated for the first 30-35%(going by approximations from this thread) of damage the ship receives.

I like the idea of armor its just going to take a lot of testing to properly balanced.

 

[Target]

If it's a threshold then would work like crippled.
Once below it doesn't matter if you go above it again you are still crippled.
If you only have 1pt of armour left & someone hits you for more the armour still counts for that weapon system just like interceptors stay till get to the crippled threshold otherwise you people start rolling dice one by one & will drive you insane. Well thats the way i think it should work. Maybe start with the crippled threshhold number & use it for the amount of hits eg
Corvan 16/12/4
Primus 52/40/12 & so on.
This seems the simpliest idea, i was getting quite confused in the previous pages. People do damage, you minus it off. Not sure if you want to add a extra point if a crit is done or not & since damage is done or not. This seems dead simple to me.

 

[Burger]

If you only have 1pt of armour left & someone hits you for more the armour still counts for that weapon system

Thats certainly the most simple way of doing it. It does make armour rather powerful, however. An Artemis with 1 point of armour gets hit by a Shadow Ship for 6 Triple Damage hits, and takes no crits? Just doesn't seem realistic.

 

[Grimbart_Kriegsaxt]

Since shields take damage the same way armour would (i just saw that in another thread and in carefully reading the rulebook ) i actually dont really see the sense of armour (and not shields) myself.
But how to incooperate non regenerating shields in all ships... dont know...

 

[Burger]

Since shields take damage the same way armour would

Noooo, the proposal for armour blocks damage, shields block hits. They are totally different.

 

[Grimbart_Kriegsaxt]

The rulebook says, that you lose 3 shield damage to a triple damage hit, same would armour.. (just an example)

 

[Burger]

Problem is there are so many variations going around now....... which variant are you talking about? Ripple's one where armour works like shields with zero regen rate?

... if so then yes it works just like shields, obviously!

 

[Target]

If you only have 1pt of armour left & someone hits you for more the armour still counts for that weapon system

Thats certainly the most simple way of doing it. It does make armour rather powerful, however. An Artemis with 1 point of armour gets hit by a Shadow Ship for 6 Triple Damage hits, and takes no crits? Just doesn't seem realistic.

18pts of damn + 1 for each crit.
It's going to be dead anyway. Maybe you didn't roll any crits any way. If you take an extra point it will taking more damage if you did roll crits. It will the same anyway. Or maybe if it had redundancy & still had some left it wouldn't take any crits. It would be the same for every one. It would be just unfortunate.