I'm done for now. Call me if 3rd edition fixes things.

[HappyDaze]

I've really discovered that I just don't care for a great many things about ACTA2E. Each of these individually detracts from my enjoyment of the game, but together they make every game an exercise in frustration. These are, in no particular order:

1) The FAP system is terrible. There are numerous choices that are 'weak' or 'strong' for their PL and no balancing factors to mitigate this.

2) The FAP system of buying down is even worse. The small ship hordes tend to dramatically outperform smaller numbers of higher PL ships almost every time despite the fact that they rate the same in fleet selection. This occurs even with squadrons mitigating the initiative sink problem.

3) Critical hits favor the smaller vessels too much. Larger (higher PL) ships need to have more redundancy (perhaps the ability to ignore the first few critical results depending on PL, or a die roll based upon PL - say on a 6 for Raid/Battle ships and 5+ for War/Armageddon ships - to ignore any critical) to balance out the benefits of 'critical resistance' gained by taking multiple smaller ships. As it stands, it's about as easy to knock out the critical systems of an Adira as it is a Centurion, and that's not good IMO.

4) The initiative sink nightmare. I'll leave this one alone - many people recognize this problem well enough.

5) The variability of Beams. I understand that luck is always going to be a factor, but IMO, Beams just push this too far. A single added roll per successful hit should be plenty rather than the current rules that allow a 2 AD Beam to score 7 hits and wildly skew the outcome of the battle.

6) Interceptors need to be fixed IMO, to reflect the power of the weapon being deflected. I'd like to see Interceptors become a trait that is either present or not - like Dodge - and usable against every non-Beam, non-Energy Mine, non-explosion attack targeted on the vessel. Weapons without a damage multiple are blocked on a 5+ while weapons with Double Damage or Triple Damage are only blocked on a 6. Weapons with Quadruple Damage can not be blocked with Interceptors. The current rules make Interceptors too useful in situations where the AD numbers are low regardless of how powerful the weapon is supposed to be.

7) Deployment should not be done entirely by one side and then the other. This can give up way too much for some forces. I'd like to see something that was more back-and-forth, but we'df have to find a way to keep it balanced to prevent 'deployment sinks'.

That's most of my problems with the game. I really hope that someday some of theis can be fixed. Maybe then I'll dig my ACTA stuff back out of the back of the storage closet I just threw it into. Maybe.

 

[darklord4]

I've really discovered that I just don't care for a great many things about ACTA2E. Each of these individually detracts from my enjoyment of the game, but together they make every game an exercise in frustration.

I second this opinion. I go back and forth between trying to play a strategic space wargame and outrageous space combat.

I'd like to expand on this duality with the points you made.

1) The FAP system is terrible. There are numerous choices that are 'weak' or 'strong' for their PL and no balancing factors to mitigate this.

2) The FAP system of buying down is even worse. The small ship hordes tend to dramatically outperform smaller numbers of higher PL ships almost every time despite the fact that they rate the same in fleet selection. This occurs even with squadrons mitigating the initiative sink problem.

While the FAP/Class system is kind of neat in grouping like-sized ships, there are some real winners and losers in every PL. As far as a deeper strategy game, it falls apart when one Raid-PL ship is not comparable to another, but is yet not comparable to Battle-PL ships. A point system would fix this but you either have to have constant updates to either stats or points. A point-based design system that equates everything would also work, but then you need constant updates to the design system. It really shines if you want to just throw some ships at each other quickly and know ahead of time that you are at a disadvantage.

3) Critical hits favor the smaller vessels too much. Larger (higher PL) ships need to have more redundancy (perhaps the ability to ignore the first few critical results depending on PL, or a die roll based upon PL - say on a 6 for Raid/Battle ships and 5+ for War/Armageddon ships - to ignore any critical) to balance out the benefits of 'critical resistance' gained by taking multiple smaller ships. As it stands, it's about as easy to knock out the critical systems of an Adira as it is a Centurion, and that's not good IMO.

The critical-hit system is a bit unwieldy. Whereas a lot of the game has a quick feel, applying and repairing critical hits bogs down my play looking up on the tables(yes, I realize there are only 2 lookups, but it takes 2-3 times as long to resolve each crit as it did to roll the dice in the first place). Somehow, shooting has the feel of the quick Woohoo! gameplay, while the critical-hit table lookups have the detailed wargame feel.

4) The initiative sink nightmare. I'll leave this one alone - many people recognize this problem well enough.

This is really a 2-part problem. Initiative sinks AND bore sights. While BS(boresight) adds to the quirky space combat feel, they don't seem to mesh well in the wargame scale of the game. Does the speck under that base stem ever _really_ BS on the target?

5) The variability of Beams. I understand that luck is always going to be a factor, but IMO, Beams just push this too far. A single added roll per successful hit should be plenty rather than the current rules that allow a 2 AD Beam to score 7 hits and wildly skew the outcome of the battle.

Again, runaway beams add to the woohoo factor, even getting hit by one, but it does not jive for me when trying to play a semi-detailed space game.

6) Interceptors need to be fixed IMO, to reflect the power of the weapon being deflected. I'd like to see Interceptors become a trait that is either present or not - like Dodge - and usable against every non-Beam, non-Energy Mine, non-explosion attack targeted on the vessel. Weapons without a damage multiple are blocked on a 5+ while weapons with Double Damage or Triple Damage are only blocked on a 6. Weapons with Quadruple Damage can not be blocked with Interceptors. The current rules make Interceptors too useful in situations where the AD numbers are low regardless of how powerful the weapon is supposed to be.

Again, the rolling and rolling and rolling detracts from the quick-play feel for me. They are quite powerful in smaller battles, unless you have beams.

7) Deployment should not be done entirely by one side and then the other. This can give up way too much for some forces. I'd like to see something that was more back-and-forth, but we'df have to find a way to keep it balanced to prevent 'deployment sinks'.

Same issues as the initiative sinking, FAP allocations, and FAP buy downs

ACTA works better for me as a quick and dirty lets-throw-ships-at-each-other system, though probably not balanced system. However, there are some aspects that drag the game into the area of the detailed-space-strategy-sim genre where some core aspects(FAP especially) fail.

 

[Triggy]

1) The FAP system is terrible. There are numerous choices that are 'weak' or 'strong' for their PL and no balancing factors to mitigate this.

2) The FAP system of buying down is even worse. The small ship hordes tend to dramatically outperform smaller numbers of higher PL ships almost every time despite the fact that they rate the same in fleet selection. This occurs even with squadrons mitigating the initiative sink problem.

While the FAP/Class system is kind of neat in grouping like-sized ships, there are some real winners and losers in every PL. As far as a deeper strategy game, it falls apart when one Raid-PL ship is not comparable to another, but is yet not comparable to Battle-PL ships. A point system would fix this but you either have to have constant updates to either stats or points. A point-based design system that equates everything would also work, but then you need constant updates to the design system. It really shines if you want to just throw some ships at each other quickly and know ahead of time that you are at a disadvantage.

Just to address this one point - a points based cost system wouldn't solve this at all. The issue is one of balance, not of granularity. This means any issues you have are with ships not being properly balanced (and there are a few). Converting to a points system wouldn't have changed anything as each ship would have just cost the same and still been unbalanced anyway.

If you are about to say that you could just raise the cost of an overpowered ship then I'd counter that with during playtesting we could have just lowered its performance slightly instead - same net result. The fact is that some ships slipped through the playtesting net for whatever reason. The only substitute is proper playtesting and feedback, not introducing a points system!!!

 

[Bostich]

If you are about to say that you could just raise the cost of an overpowered ship then I'd counter that with during playtesting we could have just lowered its performance slightly instead - same net result. The fact is that some ships slipped through the playtesting net for whatever reason. The only substitute is proper playtesting and feedback, not introducing a points system!!!

The only way *ever* that all ships at a given raid level are going to be equal is for them to be identical. Unless you can tell me every ship was pitted against every other ship at it's level and won 50% of the time.

I think the point is valid however that trying to say these 5 ships are different but equal is always going to be harder than just giving a point value to each ship individually to express how unequal it is.

Right now I get a lot of "Why would I ever choose this ship over this ship" from people I try to bring in to the game.

I get that a points system is a lot more work for Mongoose/playtesters.. but frankly so what. I'm paying money for a game and stuff like that should be built in. Warmachine for example has lots of units and point values for each and often sacrifices have to be made to squeeze in to point limits.

It's frankly a lot *easier* to say x ship should cost 5points more than go back to the drawing board on the ship.

Anyway it's all moot at this point it seems.

 

[Ripple]

I disagree with you Triggy. It is an issue of granularity, as tweaking performance is very hard, tweaking points if very easy. Tweaking performance can often be compensated for where as points you pay, no matter what. I'm not saying that points guarantees balance, I'm just saying that you have many levels to work with.

Ripple

 

[Triggy]

Frankly I've never found tweaking performance to be that hard and frankly, with the size of problems people are talking about, either way it would be more than 10% changes to the worst offenders regardless of whether it was points or performance.

I think my point is more that so long as the game is balanced, it is this balance that is more important than whether it is achieved through points or performance tweaks. It then becomes the job of the playtesters to ensure this happens and if one is harder than the other then does that really matter?

 

[silashand]

Personally, I dislike the FAP system period. I find it unwieldy and inappropriate. A points-based system would be far preferable IMO. I agree with Ripple that points would allow granularity impossible with the current system. I think certain ships *should* be powerful and tweaking performance would IMO be wrong.

As always, JMO though...

Cheers, Gary

 

[reyamc2001]

I don't mind the FAP system, although I do prefer points based systems. The larger problem in my mind is the point breakdown system. I think there should be something to encourage someone to take ships that are close to the level of game being played. Thus, if I'm playing a raid level game, I face mostly ships that are close to raid level.

 

[Rawwar]

Besides agreeing with most of what the original poster wrote I think dodge is fundamentally broken. This weekend I was sickend by the amount of shots we pumped into a Whitestar Carrier to see him roll dodges from multiple ships coming in at multiple angles. It's plain rediculous to think any ship can dodge that many times.

Then he's got onion saves, dodge followed by intercepting fighters, then Adaptive armour & finally closing blast doors. Games Workshop got shut of those sort of multiple saves ages ago. Then you have to vector in, how can the fighters know and keep up with all this dodging, nevermind intercept loads of incoming shots and who could shut all the blast doors with all these manoeuvres going on.

Intercepters I can live with as they can be overwhelmed but dodges are just sick.

I think the FAP is a very blunt tool too but I don't wanna go into that as it's been said before & I think everyone's aware of the winners & loosers here.

I also feel the Narn fleet doesn't fight anything like the Narn psychology.
You're doomed if you get flanked or worse attacked from behind.
If we're going to loose we make everyone pay a blood price. Why can't we ram? Against Centari it should be a given.
How come the Centari blow us away at medium and short range. This is the race that taught us how to fight. We captured their technology but somehow never used it.
I wanna fight like a Narn but to do so I need a Centari Fleet :shock:

I hope people are looking into this because like the OP I'm bitterly disappointed because after a hard days/weeks work I can't have a game. There's just way too much open to abuse & everytime I leave the 'game' feeling empty. It is that bad & I empathise with the OP's sentiments.

I'm just crossing my fingers that there's good news to come in the future because I love B5 & I feel there's great potential here.

 

[skavendan]

I'd like to see fleet carriers for all races reguardless it's moronic I can recover EA scum from my allied avenger but not my Psi Corps presious rare Telepaths!!!! like the corp would give a damn about those earthers!

Don't even mention the mothership love the description 7 in the hole wide empire 7!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! bah moronic raid level.

I like the ship but calling it a mothership is an insult.

And the fighter carrier.... O scary in a totally rubbish way lol what a waist and unfortunatly it comes in the box set so I have loads of them and it's only any good for Jump point bombing which is pretty much shunned by my gaming group.

Shadow Omega. Don't know if I ever get to use it properly I might add to this I just think the beam should be extended to 30".

Point sinkin is the problem with you move your enemy moves system but that I can live with.

Ramming is a no brainner some empires would out right just stand there fire till the ammo racks ran out. It's silly that ramming is so hard by the time your crippled 9/10 times your skeleton crewed so empires like the narn can not ram often if ever, not to take into consideration the affects of the crits you have suffered and how slow you are now moving to actually pull a ramming speed off.

Dodge + Interceptors + CBD's is too much,

and frankly it slows the game down alot...

on top of that Interceptors get tired...

Dodge doesn't???? for a fighter I could agree, small not very dangerous (lets pretend the vorlon fighters don't exist for a second). For a carrier ? your having a laugh how do you launch fighters while dodging around? that would splat some of your fighters on it's own.

Also think too many ships have lumbering in the game and there are loads of beams going around in high point levels it just turns into beam wars winner takes all.

 

[Rawwar]

Oh forgot crits while whinging about my Narn. All that damage & crew doesn't mean jack with this crit system. I'm critted to uselessness long before I'm crippled/destroyed.

However I think the OP mentioned this hence my omission.

 

[nekomata fuyu]

Whilst the FAP system itself technically allows you to balance ships, you can only do so by hacking around with the ships themselves. You can't just create a ship and have it as it's meant to be. One example of this would be the Shaow Omega - it's meant to be more powerful than an Omega, but no up to the standard of a Warlock, so where do we put it? Answer: shove it in to War class anyway, and leave it horribly underpowered.

As for the Psi Corp mothership, it's not meant to be a fighting ship, so it's doing pretty well to be Raid level in terms of combat capability. Instead, what's insane is that there's nothing to represent that they're actually worth a lot more than their battle capability - just giving them the special rule that they give away double VP would be enough to represent this, the same as for Gaim Queens. The only other thing the Motherships are missing are command type capabilities such as Command and Fleet Carrier.

Fleet Carriers for every race? It's stupid to say that every race should have one just for the sake of it, no matter how much each race might want one. It just wouldn't be the style for some races to use Fleet Carrier, whilst others could have reasons why they can't implement one effectively. Granted, half the problem with Fleet Carrier is that it's an overloaded trait, where 2 or 3 traits would have been better.

 

[LaranosTZ]

Actually, I think the FAP system is actually pretty good, balance wise...it just needs a small tweak...

Common, uncommon, and rare ships.

Simple, you can have as many common ships as you want in a fleet, only 1/3 your fleet may be uncommon ships, and you can only have 1 rare ship of a type in a fleet.

Then some ships that are obviously better at a certain PL get in a built in balancer, you only get a couple of them, and you can't completely load up on one choice.

 

[Davesaint]

Actually, I think the FAP system is actually pretty good, balance wise...it just needs a small tweak...

Common, uncommon, and rare ships.

Simple, you can have as many common ships as you want in a fleet, only 1/3 your fleet may be uncommon ships, and you can only have 1 rare ship of a type in a fleet.

Then some ships that are obviously better at a certain PL get in a built in balancer, you only get a couple of them, and you can't completely load up on one choice.

If the FAP system works, why do you need rarity for ships? This is the inherent problem with the FAP/PL system. Ships are too good for their PL or too weak for their PL. The varrience is too big. This is a huge playtesting issue, and to be honest (I'm sorry to say Triggy and other playtesters), a huge failing of the playtest group. In the 1 week prior to print that our group got the playtest pack as 2nd teir playtester, we identified many ships that we felt were too good, and too weak for their PL. How this wasn't identified, I really don't know. Maybe they were, and the powers that be decided not to change them, but I can't say for sure.

All I know is that there is a 3rd edition of ACTA in the future, I will need to see quite a bit of it before I invest in it, which is depressing for me as I love the genre.


Dave



Dave

 

[k3ndawg]

I'm done for now. Call me if 3rd edition fixes things.

Quitter...

And don't come back!

 

[Green_Knight]

For the FAP we switched back to the Armageddon breakdown of FAP.

We like it the way that you don't get as much small vessels when
fighting a high priority game.

 

[Da Boss]

I enjoy 2nd ed alot - not to say there are not problems.....

In sinks v boresight
FAP breakdown at lower levels...........
some ships too good or too weak

re mutiple saves of WS Carrier - yes they are annoying but then actually GW just brought back layered Invun and normal saves back into WFB.

It would be nice to make the value of "rare" ships a bit more - Exploroer, Mothership, Vree Scout etc - but not sure best way.

It is difficult to tweek ships within a PL - usually you have to bump up a level............

 

[Triggy]

Actually, I think the FAP system is actually pretty good, balance wise...it just needs a small tweak...

Common, uncommon, and rare ships.

Simple, you can have as many common ships as you want in a fleet, only 1/3 your fleet may be uncommon ships, and you can only have 1 rare ship of a type in a fleet.

Then some ships that are obviously better at a certain PL get in a built in balancer, you only get a couple of them, and you can't completely load up on one choice.

If the FAP system works, why do you need rarity for ships? This is the inherent problem with the FAP/PL system. Ships are too good for their PL or too weak for their PL. The varrience is too big. This is a huge playtesting issue, and to be honest (I'm sorry to say Triggy and other playtesters), a huge failing of the playtest group. In the 1 week prior to print that our group got the playtest pack as 2nd teir playtester, we identified many ships that we felt were too good, and too weak for their PL. How this wasn't identified, I really don't know. Maybe they were, and the powers that be decided not to change them, but I can't say for sure.

All I know is that there is a 3rd edition of ACTA in the future, I will need to see quite a bit of it before I invest in it, which is depressing for me as I love the genre.


Dave



Dave

Where this is the case, it is almost always due to the sheer number of changes that were made in any single revision and sometimes the knock-on balancing issues that left. Even in the week before it went to the second tier players there were 20+ changes in the fleet lists. Try testing all of those out in one week! Frankly time was the issue, not ability. Most of the things you pointed out had already been pointed out at least once.

 

[Ripple]

I actually agree with Triggy about the playtest efficiency. The issue was that they had too many ships to do at one go. They should have done the fleet book in two phases, a major races package (minbari, EA, Centauri, Narn, ISA) followed a couple months later by a League and other powers book (shadows, vorlons, ancients, drahk, psi-corp, league), maybe even three with league separated given the two new league races.

They just didn't have time to play enough games with a enough ship types to try stuff. And while some things were clear as daylight given the numbers to us, their games might have told them the numbers didn't add up that way. We've gotten a few things wrong over time, too. The Pak seem like they should blow everyone away, but are struggling a bit.

 

[locarno24]

Common, uncommon, and rare ships.

Simple, you can have as many common ships as you want in a fleet, only 1/3 your fleet may be uncommon ships, and you can only have 1 rare ship of a type in a fleet.

The problem is that that doesn't stack will with the races with fewer hulls.

Example - Psi-corps only have one raid-priority ship, and one that (by all logical arguments from the background) should be rare. Yet take that away and you can no longer field raid priority ships, leaving a gaping hole in the fleet when trying to do sensible splits of fleet action points.