After some thinking I think that we are off in finding the solution for this problem.
A general save could work but I don't like implementing a 40K-like save into ACTA, CBD is enough as it is.
I think that almost everyone agrees that one of the big reasons for why big ships are at a big disadvantage against smaller ships is that usually the big ships far to soon suffers the disabling by crits.
One of the problems is that if one of the swarming ships suffer one of the radical crits it doesent affect that side so much because just one ship of 20 for example is out of commission so it's just looses 1/20 of its fighting power but if the big ship suffers a disabeling crit for example only fire weapons on 4+ for exampel it looses 1/2 of its fighting power from the same result.
IF we make an exampel to destroy a big ship that have for example 200 damage (just to make it a little more obvious) if we make the example with single damage weapons would let it take two hundred rolls for potential crits.
Even if ignoring the doubling chance of crits through Precise that would mean that it would take more than 30 crits on average before being destroyed. However the crits themselves add some damage so lets say around 15 at least.
In this example a big ship has a great chance of suffering 10-12 crits before getting below half of its damage. Try rolling 12 crits on the crit-chart and think of in which condition the ship would be to continue the fight.
I.e. as it is the big ships drops in fighting capabilty far faster generally than the swarm against it does because of the crits.
One solution that is on its way is that buying down on PL will be more expensive but again I think most agree that this will not be near enough.
One other solution that will help somewhat is also the rumour that bore-sighting will be changed so it will not be necissary for some fleets to buy swarms just to be able to fire the weapons. But this will not be a complete fix either.
Instead of adding redundancy saving throws for all crits I would like to think that a route worth exploring would instead be to go to the heart of the problem and fix the crit-table.
If you think about it, today it is far more likley that an armageddon ship will suffer multiple catastrophic explosions and crits before going down, while the less roubust patrol-ships is more likley to just fizzle away through secondary weapons fire.
It should at least be equally likely for a smaller ship to suffer tough crits than it is for the big one proportionally to the total damage of the ship that is.
Taking the route of tweaking the crit-table might help us get closer to that goal instead.
Make smaller ships more likely to suffer harsh result on it per crit than the bigger ones.
To make an example of it I have modified the current crit-table to a 2d6 for the result roll instead. This also give the more reliable bell curve then the 1d6 used today.
The severity of the roll is modified by the PL of the ship suffering the damage but a better solution could be to base it on the total damage of the ship instead or to add a new value for it directly to each ship in the fleet book instead.
Also I think that a redo of the results on the crit-table adapted for this instead of using the existing straight of that I have done for the example would be better.
A general save could work but I don't like implementing a 40K-like save into ACTA, CBD is enough as it is.
I think that almost everyone agrees that one of the big reasons for why big ships are at a big disadvantage against smaller ships is that usually the big ships far to soon suffers the disabling by crits.
One of the problems is that if one of the swarming ships suffer one of the radical crits it doesent affect that side so much because just one ship of 20 for example is out of commission so it's just looses 1/20 of its fighting power but if the big ship suffers a disabeling crit for example only fire weapons on 4+ for exampel it looses 1/2 of its fighting power from the same result.
IF we make an exampel to destroy a big ship that have for example 200 damage (just to make it a little more obvious) if we make the example with single damage weapons would let it take two hundred rolls for potential crits.
Even if ignoring the doubling chance of crits through Precise that would mean that it would take more than 30 crits on average before being destroyed. However the crits themselves add some damage so lets say around 15 at least.
In this example a big ship has a great chance of suffering 10-12 crits before getting below half of its damage. Try rolling 12 crits on the crit-chart and think of in which condition the ship would be to continue the fight.
I.e. as it is the big ships drops in fighting capabilty far faster generally than the swarm against it does because of the crits.
One solution that is on its way is that buying down on PL will be more expensive but again I think most agree that this will not be near enough.
One other solution that will help somewhat is also the rumour that bore-sighting will be changed so it will not be necissary for some fleets to buy swarms just to be able to fire the weapons. But this will not be a complete fix either.
Instead of adding redundancy saving throws for all crits I would like to think that a route worth exploring would instead be to go to the heart of the problem and fix the crit-table.
If you think about it, today it is far more likley that an armageddon ship will suffer multiple catastrophic explosions and crits before going down, while the less roubust patrol-ships is more likley to just fizzle away through secondary weapons fire.
It should at least be equally likely for a smaller ship to suffer tough crits than it is for the big one proportionally to the total damage of the ship that is.
Taking the route of tweaking the crit-table might help us get closer to that goal instead.
Make smaller ships more likely to suffer harsh result on it per crit than the bigger ones.
To make an example of it I have modified the current crit-table to a 2d6 for the result roll instead. This also give the more reliable bell curve then the 1d6 used today.
The severity of the roll is modified by the PL of the ship suffering the damage but a better solution could be to base it on the total damage of the ship instead or to add a new value for it directly to each ship in the fleet book instead.
Also I think that a redo of the results on the crit-table adapted for this instead of using the existing straight of that I have done for the example would be better.
