Noble Armada: Raider Fixes - Suggestions

[katadder]

hey guys, who plays NA still?
would like to get a list together of suggestions to fix the raiders if we could please.
my ideas:
lower points
faster/better turns
more troops.

obviously not all of the above but 1 of them or a combination.
please post suggestions and thoughts.

 

[starbreaker]

I've tried playtesting them at 50 points, which still left them overpriced, and with 4 troops apiece, which was closer to reasonable - 5 troops might even be okay. That (rather than upping guns) would preserve the commonplace paradigm of having 2 smaller ships versus 1 equal-point large being a boarding win for the little guys and a shooting win for the big one - although some destroyer vs cruiser matchups don't work out so well that way, and cruiser versus dread is decided by how the crits go more than anything.

The Decados raider is a little pokey but not hopelessly slow (and they aren't a speedy fleet anyway), but the Kurgan and Li Halan are plenty fast already IME.

We want to be careful about allowing too cheap a ship with Ram 2 - they aren't as good at the suicide ram as Vuldrok's acknowledged-to-be-overpowered explorers currently are, but a raider still has a 1/3rd chance of piling 1d6 crits on a single location of a ram target, and that's a real threat. Going under 50 points is probably a Very Bad Idea, and staying at 60 with upgrades is probably safer.

 

[Iron Domokun]

Use a different method of balancing raiders for each fleet, reflecting different tactical doctrines. One fleet uses lots of raiders (low points but poor-quality ship). Another concentrates on using Troops, so their raiders get more Troops. Et cetera.

 

[starbreaker]

There's nothing wrong with doctrinal differences, but I have to reiterate, inexpensive ships with ram 2 are potentially game-breaking because of their effect on larger ships. 50 points is probably the absolute limit on any of the existing raider hulls, simply because the ram critical effects are so incredibly strong - when you factor in the expected damage from crits, a ram 2 ship delivers an average of more than 8 points in a collision. Sure, it might be 2 instead, but statistics say that three raiders plowing into your ship do ~24 raw damage and half of one critical location track. It's a bit more complex than that, actually - any crits past the first increase the odds of hitting the same track, which will increase damage even further initially, then reduce the value of future crits slightly as they're "wasted" on an overkilled, unrepairable track. Any ship with a dead crit track is a pretty unhappy camper anyway, of course - and one in six of them are just dead.

The gist of all that is that rams are wildly swingy and a serious threat even on ram 2 ships, and that if we want ships larger than frigates to remain viable in the game, we can't safely lower the cost of raiders by very much. Ergo, if we want to make them more appealing choices we have to change something else about them. At the moment, they appear to have four main uses:

1) Initiative sinks. Since most enemy explorers are cheaper than raiders, this isn't really much help - we're spending on dead weight ships while they're gaining sinks that provide scout support (or boarding and ramming, for Vuldies).

2) Mobility traps. Grappling an enemy ship at a key moment to slow its movement can be vital, even if you have zero intention of boarding. Enemy explorers can theoretically do this as well, but raiders are more durable and take more effort to squash.

3) Ramming threat. They aren't really efficient at it, but any expendable ship in a position to ram something big (destroyer and up) should be a fire magnet, saving your other ships some abuse.

4) Counterboarding threat. A lot of the time a ship making a boarding action wants to send its whole troop complement over to party. Having a raider in position to counterboard forces them to keep a few troops back to prevent a free takeover.

Decados raiders also add some much-appreciated Precise weapons to the fleet, letting you do some late-turn crit-fishing at targets with downed shields even if you don't have a cruiser or dread along (not that they have a ton of lasers either). Li Halan raiders are phenomenally maneuverable in a fleet that's generally fast but clumsy, which might help with some scenarios and certainly makes them better counterboarders. Kurgan raiders really don't bring anything to the table the rest of the fleet doesn't already have, but at least their shield-penetrating guns are never entirely useless once they're in range.

All of that put together fails to make them good buys. They're simply too expensive for too little utility, and almost anything they can do well a frigate can do better while bringing real guns, at least three times as many troops, and a tougher chasis to the table.

 

[Ben2]

This may be super controversial, but why not make them Ram 1?

Ram 2 for cheap is the thing preventing cheap raiders from being a practical item in the game.

 

[katadder]

well the vuldrok explorer is ram 2 (or going to be) and half the price, plus faster and more manoeuvrable. yes it has no guns but everyone is complaining about raider guns anyway so ram 2 cant be the problem

 

[starbreaker]

This may be super controversial, but why not make them Ram 1?

Ram 2 for cheap is the thing preventing cheap raiders from being a practical item in the game.

No reason at all that I can think of. I was just saying "don't make a ram 2 hull cheap" in all that.

If you shift to ram 1 (maybe on the Li Halan, which has by far the greatest ram threat anyway) you could justifiably drop it to 35 points or so. It would pretty much lose Use 3 altogether (no one is afraid of a hit from a ram 1 ship) but it would be much better at Use 1, and because you could afford more of them, Uses 2 and 4 would also be easier to pull off. You'd get enough guns on three of them to compete with a frigate with some chance of success, and enough crew to maybe manage an actual contested boarding. That might be an excellent approach.

The only concerns I can see offhand:

1) It might not leave enough "design space" between them and bombers, but that says more about iffy bomber/fighter/carrier effectiveness than anything about the raiders themselves.

2) Having lots of cheap ships could theoretically let you block firing arcs (via grappling) a bit too freely. I've seen it tried with Myrkwyrms to limited effect. OTOH, I'd want playtest proof of concept for that before I believed it - raiders are tougher than explorers, but not a whole lot tougher, and I suspect they'd just get blown up for their troubles.

Going back to Iron Domokun's doctrinal idea and stretching things a bit, you could leave the Decados raider's ram value and cost as-is but increase troops to (say) 4 and add Stealth 4+ while reducing Hull to 3 (stealthship penalty). Essentially a miniature version of their regular stealthship, with enough troops to storm a careless explorer reliably or contribute to a larger boarding action, and it would still have handy lasers for plinking away in support of larger ships for people who (sensibly) want to keep their stealth hulls at arms' length in the early stages of a fight. The laser ranges and very generous arc coverage will even let you circle the main fight zapping away while you try to box in or chase off the explorers that are usually hanging around the perimeter as well.

The Kurgan could maybe jump to troops 5 and otherwise stay as-is, or possibly drop to 50 points? They're a boarding fleet already and the guns on their raider force them in close anyway. With such a big troop contingent they'd be competitive even with their own frigates or Hazat's (which are also troop-heavy), and their guns have an edge against Vuldrok due to the lack of shields.

Ram 2 isn't that big a deal on speed 12 hulls, at least when there aren't a ton of them out there due to cost. You have to be kind of careless (or Lumbering) to let them into position without shooting them up first, after all. Speed 16 is more alarming, which is why the Li Halans deserve the ram downgrade most. The world doesn't need a repeat of the Myrkwyrm mistake, and even ram 2 on a fast, cheapish hull breaks stuff - so yeah, ram 1, that's golden.

well the vuldrok explorer is ram 2 (or going to be) and half the price, plus faster and more manoeuvrable. yes it has no guns but everyone is complaining about raider guns anyway so ram 2 cant be the problem

The Myrkwyrm's not only getting the ram value nerf, they've also said it's getting a price bump. I'll bet internal playtest showed the point I was trying to make - that even ram 2 is too dangerous on a ship that's fast enough and cheap enough. Ram 2 is a problem mostly in the sense that it restricts how low you can drop a ship's cost, and it's much more of a problem on speed 16 ships than on speed 12 ones. Maneuverability isn't much of a factor with rams - it helps get into position a bit, but everyone is under the one 45 degree turn restriction - but raw speed definitely is..

 

[katadder]

oh yeah hadnt noticed the bump to 40pts
ram 2.
hmm needs scout now as has no guns apart from suicide ram

 

[starbreaker]

oh yeah hadnt noticed the bump to 40pts
ram 2.
hmm needs scout now as has no guns apart from suicide ram

Did they actually fix it already? Hadn't seen it, knew it was coming. They're still a great initiative sink, still a solid boarder, and I'll bet at 40 points ram 2 is still good enough make buying 15 of them to pulverize an enemy dreadnought is not entirely a bad idea.

Let's see, ivory tower thought experiment: 15 Myrks versus a (say) Hawkwood dread. Closing under CBD orders, the dread kills about 2 per turn, takes about 3 turns to get in a ram position assuming the dread is managing to run effectively. 9 Myrks try for ram at CQ+1 versus CQ-1 - being conservative, 6 hit on the first run. That's an average of 42 raw damage and 2 crits, which should add (very conservatively) 14 more damage, so ~56 total damage. That's a crippled dread with two of its crit tracks half gone and 3 Myrks left flying. The dread can't reliably kill even 1 per turn now, so probably 2 have time to come in for a second pass. Say both hit, that's another 14 damage assuming no crit. No more Myrks and the dread wins with 5 damage left. And that's being really pessimistic - even a little luck on the crits, or some of the damage from all those exploding Myrks leaking through a flickering or weakened shields, or even just a few extra "4" results in place of lower results on the ram multipliers and it's MAD, or maybe even a slight win for a few surviving Myrks.

An extreme example, but it does sound like 40 points is about as low as you can go on a speed 16 ram 2 ship. The Vuldrok CBD order bonus helps a lot, but so do shields when you're trying to stomp lots of small targets, so that's probably a wash. I'd say they don't need guns any - they're still a very credible ramming threat, without being an overwhelming one like they first were.

To get a really cheap raider, it looks like ram absolutely has to come down some, at least on the speedy Li Halan. The other two are slower, but that's only going to help so much - leaving them at ram 2 forces us to keep their cost up quite a bit. We could drop all of them to ram 1 and they'd probably all be about right somewhere around 40 points, although it doesn't differentiate them much beyond weapon layout and maneuver.

Question is, should we lobby Mongoose for that option, or something more varied? They may already have their own plans in place for the long-delayed fleet book anyway, but player feedback can't hurt. I think we're all agreed that they're badly overcosted at 60, yes?

 

[katadder]

there are plans being tested at the moment. i posted this to get more ideas to put to the playtest group, basically as I dont think the current plans will encourage anyone to take more raiders than they do now.

 

[starbreaker]

That amount being almost zero. Even first-time players avoid them like the plague - which may be a little unfair. The Decados one might be worth bringing one or two of just for the precise weapon sniping, and i Halan's is good in scenarios where maneuvering and speed are vital.

Of course, every time I convince myself of that, midway through the game I find myself really wishing I had spent those points on something else. They lose out to troop upgrades and psychic powers, even.

 

[locarno24]

I'd agree speed isn't the way to go.

The main limiting factor on speed is supposed to be shield integrity - so whilst raiders are well shielded for their size, you must meet the limit fairly fast.

I'd agree that troops (and grapnel guns! extra troops are irrelevant if you can't get the buggers aboard!) fit the Noble Armada 'theme' of small ships winning by boarding assaults.

 

[Bellicose]

Hey, I wanted to bring up an old topic. Raiders. I had a thought about how to fix them. Well, maybe. I know it is a little anti-flavor of Noble Armada, but here it goes. Put all of the AD in the forward arc. The Reaper has 4 AD of light lasers. 1 Forward, 1 Port, 1 Starboard, and 1 Turret. You really can't do much of anything like that. If all of the weapons were concentrated into one arc though, maybe they could do something. Heck the Reaper mini only has guns on it pointing forward anyway. Same for the Kurgan raider. Like I said, anti-flavor of NA, but these aren't mini frigates. They are raiders. Meant to pounce out and attack. Anyway, I like to float the idea. Like I said, the minis all have guns pointing forward anyway. I think between that and doubling the marines and they maybe would be worth 60 points. Any thoughts?

 

[katadder]

there are additional rules for raider use now in Fleets of the Fading Suns.

 

[Bellicose]

Well, I have not bought Fleets of the Fading Suns, but I plan to. Maybe I should withhold judgement. Though I must say, use Decados as an example. Reaper is 60 points. Carries 2 marines and can put out 2 AD into an arc of light lasers. Mantis is 100 points. Carries 6 marines and can put 6 AD of medium blasters into an arc. So a raider is almost 2/3 of the price, but carries 1/3 of the marines and less than 1/3 of the firepower. Those have better be some pretty nice rules.

 

[Bellicose]

And to add, my suggestion would give the Reaper 2/3 of the marines of the Mantis. It would also give it less than 2/3 of the firepower, and only in one arc. I hardly think that is overwhelming.