Quick Rules Question: Aux Craft Deployment Restrictions

[Sulfurdown]

but it doesnt specifically say that the troops actually board in the move phase. you carry out the launch shuttles and breaching pods SA in the move phase but if you kill the ship it cant go through with the boarding. same happens with boarding pods in 1e. they breach and board in the end phase.
its in 1e you are making assumptions that the pods breach in the move phase and the troops move on board. but to actually get the troops on board they would have to carry out a boarding action which is specifically in the end phase.

I think the implication that the troops hit in the movement phase came from the Breaching pods making center contact with the target ship and the stacking rules. Originally I was under the impression that BP only had to make Base/Counter contact and they would engage and was informed otherwise on the forums (I don't have a reference to site, sorry), that they had to be able to reach that center point in their movement. If you can't stack ships, then it proceeds that they insert the troops and the BP model/counter goes away leaving no stack and nothing to shoot at. Correct or not, that's where I think the action sequence confusion stems from.

 

[Greg Smith]

You'll have to clarify, Greg, because I'm a bit lost.

As it currently stands (and all of this can change) breaching pods deploy their troops upon contact with the ship in question. The reason that pods stink is that it can be (fairly) easy to eliminate them -- they don't dodge, and automatically lose dogfights -- so picking them off is a no-brainer. Makes sense. You have to move, deploy them, have them survive a turn of fire, not get hit by a dogfighter, and not have their target manouver to where only a few of them can get to their victims. It's a long list; given that you have to spend ship troops to do it just makes it a bit more dubious.

Yea. We are on the same page.

Now, however, I can invalidate a couple of these effects. If I'm a initiative-winning race in a matchup --- say Centauri vs. Brakiri or some such -- I'll buy a lot of Pods. I'll run up to my Victim, engage, and then launch my Pods. Now, of the three defenses I used to have, I have far fewer:

-- I cannot engage them with weaponry as a Primary target. I never had a chance to shoot them.

That is true, if you aren't in a position to outrun the 6" movement of the pods.

-- I cannot engage them with Dogfighters, unless I get ridiculously lucky with initiative. You will move before my Aux Craft, and once you touch my base, it's all over.

This is still somewhat a bone of contention among the playtesters. The why i see it, the pod must remain in place until after anti-fighter fire takes place. So it is vulnerable to dogfights.

-- I can still try to manouver to avoid 6" radius spheres of podness.
That last bit is REALLY REALLY hard and usually only has a shot with All Stop and All Power to Engines some of the time.

It really depends on how fast your ship is and how close the pod is.

Unless the Anti-fighter mechanic is nonlocal -- you can support other fleet elements with your own AF capabilities -- any new mechanic will allow multiple ship's pods to overwhelm one ship fairly directly. You never got to engage the Pods as a fleet.

The new escort trait will do just that.

This, if I understand the situation correctly, is what I understand from you and Katadder. And if true, it is a major, MAJOR problem.

Well we are actually still discussing this. So things may change.

 

[katadder]

yep, we are discussing a more clarified wording for breacing pods. although this started before this thread.
at the moment in both sets of rules its not clarified that well. the example I gave above of the pods not being gone until they actually do the boarding is what a couple of my group members brought up to me as playing as read thats how it happens.
like alot of you though I tend to do them as atatcks so attack/board at the same time as fighters. but in that situation the new AF trait would get the chance to shoot them down.
it seems theres a 3rd group of you that gets them off the table as soon as they contact the ship which makes them all but impossible to stop in either rules set.

I think the 2nd option is best as you get to dogfight them or AF them before they board your ship and before people get to fire their main weapons on the breaching pods.

 

[Ripple]

I am not sure I agree with the main criticism of the non-playtesters here. Most of us are not jumping off the deep end, we're looking at the information we have and saying this is the likely consequence of that rule. If a playtester comes on and says 'I can see your point and why your worried, but that was brought up and addressed this way...', we tend to shut up or at least only ask for further clarification.

If instead we get told to 'have faith' or 'your not seeing the whole picture' with no actual reassurance or refutation of our logic, well we have an understandable fear of a bad outcome. This thread addressed some of the basic issues involved in breaching pods, that there are a number of ways to read when things happen. Depending on which timing you subscribe too, the new rule could be devastating to not so fun for the target.

If the new rule hadn't been challenged as potentially problematic folks might not even realize how differently pods are being played. CZ has some good points above on the necessity of the process and the inherent conflict, but try to keep an open mind about our non-playtester comments. Ask us why we would see something as an issue rather than just telling us we overreacting to stuff.

We seem a fairly intuitive group, we've all played enough games to have some idea of how stuff is likely to play out. Even if we don't have the full story, most of the things folks have worried about are valid and frankly fairly likely. The real thing I've seen in most of these threads is not the forum base being wrong, but debates over whether the thing they are worried about is actually a problem even if their worst fears are realized.

Ripple