Random Arcs

[Sulfurdown]

Has anyone tried using the straight four arcs when a ship looses a random arc rather then the '7'.

e.g. Forward Arc includes Boresight forward, Aft Arc includes the Aft Boresight, and if the Port side is offline then Turret weapons cannot fire into that direction?

How is that going to negatively impact the game?

 

[Arch Lector Petrovski]

That would be devastating for any ship and would pretty much spell the end of the game for that ship. I think the loss of an arc's weapons is harsh enough as it is, without penalising those other arcs that can fire within that one.

 

[Sulfurdown]

The two main examples of the straight-4 that I can think of are the Boresight races like the Drazi which could be screwed over, but by comparison not always more then others. Prime example being the the Warbird which would loose all weapons on such a crit. But normally so does the Drakh Raiders which are at the same level, the White Stars, the Vorchans, Kutai and Darkners, nearly the Torotha and definitely the Shantavi. That was just a quick look through SFoS.

The other would be the Turret impacted races like the Vree which as far as I can tell would benefit from such a change since they wouldn't immediately lose their main turret weapons on a crit but rather just fire power to a specific arc.

I'm thinking it would slightly more painful to the Drazi then their normal conditions but it would speed up the game and reduce the amount of book keeping for ships.

 

[Right Hand of God]

As a race Vree are undoubtably punished by the loss of a random arc as they only have one to use. Changing it so that they only lose the ability to fire in a specific arc is negligable when the ship has SM. Your proposal punishes the Drazi but allows the Vree to suffer the same cit 4 times before it has any meaningful effect

 

[Sulfurdown]

In both cases I would think that it's not as drastic a swing either way. The Drazi get punished meaning that they would lose the weapon systems in one crit rather then two (each of the two causing a reduction in at least 50% power) and yes the Vree are SM but they need to be awefully close in before they can really start to take advantage of that otherwise they leave themselves open to being tracked easily.

But yes it would swing power between the two. I'm looking for is how severely this would impact the game versus how it would speed it up. (As a Drakh player the loss of an arc in one 'random' crit hurts but I'm pretty used to it by now)

 

[Arch Lector Petrovski]

Think of the effect on the Ka'Bin'Tak, all of the decent weaponry is in the forward arc or the boresight; the rest is merely back-up defencive weapons. Imagine the pride of your fleet, an armageddon level ship, losing 60-70% of its strength in one critical. Yes it probably would speed it up, but I don't think the speed increase could possibly out way the negative aspects of the wider ranging effect of arc loss.

 

[Banichi]

Has anyone tried using the straight four arcs when a ship looses a random arc rather then the '7'?

At the other end of the scale, has anyone tryed ingoring arcs, and rolling against weapons systems? For example, a g-quan could loose its pulse cannon in an arc, but the twin arrays would be uneffected. Admittedly some ships would probably need a d20.

 

[Sulfurdown]

Think of the effect on the Ka'Bin'Tak, all of the decent weaponry is in the forward arc or the boresight; the rest is merely back-up defencive weapons. Imagine the pride of your fleet, an armageddon level ship, losing 60-70% of its strength in one critical. Yes it probably would speed it up, but I don't think the speed increase could possibly out way the negative aspects of the wider ranging effect of arc loss.

As would most ships since a lot keep their fire power in the forward arc regardless of the use of boresight. If I'm accounting for attack dice and damage multipliers and that's it for numbers to value firepower as the other traits change based on the target, a Ka'Bin'Tak that loses it's forward arc would lose 39% on a 1 in 7 to 50% if the Boresight/Turret is included on a 1 in 4. The 1e Adira would automatically lose 45% of it's power in a Fwd arc critical, it does however have the straight-4 so it has it may just as easily lose 20% from it's side arc.

The big impact would be that instead of a 1 in 7, it becomes a 1 in 4 and the minimum possibility of only losing 3.39% of firepower (the Turret alone), the KBT might lose 14% (portside) and maximum we are still looking at the forward arc amounting to between 39% and 50%.

It's the smaller ships like the Warbird-type that are going to go from having the 50/50 of 26.67% or 73.33% firepower down to losing it all, but again that's just like the Drakh Raiders or White Stars. Granted those ships don't have the same amount of vestment with your fleets (usually). The loss of 50% firepower on a ship taking 80% your FAP is going to be a bit more impactful then 100% loss on a ship taking up 7% of the FAP.

Keeping in mind that the impact of this all being based on the critical getting the 5.56% chance (4-5 and 6-3) of losing a random arc that in the case of a Ka'Bin'Tak could be it's Forward or it's Boresight or it's portside, of course there is also a 2.78% chance that a 4-6 appears and you don't lose 50% of the fire power, you lose it all. Thanks to ALP for engaging in the debate!

At the other end of the scale, has anyone tryed ingoring arcs, and rolling against weapons systems? For example, a g-quan could loose its pulse cannon in an arc, but the twin arrays would be uneffected. Admittedly some ships would probably need a d20.

That would definitely ramp up the granularity of the game. It's too bad the bell curve gets involved to skew probabilities when more dice were added, otherwise you could just roll two or three dice to cover all the weapon systems.