Romulans vs Klingons. Oh my...

They were always agile in SFB/FC. And they were always anti-drone armed and had a strong drone armament too. What they didn't have though was good shields.
Don't get me wrong, they weren't bad. But the front might have 8 hits or so more than the side unless it's a big ship.

I'm going to look into comparing the FC stats to the ACTA:SF stats and see what result comes out.

The big deal for the Romulans was that in FC/SFB the cloak was better - you can't shoot anything that is cloaked, and their plasma was better too - hits harder, more difficult to shoot down.
So they had bigger guns and better hiding, which made a huge difference.
 
Stu-- said:
They were always agile in SFB/FC. And they were always anti-drone armed and had a strong drone armament too. What they didn't have though was good shields.
Don't get me wrong, they weren't bad. But the front might have 8 hits or so more than the side unless it's a big ship.

I'm going to look into comparing the FC stats to the ACTA:SF stats and see what result comes out.

The big deal for the Romulans was that in FC/SFB the cloak was better - you can't shoot anything that is cloaked, and their plasma was better too - hits harder, more difficult to shoot down.
So they had bigger guns and better hiding, which made a huge difference.

We were told that you could shoot through the cloak in those games - its just harder to do as ACTA? Plasma hits very hard if you don't shoot it down - I've had ships vapourised because they were out of phasers.

Its just that drones are the weapon of choice it seems..........although they are of course useless against cloaked ships.
 
Cloak in SFB was basically this as I recall:

Shooting at a cloaked target with direct fire weapons, you doubled the actual range and added 5 to that. Use that number as the range to hit. I think Photons and Disruptors did damage per the actual range, but used the modified range number to hit first. And then you used a chart to determine if you got a direct hit or a near miss.

Seeking weapons, when the target cloaked you had to roll a die to maintain lock-on. If you did, you could still hit the target but it wasn't easy nor did you do full damage. If you failed the roll, no seeking weapons from that ship could be fired. Each ship made it's own roll, and there were opportunities to re-roll as the range changed, the EW environment changed, etc. Kind of complicated and tedious.

This is from my hazy memory, and I might be off on some minor detail. :)
 
So.. after some furious clicking and excel-ing..
I did a quick and dirty look at the Klingons and Federation.

It looks like what they've done is to take the FC shield value, and use that as the base value for the Feds. So the FC version's front shield is the shield value used in the ACTA stat.
Actually, in FC some fed ships have stronger front shields than side - heavy cruiser being a prime example with 30 front shields and 24 on all other aspects.
That doesn't make much of a difference since '6' rolls ignore shields anyway, so it's kind of built in.

For the Klingons, they took the front shield stat from FC, and used approx 66% of it instead of the 100% the feds got above. But then of course there's the Klingon shield rule to add it back in (worth about +50%)

Plasma though can double the shield values, and with no burn-through on a '6' it gets short-changed again.
Example: D6 w/ 18 shields takes 36 to drop the shields to the front with plasma.
That's an average of >10d6 worth of plasma.

Also, to finish the comparison, A plasma-R in FC does 50 damage to range 16.
So in FC the plasma-R cannot be stopped by a D6's front shields (50 hits vs 30 shields)
In ACTA it's 7d6 (~3.5 hits each) 24.5 hits halved to 13. Doesn't even drop the shields.

Of course there are other factors that would effect this in a real fight but the basic result is that the FC weapon modelled in ACTA does half the damage it really should.
(50 hits vs 24.5 hits)

So the problem actually probably isn't with the Klingon shields - they seem to work just fine actually, the numbers are very close with +50% to the front.
The problem is that plasma is way under-powered in comparison to the source material.


Thoughts?
 
And yeah.. Bill's right - my memory is obviously dodgy :p
I checked in FC too and you can shoot them, with nasty negative.
However, they do cloak faster in FC than they do in ACTA (one impulse)
 
And with a tiny bit more of my life spent over-analysing this game..
The hulls are tiny compared to FC, and the fed and klingon ships don't have much of a difference in hull size - certainly not what you see in ACTA anyway.
The scale is roughly 1 acta box = 3 to 4 FC boxes.

Curious they did that when you also add in that crits cause you to die even faster.
in effect, your hull is about 1/4th the size it really should be for most ships.
 
Stu-- said:
And with a tiny bit more of my life spent over-analysing this game..
The hulls are tiny compared to FC, and the fed and klingon ships don't have much of a difference in hull size - certainly not what you see in ACTA anyway.
The scale is roughly 1 acta box = 3 to 4 FC boxes.

Curious they did that when you also add in that crits cause you to die even faster.
in effect, your hull is about 1/4th the size it really should be for most ships.

You need to talk to Scoutdad and the other SFB veterans about the conversion ratio but as I understand it you don't include all boxes.................
 
I THINK it was said that they only counted hull boxes x2 towards the damage score.

So a D7 has 11 front and aft hulls x 2 = 22, which is correct.
A Fed CA has 16 front and aft hull x 2 = 32, which is correct.
 
Charles is correct.
The Damage value in ACTASF is exactly 2x the Hull count in Fed Comm. With a few noteable exceptions among hte Kzinti, where some values were arbitarily changed to provide a small to large progression for small to large ships.

Were it my game to design, the damage value would have been a factor of total boxes, but its not - and we have what we have.

As for shields, modst of the values are actually equal to the number 2 shield in Fed Comm, although again some specific ships had shield values changed from that formula to provide values more in line with the progression of shiled values from Fed Comm.
 
Pretty awful decision on hull sizes then, since that breaks every other previously set equation used in the other sets of rules for damage etc. (which is why people report plasma meltings or plasma bouncing but little in between)

Well it's not like I am going to be playing this in tournaments so I may house rule it into the ground. Or else just wait a year and see if the rules are re-written. Or go back to FC.
The models are brilliant so I'll be buying the other major races though but the rules.. meh. Big shame.

Now I just wish I'd bought a hexmat with hexes. :/
 
I went with a third option and bought a copy of Starmada.
Looks quite good so far.. clearly some full thrust inspiration in there. At this point I just want a set of rules I can pick up and play and not worry about the game not working properly.
 
The game works properly, and is fun and playable, but there was some debate about hull values when it first came out.
 
Seems from a quick look like they've done some similar rounding of some sort - certainly there aren't 'enough' (in comparison to FC/SFB) hull points on the ships.
How this translates in to game play though I have no idea.
I didn't see a leaky shield rule or anything similar though so the shields are much more efficient than in ACTA.
 
Stu-- said:
I didn't see a leaky shield rule or anything similar though so the shields are much more efficient than in ACTA.

SFB as part of the standard rules does not use leaky shields, though there is an optional rule. I think it was every 4th damage point leaks through the shields.

I think FC does use some sort of leak, but I am not familiar with the game enough to know.
 
Stu-- said:
Seems from a quick look like they've done some similar rounding of some sort - certainly there aren't 'enough' (in comparison to FC/SFB) hull points on the ships.
How this translates in to game play though I have no idea.
I didn't see a leaky shield rule or anything similar though so the shields are much more efficient than in ACTA.

It is 2x hull boxes, or 2x hull + cargo boxes.

I suggested total SSD boxes divided by 3, which gave a fairly big spread in the damage points for frigates, from the Snipe at 9 to the F5 at 17.
 
So as it turns out we had two full days playing various iterations of 'trek.
We did Federation Commander, Starmada and ACTA.

FC was good as always, but we forgot how slow it is - compared to the others it is not a quick game. Starmada - actually, we didn't really like the firing mechanism. The need to look up your firepower on a table was not what I'd hoped for.
So that brings us back to ACTA.
It's definately my preferred system for larger games.
1v1 and 2v2 I'd probably go FC instead - but even then, it's not a quick game.

As a result of all this then I decided to write a load of house rules - a new drone system, changes to quite a few of the base rules and a re-working of the Romulan rules.
There's quite a lot, and it changes some of the feel of the game.
They're not all done yet mostly because we didn't play them all but we did play the drone rules and liked them. I'll post them all up once I've got my notes together and then if people want to use them they can feel free - the more feedback, the better it should get.
Effectively, I'm trying to replicate what you'd get in FC if the same thing happened but without slowing the game down. That's the idea anyway! :)
 
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