I meant you have different rules for plasma and drones.
Do I ?
They work the same, at least in theory barring /when/ they're fired.
Like I said I haven't played with them yet but the basic idea is they should work the same barring amount of damage and phasers shooting at them.
One reason ACTA damage doesn't directly correlate to FC damage is that ACTA games are larger - there are always more drones and more plasma flying about, making defence harder.
Is that valid? Surely if there's more drones or plasma there's also more to shoot it down with?
Of course you've got the concentration factor - putting 30 drones in the same spot but that's only the same thing as putting 30 photons in the same spot - your opponent should know your capability and have a plan to deal with it.
Why will they hardly ever hit
Well you've got your drones to shoot their drones down, an entire fleets worth of phasers - often many ph3 with nothing else to do, especially in a formation that can all shoot at any drone in range whenever they want to.
You've got the ability to go evasive or run and then you've got your anti-drones and tractor beams too.
In your recent 900 pt game - how many ships were involved and how many were drone heavy
We did Kzinti vs Klingon. It was supposed to be a drone fest to test out the rules.
My Kzin were putting 32 drones down in a turn.
The Klingon was putting down something like 14, almost always in a counter-fire mode.
That left ~18, and to defeat them he used a mixture of formations (ships protecting one another) evasion and phaser-1's. There were a few hits but not many, but he did have to think about his defence and dedicate ph-1 to shooting down drones.
But.. that is why the Kzin have fewer weapons than everone else.
The drones are supposed to cause your emeny to have to shoot them down, reducing their available anti-ship capability.. and breaking formation is punishable by having no friends to help you out.
Boosting shields - not sure if you answered how this works with your version
Well, my 'front shield' value is just an extra feebee for the front only.
The only difference to how it works in the base game it that my version is a fixed value.
If you boost shields you get it all round so it's more efficient anyway.
But, you could repair the front if you wanted back to its original value
I don't recall seeing anything that is defined as a Replenishment ship
Nope me either. In F&E there was the idea of supply lines though from what I remember.
Effectively you were starting off at bases and heading out from there, and there were repair convoys to come strap nacelles onto broken ships.
In a campaign setting, UNREP makes definite sense though.
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As an aside if nobody likes the idea of tracking ammo for anti-drones then make it if you roll two ones your out. Or something similar. Any one and any other one or two on any of the three dice you're allowed to roll.
The main limiter I was interested in was limiting drones to 4 attacks.