Swarms

[Target]

yeah but your house rule you use your redundancy on SAs too which is crazy as why would you lose crew pulling off an SA?
and i would prefer to take crits than use you way of stopping them. most peoples complaints is some of the big crits completely stop a ship firing so want redundancy, your way Target makes them even more fragile and ends the game even quicker.

0 crew just means you are Skeleton crewed.
Depending on the size of the crit it takes that many crew to avoid so bigger ships can avoid the real nasty ones.You don't actually have use your crew to avoid them except the ones that effect your crew directly.
With using crew to do SA just think of them getting fatigued as well wounded and so on when avoided crits. To kill a ship you still get all it's hull. The Hull is designed to protect the crew.
It works, In a 5pt raid game i took a Octurion vs a Drazi fleet with it's zillions of hull 6 strikehawks & warbirds. It came down 1 ship vs 1 ship in the end both crippled but it got big crit to finish me off. Can't avoid crits forever.
A lot of our games are very close like that. They are way easier/quicker cause we don't use the crew score like the normal rules. It so much easier only having one score to mark off instead of 7pts come off the hits & 6 off crew.
I realise not everyone will agree with our reasoning behind things it just that our games have been better. Opinion again but if i take the Beam team im still not guaranteed the win unlike in the normal rules. Guaranteed = 90%.
One thing i can tell you is going to half ship hits will a bad idea, it needs to way smaller number to avoid crits.
The crit chart does need work. It was the first thing we modded. It improved our a lot we done that over 2yrs ago. We have just keeped on tinkering with things as we have gone along.

 

[Target]

Sounded a bit negative with half hits things but some ships will become absolute beasts to knock out. I actually do like the idea but can see some ships being to tough. Just mean the number needs to be smaller. Maybe a 1/3rd or give a redundancey number based on hits. We just went different way by baseing ours off the crew score since we decicded it was rather pointless but still you need to be able to skeleton crew ships.
My friend & i were talking about if ship gets slowly degraded as it loses hits which would be cool but adds more paperwork.

What we have been doing lately is making chits that have the critical effects with on them & placing them beside the ships. Makes major difference in book keeping. Both you and your opponent can see it. It's not that hard, we always talked about it were to lazy for a while. We just do it as they get done & in no time it's done. Done the same SA's.

Back to the critical chart thing. If ships can fix vital crits & swap the No Damage Control with something. Big ships don't knocked out early.

 

[Ripple]

Guess we just don't agree on when you should have a chance to remove all of a ships weapons. Seems to me that inflicting 20 points of damage is almost a standard shot for a SAP DD beam. That would allow crits to start on any Raid ship but the narn boats, and they pay for that toughness by having no really effective offense. Forcing two or more Raid level beams to be used to start crits on a battle level hull feels pretty close to me.

Go to 1/3 and you are generally starting your crits on a battle level hulls on the first shot by a 4 die beam of the common SAP DD type. I guess that's sort of what I want. That a single long range bombarbment style shot be unable to do a significant crit. Two or three such weapons firing is fine, so figure I want on average it to take 6 AD or more under CAF or other reroll to start the crit effect against a battle level hull or higher.

Ripple

 

[greenboy]

I would prefer the special criticals only not the damage to be stopped until you lost half your crew not rather than being based on damage

 

[Target]

I would prefer the special criticals only not the damage to be stopped until you lost half your crew not rather than being based on damage

Thats nice way to do it. The effect doesn't happen but the damage is still applied from the crit.

@ Ripple- 4AD beams would struggle to to 20 hits vs most battle ships especially vs with no crits for the first 20+ hits. I'd even struggle to that on hull 5 ship but thats my rolls. I thought we were talking more about the swarm of little ships doing smaller amounts damage but more damage rolls at getting the crits. I was also thinking you had to get past that threshold before damage could be done. With greenboy's suggestion half could be fine.
With regards to the no weapon thing it's fine if you can fix them 1 in 36 chance of getting it anyway. But when your ship can't thats where the problem is and shouldn't happen. You should always be able to fix crits.

 

[Triggy]

@ Ripple- 4AD beams would struggle to to 20 hits vs most battle ships especially vs with no crits for the first 20+ hits. I'd even struggle to that on hull 5 ship but thats my rolls. I thought we were talking more about the swarm of little ships doing smaller amounts damage but more damage rolls at getting the crits. I was also thinking you had to get past that threshold before damage could be done. With greenboy's suggestion half could be fine.
With regards to the no weapon thing it's fine if you can fix them 1 in 36 chance of getting it anyway. But when your ship can't thats where the problem is and shouldn't happen. You should always be able to fix crits.

Yeah, vs Hull 5 you need 9AD on average to do that amount of damage. 14AD vs Hull 6.

 

[Ripple]

My understanding was that folks were saying the damage of the crits was still going through, only effects were being floated. That lead to re-directed beams (under 1st ed) being able to do this fairly easily to hull 5, and with a bit more difficult to hull 6.

(I admit I rate critical damage higher than its statistical average, as you tend to get hit high in one number or the other, and your ship really only has to lose one of the two tracks to die.)

Most battle hulls are hull 6, agreed, but did not think this rule was only going to be applied to top end hulls but across the board. The same mechanical issue exists in games that are say 5 skirmish...do you want to go to a raid hull and risk getting critted out in first turn, or go with a swarm of patrol hulls? Beams that can roll up are fewer...but you have the flash missile swarms, etc. That was why I went down to raid...

And while I agree you should always be able to repair from a game mechanic view if not from fluff...that is not the way the game is. That is a different change than the one we discussing, and one of the big reasons crits are such an issue. One of the main defenses against crits is supposedly repair, but no SA and no DC and skeleton crewing make that a dubious prospect.

Ripple

 

[Kosh127]

Ok so this is my idea. The idea of swarms is to powerful lets go back in history. A lot of people like the KING TIGER idea. Having the largest hardest hitting toughest thing on the field. Ok I can understand this its cool to have a big bad ass mother F.... However, did you know that in truth the top brass of the US report was that alought we could only destroy this from the side at extremely close range with resulted in heavy losses. Or from the rear at a short but decent range. The King tiger could not go off road in all but the hardest ground. And it would destroy the vast majority of roads to a point that most vehicles could not follow them on the roads. The steel used was of poor quality compared to that used in the Panther or the Tiger, which resulted in the armour failing under battle damage quicker than most others. So what happened to the King Tiger on the battle field. It was destroyed by SHERMANS!!!! On a 10 to one or even 6 to 1 the King tiger was destroyed. Fast forward. So you think that at 24 to 1 you should win. Come on guys. The big stuff is useless without support. Why do you think Aircraft carries have battle groups to protect them. Don’t just think that because you have the biggest toy on the field that you will stop the competition.

 

[Ripple]

Only issue with your response Kosh is that ACtA is a case where the King Tigers front armor is crap also...not just it's sides, rear and off roading capability.

Sean

 

[prelude_to_war]

Another option would be to say that ships don't take criticals until they have suffered at least 1/2 damage, this would mean that big ships are more resiliant than small ships to criticals due to the number of damage points.
Or if that is too good, they ignore special effects from criticals just taking the damage and crew till they get to half damage.

It means that the ancient ships are able to have a fight against a fleet without being crippled by criticals on the first turn.

This is a great idea. Would make the pak'ma'ra' a serious contender with the major races due to redundancy.