And, so did most small ships!!! Take a look at the Warbird for example. Lost hull 6 but gained dodge and agile, lost AF weapon but gained a beam dice and extra TL dice. Overall: gain!
I have to say I'm with Burger on this one. While indeed most of the Battle and Up ships gained slightly over Arma (please note slightly, while weapons were increased to a degree and in cases their Dam/Crew tracks), the increase was definitely mirrored by weapons increase on most skirmish and especially Patrol PL ships (most especially the new ones added or drastically restatted, re Myrmidon/Haven/Artemis to name a few) and arguebably negated much of the increase to large ships.
anyway smaller ships die quicker, therefore you lose firepower everytime you lose a ship. a big ship can stay in the fight at full firepower alot longer unless crit effects lower it.
take 4 demos versus a G'vrahn. i think a g'vrahn could kill a demos every turn quite happily. this means each turn you have less firepower to try and kill my ship, whilst i get the same firepower to kill yet another of your ships the following turn.
Yes Demos do die quicker. But what your not taking into account is the gradual degradation of the G'Vrahn over the course of those 3 turns. Assuming it pops one Demos before it even shoots, thats a crapload of torps in the first turn, which even int 3 won't stop more than 6-8. It will most likely suffer 1-2 crits. Turn 2 the G'Vrahn pops another Demos before it can shoot, and suffers a hail of Ion cannons from 2 demos, again stopping several with int but again suffering hits and crits. Turn 3, the Demos are now behind the G'Vrahn and out of arc of much of its firepower and maybe even out of range on its secondaries, leaving the Demos to freely dump both Ion cannons and torps into the G'vrahn. At that point its game over, as with smart play the Demos can stay out of arc of the G'Vrahns guns until it dies.
1. THe PL system now makes it easier to get more smaller ships for the same battle point than it did in SFOS.
2. The beam rules make it harder to hurt lighter hulled ships, easier to hurt heavier hulled ships. See my original post for the statistics.
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Point 1 is a rules question. Unfotunately changing the rules would require a major stats redo of every single list and pretty much every stat of every ship in that list(this would have to be no matter what, and frankly I'm against, I just now got me EA to the pioint where I like them, Nova aside). This will not change until some time in 3e IMO.
Point 2 is also a rules question, but it affects far less ships upon furthur look. All it really require is boosting larger ships defense towards beams back to Arma and 1e stats. Since hull is no longer a factor in beams, some other method of balancing large vs small must be found. Dam/Crew stats redo would work, but again it would affect every ship in every list, leading to the same problem of point 1. IN fact its even worse as boosting large ships against beams in that manner would have an exponential effect with in increase of defense against non-beam weaponry(I'd imagine thered be a lot P@#%$@ centauri players out there if you took that route). So the following questions need to be answered.
1. What is it that make beams so deadly? The constant +4 to hit is a given. But is it the raw damage/crew loss which is the major problem or is crits caused by this which is the matter?
1. Can a rules mechanic be devised that helps larger ships against beams while not also providing benefit to either smaller ships or larger ships defenses against non-beam weaponry? If someone has answer of "Yes" speak now. If not.....
2. Can a rules mechanic be devised that provides a defensive mechanic to the survivablity to larger ships in general? The old redunancy idea springs to mind at first. Another possiblity is making DC scalable to the PL of the ship, either by allowing more DC checks based on PL or making the currenct DC check scalable to the ships PL.
