Will P&P address PL?

[Foxmeister]

A PL based solution sounds horrible to me. A White Star isn't going to have anything like the durability of an Explorer.

And it won't with a PL based solution - the fact that it may get to ignore a few crits (like the Explorer) doesn't mean it's going to last as long as an Explorer.

The Explorer would gain its resistance to crits from sheer size and bulk, and the Whitestar from its ability to self-repair and better electronics. The effects can be the same, but the rationale behind them different.


regards,

Dave

 

[Target]

I'd also say armour doesn't protect vs beam & mini beam since they slice through it easily & they do crits as usual. Another reason why beams should be the ultimate & why ancients use them & nothing else.

Sorry - but that would hideously disadvantage those races which don't have many beams versus those that do. Think Dilgar vs Minbari!

Regards,

Dave

Apart from the fact that Dilgar AD, weapon systems out weighs Minbari AD & weapon systems anyday & the fact that Dilgar would be doing a hell of lot more pure damage than Minbari. This way ancients wouldn't have issues with armour as they only have 1 weapon generally. I wouldn't think they would anyway. Beams are meant to be the best weapon out there & probably were designed for this reason.
Minbari ships wouldn't have a lot of armour due to stealth. Mini beams & beams don't have a lot of AD cause they are so deadly, hitting on 4+ no matter what, so why would armour stop them. Minbari & Drakh do have non beam beams, the Tigara for instance probably the one of best raid ship out there. Even Drazi tend to ballistic weapons as well.
You wouldn't give Minbari ships or any with advanced defense a lot of armour. Smaller ships probably wouldn't have any at all.
I'd generally would be putting it on raid & up. The armour would get eaten through pretty quick if when you rolled a crit you just do an extra point of dam. Not sayin i prefer this way at all but its not the huge disparity that you suggested.
I'd prefer a a score say 12 on G'Quan, when a crit is scored roll just a d6 & take that off the score, if it's more eg 2-6 means it will 4-? nice and easy.

 

[nekomata fuyu]

A Explorer can generally expect 7x as many crits than a White Star for the same percentage of damage loss from the same weapons. That to me says that the Explorer is currently much more susceptable to crits.

The main problem with the current system is that the more damage points a ship has, the less damage it takes per crit on average. Smaller Raid ships already beat the larger Raid ships on this point. Durability/Bulk/Redundancy looks to be the best way of correcting this flaw with the system, but to do that it would need to be handed out based mainly on damage score, possibly with modifiers for certain types of defences. This could be such as counting Adaptive Armour ships as having twice as many damage points whilst working out their Durability score - AA reduces halves damage, but only after the rolls which determine the number of critical hits, so this should be fair. Dodge for example should not be taken into acount as it already stops criticals.

Instead of Durability, the White Star should mainly rely on Dodge to avoid the crits. It may get some benefit from redundant systems and advanced damage control (see Adaptive Armour above), but this shouldn't make up completely for it being a small fragile hull.

 

[Foxmeister]

A Explorer can generally expect 7x as many crits than a White Star for the same percentage of damage loss from the same weapons. That to me says that the Explorer is currently much more susceptable to crits.

That's a strawman argument I'm afraid. Given it has so many more damage points as a Whitestar, of course it's going to look like that as a percentage. By that argument, a Ka'Bin'Tak is more susceptible to crits than an Explorer.

If it can take more hits it, can take more crits but it doesn't make it more susceptible to them, it just means that it's going to be around for longer and therefore the potential for more crits exists.

Ships like the Explorer and to a lesser extent the T'Loth and T'Rann, are in the minority and mostly exceptions. IMHO, any solution to this issue needs to be simple to apply without restating every ship because that isn't going to happen - PLs, for all their weaknesses, are on average a reasonable guide and therefore by using them you could implement redundancy in just a few lines of text in a rule.

Just my opinion of course.

Regards,

Dave

 

[nekomata fuyu]

If anything, hiding behind "Oh, but they're both Raid level" is the strawman. Comparing how much damage they take to get a crit is getting down to the base of the problem. And yes, the Ka'Bin'Tak is even more susceptable to crits than an Explorer.

Now, here's the real strawman... claiming that rating by damage means any more restating of ships than rating by PL.
In both cases the player needs to add the extra stat for each ship (and this only needs to be done once). Both methods also have the same complexity to understand if the rating is being determined purely by damage.
If the rating is being done by damage with modifiers with certain traits, then it does become a little more complex to understand, but even then it should be easy enough for anyone who can actually understand the core rules of the game in the first place, and will allow for a much better fit of durability to each ship.

 

[Foxmeister]

Now, here's the real strawman... claiming that rating by damage means any more restating of ships than rating by PL.

Of course it does! If you say 25% damage, then for every ship you need to calculate what that 25% damage threshold is. If you use damage thresholds (e.g 1-20, 21-40 etc), what what about those ships with adaptive armour or shields?

The *best* solution would be to restat each ship individually, but since that isn't going to happen you need to look to alternatives. IMHO, PLs work for the vast majority of cases and therefore are a good solution - your mileage clearly varies but that's fine because neither solution is optimal.

Regards,

Dave

 

[nekomata fuyu]

First of all, the simple version. Compare:
1-30 damage: Durability -
31-60 damage: Durability 6
61-90 damage: Durability 5
etc

Patrol: Durability -
Skirmish: Durability 6
Raid: Durability 5
etc

Both involve the same amount of restating, and both are as easy for the player to use. How on earth is it harder for the player to read the top table than the bottom one? They only need to read it a couple of times whilst they go through their book and pencil in the new durability stat for each ship that they use. Half of us wouldn't even need to do that, as we'd just print off and use the soon to be updated ship viewers. Both will have ships which they don't cover properly, and which Mongoose will need to restat. Working with damage does attack the problem itself rather than being something that may or may not be related to the problem by varying amounts depending on the ship.

Now for the "advanced" version. It still involves the same amount of going through the book adding the new stat for each ship used. Unless you think that a significant number of ACTA players are drooling idiots who can't count to 20 without taking off their shoes, it barely requires more thought either. It does however take into account the effects of certain traits without effectively making any trait that would boost PL also boost Durability.
Adaptive Armour can be taken into account by saying "if a ship has Adaptive Armour, count it as having twice as many damage points for the purpose of working out durability". Other similar traits can be treated in a similar fashion. Shields should not be taken into account because it already blocks crits, as does Dodge. You would only need a handful of such rules to cover all the traits which should be taken into account, and you can say that they should be applied in the order that they're encountered in the list (just to stop arguments over adding or multiplying first). This method will give much better results than either purely going by damage or PL, and would still be childs play for anyone who can actually play ACTA in the first place.

To put it your way, the best solution would be to restat each ship individually, but since that isn't going to happen you need to look for a workable solution that gives the best general results. This is where the damage based system works well, and has the flexibility with a few simple modifiers to work superbly.

 

[Foxmeister]

What are you going to do about self-repair taking you back over the threshold? What about those ships that rely on stealth? You've just admitted you need a handful of rules to cover all the affected traits - why do you need this complexity when a *single* rule would do the job for 95% of situations?

Regards,

Dave

 

[nekomata fuyu]

...
Last I checked, Self-Repair didn't go around changing any of the stats in the book. It could just be me though, and it might have been changing the Speed stat or the hull stat of my Hunters whilst I wasn't looking. *checks* Nope, Self-Repair has left all the ships in my fleet book with the same stats as last time I played. Not sure why you think Durability would be any different...

Stealth? Stealth already blocks criticals, so why are you trying to have it affect Durability?

You'd need to go through your book and add a durability trait once. Ever. Not per turn, not per game, but ever. After that, Durability would be just another stat, just like Speed or Hull. It's not exactly hard. It's not even mildly taxing in the grand scheme of things. It does however give better results that to match with a PL based system you would need many more than a handful of much more complicated rules.

 

[Lokai]

I think that a save that is applied based on a ships PL would work okay, but at this point unless they can put a lot of time into playtesting to give each ship its own specific save number they should just assign a save number to each PL. this would be in line with helping bigger ships deal with their being so suseptable to crits as compared to their value in lower pl ships. the damage of a crit should still be applied as a good hit is a good hit but the ship may be able to shrug off the EFFECT

in a perfect world, they'll come out with a 3rd edition and they can sit down and come up with a good system that they can assign resiliancy stat to each ship in a balanced manner, but i think thats a little much to hope for at this point. I'll take a band aid as opposed to a big fat goose egg.

 

[Target]

Here's a formula for armour
(Hits/10)+ Hull score
If you have dodge or stealth * by the chance of hitting eg
5+ dodge=.66
4+ dodge=.5
5+ Stealth= .33
4+ Stealth= .5
If you have interceptors or GeG - the score GeG 3 is 3
If you have Shields regen rate or Self repair also minus the score, d6 probably 3.5
That becomes your armour score, round up.

 

[nekomata fuyu]

Having run through all the traits, it looks like the handful of potential rules boils down to one, leaving a system as follows (exact number open to playtesting):

Each ship now has a Durability stat. To add this stat to older 2nd Ed ships, use the following process:
Take the ship's damage score. If the ship has Adaptive Armour, double the ship's damage for the purpose of working out Durability. Look up the ship's Durability stat on the bollowing table.

1-30: Durability -
31-61: Durability 6
61-90: Durability 5
91-120: Durability 4
121-150: Durability 3
151+: Durability 2

Once you have added the Durability stat to a ship, it is a fixed stat just like any other, and is not modified due to in-game effects or refits unless specifically stated. New ships stats may be released with a Durability stat which works out to be different from that generated by this system. Such cases override this system, and this system should be used purely to convert older stats which do not feature a Durability score.

Note that the numbers are not fixed and open to playtest. Each group doesn't even have to be the same size - it may be decided that the "Durability -" group should only cover 0-25 whilst the "Durability 4" group covers "75-150", and there's no "Durability 2" group. It might also be decided that the bonus for Adaptive Armour should be 1.5x rather than 2x. None of this should have any effect on the player, who can still work out his new stats as easily as above.

Why not any stats other than Adaptive Armour? With the exception of GEG, all the other traits are either non-defensive or they already block crits by blocking hits. GEG specifically says that it has no effect on crits, and so has been ignored.
Note that Self-Repair doesn't block hits, but doesn't do anything to stop damage either. Instead it repairs the damage afterwards. This is already taken into account with crits in that Self-Repair grants a +1 bonus to Damage Control Checks.

 

[CZuschlag]

We're trying here to come up with some general formula that specifies whatever-you-want-to-call-this-crit-mechanism. I don't think that's right at all. This is a mechanic that shouldn't be coarsely-done; criticals are such a large mechanic in the game that doing this would likely put "crossbeam's outa skew on treadle".

This one reeks of slow balance and playtesting. In particular, ships that play best in the endgame because of manouverability -- White Star, Vree, Agile Ships, G'Vrahn, Shadows, Dargan, Liati, Tinashi, Tashkat, etc.) or play best to the endgame because of very powerful defense systems like GEG (Adira, Amu, Dra'vash, Adult Shadow Ship) need to be reigned in on this. Ships that don't include the big lumberers that have trouble at the end .... Nova, G'Quan and variants, T'Loth, Wahant, Rohric, Rongoth, Primus, Octurion, Omega, Fireraptor, Urik'hal, Hurr Gunship, Avioki and variant, Corumai, Jucaya, Orestes, Sharlin.

This is just an attempt to account for balance, above all! We can't keep trying for this goal, and yet apply some flat fix. Quick-and-dirty got us to where we are, but if we want better, it's going to take time. No one ever claimed game balance was easy -- it's not!

This, if done, should be done on a case-by-case basis. And, because we have demonstrated in a variety of ways here our collective blindness to any balance issues about ships that we personally fly (me, too --- it took a while before I relented on the 1st Edition Targrath as overbuilt), I don't think this is something that the community can do.

We likely need the Mongoose for something like this.

 

[Foxmeister]

Here's a formula for armour
(Hits/10)+ Hull score
If you have dodge or stealth * by the chance of hitting eg
5+ dodge=.66
4+ dodge=.5
5+ Stealth= .33
4+ Stealth= .5
If you have interceptors or GeG - the score GeG 3 is 3
If you have Shields regen rate or Self repair also minus the score, d6 probably 3.5
That becomes your armour score, round up.

Ok, let's work on the assumption that a formula based solution could work (which I don't believe). Look how many variables you have there - how much playtesting is this going to require?

At least if you were to add something across the board by priority level, you stand far less chance of affecting the balance since ships are supposed to be balanced by PL already (which is true in most cases), and therefore is *likely* to require less playtesting.

Regards,

Dave

 

[Da Boss]

if you are going to a save system rather than a fixed "Ignore X crits" I can see problems with ships just not dying - and probably not the ones you want:

White Star gunship - dodge, adaptive armour, CBD, crit save.

Minbari will have a reletively low crit save I grant you but as crits are often the only way to hurt them as you often spread your AD about in attempts to break stealth.

Also under the system you are looking at the Victory gets a 2+ save :shock: against criticals - does it really need that?

 

[Target]

The formula or which ever way has probably got to based on hits.
If the ship has low hits it has some sort of defense, this is done in balancing the ships so it should be balanced as well.
The formula i put up probably looks more complicated than it is cause my poor writing skills. Only took me 5 mins to think up.
Fast Destroyer (3.4) 24/20/5- 4pts of armour
Altarian (8.9) 29/20/6- 9 pts of armour
Halik (8.6) 36/27/8- 9pts of armour
Firehawk (5.1) 28/22/8- 6pts of amour
Whitestar (2) 10/8/3 2pt of armour
Tigara (2.4) 24/21/8 3pts of armour
Hyperion (5.8) 28/22/6 6pts of armour
Shadow scout is really ugly to work out & is probably a negative armour.
On the main is the numbers don't look to bad at all to me & probably are balanced to a reasonable degree. Just giving a set score across the priority would be awfuly unbalanced. Our group bases our redundancy off crew score & it works very well for us. We haven't come across any glaring balance issue but we mainly play Centauri, Dilgar, Drazi, EA, Minbari, Narn. Haven't gone too much effort with the Shadows as we don't use them as a Campaign fleet. They can be bought to attack people & we have them pretty damn hard. If we used them more often we would come up with a decent set of rules.
Guess my point is it has to based off Hits as thats meant to be already balanced with defensive systems.

 

[Foxmeister]

i
Also under the system you are looking at the Victory gets a 2+ save :shock: against criticals - does it really need that?

Under the proposal I advocate, a Victory wouldn't get a crit save at all vs ships of the same PL and the one below.

Regards,

Dave

 

[nekomata fuyu]

Also under the system you are looking at the Victory gets a 2+ save :shock: against criticals - does it really need that?

Then use numbers that don't give the Victory a 2+ save? I mean, using playtested numbers is only suggested twice in my post...

 

[Target]

If you are the same level or higher no need to roll to confirm the crit
-1 level 2+
-2 level 3+
-3 level 4+
-4 level 5+
-5 level 6+
A patrol ship would need roll a 6 to confirm a crit vs Armagedon & a raid would need 4+.
I'd say fighters couldn't go above 4+ as they are a bit more pinpoint than ships.
Not sure if this was what foxmeister was suggesting earlier or not.
I thought Fox was meaning ships at a PL have a set save, sorry if this wasn't the case. Is this the way they do it in VAS? Have rules but haven't read them.

 

[Foxmeister]

If you are the same level or higher no need to roll to confirm the crit
-1 level 2+
-2 level 3+
-3 level 4+
-4 level 5+
-5 level 6+
A patrol ship would need roll a 6 to confirm a crit vs Armagedon & a raid would need 4+.
I'd say fighters couldn't go above 4+ as they are a bit more pinpoint than ships.
Not sure if this was what foxmeister was suggesting earlier or not.
I thought Fox was meaning ships at a PL have a set save, sorry if this wasn't the case. Is this the way they do it in VAS? Have rules but haven't read them.

In VaS, if you roll a 6 on your damage dice you then roll to see if you convert it into a crit by rolling amother D6 and on a 4+ you get the crit.

My idea was to take this but apply the firing ships PL to it.

An idea I posted here a while ago (and can't find now) was to add an additional roll if a a firing ship was more than 1 PL below the target ship (i.e. Skirmish to Battle)

For example, if a Ka'Toc (Skirmish) fires on a Primus (Battle) and scored a "crit" (i.e. a 6 on the damage roll), they would need to roll a 4+ to actually convert that into a crit. A Patrol PL vessel against the same target would need a 5+, and a fighter would need a 6+. Precise weapons would get +1 to the roll, so effectively firing one level above their weight (and still getting the potential crit on a 5 or 6).

Of course, this would mean that a fighter without a precise weapon couldn't score a crit on a War or Armageddon level ship, but this feels right to me.

Regards,

Dave