Dataphract

What's left out is that they've played the game with the new rules and ship stats and we haven't. We're reading a script and calling the movie ****.

My guess is that the game works better than we think with the info we have. If it were as awful as people here are claiming it will be, the testers would've thought so too, right? There are a couple conclusions we can draw from that: The beta testers were completely ignored and it's all garbage, or it actually works well in play. Maybe the things we dislike from the bits we've been given to read are actually fun on the table?

What about if, god forbid, we nixed fore fixed and didn't feel like rebalancing everything, just make it so if you fire FF kinetics, that it's the ONLY weapon system you can fire that turn? That would get around people splitting arcs with a massive railgun. I'm still all about keeping FF, but just a thought.

If you replace fore fixed with just fore in a race like Dindrenzi, you have to drop the AD significantly to keep them from becoming OP, as well as increase side arc AD to prevent them from being helpless. At that point you've taken away everything that made them unique. Removing fore fixed is a step towards a homogeneity that I think we should strive to avoid.

I respectfully disagree. I agree that in it's current state it can slow play, but I think having a limited front arc adds a lot of flavor to the weapons and factions that use it. I don't think it should be removed, just revamped a little. Plus, if 3.0 brings decent changes to movement, there's not too much reason to get rid of it.

Nope =] For any square base the angle is the same. The ratio between the long side and half of the bottom is always 2:1, so the angle of the arc will always be 2(tan^-1)(1/2) ≈ 56º The only time it fails is with non-square bases, and I think there's only one in Firestorm.

My thought was making a new arc from the middle of the back edge through the top corners. Comes out to about 56 degrees, and it's really not any worse to check than the normal arc if you just mark your bases. It's better than the current fixed fore (especially at long range) but it's still pretty limited. It would keep the effect that FF has of making it difficult to line up shots at close range, while speeding up play by removing the need to get super (and imho unnecessarily) finnicky about movement with FF ships. This might also make a pure template movement system more feasible as well.

Seems like having to take min. squads would hit Sorylians a lot harder, seeing as how their big thing is large squads.

My only issue with a pure template movement system is that it would make it almost impossible to line up fixed fore. You'd have to allow for some kind of pivot at the end or something

Keep in mind that no one else would get the PD boost either.

Wouldn't option two already be more damaging? If anything, I'd like to see ships a bit MORE survivable.

What about just having SRS tokens PD only work against other SRS?

I like this. It's the simplest in terms of algebra, though it does seem to make picking your focus less important. For me though, that loss is acceptable. It still keeps the spirit and feel of linking and firing,

What could Spartan do in V.3 to streamline the slow parts?

I'm just curious what kinds of techniques you use, or house rules you implement, to speed up the game. My group is still new, and I know speed will come with experience, but Firestorm seems like a slower game to begin with. What kinds of shortcuts or rules could speed up gameplay without taking away from the complexity?