Pok

And with that, my interest in the project dies. I have nothing against the man as a person, but I couldn't stand Planetfall, his take on Dystopian, and I doubt I'll like his take on FA. I'll check the rules out when they're done, but don't expect miracles out of it.

It feels like discussion about wording. In game terms, a ship with 0HP is out of action. To you, as a commander, it doesn't matter if it turned into gas or just blew a tire. In either case, it's state is so bad it cannot move under it's own power. After the battle the victor can roll to see if his ships are recoverable (probably not tho...at some point, the cost of repairs is higher than cost of building a new ship) if you want to play a campaign, but it should have no impact on the actual battle. It's destroyed until proven otherwise.

I think the military has a special name for people who run away from the fight without orders?

You die, because there is no way that a human can react in time to anything happening in any remotely hard sci-fi combat scenario.

How about we start with a working engine that's quick, fun and allows for decent tactical choices first, so we know what has to be written to make it work background wise?

I'd rather stick to damage dice if possible. I tried DropFleet, and the pegs damage system was used once before we went back to the more convenient and quicker dice damage tracking. Apps are fine...until the phone battery dies, which as we all know, happens at the worst of times. Cards are a fine solution, I don't mind them at all, and best option would be to have a simple program to prepare a fleet list, and print it out with all hardpoints accounted for. It also gets round the "1st ed cards packed with models when we're on v2" issue that come with pre-printed cards.

What I'd like to see but almost certainly will not be is move from land-inspired "lots of chaff, some mediums and few larges" list. Look at Jutland, the British had 28 battleships involved, with 14 cruisers/light cruisers in squadrons, and around 45 destroyers in the grand fleet. Obviously no one will field 28 BB's in a game, but it shows a force that is much more top-heavy than "balanced" fleets in Firestorm. I could be an unique selling point- focusing the game on large ships, you could have as much depth of detail as you want without bogging it down.

Not really, in a smaller game it just means I've wasted however much time it took to get to that point with zero chance of comeback. In larger games, it just means I get crippled from a cheap shot. What you are describing sounds to me like a game that swings on dicerolls entirely, and takes forever to play out, because goodness knows we have to give those frigates a chance to shine, instead of treating them like cheap chaff that they are point and stats-wise. There's this fetish for keeping the "1 in 100 chance for a single cruiser to damage this battleship" like it's a good thing, when it just ends up being your dice winning for you. It's tabletop equivalent of playing an online match, being ahead of the enemy by a huge margin, and losing because you got disconnected by your modem. In short, if you want to make a game that's so swingy and reliant on dicerolls over everything else, that's fine, but at least don't try to make it tactical and slow in resolution. Age of Sigmar is a good example. It's very simple, very dice-reliant, but I can finish a game with 50+ models in about an hour and a half, so it doesn't feel like wasted time if it goes funny.

As someone who likes to play FT as well, I would far prefer static defense that you can rely on than rolls. Most importantly, you can price shields/PD much better this way, as they always give the same effect, and criticals that cut them in half also work better. In FT, I will always pick armor boxes over shields, because they make the ship plain more durable with no luck element. Loss of "interactivity" might be an issue, but with alternate activations, both players stay "in the game" so to speak, so it's not like one player sits for 5-10 minutes just watching his ships take it before it's his turn. And with stable values, you can even have weapon mars that pierce shields and so on, making weapons more interesting to use.

Of which one was always superior. Like with poor Terrans, which had to pick the +1HP upgrade if you picked any at all, as it was simply superior to the rest.

I remember when the game had no alliance/league ships at all, only 6 main factions, and I'd go back to it in an instant. In my opinion the alliance ships only ever took away from the main six' potential fleet growth. The second SG started releasing alliance ships, the same second we've stopped getting interesting main 6 unit types. Woo, a faction which can teleport all over the board (Hi Kedorians) vs boring old relthoza, with one teleporting ship that's inferior in every way.

"I love the look of Terquai, why can't I run them alone!" is how it ends. It's been clearly demonstrated in the past that people don't want to play a soup, they want "their" chosen tiny subfaction to be fleshed out to full list. It's inevitable.

The problem is, indirect weapon systems, aside from gravs, have very limited AD range between "useless" and "OP". So you can't make a cruiser with 12 AD of torps, and you can't make a Battleship with 4 ad of cyberwarfare, because there is no point. As for MARs, half of them are either pointless or add so little it might as well be. Functionally, using the exploding dice system in v2.0, there was no difference between ship with 6 and 8AD for example...and you can't give ships too much AD or defense, or they will break the system. You'd have to use something completely different to accomodate enough variety to fit more than around 8-10 factions total.

Uh...if you like tramp stamps on your ships I guess? I still would prefer not to have it on the game models. I can't un-model them, and fans of such can always paint them on (or maybe glue on, if i's a separate element).

Simple. Any fleet game will have very limited number of variations (and FA, in it's 2.0 version, had even less!) and every"allied" fleet either takes away some new gimmick that could be added to the main fleets,leaving them bland and boring in comparison (see grav guns on terakians vs absolutely no-frills sorylians) or they double the existing fleets' abilities. From gamers' perspective, it leads to scattershot releases with main fleets being the less exciting option. Why play Terrans, when Hawker has more unique toys? From company perspective, the more SKU the harder it is to keep everything in production and in stores.