Spartan old rules!

[Hive]

4 hours ago, Jorgen_CAB said:

 

Or some such...

I don't think that looks too busy, I could definately see something similar working, but I have a few questions- why define the weapon as large/heavy if you're going to list out its dice colors vs targets anyways? Does being a railgun actually mean anything in this stat block? Obvs you would need to list firing arcs somewhere... Also, you mention the ship having weapons to account for the fact that this railgun couldn't target smalls, but aren't you worried about your large ships becoming swiss army knives? No ship (with weapons I guess since a bunch of the System Wars ships seem to be Point Defense Only...) should be unable to harm another is a core design principle that prevents stalemates, but if the BB has a weapon for smalls and a weapon for everything else, what's the point in breaking them down that way anyways?

[Jorgen_CAB]

This was just an example of ONE weapon system, a ship can have multiple weapons systems for different targets in different arcs. You also want some variety and some drawbacks on most platforms or things become too boring. The name of the weapon was only for flavour, I guess their fixed fire arcs is enormous railguns of some sort. This was not a complete statline either. You would probably use rangeband distance, arcs and other key words effecting the weapon etc..

I could see that a Dindrenzi battleship would have gun-racks firing at port/starboard to target both medium and small ships just like a regular WW2 battleship, more or less. But you still would like to protect it with smaller cruisers against smaller ships with torpedoes. The important thing here is that many small ships would have weapons they can fire outside the BB effective  fire range and most BB would not pack enough weapons against small to account for their points cost, just a token amount. Not all small ships are built for attacking battleships either, their torpedoes are mostly a support weapon, their real use would mainly be out of combat anyway as scout and patrol ships... points and other effect will reflect such things in a game.

The wording of Huge, Large and Medium would be a key word for the TARGET not the weapon class. If you shoot a ship with the key word Huge or Large you roll RED dice if you shoot against a ship with the key word Medium you roll BLACK dice.

No system or rule system is prefect but some are better than others and it also depend on what you want the game to do.

[Jorgen_CAB]

2 hours ago, Wolfgang Jannesen said:

I can't playtest it with that explanation, but I'd definitely be curious how it works on the table. When you've got something I can take to the table and see how it feels I would love to give it a shot and compare. Right now I really dont like these ideas, but I haven't gotten a chance to try them. I dont understand how you balanced your ships for this system

I don't think my old conversion rules would make much use to anybody since we only converted and balanced the ships we had and they were sort of internally consistent with each other. I also would need to completely rewrite those rules and if I did that I would probably rather make an entire new game with the flavour of FSA in the background instead, you would not recognise the rules anymore outside some core aspects.

In short, it would be a very different game.

[Wolfgang Jannesen]

16 hours ago, Jorgen_CAB said:

I don't think my old conversion rules would make much use to anybody since we only converted and balanced the ships we had and they were sort of internally consistent with each other. I also would need to completely rewrite those rules and if I did that I would probably rather make an entire new game with the flavour of FSA in the background instead, you would not recognise the rules anymore outside some core aspects.

In short, it would be a very different game.

Fair enough, I might not be onboard with idea but I can't make a real opinion until I try it out. Is the uh, is the basic idea that you'd rather play Star Wars Armada using Firestorm models?

[Hive]

On 5/24/2018 at 4:40 PM, Jorgen_CAB said:

The wording of Huge, Large and Medium would be a key word for the TARGET not the weapon class. If you shoot a ship with the key word Huge or Large you roll RED dice if you shoot against a ship with the key word Medium you roll BLACK dice.

No, I get that, just that you mentioned in an earlier post Heavy weapons not working against smalls, and have Large as part of the weapon designation in addition to Railgun. I wasn't sure why you'd bother given that the weapon name/designation doesn't have any real impact, only its target designations.

[Jorgen_CAB]

9 hours ago, Wolfgang Jannesen said:

Fair enough, I might not be onboard with idea but I can't make a real opinion until I try it out. Is the uh, is the basic idea that you'd rather play Star Wars Armada using Firestorm models?

No... I like the shooting and movement phases to be separate... that is what I would like in any naval game space or blue navy type.

What I feel about Star Wars Armada is that it feel more tactical in that you really need to plan many turns ahead were your ships and the opponent will be and you win the game by maneuver more than in FSA. Part of that is shooting before movement since this at least always give you a chance to control the engagement. But it still have the activation issue in the same way you do in FSA. This activation issue is a game mechanic that I feel get in the way of proper game board tactics because it can often lead to a snowball effect based on luck more than skill.

I'm not saying either game require no skill, they certainly do, just not the kind I fully enjoy. Activation advantage is a thing I think games need to fix.

 

I have created another ship combat rule system for smaller space ship models. Here all ships altered movement in a similar way but ship always activated in class order, they also fired in reversed class order too. So smaller ships had a big advantage over bigger ships since they moved last and shot first.  This worked really well and felt thematic for smaller ships to have more initiative than larger ships. Smaller crews with less rigid command structure give them some advantages. I also had more mechanics for FOW and crew psychology, such as you could not just pick your targets freely etc... there were some rules you needed to follow which also was based on if the ship was damaged, under fire and such.  The more experienced and effective crew you had the more tactical option they gave you. You could expect a ship with bad crew to disengage at first sign of trouble and elite crew to keep firing at that more important target even under heavy enemy fire.

These rules might sound complex but really was not... less special rules but more rules that interact in a way you can anticipate and correct for.  I used far less record keeping in this game than in FSA and far less tables and special rules to remember and played faster too. You could obviously use these rules with FSA models too, but smaller models where more ideal for these rules.

 

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

15 minutes ago, Hive said:

No, I get that, just that you mentioned in an earlier post Heavy weapons not working against smalls, and have Large as part of the weapon designation in addition to Railgun. I wasn't sure why you'd bother given that the weapon name/designation doesn't have any real impact, only its target designations.

The way that I design games these days are by the use of KEY words and ONLY that. Some text is only for flavor, flavor is also important.

It might be that weapons are divided into classes if they have some sort of influence they are then introduced through proper key words and all key words must be unique. In the picture the name was only a name for flavor and I did not include any keywords for the weapon class. Its not like I have made some real rules for this that is up to date or anything... I have an old rule-set I changed for FSA v1.x something... don't remember really and what I wrote were just some examples taken out of the blue.

[Ryjak]

On 5/22/2018 at 3:48 AM, Jorgen_CAB said:

In real naval battle during WW1/2 ship casualties was rarely above 10%. Most ships was damaged rather than sunk in the majority of engagements. Some might not consider it fun, but  saving your points by finding a tactical way to disengage  ship is also fun if that means denying the opponent the points for them.

This is mostly because the weapons of the era weren’t all that leathal, because it was so hard to hit anything... that’s one reason why Carriers became dominate: planes with one bomb/torpedo were much more likely to land a hit than a battleship firing during the entire engagement.  If your ship took a hit or two, you could easily run away, particularly since gun engagements generally happened at extreme ranges.

In FSA, everything is lethal, and escaping is very difficult, so even if it’s a good tactical move to FSE, and you execute it properly, it’s still too late most of the time.

[Ryjak]

On 5/22/2018 at 3:53 PM, Jorgen_CAB said:

I really think that most people (outside really competitive players) want to fly their ships and do cool manoeuvring to fool the opponent and win by superior positioning. Winning by rolling the better dice from the best combination of weapons is not what I think most people consider fun in comparison.  

“Really competative players” want to win as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, in most game systems it’s much easier to win by consentrating on list-building and combos before th game than it is to win via positioning and outplaying your opponent during the game.

I felt X-wing, when it first came out, was all about outplaying your opponent during the game, but since the game machanics didn’t actually reward you for out-maneuvering your opponent (you still needed to roll dice for damage, and RNG is fickle), FFG started adding things the made maneuvering less important, like turrets, and they also figured out a subtle way to make the game pay-to-win, which is great for the bottom line, but generally not great for gameplay.

FSA 2.0 is more about positioning and maneuver than most games, and you are almost always rewarded for out-positioning your opponent.  For example, pretty much everyone that plays FSA 2.0 loses their first half-dozen games, because they’re learning the value of tactical positioning and strategic timing for the very first time.  Once you get the hang of your fleet and how it fires and maneuvers, you start drawing (per Battlelog) and that first actual win is very sweet.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Yes... I agree that competitive players rely allot on list building and what I would deem the flaws of having too many options... the truth is that complexity often give you LESS real options if you are to be competitive and it often come down to power combinations to win games. Most games have this problem of illusory choices. This is what my argument was all about. It is much better to have LESS options but make them all viable. It is when you can stack effects upon each other the points you pay for them become too cheap.  What I have learned is that when you give powerful options such as dice manipulation they MUST come with some drawbacks or conditions, otherwise they will be abused if stacked with other similar abilities, that is just a fact. X-Wing is a good example of this, I also think they made some damn good changes to the 2.0 version of that game, it remain to be seen if it was good enough though. At least they made the point system and upgrade slots seamlessly changeable so they should better be able to balance that game in the future.

 

I might also again point out that my first post was in general directed at dystopian wars NOT FSA, so me referencing WWI/II had more to do with that game. However I still think it is more or less directly translated to FSA as well. I might not agree that weapons don't act like WWI/II in FSA... I actually think they work almost exactly like that. Given the distances and speeds in space weapons and targeting systems most likely have the same problem as they did in WWI/II in the FSA universe, the rule mechanic and weapons used seem to indicate that is the case in my opinion. Ships seem to work much like ships in what as do their weaponry as well. The similarities between DW and FSA are quite remarkable in terms of interaction. DW even have more of a 3D environment than FSA have too.

 

To be honest I'm probably more interested in DW than FSA in the future. I tend to favour smaller scale space battles where the board become a bigger field to operate in... I would like that for a game like DW as well but I take what I can get and there are no DW type models in a smaller scale available as far as I know.