Different Battery Idea

[Xyon]

Under the suggestion of Horizon, I'm presenting my idea for determining how many dice battery weapons use when rolling to damage vs the armor of a ship.

Instead of the gunnery table, and using column shifts for abeam/closing/type of target/distance.  We incorporate this information into the base profile of the ships themselves.


Using a new entry for each ship, called evasion (I dont like this word for reasons you'll see too, maybe target as a replacement).    Standard cruisers would be the standard to base this stat on.  
Thus (as an example for showing the mechanic, not a balanced final value) for a standard cruiser it would have +1F/-1S/0R.    +1 evasion in the front, -1 for the side (or abeam), and 0 for the rear.    Compared to an escort, which would have 0F/-2S/-1R  for its evasion values.

What does evasion do?  It subtracts or adds the number of dice you roll for each battery weapon that is firing at the ship from the corresponding arc.  Evasion also allows you to incorporate things like holofields (just add higher evasion), or any other mechanic that would make a ship harder or easier to hit. Weapons that always count as closing would of course always use the front evasion value.


Next for the weapons themselves.   Break each battery weapon into range bands of effectiveness.     A 60cm weapon battery at strength 10, would be rewritten as 0-15cm st7, 16-30 st5 31-60cm st4.            If it had something that allowed it to ignore a right shift for range in the current rules, then it would be 0-5cm st7 16-60cm st5.  


In this sort of rule set, I wouldent expect people to memorize the range bands of things, but evasion values being fairly standardized would be easier to remember, and would not present a difficult way to modify the strength of the weapon when you check the range band.    I also think that it would not be more difficult to do this system for a new player, than would using the gunnery table.


As an example,  a squad of 2 escorts shoot at a cruiser both are in the 16-30 range, at st3 since they're the same type of escort.   One is in the rear (evasion 0) another abeam (evasion -1)    so 3+0 and 3-1 dice are rolled for a total of 5 dice,   and you hit vs armor as you normally would.

[RayB HA]

Interesting concept.

It can't work though, unless it was a modifier to a to hit roll (Replacing the Gunnery table with the to hit dice it represents). It can't work as gunnery strengths vary too wildly, escorts would become next to useless!

Even then though you'd have to rejigg alot of ships surviabilty to counter this unless it wasn't so different from how it is now. In which case there would be no point.

Cheers,

RayB HA

[Xyon]

Why do you think it has to be a way to modify hitting or not, instead of just a different but similar way to represent column shifts?  Either tweaking the strength of escorts, or allowing them to combine dice before subtracting them, would help them stay about as equal as they are now, or adjusting their points to allow more escorts in general.  Granted I see what you mean, but when I was developing this idea, I was also developing a kind of.. bfg 2.0 if you will, so it probably fits better in that context than it does inside the context of bfg 1st edition.

[RayB HA]

I understand that this replaces column shifts, but obviously not all, as you have to take range and BM's or what not into consideration as well.

What I'm saying is that this would work better as a modifier for a gunnery to hit roll that the original gunnery table represents. (From left to right it goes, gunnery strength, hitting on a 2+, 3+, 4+, 5+ and 6+).

So instead of having capitalships/escorts and facing as universal values these would be different shifts depending on the targets 'evade profile'.

Actually, this would still work fine with the normal gunnery table!

You would still have to take a ships changed survivability into account, for instance Chaos cruisers should be slightly harder to hit than IN cruisers because they are faster, therefore Chaos should have a new built in weakness to counter this (a 5pt price increase would work).

Cheers,

RayB HA

[Xyon]

I was thinking blast markers would just be another -1 dice rolled, or whatever # is found to be appropriate. 


Have people in the HA considered a system similar to firestorm armada? Of course not doing the exact same thing, but it is a much newer game to gain ideas about how newer games are going. BFG came out in '99. So while not ancient, it is  somewhat dated in the mechanics used.

I'll keep working on a different idea, maybe not the one I have in this post, but I think something different could be done and still leave the game balanced and as good/tactical as it is now.

[Sigoroth]

Ray, the modifier applies to the number of dice rolled against armour, it doesn't apply to the number rolled against. Therefore it merely replicates the gunnery tables column shifts. Both methods represent missed hits due to difficult circumstances.

However, consider a squadron of 3 Tyrants against an abeam escort. In Xyon's system at long range these get the same number of dice. 30 WB on the gunnery table against abeam escort = 6 dice. WB 10 converts to 4 dice at long range (7 at close range, 5 at normal range) - 2 for abeam escort = 2 x 3 = 6 dice. However, at normal range it gains 3 dice, +50% firepower. So this system doesn't scale the same as the gunnery table, though you could get close. In this case it makes escorts weaker, since they'd need range or BMs to maintain the defensive capabilities they currently enjoy against WBs.

Note: I made it a squadron of 3 Tyrants for this example just to illustrate the point. One Tyrant would have done just as well to demonstrate +50% firpower, but people have a tendency to dismiss a difference of "just one dice". One dice difference isn't much, but the important point is it scales.