Nova Cannon limitations

[Admiral_d_Artagnan]

Ah.  For a moment I was thinking I had taken way too many direct nova hits

That's absurd. Will never happen.

[Vaaish]

No. Let me try again with Ray's:

So an even more stream-lined version would be: 30cm-150cm range (back to 30cm for balance).
Scatter dice with D6cm scatter, where a hit is 0cm scatter.

D6 damage with the hole over the stem, D3 with the hole over the base, 1 damage with the outer template over the base.   

No benefit for being on Lock-on.

You have to target a ship/defence or ordy marker/wave. Target priority is identical to other weapons, so you must pass a leadership test not to shoot the closest target.

You may not have more capital ships with NC's as without.

[lastspartacus]

Thats pretty powerful. Essentially, a large based ship will never take less than d3 hits from a nova.

[Vaaish]

Not true. A large base ship can only scatter 3cm and still have the hole over the base. That means it will only take d3 hits 50% of the time which will have the same effect as the center hole scattering off the base 33% of the time. I think that means with scatter against a large base you will result in one hit around 66% of the time.

Now, large base ships tend to have 3-4 shields which means you are doing diddly squat against them. I really wouldn't be concerned since this means that against small based ships which account for the vast majority of your fleet you'd have an even higher probability of doing only a single hit.

The NC HAS to have some bite or it's just not worth taking which is where you seem to want it to be.

[commander]

And, on a normal table you can have two to three NC shots max.

I take about two NC in my fleets. With some good and concentrated shooting (new rules), I can put some damage on ships before the NC become useless.
1:1 seems allright to me.

[RCgothic]

New battle report:

Seeing as how the IN player is spamming NCs, for this battle report I felt it only fair that the Chaos player can spam Slaughters, so with a little bit of Proxying, Steve put forth this list:

Warmaster Ld8
Pair of Slaughters Ld8(WM) & Ld9
Pair of Slaughters Ld6 & Ld 8
Pair of Slaughters Ld7 & Ld7
Pair of Slaughters Ld6 & Ld8
4 Iconoclasts Ld8

I used the same 1500pt list as before:

Admiral Ld8
Mars Ld8 (Admiral)
Pair of Dominators Ld7 & Ld8
Pair of Dominators Ld7 & Ld8
Pair of Lunars Ld7 & Ld9

Deployment ended up 110cm apart, with the Imperials forming a tight group around the Mars, and Chaos spread behind a skirmish line of Iconoclasts in a thin arc equi-distant to the Imperials at about 120cm.

Imperials got first turn, moved forward 10cm, and targetted the Warmaster's Slaughter. 1 squadron failed the check and shot at the Iconoclasts, missing and doing nothing. The other five Novas scored one direct hit, and 2 points of damage, with a blast marker on the other ship in the squadron.

The entire Chaos fleet went AAF (after using up the re-roll), with the Iconoclasts (50cm) closing to 50cm of the Imperial fleet, and the Slaughter pairs moved 51cm (WMaster 56-5cm), 51cm, 48 and 36cm to close to between 59cm and 74cm.

The Imperial fleet moved forwards 10cm to 40cm from the Iconoclasts and 49-58 from the cruisers, and fired again. Again, one squadron failed its leadership test and fired on the Iconoclasts. The Nova Cannons scored two direct hits against the closest Iconoclast, rolling a 6 and a 2 to obliterate it four times over. At this stage, Steve was doing a slow hand clap. "[sarcasm]Nice one mate! You killed the **** out of that destroyer![/sarcasm]. The other five shots scored one direct hit on the Warmaster's vessel, doing 1pt of damage, and the other four scattered.

The Chaos fleet closed to entirely within 40cm and went abeam across the Imperial vessel's prows. Firepower 121 and 16 lances leapt out at the closest Imperial Dominator Squadron, which despite bracing took 19 hits, hulking one of them, with 1 hit carrying over to the shields of the second Dominator.

The Imperials, now well within Nova cannon minimum range were a bit stuffed for options. With 6 ships remaining, 1 of which braced, they could go abeam and lose to the Slaughter's overwhelming firepower, or they could attempt to break the line, which is what they chose to do. They moved 20cm towards the Chaos lines, and managed to get a couple of shots off, which were mostly absorbed by shields. The Iconoclasts were obliterated.

In the Chaos turn, two squadrons went on Lock On orders, whilst the second half swung round to maintain a close-range fire.

The Locked on Squadrons managed 19 hits against the closing lead Lunar Squadron, turning one into a blazing hulk.
A third squadron crippled the Mars, which needed to reload and so refused to brace, doing 4 hits past shields.
The fourth squadron did three hits on the orphaned Dominator, which had braced.

So at the end of turn three, it looked like:

Chaos fleet, 8 Capital ships remaining, none braced, 3 hits past shields on the Warmaster's ship, 4 Iconoclasts lost.
Imperial fleet: 5 Capital ships remaining, of which 2 braced and 1 crippled.

This was a bad tactical situation, and only going to go more Chaos's way, but I decided to see what one more turn brought.

The undamaged Dominators went on Lock On, and managed to get between the two ships of one undamaged Slaughter squadron, Moving Away/Closing at close range. The squadron braced, with the closing slaughter being crippled with 5 hits, and moving away slaughter being crippled with 4 hits. The remainder of the fleet managed to get only abeam profiles, with the orphaned Dominator the only other ship managing to line up both broadsides, but was braced.

The focused fire of the rest of the fleet failed to get through shields.

Steve disengaged the damaged slaughters, and went Lock On with the two squadrons which had turned in the previous turn, whilst the final squadron turned around the Imperials. One pair of Lock-On Slaughters did 3 hits past shields to the lone Dominator, which braced, and it was finished off by the non-locked on slaughters. The second pair of locked on slaughters targeted the Mars, which evaporated in a Plasma Drive overload, which put blast markers in contact with the shields of the remaining Dominators and did a hit on the Lunar.

At this stage the Imperials were outnumbered 2-1 by nastier ships and were not pointing the right direction. I disengaged.

The tally was: Imperial kills: 4 destroyer escorts and 2 crippled/disengaged slaughters. (2 Capital Ships Crippled/Disengaged)
Chaos kills: 2 Dominators, 1 Lunar and 1 Mars. (4 Capital Ships Destroyed)

This was a massacre victory to Chaos.

[RCgothic]

There's nothing overpowered about the Nova Cannon. They barely compete with Torpedoes as is, even without a points premium - I only usually take them when I want a Dominator's FP12. If a Tyrant was FP12 @30cm base for 180pts I would never take a Dominator.

DO NOT change or limit the NC.

[lastspartacus]

Barely compete?  They start a lap ahead

Well not really.  But one option can be negated by turrets, armor, attack craft, and manouvering.  Barely compete my patooty.

Think its a balanced battle report to spam the fastest and cheapest cruiser in the Chaos fleet against something with a minimum range?  Discount! :p

With 1d6 it would mean that large bases are getting at least one hit on them, every time.  That marker isn't ever not completely off it.

So with a third chance of a D6, a third of a D3, and a third of a single hit, thats 2.16 hits on average to a large base ship from every nova cannon shot, under your proposal.


Novas are much less common than torps, so a limit would make fluff sense in the same way it does for the Voss patterns.
I would however like to find an option that makes NC balanced at 90cm-0cm.  Maybe the D3 idea would work with that, if it scattered 2d6.

[Admiral_d_Artagnan]

Even with the rules being proposed by Vaaish/Ray Bell, I wouldn't agree to a limitation. Still not that great. Now, allow Lock On on it (and I don't get why one can't Lock On, fluff wise and even rules wise), then i would agree to a 1 in 500 rule. Even 1 in 750.

[Vaaish]

LS, you really just want NC to always scatter off base don't you? It doesn't matter what the proposed rules are you just want to see the NC do nothing on the table. This makes the 3rd report where Chaos went AAF and obliterated the IN NC fleet. Second, he didn't even score that great of damage when he did fire. Are you not seeing that?

I only posted Ray's rules because yours were so off base to the point of total uselessness to give you some perspective. I still think the NC is underpowered because it is too predictable at long range and easily avoided as noted in the previous battle reports. As I said earlier, play some games and try new tactics before posting new rules for the NC.

[RCgothic]

Well not really.  But one option can be negated by turrets, armor, attack craft, and manouvering.  

And Nova Cannons can be negated by using strategy and tactics. I'd already done two reports of the Chaos player being reasonable in the face of NC spam (And Chaos still won), so I decided to post the sort of list a Chaos player would field if he ever got bored of the IN player providing him with an I Win Button. And as expected, the Slaughter Spam list annihilated the NC Spam list and atomised the bits.

NO to any limit. NO to any changes.

[BaronIveagh]

Well not really.  But one option can be negated by turrets, armor, attack craft, and manouvering. 

And Nova Cannons can be negated by using strategy and tactics.

NO to any limit. NO to any changes.

Yes to limits, meh to changes.

[Admiral_d_Artagnan]

Yes to limits, meh to changes.

Can't or don't want to figure out how to win eh?

[lastspartacus]

LS, you really just want NC to always scatter off base don't you? It doesn't matter what the proposed rules are you just want to see the NC do nothing on the table. This makes the 3rd report where Chaos went AAF and obliterated the IN NC fleet. Second, he didn't even score that great of damage when he did fire. Are you not seeing that?

I only posted Ray's rules because yours were so off base to the point of total uselessness to give you some perspective. I still think the NC is underpowered because it is too predictable at long range and easily avoided as noted in the previous battle reports. As I said earlier, play some games and try new tactics before posting new rules for the NC.

Thats quite a straw-man you built there

The nova is currently a very useful tool, and no matter what has been proposed, at its root you still have a 1/3 chance of d6 hits, and its why you see them in so many lists.
How were mine off base to the point of uselessness?  You need to try some sort of real argument if you are going to use statements that strong.

@RC
'Strategy and tactics' is something I've heard way too many times in my wargaming history to cover the fact that there are no real strategy and tactics.  So to keep from looking like that, fill that gap with the strategy and tactic you like using.
And, ya, Slaughters are like the absolute best thing to combat NC.  How much terrain was on the board, out of curiosity.

[Vaaish]

Not really, a straw man would be if I superficially changed your argument and then proceeded to refute it. I did neither. I did infer from your rules that you'd like the NC to do jack squat and pointed you to the evidence that has been gathering that the NC is not overpowered and thus your changes were unwarranted.

Your rules were off base because you are reducing the range and increasing the scatter. Ie, you make the NC even less accurate and give a player less time to use it if you follow the reasoning you gave about shooting across diagonals. That gives a player less incentive to use the thing at all. You are further nerfing a weapon that HAS NO PROOF of being overpowered as it stands. Prove it's overpowered before trying to nerf it. Since that's your premise it's on you to prove it.

You see the NC in so many lists because it's iconic to the IN. That's their one special feature and it generally needs three to be effective. Any less and it's just flavor for the list that might do something here or there but certainly won't kill a fleet. Even with the maximum number of NC you can get in a 1500 point fleet you are looking at maybe two hits a turn and you've got the same odds of doing 1 hit as 6.