The B-Wing as written can still do that. It's clunky, but a good pilot can leverage those shields and big guns. It isn't supposed to be a super fighter, but rather a fast assault bomber that can also dogfight in a pinch.

The Defender is the real concern, but there's not much that can be done about that and keep it balanced except for, maybe, making it hyper rare and not allowing the PC's into it.

Well I think we mostly use the TIE/D because it's a very clear example that many people know.

There's no issue, balance-wise, with allowing the PCs into it if they'd otherwise be in a Lambda, or if the Commander has a Corvette of any kind or an old Consular class, or if a Pilot, an R2 and a Gunner (as in 'the careers') are getting to really focus themselves by cramming themselves into a Y-Wing, and so on. All things we've seen, played or at least have read of being done by mid-game at the latest.

Those highly expensive one-man starfighters allow a solo pilot to almost keep-up with far more "optimized" character choices without coming anywhere near close to potentially approaching overtaking their capabilities and output.

... Or they would if they hadn't been dragged down to "balanced with other basic cannonfodder" in all but cost and rarity. Bit of a double standard if they're kept where they are "for fluff/continuity/whatever" reasons while the capabilities of the craft get changed because "screw fluff/continuity/whatever it's all about balance". A GM can easily see the price and rarity and go "I ain't giving them one of these things that easy!" The cost and rarity were already balancing factors. The double-whammy? that's just wrong. And rules that are wrong deserve errata.

Well I think we mostly use the TIE/D because it's a very clear example that many people know.

There's no issue, balance-wise, with allowing the PCs into it if they'd otherwise be in a Lambda, or if the Commander has a Corvette of any kind or an old Consular class, or if a Pilot, an R2 and a Gunner (as in 'the careers') are getting to really focus themselves by cramming themselves into a Y-Wing, and so on. All things we've seen, played or at least have read of being done by mid-game at the latest.

Those highly expensive one-man starfighters allow a solo pilot to almost keep-up with far more "optimized" character choices without coming anywhere near close to potentially approaching overtaking their capabilities and output.

... Or they would if they hadn't been dragged down to "balanced with other basic cannonfodder" in all but cost and rarity. Bit of a double standard if they're kept where they are "for fluff/continuity/whatever" reasons while the capabilities of the craft get changed because "screw fluff/continuity/whatever it's all about balance". A GM can easily see the price and rarity and go "I ain't giving them one of these things that easy!" The cost and rarity were already balancing factors. The double-whammy? that's just wrong. And rules that are wrong deserve errata.

I agree, why is starfighter combat the exception when it comes to both high level awards and the general tone of combat? We get so many awesome, high level/costly/rare personal weapons, armor, talents and such and ground combat (at high exp levels) can quickly become unrealistically (realism is not the point of this system, so this isn't a bad thing) slanted towards a combat focused PC (same thing with social characters and other skilled specialists in their respective encounters) unless you bring out custom made nemesis characters or massively titled odds, and even then a skilled and well equipped hero can pull through.

But the movement you step into a ship or vehicle that smaller than Sil 4? Even the most expensive and rare starfighters are barely better than standard issue stuff (at best!), combat becomes brutally realistic (again, not a good thing) thanks to shields being useless and speed/piloting skill/handling not doing anything when it comes to avoiding hits, and tissue paper armor ensuring that most fighters are scuttled after two good hits. In vehicle combat even the the most skilled Rebel jockey or most feared Imperial ace end up incinerated in a quick and downright disappointing fashion and you can't even equip them with awesome, rare custom fighters because all the canon examples were nerfed into the ground.

This system allows for us to be awesome Jedi, officers, assassins, engineers, hackers, snipers, brawlers, diplomats, scoundrels, gunslingers and almost every other Star wars role you can imagine. But not pilots, they have to be mediocre with one of their core skills, piloting of all things, being useless in combat. Why are pilots the exception? Why do they have to be disproportionately weak, in terms of their combat system and equipment, compared to literally everyone else? Even the book meant to flesh out Aces did next to nothing to solve this fundamental problem.

If I wanted a gritty, high attrition air to air combat RPG I would look somewhere else, not at a Star Wars system that's meant to be highly abstracted and narrative (and does so quite well at almost everything else). In Star Wars the protagonists and villains are supposed to be heroic (compare a Nemesis to a Minion, the big fish are supposed to step all over the grunts in a lopsided manner, and this works well outside of vehicles), including starfighters aces. Yet there is little separating a member of Rogue Squadron from a pirate flying a rusting Z-95, and that feels wrong.

Before anyone says "two good hits" is appropriate, please remember that "two good hits" is an average roll from anyone past "rookie" in a stock-ass TIE.

Yeah most rpg systems can tke out fighters in two or thee solid hits. The problem is that its so much harder to evade attacks in this system and the pcs are usually outnumbered so there are a lot more shots heading their way.

Before anyone says "two good hits" is appropriate, please remember that "two good hits" is an average roll from anyone past "rookie" in a stock-ass TIE.

Yeah most rpg systems can tke out fighters in two or thee solid hits. The problem is that its so much harder to evade attacks in this system and the pcs are usually outnumbered so there are a lot more shots heading their way.

I'd recommend going beyond the Core if you're having issues. AoR's GM Kit adds squads and squadrons give a way to add a Wound/Hull Trauma buffer for both players and important NPCs, as well as adds in certain benefits from formations (makes Gain the Advantage easier/harder, harder to use Auto-Fire/Blast against squadron, increased shields on all zones).

Stay on Target adds, well, a lot. Astromech rules lets players share the piloting needs with both player and NPC astromechs, and allows them to use an action to increase defense on single defense zones. A few attachments, new talents (primarily in the Rigger tree), and both Signature Abilities increase survivability for players in different ways. And terrain rules add different ways to handle attacking ships while breaking away from the monotony of duking it out in open space, and helps require regular Piloting checks to avoid the general hazards.

And there's general creativity. Not all encounters need to be a head-on fight in open space, and shaking the ship around with the same basic actions/maneuvers any character can do will only get you so far. Put fights in different settings, change it around so you've got different objectives like escorting something (and so enemies are split between you and the target). These are actually tips in Stay on Target as well, now that I think about it.

And this keys into being creative as well: make Piloting skills mean something; you're not limited to the listed actions and maneuvers in the book for normal personal combat, and you're not restricted here. Maybe a player doesn't have Brilliant Evasion or This One Is Mine to help curb the number of opponents after him, but if he's in a debris field, he may elect to fly through crowded portions to try and split up his targets requiring a Piloting check, and one that gets more complicated the trickier he wants it to be. Not all enemies will try and follow, and the ones that do need to perform a more difficult check to keep up (perhaps the same check as the pilot upgraded once or increased in difficulty once; perhaps made even more difficult with more successes and advantage). And if those enemies fail, then the terrain will start weeding out a number of them.

And of course, balance encounters for your group. Again, this isn't one of the video games, it's meant to mimic the films. 4 single fighters are going to have hard times against 3+ minion squads of 2 TIEs. Even the Millennium Falcon was catching on fire and breaking down with 4 fighters after them in A New Hope.

But the movement you step into a ship or vehicle that smaller than Sil 4? Even the most expensive and rare starfighters are barely better than standard issue stuff (at best!), combat becomes brutally realistic (again, not a good thing) thanks to shields being useless and speed/piloting skill/handling not doing anything when it comes to avoiding hits, and tissue paper armor ensuring that most fighters are scuttled after two good hits. In vehicle combat even the the most skilled Rebel jockey or most feared Imperial ace end up incinerated in a quick and downright disappointing fashion and you can't even equip them with awesome, rare custom fighters because all the canon examples were nerfed into the ground.

I came up with a few rules tweaks to try and make starship combat less swingy/give Aces more of an advantage over chumps here, though the thread was fairly rapidly derailed :/.

Rebel Assault II and the TIE Phantom was part of my childhood - I got into X-Wing Miniatures and FFG because of their Wave 4 release of the TIE Phantom and the art associated with the promotion.

Having it in Stay on Target is perfect.

More options - not fewer. Resisting the addition of options and creativity is absurd.

Agreed. As is allowing some form of improvement or growth.

Just as the Interceptor was to replace the TIE/LN, and the T-65 replaced the Headhunter.

It *would* be nice to have some extra modification options, but the "attachment" system does leave one thinking we'll eventually have full crafting/upgrade rules, to go with the extremely limited hardpoints for extra systems on those starships.

The Heavy Z-95 was nice to see; it's going to make for nice deus ex machina for my Players. I've set them up to be screaming for help, and even then, expecting only two flights of straight Zs. Instead, a full squadron of Heavies is going to revert to realspace and yank them out of the fire.

That might not go how you hope it will; Heavy 95's aren't much tougher in practice, and the players themselves if in starfighters could be vaporized too fast for it to make a difference.

It likely won't go over all that well if you are forced to "cutscene" things.

Isn't that why we roll the dice? To set up the cutscenes? This is a very narrative-driven game, after all.

I feel bad for the Assault Gunboat. It's one of the ships hardly seen in RPGs, EU sources, yet it's one of the most well-loved contributions from TIE Fighter. This and the TIE Avenger are clearly superior craft yet focus seems to fall on these Frankenstein-fighter duds that came out of Galaxies and Battlegrounds.

Oh well.

With my current campaign focusing on pre-yavin days I can see using these as specialized variant fighters in place of the later-years powerhouses, but honestly I'd rather have the Assault Gunboat over the TIE Aggressor.

Yeah the whole source book falls flat on its nose for all the ships and the stats feel odd.

The B-Wing as written can still do that. It's clunky, but a good pilot can leverage those shields and big guns. It isn't supposed to be a super fighter, but rather a fast assault bomber that can also dogfight in a pinch.

The Defender is the real concern, but there's not much that can be done about that and keep it balanced except for, maybe, making it hyper rare and not allowing the PC's into it.

Hyper Rare is should be anyway in Age of Rebellion, PCs gettin into it should be a campaign on it's own, considering the history of the TIE-Defender and its role in the empire's history. Lasty it is not supposed to be balanced. It supposed to turn the tides in space superiority and even empire doctrine, it is an something that should be given to aces of the empire who serve under special commanders. As we can ignore EU inconsistencies as we like (and take what we want) it should be as well easy to limit availability to only very, very few high-ranking imperials and the ace pilots under their command.

Outside of that: Would be really be that game breaking of the thing is actually more deadly than an X-Wing and not inferior to even a TIE/IN?

For me the "new TIEs" in SoT were from recent video games, which are mainly designed to be Imperial version of Rebel fighters.

From my Point of view, i would think the Imperials arrogant enough to think the normal movie TIEs are good enough, especially in sufficient and superior numbers that they wouldn't need to develop new fighters to counter the rebel threat. Especially when they have Star Destroyers, which are arguably the Premier ship of the line at the time of the Rebellion.

Granted i might be a bit hypocritical saying this. But the T-wing, and R-41 were the result of another video game with a long history. The Avenger and Assault Gunboat would have been appreciated. Even the Skipray Blast boat

Even rules for Uglies

GAT 12-H Skipray is in Edge of the Empire, page 259.

Granted, I'm completely armchair-ing here but I'm not a fan of how sheilds are just setback dice. Too often in the movies we blasts deflecting off of shields and yet 2 or 3 setback dice really don't translate well to the cinematic feel for me.

I would have liked to see shields be a bigger, diminishing, soak. Something to where the star destroyer can take shots from a fighter all day long without blinking, but once the big ships show up things start to happen.

There are house rules floating around that basically make shields use the same system as parry/reflect, which works pretty well IMO. The only problem they have is that they don't have a point where they just "collapse" (short of the ship running out of system strain, which is a different beast entirely).

Granted, I'm completely armchair-ing here but I'm not a fan of how sheilds are just setback dice. Too often in the movies we blasts deflecting off of shields and yet 2 or 3 setback dice really don't translate well to the cinematic feel for me.

I would have liked to see shields be a bigger, diminishing, soak. Something to where the star destroyer can take shots from a fighter all day long without blinking, but once the big ships show up things start to happen.

Actually, the triangular progression sounds better than a flat 3...

1D: 1 soak

2D: 3 soak

3D: 6 soak

4D: 10 soak

Another thought... Size differences are undervalued; it feels like they wanted to use scaling like d6 SW 2R&E, but chickened out at the last moment...

Granted, I'm completely armchair-ing here but I'm not a fan of how sheilds are just setback dice. Too often in the movies we blasts deflecting off of shields and yet 2 or 3 setback dice really don't translate well to the cinematic feel for me.

I would have liked to see shields be a bigger, diminishing, soak. Something to where the star destroyer can take shots from a fighter all day long without blinking, but once the big ships show up things start to happen.

The easiest way to do that, I think, would be to make the soak from shields some multiple the dice (3 sounds about right), still include the black die (but for each multiple of points lost, one die goes away), but allow spending advantage to reduce them, and triumph to simply collapse them. They can only be restored by replacing the shield die.

Actually, the triangular progression sounds better than a flat 3...

1D: 1 soak

2D: 3 soak

3D: 6 soak

4D: 10 soak

Another thought... Size differences are undervalued; it feels like they wanted to use scaling like d6 SW 2R&E, but chickened out at the last moment...

Another option might be to keep the dice but convert the shields to a shield point system. Say 1D=10pts, 2D=20pts, etc. Then have shields recover a set amount each round. That way a big ship could be overwhelmed by a swarm of fighters still.

Maybe one day I'll get into a game again and be able to try some of these options out.

So I have a pretty extensive overhaul of space combat that I have been play testing and tweaking, both in actual play and scenarios to test extremes.

One day I'll post it. For now, this is what I do with defense:

I have used defense as a shield pool that can absorb incoming damage. At first, I was using 1 defense = 10 shield points, and each round at the beginning of that ship's first initiative slot (for ships with multiple initiative slots for whatever reason) that zone would regain 1 shield point for each point of defense.

Now I instead give 5 shield points for each point of defense, and they regain 2 shield points for each point of defense.

In both of these cases, I did not reduce damage by the armor rating until after shields were down. If an attack did more damage than shields were left, I then applied armor rating. This often caused most attacks that "popped" the shield to not have enough left over to actually hurt the ship.

This has helped smaller ships last a little longer (not much longer, but enough to make it not a completely insane choice to climb into a snub fighter). It also makes larger ships less likely to get "chumped" easily. It also means that to disable vessels quickly you have to continuously attack them, because not hitting them for a round or two brings more shields back.

Now I instead give 5 shield points for each point of defense, and they regain 2 shield points for each point of defense.

I'm interested in your further play testing. A few questions.

Did this noticeably slow down combat?

If I were to not use the automatic recharging of shield points (instead saying they are replenished at the end of the encounter or perhaps some tweaking with an Action), how would that affect things in your opinion? Best to go back to the 10 shield points per defense or still too strong?

Did you allow Angle Deflectors to simply allow a player to move remaining points from one arc to another? Did that cause problems? For example, an X-wing would have 5 points front and 5 points rear. Could Angle Deflectors allow 10 points to the front and 0 to the rear? If so, was the book keeping a pain? A.i. keeping track of current points remaining and how much allotted to each facing?

The quick recharge makes me think you played the old X-wing game?

Instead of recharge, a Mechanics Action might be fun. Without any fiddling, the points would not recharge until after the encounter. But, a Mechanics Action could move power from weapons or engines to recover lost shield points up to their maximum. Something like for each max. speed -1 for 3 rounds gains 2 points of shield? Or each -1 of damage to all energy based weapons for 3 rounds gives you a point of shields? So the X-wing has had its 10 points of shield reduced to only 2 remaining on the aft. A Mechanics roll could revert power from the engines reducing their speed by 2 for 3 rounds (until they recover), but the X-wing regains 4 points of shields.

So I initially had a mechanics/computers action similar to damage control to restore lost shield points. It was too good, I took it away. Instead I use a slightly modified version of the Boost Shields action.

It didn't slow down combat beyond the necessity of tracking a third pool of points. My changes did however turn a 2 round rocket tag match into a 7 round dogfight. This may not be what some groups want, but my group enjoyed it.

If the shields aren't going to come back on their own, but you're going to allow an action to recover them, I'd keep them at 5 points per 1 defense. If there is no way to restore the pool during an encounter, I think 10 would be fine.

I do allow angle deflectors to move shields around still, so an x-wing could put both defense points forward, and have 10 shield points there, and regenerate 4 points per round. This works just fine in my overhaul, as maneuvering around and lining up shots matters, so leaving a zone unprotected could lead to a bad day pretty quickly.

Taking away a self recharge and making an action could be interesting. However, I believe it may be too much additional bookkeeping, on top of what I've already added. My overarching goal with my overhaul was to make maneuvering into position matter, let shields absorb some damage without being too much or too little, and in general, make space combat more fun for my group. So much of space combat felt like you had to pay a "talent tax" to do anything cool, where as ground combat doesn't feel like you have to pay the tax to do the cool stuff, just to do the cool stuff better.