I am curious to know how the all of the various defensive attachments and talents for a starship stack together (if at all).

As an example:

Basic Y-wing firing torpedoes at the starboard side of a Gozanti.

The Gozanti has the following defensives:

Improved Shields (3/3/3/1)

ECM (fully mod)

Physical Counter Measures (fully mod)

Defensive Driving (2x Stacks)

Tricky Target

Hacker performing additional ECM

Anyone willing to help figure this out?

Wow....


OK let's see, for starters vehicles defenses cap out at 4. Yes, I asked.
So the shields and defensive driving will give you 4/4/4/3
ECM will reduce the Sil to 4, and add a Difficulty Die vs Guided weapons.
Tricky Target will reduce it to Sil 3.
Countermeasures adds 2 Setback. The other effect doesn't kick in unless Guided is active.
And assuming a basic spoof success, one upgrade...

So, unless I'm forgetting something or my math is off.
The Y-wing will be looking at a Difficulty of...PPRBBBBBB

First: The Gozanti is silhoutte 5 and Y-Wing is 3. This difference means a base difficulty to attack of Easy.

• Shields impart setbacks equal to their rating, depending on which zone the Y-Wing is attacking. It would make sense to attack the least-defended Aft zone, so that's 1 Setback.
• The ECM lowers the silhouette when determining difficulty, so that brings the attack difficulty to Average instead of Easy (Silhouette 3 Y-Wing attacking an effective Silhouette 4 Gozanti).
• The modded ECM also increases the difficulty to the torpedo attack, since it's got the Guided quality, so now it's a Hard difficulty.
• The fully modded PCM adds 2 setbacks to the attack, and if it the attack misses (which it's likely to do!) and the Guided quality activates, the difficulty is further increased once.
• I'll take Ghostofman's word for it: even though Defensive Driving adds 2 to each defense zone, the hard cap is 4, so now we're looking at 4/4/4/3, meaning a minimum of 3 Setbacks from the ship's defense. But yes, defense caps out at 4, so it'd make sense to angle the shields from one of those capped zones to the Aft zone.
• Tricky Target has no further effect on this attack, but the Gozanti is now treated as Silhouette 3 for targeting purposes.
• A slicer onboard uses his Computers skill to perform the "Spoofing" Missiles action, which if successful upgrades the difficulty of the attack once, and an additional time per every 2 additional Advantage).

Giving us a difficulty of... Hard, upgraded once (at least), with 3 setbacks from defense (could easily be 4) and 2 from the Physical Countermeasures.

If the attack misses and Guided quality is activated, assuming the same circumstances, the Guided attack would be looking at a difficulty of Daunting, upgraded once (at least), with 4 setbacks from defense and 2 from physical countermeasures.

First attack: (Spoofing Missiles could potentially upgrade the difficulty much more, and defense could introduce a sixth Setback)

EDIT: Found the developer answered question here, https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/108101-ffg-developer-answered-questions/#entry1111204

Thanks Ghostofman!

Awesome. Thanks to you both. Greatly appreciate the help. Just helped me figure out what attachments to get for our Gozanti. Will skip the improved shields as they do not stack with the talent and keep the ECM & PCM. Probably get the Advanced Targeting System and a Heavy Tractor Beam.

Thanks again.