Check out this video. I found it helpful and entertaining. Enjoy

Though I am kind of confused about having to engage your target when you are in close. What does that mean? Am I misunderstanding something?

No, Close in space combat is the same as Engaged in personal combat. I read the guy's reply in the comments of his video, and he's just plain wrong that you need an extra manoeuvre to dogfight someone at Close range.

No, Close in space combat is the same as Engaged in personal combat. I read the guy's reply in the comments of his video, and he's just plain wrong that you need an extra manoeuvre to dogfight someone at Close range.

Read the annotations; he brings it up and mentions that his group works best with requiring a maneuver to engage in a dogfight, and that other groups don't need this.

Yea, from reading the rules I guess it is a houserule they have and it doesn't make much sense to me.. Besides that, I really like how he explains why this is how space combat is done in a narrative game like this, but differently in more crunchy or board-gamey systems.

I think he throws in an interesting (and valid, YMMV) reason on why he says there's an extra maneuver for dogfighting: it prevents a sufficiently fast craft from spending a maneuver moving to close range, making an attack, then moving out of range of retaliation.

A fast ship still have to spend the maneuvers it takes to move in and out. So not sure you actually can move in and out of range like that. And if they do, just hyperjump(because you have one if you are that slow ). They would have to take system strain in any case to keep it up, and they couldn't do that for too long in any case... And what about ships with weapons, like heavy laser cannons and missiles and that have a longer range than close? Do they have to engage?.. No, maneuver to engage while close still makes little sense to me.

Yes, a ship can perform more than 2 maneuvers; in AoR, the how is on p. 245, under the Maneuver subheading.

I can see his logic. He probably took this following bit, found under the description of the Fly/Drive maneuver and what a vehicle can do moving at certain speeds:

"One starship maneuver to move within close range of a target or object..."

And interpreted it to mean that to perform a combat check at a target within close range, you have to first spend a Fly/Drive maneuver to line up for your attack run. Seeing as most dogfighting starships (dogfights being the primary example he used) are armed with weapons with a range of Close, being within this range is required.

What that extra maneuver prevents, at least from the way he describes it, is a fast moving fighter (a TIE fighter) from moving from medium range into close range, attacking, then back to medium range, preventing any retaliation from the target.

Although that might not be so bad with two ships of the same speed (A-wing vs. TIE Interceptor) which can pull off the same trick and pursue, if one combatant is a slower vessel (a YT-1300), then this basically prevents the group in the YT-1300 from retaliating at all. Although one TIE can't keep up that strategy, a group of 4+ can probably lay on the pain in a single round.

If you are discussing ships with weapons with longer ranges than close, you're dealing with a different kind of space battle than a dogfight.

But then you can still, with 2-4 speed use two maneuvers to catch up and retaliate, couldn't you? One to move from close to short and one from short to medium(or from close to short twice, since ranges are always relevant to the ship?)... Some starfighters and freighters have short range attacks though.

And "within close range" is clearly meant to be all movement that happens within that close distance, it could be to a docking bay or whatever and applies mostly outside of combat.

The tie is at medium range, you are at close. One maneuver at 2-4 speed and you have moved from close to short. That means you are at close and it is short now, one range band closer. So you take system strain, just like it had to do to move in and out, and you move from close to short a second time. Now you and the tie are close. Retaliate!

... right? :/

Edit: Wait, it even says 2 maneuvers from close to medium with 2-4 speed, so you can absolutely do it. EotE CRB page 232

Had to contemplate this a bit. Yes, it can be done that way.

Now, this is me trying to guess at video guy's logic: What he was trying to describe (or what he and his group wants to describe) is a tense, uncomfortably close fighter engagement, where the different combatants have to risk themselves to hit their target (risk being getting shot in return). As his annotations bring out, a fast enough ship can cross an enormous distance (planetary medium range), strafe their target, then ghost back out to where they came from, before the target even gets a chance to look at what hit them. The mentioned distances involved, it's not exactly (what he envisions as) a dogfight, more like a peculiar cosmological joust. His interpretation of the rules (or house rule, whatever), basically means that an aggressive starfighter has to sacrifice their best defense (high speed) to hit a target, leaving them open to retaliation. It (at least to him) represents the inherent dangers in a dogfight between two or more ships.

It also has the benefit of not curtailing the options available to the players (which should be a motivator for everything). Although a 2-4 speed ship can keep up with a 5-6 speed ship relatively consistently, its at the sacrifice of other maneuvers and possible actions. Any decent GM should have more than one objective in any encounter, space combat included, and any PC may have things they want to do, but if the only logical thing to do is pursue, pursue, shoot, pursue, pursue, shoot, etc, then it can get a bit boring.

To me it seems like he is taking away one of the advantages the faster, less bulky ships have. More hull treshhold, armor and defense, more than makes up for being slow in my opinion. So the fast starfighters or less bulky freighters like the hwk-1000 is stripped of one of their one advantage, what the players have focused on and invested in. Those players who want ships that could avoid combat and dog-fights, often with good reason in a smuggler game, should have that option. They run away and hyperjump, maybe they get to shoot a little before they run away. Players who wants a game with a heavy focus on space combat will have fast ships or ships with other combat focused advantages that more than makes up for it.

Ps. I still like the video and the main message about keeping the ship combats narrative