Hello! I mastered several starship fights, and I finally realize that people never use their triumph or advantage to trigger a critical hit, because the Linked quality is so much more powerfull. Most starships of sil 3 or 4 have this linked quality, often more than once, up to 3 for starfighters like the X-Wing.

Actually triggering once the Linked quality is most of the time synonym of death for starfighters. It cost only 2 advantages, and most weapons need 3 advantages to trigger a critical hit. On the other hand a critical hit, especially the first one is usually not that painfull, look at the table for numbers below 100. It's even worst if the ship doesn't have shields like TIEs... you spend 3 advantages for a critical hit and you end with 2 system strain lost on that TIE...

Do the math : 3 advantages for 2 system strain against 2 advantages for a linked shot that inflict minimum 5 or 6 more damages and kill that TIE.

Another problem is the fact that those shields are useless against the linked quality. As soon as you hit once, you can activate Linked 1, 2 or 3 times and your shields have no effect ! not really realistic...

I rarely see player spending their advantages for critical hits during space combat, and almost never during dogfight between starfighters. What's your experience and thoughts about it? Maybe changing the advantage requirement of the Linked quality could solve the issue, at least the same value of the critical rating, maybe one more.

Thanks

Not every option has the same attractiveness as every other option and they shouldn't. Why have options then? Fight a capital ship with some armor and a ton of Hull, criticals become critical.

Yes but the problem is that you need to deal damage POST armor to be able to inflict a critical hit...

And capital ships are not really included in my initial reflexion as I talked about 90% of the encounters involving sil. 3 and 4 ships

Sometimes you want a target dead, and sometimes you just want them disabled. Crits seem to have a better chance of neutralizing a target without having to kill it.

Also, just a point or two, a ship that's had its HTT exceeded is no more destroyed than a character with their WT exceeded.

Likewise minion rules can roll over to vehicles. So you got a group of 4 TIEs? A crit will remove a minion outright.

5 hours ago, Rosco74 said:

Yes but the problem is that you need to deal damage POST armor to be able to inflict a critical hit...

And capital ships are not really included in my initial reflexion as I talked about 90% of the encounters involving sil. 3 and 4 ships

This is kind of my point, the rules are written for all the encounters that might occur. Not just the ones you've limited yourself to.

I have to admit I have never liked Linked...too mercurial, and 2A is too easy for any competent gunner. House rule: Linked is like Auto-fire with a max number of times it can be triggered, if you want to use it you have to specify in advance.

Criticals may be bad against fighters and such, but when you're fighting a capital ship and you have a choice between 2 damage and a crit or 4 damage, the crit suddenly looks pretty appealing.

1 hour ago, whafrog said:

I have to admit I have never liked Linked...too mercurial, and 2A is too easy for any competent gunner. House rule: Linked is like Auto-fire with a max number of times it can be triggered, if you want to use it you have to specify in advance.

That's how autofire should work to begin with, come with a number that denotes the fire rate of the weapon.

7 hours ago, Rosco74 said:

Yes but the problem is that you need to deal damage POST armor to be able to inflict a critical hit...

And capital ships are not really included in my initial reflexion as I talked about 90% of the encounters involving sil. 3 and 4 ships

No you don't, You need to deal as much damage as the armor rating, no point of damage is needed. That is explicitly different to critical injuries in personal scale combat. Besides, most of your space battles in recent time seem to involve star destroyers … so your mileage may vary applies.

Lastly, critical hits kill minions, so you usually you want to apply one critical hit, plus as many times linked as you can. So criticals are very helpful against fighters too, just not in duels between aces (nemesis characters), but when fighting squadrons of minions.

Example: Protons fired into a TIE minion group with 5 success and 6 advantages. You trigger linked to deal 2x 13 damage, but you do trigger that crit for sure as well. And iirc you actually would like to crit on the second hit too to remove another minion for a total of 4-5 Minions killed on one volley.

Technical 13 damage are only enough to kill one TIE, so you could kill with each hit 2 TIEs and a third heavily, depends on how the GM wants handel, at least IIRC. Convenient would be just to downright kill 5, so you don't have to deal with two TIEs at Hull Trauma 6

For your shield argument, it is actually the opposite. As the damage of your canons when you use linked is based on your successes, and the shields reduce those, they reduce each hit by the same amount. And on top can those deflectors prevent whole activations of the linked quality and thus avoid whole shots. You should have seen the face of our GM when she forget two weeks ago to apply the 4 defense from a MC80 on her shot, rolled those afterwards and her whole barraged missed the silhouette 9 target by an inch. Defense 1 rarely matters, but defense 4 is the gold standard für space combat as you always should align your shields in away to take those hits. Poor TIE-Pilots who don't have shields to re-align.

And seriously, correct me if I got it wrong on the one dead minion for each unique hit with a critical.

4 hours ago, whafrog said:

I have to admit I have never liked Linked...too mercurial, and 2A is too easy for any competent gunner. House rule: Linked is like Auto-fire with a max number of times it can be triggered, if you want to use it you have to specify in advance.

Not a big fan of the whole weapon qualities either. It very gamey, not very realistic either, very mercurial as you said and it many ways extremely silly as those quad medium lasers of an x-wing are aiming all for the same focal point. which is the whole reason why those weapons have a rather limited range. On top is the damage model itself, the base that you increase your damage significantly based on your roll odd too, a little less so in personal scale combat, but very much so in space combat, which gets emphasized even more by the critical hit system which applies random critical hits for advantages, while someone your randomly hitting enemy bodies makes your hits more deadly. So much actually that a decent single medium laser hit with 4 success will blow up a TIE-Fighter in one shot without a critical hit, but one or two or three success will keep it flying without much of hindrance. So yeah, the mechanical sides of the system is in many ways odd, but it works as it does. *shrugs* There are a lot of interactions which seem to rely on the workings of the system. Remove link for example and squadron fights become quite a lot different and less cinematic as they are meant. etc …

… I don't think the system is very good to be tweaked into something else. Still making linked autofire is a little anti-thematic, but should work mechanically actually rather fine. Now linked represents energy capacitors instead of gun barrels, which is thematic still appropriated. And making it a little harder to hit is not really a problem in space combat.

SEApocalypse, I jusr checked and page 242 of FaD corerule book, they say you have to deal damage past armor to inflict a critical hit. They even say the mechanic works like personnal fight.

Your assessment on shields is somewhat valid, but mine as well actually... If you miss your shot because of the setback dice of the shields, you cant activate the Linked quality, thanks to the shields 100% of damages are avoided. If you hit your target even with those setback dice, then the shields were useless at all, and you will sink all your advantages to activate Linked.

It's exactly the same as buying lotery tickets only after the numbers are drawn.... or waiting the end of the race and results before betting on your horse. You know what I mean?

I'd prefer if Linked X just let you reroll that many dice when attacking. As it stands there's no room for autofire in space combat because linked does everything better.

11 minutes ago, Talkie Toaster said:

I'd prefer if Linked X just let you reroll that many dice when attacking. As it stands there's no room for autofire in space combat because linked does everything better.

Well, Auto-fire is still useful in hitting multiple non-minion group targets (something Linked can't do), but the issue is that the auto-blaster is so weak that it's practically worthless against most starships.

1 hour ago, Rosco74 said:

SEApocalypse, I jusr checked and page 242 of FaD corerule book, they say you have to deal damage past armor to inflict a critical hit. They even say the mechanic works like personnal fight.

Your assessment on shields is somewhat valid, but mine as well actually... If you miss your shot because of the setback dice of the shields, you cant activate the Linked quality, thanks to the shields 100% of damages are avoided. If you hit your target even with those setback dice, then the shields were useless at all, and you will sink all your advantages to activate Linked.

It's exactly the same as buying lotery tickets only after the numbers are drawn.... or waiting the end of the race and results before betting on your horse. You know what I mean?

I don't think your analogy works.

The damage from a medium laser is 5 plus number of success. So if someone shoots at you with 5 success and the setback dice reduce this to 1 success you have reduce the damage by 40%, no matter how many times he can activate linked. If you had in the same roll 2 advantages, and the setback dice reduced this to one, you reduced the damage by 70% and transformed 20 damage into 6, which usually gets reduce by 3 armor to 3, ending with a 85% damage reduction.

But you know what is like the lottery? Making the check in the first place. All defensive options are just screwing with the odds, even soak/armor is just changing the odds of getting damaged. "You invested in an armor attachment and now the guy hitting you is just rolling one extra success and your extra armor becomes completely useless", said no one ever. But naturally the psychological effect is rather different when you see all those blacks coming up blank. ;-)

Having defence vs not having defense.

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=2&ability=2&difficulty=2

http://game2.ca/eote/?montecarlo=100000#proficiency=2&ability=2&difficulty=2&setback=4

Or, you know, the player might just think it's cooler/more cinematic to have a crit rather than just more boring damage. The game is a lot less fun if a GM's objective is to simply beat the PCs in combat.

7 hours ago, Hinklemar said:

Or, you know, the player might just think it's cooler/more cinematic to have a crit rather than just more boring damage. The game is a lot less fun if a GM's objective is to simply beat the PCs in combat.

You get the crit for free with linked as you exceed the hull threshold and generate a automatically crit. And the drama is better too as a damage control action should bring the player ship back into the action and the hull trauma below threshold ;-)

One more point, for auto-fire you need to increase one step the difficulty in personnal combat because of the recoil of the weapon (description). In starship weapons the recoil is almost zero. Tell me if this sounds good? I will remove the difficulty increase for starship combat using auto-fire, and it is supposed to be activated all the time, you just choose if you target a single opponent or not. You rolled 2 advantages, spend them for a second shot. For the Linked quality, the player will decide before rolling if he uses the quality. If he decides to, the damage will be stucked at base weapon damage, and he can spend advantages to activate Linked, each additional hit dealing base weapon damage as well, no matter how many success he rolled.

Actually I think I will expand this rule to all starship weapons, aka using only base weapon damage no matter how many success you roll. First, starship combat will be a little less deadly, critics will be a little more usefull. On personnal scale combat ok depending if the shot hit you in the head or the leg I can understand variable damage with success, but a lot less on an armored hull. Maybe if you spend advantage to find a weak spot..

3 hours ago, Rosco74 said:

One more point, for auto-fire you need to increase one step the difficulty in personnal combat because of the recoil of the weapon (description). In starship weapons the recoil is almost zero. Tell me if this sounds good? I will remove the difficulty increase for starship combat using auto-fire, and it is supposed to be activated all the time, you just choose if you target a single opponent or not. You rolled 2 advantages, spend them for a second shot. For the Linked quality, the player will decide before rolling if he uses the quality. If he decides to, the damage will be stucked at base weapon damage, and he can spend advantages to activate Linked, each additional hit dealing base weapon damage as well, no matter how many success he rolled.

Actually I think I will expand this rule to all starship weapons, aka using only base weapon damage no matter how many success you roll. First, starship combat will be a little less deadly, critics will be a little more usefull. On personnal scale combat ok depending if the shot hit you in the head or the leg I can understand variable damage with success, but a lot less on an armored hull. Maybe if you spend advantage to find a weak spot..

Not allowing the successes to convert to damage will make it impossible for light weapons to be useful in combat. The autoblaster only has damage 3, which won't hurt Y-wings. It needs a competent gunner to do damage. Also, it really makes armor mods and the Rigger godlike. Take an armor 4 or 5 freighter, boost it to 6 or 7, and suddenly you are immune to fighters without torpedoes.

4 hours ago, Rosco74 said:

One more point, for auto-fire you need to increase one step the difficulty in personnal combat because of the recoil of the weapon (description). In starship weapons the recoil is almost zero. Tell me if this sounds good? I will remove the difficulty increase for starship combat using auto-fire, and it is supposed to be activated all the time, you just choose if you target a single opponent or not. You rolled 2 advantages, spend them for a second shot. For the Linked quality, the player will decide before rolling if he uses the quality. If he decides to, the damage will be stucked at base weapon damage, and he can spend advantages to activate Linked, each additional hit dealing base weapon damage as well, no matter how many success he rolled.

Actually I think I will expand this rule to all starship weapons, aka using only base weapon damage no matter how many success you roll. First, starship combat will be a little less deadly, critics will be a little more usefull. On personnal scale combat ok depending if the shot hit you in the head or the leg I can understand variable damage with success, but a lot less on an armored hull. Maybe if you spend advantage to find a weak spot..

Base damage against my Armor 7 gozanti or just one hit. I love it.

But I suppose all armor 4-5 ships will really, really like that idea too, it nice when you become immune to starfighter weapons.

Hehe, you're right.

And for the auto-fire ? what do you think of removing the increased difficulty ? the weapon would become more attracting with a potential increase damage rate. 2 advantages to activate auto-fire etc

For Linked I finally decided to change the advantage cost at the same price of the weapon critical, like 3 for a X-Wing.

Having totally reworked the vehicle combat rules (up to Sil 4), I decided auto-fire weapons put out such an intense volley that when 2 Advantage are spent to trigger it, it will reduce the target's Defense -1 until the end of the following round (or until fortified). Seems a balanced assessment, considering auto-blasters have such low damage potential. It has tested okay, my players using auto-blasters to weaken shields prior to hitting their targets with a linked weapon.

Personally I rather use the slicer of the group of "Slice enemy systems" to reduce defense and disable enemy systems on top. But if you are a good shot to increase the damage of those auto-blasters the bonus seems to be nice. even when thematically a little odd against larger vessels.

Myself, I do not like the "Slice Enemy Systems" action, not at all! To me, it is running contrary to the physical-connection-premise for slicing, many people (including me) feel there is.

10 hours ago, Alekzanter said:

Having totally reworked the vehicle combat rules (up to Sil 4), I decided auto-fire weapons put out such an intense volley that when 2 Advantage are spent to trigger it, it will reduce the target's Defense -1 until the end of the following round (or until fortified). Seems a balanced assessment, considering auto-blasters have such low damage potential. It has tested okay, my players using auto-blasters to weaken shields prior to hitting their targets with a linked weapon.

I would make it an option instead of an addition; forego the extra damage to lower defense (on the targeted side only, of course).

For what it's worth, it is quite harsh blasting your critics with ships' weapons, isn't it?

I agree on the slicing. Remember all those times we saw slicers disabling ships in combat? Me neither.