I'm in the planning stages of a somewhat starfighter-centric campaign in the vein of rogue/wraith squadron and there are some... quirks in the vehicle combat system I'd like to adress and I'd love some input from the hivemind here.

Pilot only weapons: Single seat starfighters tend to get somewhat shafted by the action economy compared to ships with separate gunners (looking at you, Y-wing!) as they can pull both the Gain the Advantage and an attack in the same turn. Crafty players can sidestep/exploit this by putting a gunnery droid brain in their single seater to do the shooting while they GtA, but to me that feels somewhat wrong. After all, the guns on a fighter tend to be fixed forward and shouldn't be able to be aimed or fired by anyone but the pilot. So, I was thinking of a house rule that allows a triumph on a GtA-check to be used a free hit hit with pilot controlled weaponry at base damage, possibly allowing extra advantages to be used to activate critical hits or qualities like linked. The drawback would be that it completely nullifies any benefits the target would normally have from defense rating and defensive talents.
Of course, I'd have to classify which weapons are pilot only on every ship, but that would be fairly obvious in most cases.

Nimble targets: As a rule, I feel it's too easy to land a hit in this system, especially in starfighter combat where the results are quite dire. In one the campaigns I'm currently playing in, the GM has added a flat difficulty upgrade of +1 to all combat checks, which works reasonably well for now, and I'm leaning towards adopting it. However, I would like something to simulate portray the difficulty of scoring hits against small and mobile targets like starfighters. GM Phil's Snap roll-move is a good start, but I'm thinking of going one step further by adding a ships handling score to it's defense, possibly even awarding boost dice to the attacker for positive values. This would be somewhat offset by ships with a engineer or astromech aboard being able to pump up the shield rating beyond 4 for ships with negative handling. It could be over the top if combined with snap roll or the ideas for initiative below.

Inititative: As starfighter combat is so ridiculously deadly, initiative becomes extremely important. I'm thinking that smaller, nimbler craft should have an advantage here, so perhaps adding boost/setback dies based on Handling to the roll for pilots only. Perhaps speed should be a factor as well?

I'm not sure if these rules would weigh too much in favor of ships with good handling, but as it is now, handling is getting fairly shafted considering how important it should be in the type of dogfighting Star Wars presents to us (short range WW1-WW2-style).

Ideas? Opinions? Critique? Please chime in!

Master Pilot is what you are looking for.

Furthermore GtA has defensive uses, when you are locked behind your target, it will not shoot back either, which than again allows to to fire next turn with a still active GtA and maybe stay on target maneuver bonus.

Lastly, you are correct that ships like the Y-Wing profit greatly from the better action economy, but at the other hand, they suffer greatly from their handling and speed to actually make a successful GtA maneuver. Oh, and Astromechs, Gunner Brains are one thing, and they do the job once you negated evasive maneuvers via your own GtA action, but pc astromechs do a far better job, the natural pairing for single seater fighters, at least on the alliance side.

For initiative, smaller, faster and nimbler ships have the advantage that they actually have an easy job in gaining the advantage, which they can do before the ships are actually in shooting range, which negates a lower initiative slot at least partly, because they force the enemy target first to take an GtA action to get them into a fire angle, which means at least against other single seaters that they get their chance again to counter the counter to their GtA. Furthermore the higher speed can sometimes allow to dictate range, at least if the opposing ships are slow enough to not get the extra range bands when using a maneuver to move.

So there are the things you like to see already part of the system, if you think those effects should be stronger, go ahead, but keep in mind that your additions synergise rather strongly with the mechanics in place already. Handling for example is super helpful to keep GtA up, as boost dice are very helpful and superior speed is nearly a free GtA, unless the handlings is rather big in the negatives and the opposing forces have rather high positive handling (or pilot skill or both) to still run successful GtA checks.

I've added the Handling as Boosts or Setbacks to Initiative checks. With the Pilot's Skill, Talents, and Force abilities he's still able to top full minion groups of TIEs while flying a YT-2400. I think because he pilots freighters mostly is why he hasn't gone straight for the Master Pilot talent yet. There is a Gunner in the group and the Pilot's gunnery Skill is 0.

Just to keep you outta trouble:

Do you have the GM kit for AoR? The squadron rules in that change things a bit, and in a RAW starfighter campaign are essentially required reading.

If you've already decided not to use them, disregard, but if you are going to use or allow make sure that's included in your plans.

Also:

6 hours ago, penpenpen said:

GM Phil's Snap roll-move is a good start, but I'm thinking of going one step further by adding a ships handling score to it's defense,

Remember that vehicles have their defense capped at 4, so you may need to drop that rule too or things like Defensive Driving will be less valuable.

That's part of the "problem" with vehicles, especially starfighters. It's such a knife fight that every little boost and talent matters more, so trying to reel it in devalues other things pretty easy.

Edit:

Also:

Quote

So, I was thinking of a house rule that allows a triumph on a GtA-check to be used a free hit hit with pilot controlled weaponry at base damage, possibly allowing extra advantages to be used to activate critical hits or qualities like linked. The drawback would be that it completely nullifies any benefits the target would normally have from defense rating and defensive talents.

This would also make fighters with high speed and handling (*cough* TIE Fighters*cough*) even nastier than they already can be....

6 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

Just to keep you outta trouble:

Do you have the GM kit for AoR? The squadron rules in that change things a bit, and in a RAW starfighter campaign are essentially required reading.

If you've already decided not to use them, disregard, but if you are going to use or allow make sure that's included in your plans.

I've looked at them and I'm not sure I understood them correctly. As far as I understood it, the squadron becomes a single entity that can perform either an action from the minions or the squad leader every turn?

I'm not super thrilled by upping survivability by adding some npc meat shields, but then again, if they're turned into compelling characters and not just faceless underlings, the choice to sacrifice them to avoid a hit can be downright sadistic. Deliciously sadistic.

6 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

Remember that vehicles have their defense capped at 4, so you may need to drop that rule too or things like Defensive Driving will be less valuable.

Or, low defense, low handling vehicles become more viable with Defensive Driving.
I'm leaning towards skipping this one anyway as it can quickly become weird. Adding the handling bonus on initiative should be enough.

6 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

This would also make fighters with high speed and handling (*cough* TIE Fighters*cough*) even nastier than they already can be....

1 hour ago, penpenpen said:

I've looked at them and I'm not sure I understood them correctly. As far as I understood it, the squadron becomes a single entity that can perform either an action from the minions or the squad leader every turn?

Not quite.

They attach to the leader becoming a single entity, he can set formations, and he's the acting character.

HOWEVER

Any time he rolls a Triumph, he can spend it for the attached minion group to attack. So there's your "Triumph to attack on a GtA check" right there. The leader... leads the maneuver and the squadron performs the attack. Sort of a "I'll set em up, you knock em down" type thing. But it works for pretty much any check. He rolls a triumph on a scanning check, they attack. He rolls a triumph on a mechanics check to fix his fighter mid-battle, they attack. Triumphant nose-picking? Attack.

1 hour ago, penpenpen said:

I'm not super thrilled by upping survivability by adding some npc meat shields, but then again, if they're turned into compelling characters and not just faceless underlings, the choice to sacrifice them to avoid a hit can be downright sadistic. Deliciously sadistic.

Ok first off, think less "Hey Bob, stand here a sec" and more "Wedge get clear you're not doing any good back there" First off the narrative doesn't have to be meatshield even if the mechanic is, Wedge is just the one that got unlucky. Secondly, being removed from combat and being killed aren't always the same. So you don't have to kill off Porkins every time. They can just be damaged enough to be combat ineffective, and withdraw.

Additionally something that people overlook that might be of value: Damage is by-hit, not by-damage. So that Damage 500 Breach 100 superlaser hit that tags your Squadron removes one minion, not everyone like a normal minion group. It's easier to justify when old Biggs eats a turbolaser blast for the team, plus it allows Squadrons to take on really big nasty targets.

And when Ghostofman says rolling a triumph, he means it in a very loose way as the hotshot can generate a triumph out of any successful check. ;-)
Hotshot Squadron leaders are rather awesome.

9 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

Ok first off, think less "Hey Bob, stand here a sec" and more "Wedge get clear you're not doing any good back there" First off the narrative doesn't have to be meatshield even if the mechanic is, Wedge is just the one that got unlucky. Secondly, being removed from combat and being killed aren't always the same. So you don't have to kill off Porkins every time. They can just be damaged enough to be combat ineffective, and withdraw.

Additionally something that people overlook that might be of value: Damage is by-hit, not by-damage. So that Damage 500 Breach 100 superlaser hit that tags your Squadron removes one minion, not everyone like a normal minion group. It's easier to justify when old Biggs eats a turbolaser blast for the team, plus it allows Squadrons to take on really big nasty targets.

True, but it dumps a fairly important decision on the player that not all players might like. It does give the campaign a nice chains-of-command-sending-people-to-their-deaths kind of war movie vibe, and not all players might like that kind of... weight. I'd definitely had to bring that aspect up with my players pre-game.

On 5/2/2017 at 2:00 PM, penpenpen said:

Nimble targets: As a rule, I feel it's too easy to land a hit in this system, especially in starfighter combat where the results are quite dire. In one the campaigns I'm currently playing in, the GM has added a flat difficulty upgrade of +1 to all combat checks, which works reasonably well for now, and I'm leaning towards adopting it. However, I would like something to simulate portray the difficulty of scoring hits against small and mobile targets like starfighters. GM Phil's Snap roll-move is a good start, but I'm thinking of going one step further by adding a ships handling score to it's defense, possibly even awarding boost dice to the attacker for positive values. This would be somewhat offset by ships with a engineer or astromech aboard being able to pump up the shield rating beyond 4 for ships with negative handling. It could be over the top if combined with snap roll or the ideas for initiative below.

Inititative: As starfighter combat is so ridiculously deadly, initiative becomes extremely important. I'm thinking that smaller, nimbler craft should have an advantage here, so perhaps adding boost/setback dies based on Handling to the roll for pilots only. Perhaps speed should be a factor as well?

I'm not sure if these rules would weigh too much in favor of ships with good handling, but as it is now, handling is getting fairly shafted considering how important it should be in the type of dogfighting Star Wars presents to us (short range WW1-WW2-style).

Ideas? Opinions? Critique? Please chime in!

The way I handled survivability was:

• Evasive Maneuvers: In addition to the upgrade, adds defence = handling if the ship has +ive handling. This extra defence is ignored by GTA, just like the upgrade. Necessary to gate it behind a maneuver as otherwise minion TIE swarms get a flat +3 defence and become too hard for low-level PCs to hit. Aces who can afford to suffer the strain to evade + move + attack *are* a real threat.
• Shields: No longer add defence, instead you can convert damage up to your shield rating to System Strain. This roughly turns a shielded ship's SS threshold into a second HP bar, which you can regen. This means rebel fighters, particularly ones with astromechs to perform Damage Control, are a lot more survivable.
• Guided: Guided rating is now the speed of the missile. Against targets with speed > rating, increase difficulty by 1. Speed < rating, reduce difficulty by one. This stops round 1 Proton Torpedo 1-hit-KO attacks in fighter combat, but makes them even *more* effective against capital ships.

The upshot of this is fighters behave quite differently: you have tanky regen fighters (e.g. Xs, Ys) that can survive a long fight, durable shielded fighters (e.g. Bs) that have high effective HP but can't regen it well, and agile interceptors (e.g. As) that can completely dodge hits with Evasive Maneuvers but only until they run out of strain. Neatly, the latter benefit the most from a highly-talented pilot.

Adding Maneuverability to initiative is a good idea and one I'll steal.

3 minutes ago, Talkie Toaster said:

The way I handled survivability was:

• Evasive Maneuvers: Adds defence = handling. This extra defence is ignored by GTA, just like the upgrade. Necessary to gate it behind a maneuver as otherwise minion TIE swarms get a flat +3 defence and become too hard for low-level PCs to hit. Aces who can afford to suffer the strain to evade + move + attack *are* a real threat.
• Shields: No longer add defence, instead you can convert damage up to your shield rating to System Strain. This roughly turns a shielded ship's SS threshold into a second HP bar, which you can regen. This means rebel fighters, particularly ones with astromechs to perform Damage Control, are a lot more survivable.
• Guided: Guided rating is now the speed of the missile. Against targets with speed > rating, increase difficulty by 1. Speed < rating, reduce difficulty by one. This stops round 1 Proton Torpedo 1-hit-KO attacks in fighter combat, but makes them even *more* effective against capital ships.

The upshot of this is fighters behave quite differently: you have tanky regen fighters (e.g. Xs, Ys) that can survive a long fight, durable shielded fighters (e.g. Bs) that have high effective HP but can't regen it well, and agile interceptors (e.g. As) that can completely dodge hits with Evasive Maneuvers but only until they run out of strain. Neatly, the latter benefit the most from a highly-talented pilot.

Adding Maneuverability to initiative is a good idea and one I'll steal.

I'm leaning towards not going with adding handling to defense as it becomes rather strange in situations where it should be nullified for whatever reason, and the ship has negative handling. Suddenly a clumsy ship with restricted movement becomes harder to hit. Of course you could just count negative handling as zero rather than handing out boost dice to people targeting it I guess. I'm assuming you're adding defense in addition to upgrading difficulty, in order for low handling ships to gain any benefit at all from evasive maneuvers?

I do like your way of handling shields, but I think it would put too much stress on the Strain pool if combined with the Snap Roll. I'd have to pick one.

Guided mod is also nice. All in all, I might steal these wholesale!

Negative handling would apply boosts dice for the enemies instead of setback dice like defense, analog how handling works on piloting checks itself. That really is not an issue.

Actually, I can't see any issues at all with the changes, sure, TIE Fighters with defensive driving become now defense capped and defensive driving itself becomes more of a negative handling ship thing, but should be ok. Y-Wings and X-Wings become stronger too, just in a different kind of way, evasive and GtA get a little more important sure, evasive actually becomes worse low agility ships with negative handling and that is fine too.

Guided sounds a lot more fun now too, it solves the torpedos vs fighters issue too, while you still can fire them if your gunnery skill is good enough for it, which is in line with the old X-Wing space sims and the Stackpole X-Wing novels. Usually I shoot down all those house rules because of the obvious balance issues, but this one seems to check out. Well, rebel regen becomes incredible annoying to deal with, but that seems fine too.

edit: Though you get really, really tough starfighter that way.

2 hours ago, penpenpen said:

True, but it dumps a fairly important decision on the player that not all players might like. It does give the campaign a nice chains-of-command-sending-people-to-their-deaths kind of war movie vibe, and not all players might like that kind of... weight. I'd definitely had to bring that aspect up with my players pre-game.

Try running a Squadron Demonstration encounter with the players in TIE Fighters, should drive the point home that starfighter work is dangerous, not everyone gets to come home.

Also the narrative and long-game is important. I can't overstress that. We had a squad member the players loved. He was just another minion with a token that stood out causing the players to crack a joke, and the character made some snarky comments. The players loved him. When a sniper took him out it was heart wrenching. When he showed up next mission, now as a Rival level NPC with a special injury-based ability the players loved it, and now take him along when they need a "b" team to send off screen when they tackle the main plot.

3 hours ago, penpenpen said:

I'm leaning towards not going with adding handling to defense as it becomes rather strange in situations where it should be nullified for whatever reason, and the ship has negative handling. Suddenly a clumsy ship with restricted movement becomes harder to hit. Of course you could just count negative handling as zero rather than handing out boost dice to people targeting it I guess. I'm assuming you're adding defense in addition to upgrading difficulty, in order for low handling ships to gain any benefit at all from evasive maneuvers?

I do like your way of handling shields, but I think it would put too much stress on the Strain pool if combined with the Snap Roll. I'd have to pick one.

Guided mod is also nice. All in all, I might steal these wholesale!

Yeah, I should've made that clearer- Evasive Maneuvers gives a difficulty upgrade *whatever* your maneuverability, and a defence if it's positive. Adding boosts on attacks against negative handling ships would make them too much of a deathtrap, IMO, and lead to huge dice pools in capital ship combat. I'm glad you like the tweaks! They worked fairly well when we used them, but we didn't have much space combat - after our first few encounters with the regular rules we switched focus to the ground game. So there's almost certainly room for iteration/improvement.

1 hour ago, SEApocalypse said:

Well, rebel regen becomes incredible annoying to deal with, but that seems fine too.

edit: Though you get really, really tough starfighter that way.

Yeah, my reasoning was rebel ships are PC ships so making it easier for them to fight multiple engagements in a row and much harder for them to die is A Good Thing. Ideally rebel ships will run out of System Strain before they run out of hull, allowing for PCs to be taken out during one combat and still be able to participate in the next encounter, whilst still preserving their long-term hull damage between fights.

1 hour ago, Talkie Toaster said:

Yeah, my reasoning was rebel ships are PC ships so making it easier for them to fight multiple engagements in a row and much harder for them to die is A Good Thing. Ideally rebel ships will run out of System Strain before they run out of hull, allowing for PCs to be taken out during one combat and still be able to participate in the next encounter, whilst still preserving their long-term hull damage between fights.

I think you underestimate the power of astromechs here. Rebel ships will regen about 3 to 7 points of system strain per turn if a proper PC astromech is doing the damage control actions, as damage control is regenerating one point per success. This means the shields become effectively 4 extra points of armor (with angle deflector shields and shield boost there is little reason to assume a fighter will less than 4 points of shields), while requiring an action every other turn to maintain. That is not a bad mechanic, but it makes X-Wings monsters. In capital ship combat you will cut damage most likely in half as well as those armor values of 7-9 points, combined with up to 6 or maybe even 8 points of shields will negate all hull damage, while a few groups of damage control minion groups will regen strain rather quickly, so I guess a reduction to once per turn for damage control would be in order, simular how the hull repair effect of damage control is already once per encounter.

Speaking of once per encounter. As PC ships usually don't just explode when their they take hull damage that exceeds their hull trauma, you can certainly say that player ships can already get repaired between combat encounters into a flight ready state again. The crits would stick, but in fighter combat nobody bothers with crits usually as a good hit used to take out a ship, so using damage control in between encounters is usually enough to get the hull damage down into areas in which the ship becomes usable again.

Lastly: A C-Roc Gozanti goes up to 7 armor already, so the new shield mechanics can make the thing rather sturdy not only against TIE-Minions, but as well turbolaser fire from cap ships. You might end up in a Perry Rhodan scenario when the shields and shield regen exceeds the ability of conventional weapons to deal damage, especially if multiple characters do damage control actions to regain system strain.

Overall I still like the house rules. And the main issue, unlimited damage control actions to regen system strain can easily adjusted to once per round or sil/3 rounded up per turn. And btw, sil 4 freighters with their larger crews are damage sponges, thick shields, enough crew to angle deflectors fast for 6+ damage absorb and multiple damage control actions per turn. Those things become tough nuts to crack even when their handling is negative, especially as sil 4 ships can decide which shield zone is attacked and thus focus the shields especially well, while multiple crew members allow to react quickly to GtA actions to protect exposed arcs.

How do you get a C-Roc to 7 armor?

29 minutes ago, Ahrimon said:

How do you get a C-Roc to 7 armor?

Base armor 5.
Rigger adds one armor for his lovely signature vehicle and compensates the bad handling.
Armor attachment another one.
Profit!

2 hours ago, SEApocalypse said:

I think you underestimate the power of astromechs here. Rebel ships will regen about 3 to 7 points of system strain per turn if a proper PC astromech is doing the damage control actions, as damage control is regenerating one point per success. This means the shields become effectively 4 extra points of armor (with angle deflector shields and shield boost there is little reason to assume a fighter will less than 4 points of shields), while requiring an action every other turn to maintain. That is not a bad mechanic, but it makes X-Wings monsters. In capital ship combat you will cut damage most likely in half as well as those armor values of 7-9 points, combined with up to 6 or maybe even 8 points of shields will negate all hull damage, while a few groups of damage control minion groups will regen strain rather quickly, so I guess a reduction to once per turn for damage control would be in order, simular how the hull repair effect of damage control is already once per encounter.

Speaking of once per encounter. As PC ships usually don't just explode when their they take hull damage that exceeds their hull trauma, you can certainly say that player ships can already get repaired between combat encounters into a flight ready state again. The crits would stick, but in fighter combat nobody bothers with crits usually as a good hit used to take out a ship, so using damage control in between encounters is usually enough to get the hull damage down into areas in which the ship becomes usable again.

Lastly: A C-Roc Gozanti goes up to 7 armor already, so the new shield mechanics can make the thing rather sturdy not only against TIE-Minions, but as well turbolaser fire from cap ships. You might end up in a Perry Rhodan scenario when the shields and shield regen exceeds the ability of conventional weapons to deal damage, especially if multiple characters do damage control actions to regain system strain.

Overall I still like the house rules. And the main issue, unlimited damage control actions to regen system strain can easily adjusted to once per round or sil/3 rounded up per turn. And btw, sil 4 freighters with their larger crews are damage sponges, thick shields, enough crew to angle deflectors fast for 6+ damage absorb and multiple damage control actions per turn. Those things become tough nuts to crack even when their handling is negative, especially as sil 4 ships can decide which shield zone is attacked and thus focus the shields especially well, while multiple crew members allow to react quickly to GtA actions to protect exposed arcs.

Hmm, I assumed shields would cap at 4 as defence does, but of course they're no longer defence - so that should be an explicit statement too then. I handled the cap ship problem by limiting their NPC actions to 1 per rank of Leadership the captain had, so in general you'd be looking at 15ish SS regen/turn on a Star Destroyer, say. That's probably bad if you're using the combined fire rules where each weapon adds 1 damage, I basically just divided the total guns into X identical minion groups, rolled 1 attack, then multiplied the hits by the number of gun groups which should up the damage. Equally though yeah, if 4 PCs on a freighter all perform Damage Control that's still 10ish SS so 1/round limit on Sil. 1-4 ships is a good one. Hadn't considered PC astromechs either, though a ship with a PC astromech and a PC pilot should probably be twice as hard to kill as a normal ship.

RAW, exceeding Hull Trauma is definitely horribly crippling:

[...] with a Hard [PPPP] Mechanics check, the crew can bring the ship back to some semblance of life.

The ship reduces its hull trauma to one below its hull trauma threshold but suffers the following penalties:
speed is reduced to 1, handling is reduced to -3, and all weapon systems are inoperable until fully repaired.
If the ship reenters combat in this fragile state, any attack that inflicts hull trauma immediately generates a Critical Hit, with +30 added to the roll on Table 7-9: Critical Hit Result. All of these effects persist until the ship can be dry-docked and repaired.

5 minutes ago, Talkie Toaster said:

I handled the cap ship problem by limiting their NPC actions to 1 per rank of Leadership the captain had, so in general you'd be looking at 15ish SS regen/turn on a Star Destroyer, say. That's probably bad if you're using the combined fire rules where each weapon adds 1 damage, I basically just divided the total guns into X identical minion groups, rolled 1 attack, then multiplied the hits by the number of gun groups which should up the damage. Equally though yeah, if 4 PCs on a freighter all perform Damage Control that's still 10ish SS so 1/round limit on Sil. 1-4 ships is a good one. Hadn't considered PC astromechs either, though a ship with a PC astromech and a PC pilot should probably be twice as hard to kill as a normal ship.

Which would leave our sil 5 gozanti with armor 7, a high shield value and about 10+ SS per round regenerated. Basically immunity against even multiple squadrons of TIE-fighters. The handling of -2 is the only minor downside about it, but 16 gun barrels make up for the low handling just fine.

BTW, defensive driving and watch my back, are they in your house rules supposed to increase defense or shields?

On 5/2/2017 at 7:40 AM, SEApocalypse said:

Furthermore GtA has defensive uses, when you are locked behind your target, it will not shoot back either, which than again allows to to fire next turn with a still active GtA and maybe stay on target maneuver bonus.

I've been looking for this but don't see it under GtA, where in the books does it say that GtA prevents the target of this maneuver from shooting back?

Personally looking for anything that helps with space combat since its sad that speed of a craft plays Zero part in how hard it is to hit and that a scrub with agility 1 and a pilot with Agility 5 piloting 5 are both equally easy to hit with an attack making piloting skill pretty lackluster in the grand scheme.

Anything rule wise that helps and makes more sense would be useful, other wise I think I will use;

On 5/3/2017 at 7:02 AM, Talkie Toaster said:

• Evasive Maneuvers: In addition to the upgrade, adds defence = handling if the ship has +ive handling. This extra defence is ignored by GTA, just like the upgrade. Necessary to gate it behind a maneuver as otherwise minion TIE swarms get a flat +3 defence and become too hard for low-level PCs to hit. Aces who can afford to suffer the strain to evade + move + attack *are* a real threat.
• Shields: No longer add defence, instead you can convert damage up to your shield rating to System Strain. This roughly turns a shielded ship's SS threshold into a second HP bar, which you can regen. This means rebel fighters, particularly ones with astromechs to perform Damage Control, are a lot more survivable.

At least this will make it so that it is actually harder to hit a TIE or A-wing over a Y-wing. I would continue the limit of 4 per arc and for balance purposes I would limit the Damage Control check to once per turn. The Shield rule also works with the idea of ion cannons being anti-shield as they do nothing to reduce damage and just fill up your strain. Might be a good idea to say shields can not cause a ship to go over it's strain threshold and just fail at the point you would hit cap. AKA; having 3 shields but only 2 strain remaining your shields only reduce damage by 2 the next time your hit, capping you for damage.

In the books? Nowhere, it is one of the many great achievements of the FFG editorial to hide this information in some emails or FAQ entries and be as vague as possible about this in the books. Nonetheless it seems to be indeed part of the game rules as this was coming directly from the devs as rules as intended in some clarification question about GtA.

Other great missing stuff is for example that damage control heals one system strain per success, though the newer editions have this at least corrected, which makes 2 evasive maneuvers per turn a valid sustainable choice.

So a Question of would it be so bad;

Was discussing the idea's on this forum with the other players in our group when one of them said "Why not just make it a gunnery vs. piloting combat check." Thus kind of blew my mind since it seemed like such an obvious answer and after discussing it further we came to a few points.

1. Gunnery vs. piloting is only used when firing on a craft that is reasonable piloted by 1 or 2 individuals, a craft that consists more of a large bridge with people working together uses the normal rules.

2. Handling, positive handling is black dice included with the piloting check and negative handling is blue dice included with the gunnery check.

3. Silhouette modifies the piloting dice as per normal (increasing/decreasing the difficulty).

4. We will be using the defense dice as Shields that give extra armor that convert hull damage to strain and only 1 mechanics check per turn may be made. Also we feel that shields always takes effect before armor in the case of a weak damage attack.

5. The Arc hit by the opposed check is decided by advantage/threat, net Advantage the attacker decides the arc, otherwise the defender decides.

6. Gain the advantage in addition to its normal benefits makes the next attack made by your craft against the normal difficulty if you so choose.

Remember these rules ONLY apply when dealing with craft that you could make gunnery vs. piloting checks. You use the normal rules on craft it does not apply to, this includes the shield rule and including handling with the combat check. We feel this goes to show that the deflectors of larger craft either out right repel an attack without straining the craft or the shot penetrates and damages the ship, and handling neither helps nor hinders such large ponderous craft.

If you can think of any points that we have missed, should consider or problems with the points we came up with. We would like the input.

Range? Obstructions, atmospheric phenomena, asteroids, etc? Wouldn't Silhouette modify the gunnery dice?

I'm curious why you're drawing an arbitrary distinction about the size of the target's cockpit. A VCX-100 is silhouette 5, just like a CR-92A Assassin-class corvette, but the former has a pilot & co-pilot while the latter has a much-larger command staff.

23 minutes ago, SFC Snuffy said:

I'm curious why you're drawing an arbitrary distinction about the size of the target's cockpit. A VCX-100 is silhouette 5, just like a CR-92A Assassin-class corvette, but the former has a pilot & co-pilot while the latter has a much-larger command staff.

I still say that they screwed up on the VCX-100 and just made it sil 5 because of the sil 3 shuttle. The Ghost does not have a hangar and does not need to be sil 5.

17 minutes ago, Ahrimon said:

I still say that they screwed up on the VCX-100 and just made it sil 5 because of the sil 3 shuttle. The Ghost does not have a hangar and does not need to be sil 5.

I agree; I know it's quite a bit bigger than the Falcon, but I still wouldn't put it in the same category as a GR-75 or CR90.

EDIT: I chose those two ships because mechanically they're the same Silhouette, but have disparate crew requirements.

6 hours ago, SFC Snuffy said:

Range? Obstructions, atmospheric phenomena, asteroids, etc? Wouldn't Silhouette modify the gunnery dice?

I'm curious why you're drawing an arbitrary distinction about the size of the target's cockpit. A VCX-100 is silhouette 5, just like a CR-92A Assassin-class corvette, but the former has a pilot & co-pilot while the latter has a much-larger command staff.

As far as I know range isn't a thing in vehicle vs. vehicle combat.

Silhouette normally modifies the difficulty dice, so since opposed checks have the initiator (gunnery) use the green/yellow/blue dice and the opposition (piloting) use the purple/red/black dice it is easier to continue having modifiers effect there original dice pool to avoid problems. So Obstructions, atmospheric phenomena, asteroids, etc, would still apply there dice/modifiers to the same side of the dice pool.

As for the VCX-100, this may get me hated, but please stop dissing my favorite Ace Pilot Hera. My point of view is that it's Hera that makes the VCX-100 do what it does as a silhouette 5 ship.

Is she using the maneuver Punch it or the Talent Full Throttle from Ace(Pilot talent tree) which increases your speed beyond your maximum.

Is the ship maneuvering and avoiding fire so well because the VCX-100 silhouette 4 or because its silhouette 5 with Talent Tricky Target from Ace(Pilot talent tree) that treats your silhouette as being 1 lower when being attacked so she pilots a silhouetting 5 craft like its a silhouette 4 craft.

Finally is she using Gain the advantage or the Talent Brilliant Evasion from Ace(Pilot talent tree) that prevents a target from being able to attack you for a number of rounds.

If you look for the tree you will see other talents that make pilots great. Personally I feel that most people are merging Hera and VCX-100, its just a big bucket of bolts with a few non standard modifications involved, its Hera that made the ship truly great. After all in Season 2 - Homecoming, The imperial carrier that Hera started piloting was narrowly missed by the initial volley of proton torpedoes giving the gunners time to gun them down before the torpedoes circled back around. I doubt that even imperial pilots normally miss hitting something the size of a carrier and were very surprised to see the first volley skim past the ship.