Hello everyone,

The Imperial gunners are known to have all stats at 2 and Gunnery as a group skill, yes they are minions.

What is the number of gunner needed to fire a turbolaser? If it is 4, do you use a pool of 2 upgraded 3 times, then 2Y1G for each turbolaser firing? Do you say only one and the minion group is supposed to be several turrets? For exemple you fire 4 turbolasers at a target, you use 2 upgraded 3 times like above?

Maybe it depends on your time invested in the space fight, if you fire turbolasers one by one or grouped... but think about a Gozanti. It has 6 gunners for 6 turrets, and the maximum you can group is 2 (left or right), because dorsal and ventral turrets are a different type. How do you rule that?

Thanks

As a quiick suggestion:

Light turbolaser crew of 2.

Medium turbolaser crew of 4.

Heavy turbolaser crew of 6.

Remember to spend turns not firing (due to Slow-Firing) taking Aim.

You give them the skill appropriate to the encounter, not read gospel out of the rulebook. Most of the time that is going to be a fairly poor roll. Maybe YG or YGG or YYG. Sometimes it is more or less. Soemthing like a single Gozanti acting as a patrol cruiser I would probably do as YGG. It might be a bit of a threat to beginners, but an elite group should barely even notice it.

Also, dont get caught up in the tiny fiddly bits in encounter design. Just because the book says an imperial gunner is a minion and has certain stats, that doesnt mean you have to use them. Trying to figure out the die pool of every situation for every NPC action can drag down the fight. If it is slowing the game, dont worry about the bits, but roll some dice and get going. It may take a bit of practice to get the on the fly die pools down, but once you do the game will be smoother.

Thanks men, I really like the aim maneuver while the "slow firing" of the turbolaser is recharging

Good suggestion on the pool dice, adapt and change the skills of gunners sometimes. Experienced crew today on patrol, no luck for you smugglers!

I find it funny how happy is so strongly voicing his opinion that starship combat damage is too **** high, while trying to use every mechanical trick to increase damage output, especially for turbolasers.

The rulebook suggests that you use oner gunner minion per turbolaser and group turbolasers into batteries of appropriate size and skill level for your encounter. AoR-CRB Page 252. Backbox "Vehicles and Minons"

Any time they've shown a turbolaser crew, it has multiple men per weapon. For smaller ships, like corvettes and frigates, the battery rules suck. Even for bigger ships, they suck.

15 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

I find it funny how happy is so strongly voicing his opinion that starship combat damage is too **** high, while trying to use every mechanical trick to increase damage output, especially for turbolasers.

It's not that damage is too high, it's that HTT/SST and Armor are too low. When I've got personal scale combat-focused characters with WT 23/ST 14 and Soak 8, I'd like to see comparable values in a heavy fighter/bomber. That character typically does base Damage of 10, which against himself would take a maximum of 8 hits to exceed WT. Most fighters and speeders can only survive a maximum of 4 hits (and that's on a tough fighter) from their main weapons (and I'm not talking about torpedoes). This cuts down staying power dramatically, especially as many fighter/speeder weapons have Linked.

Outside of the issue that success adds damage, damage to high or HTT/SST to low are basically the same thing and in either case armor plays a roll into it as well. So yeah, either way you want to increase effective hp.
Btw, I am playing a space combat focus character in a space combat heavy ship with HTT 55 / SS 26 and Armor 7. That ship does typical base damage of 6.
Now in the hangar there are two ships which come down to Sil Zero and are pure evasion tanks in combat, those go down indeed by someone scratching the paint with his key.

And I actually agree, some more actually heavy fighters would have been nice. The TIE-Defender, the B-Wing would have been prime candidates for some special rule to get one point of extra armor while their shields are active. The TIE-Bomber or at least the Punisher would have liked a point of extra armor.
The B-Wing would have been nice to have 2 HP as well, so that you actually had to choose between an armor mod and advanced targetting array. And for that matter, I don't think it would have been bad if the armor attachment added 2 points of armor for 2 hardpoints.
It is a little bit ironic that currently one of the best tanky sil3 fighters in the game is lousy shuttle from "Friends like these". Which may or may not be able to reach armor 5 with an armor attachment and 6 for Riggers.

Lastly, pierce is quite common with personal scale weapons, while breach is mostly limited to turbolasers and self-propelled munition, so that soak 8 is usually not worth the full 8 points, while ships armor usually is. Still I get your gist, if you want something as tanky as this WT23/ST14 Soak 8 character and still fly like a fighter, you are for the most part relegated to Sil4 ships, like an YT-2400 with base armor 4 and potentially 2 armor points added from attachments and spec. There are multiple specs with endurance, but there is only one with a single lousy rank of bolstered armor, as if they could not have added that one to modder.

I don't wanted to increase damage, but as I have seen a Gozanti use one gunner per cannon, as described in "crew complement", and as we can see in the official movies, anims etc that turbolasers use more than one gunner, I was just curious and searching advices about how to play them. I said for Sil 5 or 6 at least as of course I won't shoot every single turbolaser of a stardestroyer...

But a standard CR90 has only two turbolasers, one ventral and one dorsal, so at best you can fire 2 shots in a round against the same target, two separates dice rolls is not inappropriate I think, that's why I wonder how many minions are on charge of every turbolaser. The ship complement only says the crew is btw 30 and around 165... you can't be less accurate lol

I go with the 1 Minion per weapon and group them according to firing arc, it's too much of a hassle to shoot every dam weapon otherwise.

4 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

I go with the 1 Minion per weapon and group them according to firing arc, it's too much of a hassle to shoot every dam weapon otherwise.

Not only that, but it makes sense from the theme of the minion rules too. A group of 6 stormtrooper are not magically becoming masters with the heavy rifle, they just shoot more from their 6 individual weapons.

8 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

It's not that damage is too high, it's that HTT/SST and Armor are too low. When I've got personal scale combat-focused characters with WT 23/ST 14 and Soak 8, I'd like to see comparable values in a heavy fighter/bomber. That character typically does base Damage of 10, which against himself would take a maximum of 8 hits to exceed WT. Most fighters and speeders can only survive a maximum of 4 hits (and that's on a tough fighter) from their main weapons (and I'm not talking about torpedoes). This cuts down staying power dramatically, especially as many fighter/speeder weapons have Linked.

I generally agree with you, but FFG was trying to make a simplified set of rules. If you want to toughen up the fighters, you really need to add an extra scale for capital vessels. Then a turbolaser still plasters a fighter, but fighter on fighter, you can last longer. As I think about it, that would work well. Add a rule that torpedoes are capital scale ...

I agree with Agility 2, 1 rank per gun after the first for the base pool. If the gun has any slow firing then the gunners get to aim twice, otherwise it's just one aim. For noncombat/civilian vessels like the stock gozanti and CR-90 this results in pools of only YGBB but even this pool hits DDDS 46% of the time (which would probably scare off opportunistic raiders). When applied to combat starships, the dice pool grows to YYGGG (plus boosts) pretty quickly. Also, concentrated barrage is great.

Thanks for the tips, with the blue dice from aim this seems fairly correct, so even with 2 turrets, minions grouping work apparently very well, I will'try that

I won't create a new thread but as a last question about big crew, to be sure, do you allow a capital ship in a single round multiple actions because of the hundreds peoples managing the ship? Like firing the turret one side, blanket barrage the other side, and damage control ? Plus the pilot only maneuver "Fly/Drive" and why not an "angle the deflector shields", all in the same round.

1 minute ago, Rosco74 said:

I won't create a new thread but as a last question about big crew, to be sure, do you allow a capital ship in a single round multiple actions because of the hundreds peoples managing the ship? Like firing the turret one side, blanket barrage the other side, and damage control ? Plus the pilot only maneuver "Fly/Drive" and why not an "angle the deflector shields", all in the same round.

Just wait and see what happens when 100 damage control teams wipe away all the SS from a full barrage of ion cannons in a single turn. Hope those guys at least caused some Criticals because otherwise they're practically useless.

30 minutes ago, Rosco74 said:

I won't create a new thread but as a last question about big crew, to be sure, do you allow a capital ship in a single round multiple actions because of the hundreds peoples managing the ship? Like firing the turret one side, blanket barrage the other side, and damage control ? Plus the pilot only maneuver "Fly/Drive" and why not an "angle the deflector shields", all in the same round.

I do allow capital ships to fire all weapons, pilot, plus most maneuver. It hasn't come up yet, but I would limit damage control teams severely. Maybe more than 1 per turn, but certainly not 1 per "engineering crewman". Maybe assign a number of "damage control" teams with 1 roll per team, based on ship size, experience, officers, or even type of ship.

After all, a PC freighter can do all those things, if there are enough stations.

That's what I thought, a light freighter with PC can do all of that so why not a capital ship. Off course I won't use all available actions, like jamming, boosting shields, ploting course etc, as I think it represent orders given by the captain of the ship, so basically I assume the captain give the order to open fire then all weapons fire as an action. He spends a maneuver to order the pilots to move the ship where he wants to. From now weapons fire each rounds, but if he wants something special, like a concentrate fire he needs to give the order with a maneuver. In a round as a rival or nemesis he can give 3 orders for 2 strains, so for exemple fly here, angle deflector shields and concentrate fire on this ship. Or slow down the speed, damage control team on deck 1 and cease fire. I will try that, simple enough I think.

Thanks

I'd allow the ship to take 1 manoeuvre, fire all its weapons, and perform 1 action per rank of Leadership the commanding officer has- probably about 2-3 for a Star Destroyer. Assume the minion groups performing the action have ranks = 1/2 silhouette and it works about right.

I've recently been thinking about this (along with the Order 66 capital ship combat reccomendations) and will be using the following for capital ships (not freighters/transports) until it doesn't work (it's been ok in the skirmishes I've put together).

1. Capital ships get a number of extra turns depending on silhouette: 5-6 = 1 turn, 7 = 2 turns, 8 = 3 turns. If the ship is supposed to be particularly dangerous or has an elite captain (read: is a story villian) it gets an extra turn. Ex: a sil 6 capital ship commanded by the villian would have 3 turns total; 1 regular, +1 from being sil 6, +1 from commanded by the villian. Initiative is rolled once and the extra turns are taken in initiative order after the normal initiative order.

2. Turns are still limited to 2 maneuvers and 1 action, but no strain is taken for doing 2 maneuvers. Actions can be anything (read: there aren't specific turns for gunners vs crew) and gunners are assumed to aim twice during a slow firing turn unless they are immobilized (so a ship won't need to use the aim maneuver when using slow firing weapons).

3. A ship can repair hull trauma in combat once per turn it gets. A ship gets ranks in solid repairs and fine tuning equal to the number of turns it gets. Ex: A silhouette 7 ship can damage control action for hull trauma 3 times during the battle and with 1 success will repair 4 hull trauma.

4. Specialist minion crew (read: not gunners) has 3 in the relevant characteristic and minions in the group equal to silhouette-2. Ex: sil 5 has 3 minions in a group.

5. Gunners work as described in my earlier post.

6. If you give the ship's captain stats, they can go on one of the ship's turns and offer up extra options for that turn (I intend to use the generic naval officer from EotE core for most imperial ships so it can use tactical direction to hand out boost dice). The ship's action the captain uses can use either the crew's dice pool or the captain's.

This is a classic area where story runs counter to reason.

A capital ship running in combat should be utilizing every possible combat option every round. Officers should be designating targets for gunnery crews whose leaders are inspiring them to aim and coordinate their fire. Scanning crews should be jamming the enemy communications while others are attempting to slice the enemy's computers. On the bridge, navigators should be plotting course for the helm while the captain oversees everything, adding judicious leadership abilities wherever needed.

That being said, this is a monstrous amount of dice rolling and record keeping, and none of it helps the story.

What I have done is have capital ships do just enough to discourage my PCs from thinking to challenge them. Whatever the PCs try, they are met with resistance enough to make the story interesting and ensure that the outcome hangs in the die rolls.

For the gunners, I have the individual guns work like a minion starfighter. If there are four of them targeting the PCs, they roll YYGB.

6 hours ago, Hinklemar said:

I've recently been thinking about this (along with the Order 66 capital ship combat reccomendations) and will be using the following for capital ships (not freighters/transports) until it doesn't work (it's been ok in the skirmishes I've put together).

1. Capital ships get a number of extra turns depending on silhouette: 5-6 = 1 turn, 7 = 2 turns, 8 = 3 turns. If the ship is supposed to be particularly dangerous or has an elite captain (read: is a story villian) it gets an extra turn. Ex: a sil 6 capital ship commanded by the villian would have 3 turns total; 1 regular, +1 from being sil 6, +1 from commanded by the villian. Initiative is rolled once and the extra turns are taken in initiative order after the normal initiative order.

2. Turns are still limited to 2 maneuvers and 1 action, but no strain is taken for doing 2 maneuvers. Actions can be anything (read: there aren't specific turns for gunners vs crew) and gunners are assumed to aim twice during a slow firing turn unless they are immobilized (so a ship won't need to use the aim maneuver when using slow firing weapons).

3. A ship can repair hull trauma in combat once per turn it gets. A ship gets ranks in solid repairs and fine tuning equal to the number of turns it gets. Ex: A silhouette 7 ship can damage control action for hull trauma 3 times during the battle and with 1 success will repair 4 hull trauma.

4. Specialist minion crew (read: not gunners) has 3 in the relevant characteristic and minions in the group equal to silhouette-2. Ex: sil 5 has 3 minions in a group.

5. Gunners work as described in my earlier post.

6. If you give the ship's captain stats, they can go on one of the ship's turns and offer up extra options for that turn (I intend to use the generic naval officer from EotE core for most imperial ships so it can use tactical direction to hand out boost dice). The ship's action the captain uses can use either the crew's dice pool or the captain's.

Thanks, it worth a try. Just few questions about it.

2 Do you mean your ships Sil 5 or more are allowed to perform more than one pilot only maneuver in a round? When you take the fire action, I assume all your guns fire at once?

4 for any action you consider the base dice pool from the specialist minion crew? For exemple piloting a Sil 6 or an astrogation check would roll dice based on 4 minions, so 3 greens upgraded 3 times?

6 Do the captain has to use one of the turn each round, representing giving orders?

EDIT : one must be carefull with Sil 5 ships because a VCX-100 is Sil 5 like the Wayfarer. On the other hand a CR90 is Sil 5 as well but with a crew of max 165... so I would allow a CR90 to have an extra turn but not a VCX-100...

In general, I intended any rule which isn't mentioned is meant to be obeyed. So for 2) it'd still only be 1 pilot only maneuver per round, but the ship can take that pilot only maneuver during any of its turns. If the ship attacks as its action you'd make a normal attack with one set of weapons like you would any other ship; if using a barrage action, then use the rules under that action. For 4) a sil 6 would have 3 ability and 3 ranks for YYY as the base pool. Astrogation, repair, piloting, whatever you'd need which the ship's crew would do would use the base pool. For 6) I might not have been super clear, but the captain would only take part of the ship's turn whenever he chooses to act and it's only relevant if the captain has special abilities or skills. Look at it this way, if the captain does nothing then the ship gets 2 maneuvers and an action. If the captain uses his abilities or skills as a maneuver or action, then that uses one of the ship's maneuvers or action. If the captain uses his abilities and skills for both maneuvers and the action, then the captain would get 2 strain (since he'd need to do 2 maneuvers and an action on his own). The other point is the captain can only act on 1 turn, if things change later in the round the captain has already acted and wouldn't be able to help until next round.

For your final point, this is why I said capital ships and not just silhouette 5+ vessels. I (and probably many others) consider capital ships to be military vessels of 100 or more meters long. In the "Hull Type/Class" line of the stat block it'd have to have corvette/frigate/cruiser or the like for me to use these with; anything that had transport/freighter/yacht or the like wouldn't get this treatment. I would also mean for these to only be used in small scale capital ship vs capital ship combat when a PC is in command of at least 1 of the friendly capital ships or when capital ships are directly involved with the PCs' actions (such as if the PCs are attacking one as the primary part of the encounter). If the PCs don't have capital ships on their side and they're just trying to evade/outrun the enemy capital ship then the normal rules should suffice. If the PCs have capital ships on their side but they're not directly involved with the PCs actions, use mass combat rules. If the battle is just too dang big and involves more than a small handful of capital ships then use mass combat rules (whether some PCs are in command of them or not). Notice I didn't even touch sil 9 because any battle involving something that big would automatically be a mass combat for me. The largest I'd probably run things without mass combat is a convoy or something where the enemy would have 6-ish initiative slots: 2 for a Nebulon-B, one each for 2 star galleons, and one each for 2 minion groups of 6 TIEs flying escort (with the nebulon-b's other squadron launching once most of the first squadron is wiped out). On the PC's side I'd expect 1 big or 2 small capital ships (with 1-2 PCs in command), 1-2 PCs in starfighter squads, and 1-2 PCs in a boarding shuttle/light freighter. This is certainly a big fight, but it's not totally unmanageable.

Ok thanks a lot for clarifications. I will try that. And good catch on the ship type.

On 26.8.2017 at 5:01 AM, Hinklemar said:

For your final point, this is why I said capital ships and not just silhouette 5+ vessels. I (and probably many others) consider capital ships to be military vessels of 100 or more meters long. In the "Hull Type/Class" line of the stat block it'd have to have corvette/frigate/cruiser or the like for me to use these with.

Just a side note: FFG considers the c-roc gozanti cruiser a capital ship, it just 75m long and the elephant in the room is that FFG is inconsistent with their own classification of capital ships and basically seem to ignore for example the special weapon rules in newer publications.

So your own definition works most likely indeed better, und would work as well better with the special rule from EotE which gives small sized weapons extra accuracy when mounted to capital ships, as they are dedicated anti-fighter weapons and not as hard penalized from the large silhouette.

Starfighter Defense

Quote

Capital ships tend to mount turbolasers and ion cannons to combat other large vessels. These ships are the only ones large enough to mount such heavy weapons. However, it does tend to leave them vulnerable to much smaller and more agile snub fighters. Turbolasers and ion cannons fire more slowly and are unable to traverse rapidly enough to target these ships effectively, and the larger surface of the ships means the weapons need to cover wider fire zones.
For this reason some capital ships mount dedicated anti-starfighter weapons, typical laser cannons and blasters. Doing so is a calculated trade-off – every anti-starfighter weapon takes up power and space that could go towards more powerful guns. However, some designers consider the tradeoff worthwhile, especially when building mid-sized escort vessels.

Edge of Empire is as well the one corebook with a special set for of extra guidlines for capital ship combat:

CAPITAL SHIP COMBAT

Quote

Combat in larger, capital-class starships of silhouette 5 or higher is, by necessity, more abstrac t due to the complexity of the vessel and the number of crew members involved. Similar to combat in small craft, capital ships can only perform one starship maneuver and one starship acti o n (or two starship maneuvers) during t h eir turn. This is not an inherent quality of the ship, however; it is based on the pilot or captain's actions and starship maneuvers. Along with the pilot, each additional crew member aboard can use his actions and s t a r s hip maneuver to man weapons, operate sensors, move about the ship, and generally engage in combat along with the pilot. This all happens in the same round, and is subject to Initiative order just like per sonal combat. Something to remember concerning ship combat with vehicles of this immense size is that each ship is likely to have hundreds or thou sands of crew. GMs and players should not track all of their initiative s l ots and actions during combat. Instead, only focus on those individuals who are actually doing things pertinent to the ongoing encounter, and feel free to ignore the rest.

The last sentence is here especially important, because naturally not a 100 crew man can work at the same time on repairing strain as the strain still should occur locally. Max dice pools for minion groups or using a repair crew squad still seems appropriate.