On 9/27/2017 at 7:07 AM, MonCal said:

My own very opersonal take on what the shields seem to reflect in the old trilogy (my reference point; have not seen tep 1-3 since... 2005 or so) seem to show that ships get their shields degraded, but they take a lot of punishment out of the hull until that happens. Once shields are busted the ship takes massive ammounts of damage per hit (lethal for fighters, criticals for freighters). Remember that TIEs do not ahve shields, so they simply die if hit.

I've never tried it, but I'm kind of a fan of giving ships shield points of 5 pts per die. As those points go down the defense goes down. Models shields deflecting and absorbing but loosing effectiveness as they do.

2 hours ago, Ahrimon said:

I've never tried it, but I'm kind of a fan of giving ships shield points of 5 pts per die. As those points go down the defense goes down. Models shields deflecting and absorbing but loosing effectiveness as they do.

Would that value vary by Silhouette? Surely the shields on the side of a CR90 can take more than the shields on rear of an x-wing even through both are Defense 1.

I know there's some starship homebrew in this PDF, too. Think someone combined some of Norton's Rules with a dogfight maneuver and adding points to shields.

There's stuff that I don't like in there (all those X-Wing boosts), and sometimes the dogfighting can be a hassle to run, but it's also a start.

Starfighters of the Adumar Houserules

8 hours ago, satkaz said:

I know there's some starship homebrew in this PDF, too. Think someone combined some of Norton's Rules with a dogfight maneuver and adding points to shields.

There's stuff that I don't like in there (all those X-Wing boosts), and sometimes the dogfighting can be a hassle to run, but it's also a start.

StarfightersoftheAdumarHouserules.pdf

Link not working for me... .(

12 hours ago, Ahrimon said:

I've never tried it, but I'm kind of a fan of giving ships shield points of 5 pts per die. As those points go down the defense goes down. Models shields deflecting and absorbing but loosing effectiveness as they do.

That seems like it might add quite a lot more bookkeeping and things to remember. A capital ship now has 4 extra 'shield HP' tracks to worry about and has to constantly update its defence. Solutions like Snap Roll or Shields = Parry are handy as they don't really add any more things to track.

22 hours ago, HappyDaze said:

Would that value vary by Silhouette? Surely the shields on the side of a CR90 can take more than the shields on rear of an x-wing even through both are Defense 1.

I don't see why not. I've never actually tried it, it just sounds like a decent way to make shields a little more relevant to me. Say Sil 3 & 4 are 5 per shield point and Sil 5 & 6 are 10, etc. Possibly even 5*(Sil-2). I'm not familiar with larger ships so I couldn't say if it starts to break down or would need to be adjusted.

11 hours ago, Talkie Toaster said:

That seems like it might add quite a lot more bookkeeping and things to remember. A capital ship now has 4 extra 'shield HP' tracks to worry about and has to constantly update its defence. Solutions like Snap Roll or Shields = Parry are handy as they don't really add any more things to track.

It very well could be, but I've got a head for numbers so I hadn't concerned myself with it. It's an untested idea for a potential fix is all.

The homebrew I linked (hope to god I at least got the download location right on the last post) had differing shield values: a Sil 3 fighter had 6 shield points for every 1 defense, while a Sil 8 ship had 12 Shield points for every 1 defense.

It works like temporary hull points: any attack has to burn through the shields before actually dealing damage to hull trauma.

I've been taking into account what's been said here and some of the homebrew rules and finally I've come to some modifications to combat. I admit it, I rather go with a longer combat with ships more resilient and able to soak more damage. With that in mind:

a) Missiles, torpedos, turbolasers, tractors and battleship cannons are going to have more difficulty targeting ships of silhouette 1-4 at speed 4+ and in close/short range. Ships with silhouette 1-4 are going to require to use Stay On Target maneuver in order to achieve a lock and be able to shoot torpedo/missile (with no upgrade to the shot, but other ships upgrade their rolls to hit the ship)

b) Starting from medium range, all ships are goint to increase difficulty to hit a ship (once per medium, twice per long, maybe this makes impossible to hit a ship depending on difference of silhouette)

c) I've added the Snap Roll rules for ships with silhouette 1-4.

d) I am adding more points to hull and strain per ship. Not sure about quantity yet, but no less than 50% to fighters. Maybe less to silhouette 4 ships.

I don't really have an opinion on the various house rules and stuff, to me those are always a matter of taste. But I concur with some of the statements made earlier that the setup of this encounter really heavily favored the Empire, I'm not surprised to see how quickly the rebel force melted.

One of the difficult things to come to grips with in Edge of Empire is exactly how to create balanced and interesting encounters as we are working in the realm of a very unusual narrative dice system which results in a really wide range of "effects" as opposed to some sort of calculable system of damage vs. defense vs. hit point etc that you can do in a lot of other games to at least get a feel for the impact of different abilities, weapons etc..

I would point out as well that you picked a pretty high end, complex battle for your first outting! That is a lot of management and depth in a fight like that, i think it would be difficult to manage even for veteran GMs.

Also keep in mind that, you want the players to be the heroes of battles anyway, sure its best when they feel challenged but if you ever put them against a truly "equal" space combat where its an actual balanced encounter, some of your characters are going to assuredly die in a horrible explosion. Dog fighting in space is super dangerous and even winning a battle usually comes at the cost of life. So really typically you want to create encounters that generally favor the players in space combat anyway as doing otherwise kind of seals their fate. Really dangerous encounters should probably be kept to epic, important moments (battles).. aka the players go into it knowing.. ok this is it, the story has been leading up to this battle, people are going to die, and thats just the way it is.

Just my two cents.

On 27.9.2017 at 8:28 AM, Emperor Norton said:

I'll admit that starship combat works fine in the game if you are working from the perspective of the players being in a freighter, but once you move to starfighter scale it turns into rocket tag.

Add in that y-wings are harder to hit than a-wings, the frankly (and this is the only part I think is truly broken) broken sensors rules (an X-Wing can actually move farther in one move than it can see with its sensors), the fact that no Cap ships in the system should ever need a fighter screen (A cap ship can take out a squadron of fighters at ranges so long that the fighters couldn't even tell it was there), and the whole thing just feels... off for the source material it is supposed to represent.

If it works for you, more power to you.

I smirked.
Try to hit a fighter with a cap ship. Don't forget to apply double evasive maneuvers one the fighters are in range. And remember that capship use stuff like minion gunners, because they big and need super large crews. Don't forget either to re-align shields as fighters can decide which arc capital ships have to attack.

The truth about the system is that some decent player as squadron leader of 11 minions with about 600 XP will destroyer even an imperial class star destroyer if the star destroyer lacks any fighter screen or escort. Brilliant Evasion makes this actually rather trivial and you can assume that usually an capital ship will be dead after receiving 10 or more critial hits, which again is trivial with proton torpedoes from the squadron leader and his squadron coming in every turn. And that is ignoring that an ISD has an actual blind spot on his aft section AND trenches to hide from enemy turret fire, plenty of options to abuse Gain the Advantage.

1 hour ago, SEApocalypse said:

I smirked.
Try to hit a fighter with a cap ship. Don't forget to apply double evasive maneuvers one the fighters are in range. And remember that capship use stuff like minion gunners, because they big and need super large crews. Don't forget either to re-align shields as fighters can decide which arc capital ships have to attack.

Double evasive maneuvers is going to tear up the fighters's SSTs though, and not all of them are going to have PC astromechs.

As for those minion gunners, minion group skills can actually make them pretty deadly with Gunnery 5 (on groups of 6+ minions) along with Agility 2 and Aim. If the non-minion crew on those ships actually take certain actions to bolster them, it gets much better (an example is a commander using multiple ranks of Speaks Binary to direct the fire of droid gunners).

8 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

As for those minion gunners, minion group skills can actually make them pretty deadly with Gunnery 5 (on groups of 6+ minions) along with Agility 2 and Aim. If the non-minion crew on those ships actually take certain actions to bolster them, it gets much better (an example is a commander using multiple ranks of Speaks Binary to direct the fire of droid gunners).

Indeed more deadly they become, but by design they summarize a lot of the ship's weapons into one large deadly pool as you combine multiple turbolasers for example into one large minion group to reach that sweet PPAAA dice pool. And such a pool is still just as likely to generate dangerous despair rolls as it is to roll triumphs whole the chance of success against CCDDDSSSS ain't the best. An ISD has iirc ~72 turbolasers. If you build your full attack pool minion groups with them you are down to 12 shots per turn. Sure, about half of those will hit, while an ISD is out of commision after about 10 torpedo crits. On top can the fighters further increase the difficulty for the ISD, not only with their own rolls, but as well from all those threats and despair rolls that the capital ship will generate. And once the chances get even lower the capital ship will get into a downward spiral.

Not all fighters having access to PC astromechs is certainly right, still some have access to secondary crew as well (like Y-Wings, ARCs or Phantoms), while other simply have pilots with ranks in high-G maneuvers or just a skilled mechanic as pilot. And either way, taking double evasives for a while is certainly a valid way when fighting a capital, simple because not getting hit and forcing despair rolls is a lot better than keeping system strain low while the HT goes up.

On 9/22/2017 at 9:35 AM, SEApocalypse said:

Are you dissing quake here?
How distasteful. Nearly as distasteful as DnD damage sponge boss monster combat encounters. ;-)

You take that back, everyone loves participating in 30-round slugfests against my homebrewed suberbosses with 80 CON!

On 10/2/2017 at 8:31 PM, SEApocalypse said:

Indeed more deadly they become, but by design they summarize a lot of the ship's weapons into one large deadly pool as you combine multiple turbolasers for example into one large minion group to reach that sweet PPAAA dice pool. And such a pool is still just as likely to generate dangerous despair rolls as it is to roll triumphs whole the chance of success against CCDDDSSSS ain't the best. An ISD has iirc ~72 turbolasers. If you build your full attack pool minion groups with them you are down to 12 shots per turn. Sure, about half of those will hit, while an ISD is out of commision after about 10 torpedo crits. On top can the fighters further increase the difficulty for the ISD, not only with their own rolls, but as well from all those threats and despair rolls that the capital ship will generate. And once the chances get even lower the capital ship will get into a downward spiral.

Not all fighters having access to PC astromechs is certainly right, still some have access to secondary crew as well (like Y-Wings, ARCs or Phantoms), while other simply have pilots with ranks in high-G maneuvers or just a skilled mechanic as pilot. And either way, taking double evasives for a while is certainly a valid way when fighting a capital, simple because not getting hit and forcing despair rolls is a lot better than keeping system strain low while the HT goes up.

I think a mistake gms make is tryi g to have players handle more than they can. They try to jump too far ahead.