2 hours ago, MalusCalibur said:I've been a big fan of everything you've done with Supremacy up til now, but...I don't like this change to turrets at all. It feels overly punishing and needlessly clunky, and creates a lot of limitations on turrets that don't make a lot of sense - tying them to Target Locks limits the ships that can have turrets at all, for starters (since the chassis would have to have the action), as well as making them vulnerable to Target Lock removal and, unlike a mobile arc, range-limits and overly telegraphs their firing intentions. That's not to mention that it doesnt really follow with what we see in ANH, where Luke and Han are clearly not using fancy targeting systems to shoot down TIE's, just their own ability to aim.
From what I've been able to ascertain, the only turrets that get complained about are 3-dice primary turrets (of which there are only actually three in the current game: the Falcon, the Decimator, and a Punishing One Jumpmaster) and the Twin Laser Turret (which you have not yet implemented into Supremacy), and since you are designing from the ground up you can account for the capability of such weapons in other ways (points cost, availability, altered or new rules text etc) as and when necessary.
Allowing the defensive bonus from being at range 3 is perhaps enough 'punishment' for these weapons, but to keep things consistent and elegant you could always impose a further +1 defence dice bonus for a target being shot out of arc, or disallow the range 1 attack dice bonus for firing out of arc (or both?) if you felt these weapons needed to be reined it - as it stand, though, it feels that you are punishing them in an odd fashion.
Okay, so hear me out on the design philosophy on this change as its a pre-emptive measure. And also keep in mind if it doesn't pan out it, well, it doesn't pan out!
This fairly aggressively lowers the basement of any turreted ship. Thematically, this may represent roughly speaking an under-crewed ship. Take the attack scene in TFA, both Luke and Han are crewing the ship. When it comes to PWTs, I don't see why we wouldn't want to take that into account with regards to the crew slots on the falcon. So you could make crew abilities to actively counteract this effect we've designed in. But that makes it a conscious squad building design choice to do so, in place of other crew. So when designing the falcon, maybe you take the requisite crew to make it an all-around powerful ship that can fire in any direction at all times, or maybe you take it more in the direction of being powerful in arc.
I'm the first person who would love a very strong Falcon that feels like it does in the films, but I'm also conscious of the power of a fully-crewed ship and I feel like the more competing options we can establish for crew slots on large-base ships the better.
Now, all of this said, it might not work, ultimately the smell test has to be is it fun and interesting to fly. In an ideal situation, flying the falcon has to feel both thematic and powerful under certain circumstances. I know there are film design reasons for this but watching the battle of endor for example, the falcon does a LOT of fast maneuvers shaking TIEs without firing before getting into position behind a flight of interceptors and mulching three of them in succession once it got behind them in a chase. We were considering making the in-arc abilities of the falcon extremely strong. This change would then let you pick crew to improve your maneuverability, so as to better use your in-arc massive damage (currently 4 dice for the falcon) OR let you build a falcon better suited for 360 defense, but not both at the same time for a 'fat han' style ship.
hopefully this clarifies where we're coming from!
