10 minutes ago, CDAT said:

Photon Torpedo

Get that Star Trek heresy out of here 😁 Jokes aside, i dont think the Venator should have less firepower than a Victory. About the same amount seems reasonable to me, since it has to fill the role of the mainline battleship of an entire faction. Also, the Episode 3 Incredible Cross Sections Books suggests that a Victory and a Venator have about the same amount of firepower. So juding both from lore and a gameplay perspective, giving the only large ship of your faction a firepower worse than a victory is not a good decision in my eyes and also not really fun to use. Keep in mind that you always have 2 different versions of a ship, so one could be more firepower oriented and one more carrier focused.

13 minutes ago, >kkj said:

Get that Star Trek heresy out of here 😁 Jokes aside, i dont think the Venator should have less firepower than a Victory. About the same amount seems reasonable to me, since it has to fill the role of the mainline battleship of an entire faction. Also, the Episode 3 Incredible Cross Sections Books suggests that a Victory and a Venator have about the same amount of firepower. So juding both from lore and a gameplay perspective, giving the only large ship of your faction a firepower worse than a victory is not a good decision in my eyes and also not really fun to use. Keep in mind that you always have 2 different versions of a ship, so one could be more firepower oriented and one more carrier focused.

I respectfully disagree. The VSD was designed to replace the Venator no?

And even if not so, I think it would make for an interesting change to have a large base ship that played differently to most other large base ships.

47 minutes ago, ISD Avenger said:

I respectfully disagree. The VSD was designed to replace the Venator no?

And even if not so, I think it would make for an interesting change to have a large base ship that played differently to most other large base ships.

The Victory was designed differently because of shifted design philosophy. And just because it was the model longer in service doesnt mean that the Venator was necessarily worse in firepower, the Empire just had no usage for a battleship/supercarrier hybrid and thus threw out the second aspect when they made the Victory because there was no longer a large enemy military that uses enormous waves of Droid Starfighters. From 420 Starfightercapacity to 24. But thats just my interpretation of the material. I dont really want the Venator to feel like a absolutely terrible battleship, i just dont think thats fun. Also, as i said before, size generally dictates powerlevel in Star Wars and the Venator is much bigger than the Victory.

At the end of the day, it boils down to... the Venator has to be good enough to move product. If its equal to or worse than the Victory, they'll have put a ton of money into R&D, Production, shipping, and licensing... for a crappy product that wont get bought as much as other stuff. And an annoyed fan base for either not making a viable faction for play, or wasting time with going into Clone Wars.

When it comes down to it, Venator needs to be in the 90+, preferably 100+ value bracket. It is the best GAR has to offer. If their biggest is some 85 pt carrier, the faction will lack that cornerstone design.

It isn’t necessarily inferior to the ISD. It is geared towards shorter, higher intensity fights based around squadron combat while the ISD is a long term, one size fits all, pacification weapon. So the smaller size isn’t so big a deal.

Was there discussion about how size matters when the Home One came out and it was only the slightest lower points cost than the ISD in spite of being a significantly lower volume?

2 hours ago, Ling27 said:

At the end of the day, it boils down to... the Venator has to be good enough to move product. If its equal to or worse than the Victory, they'll have put a ton of money into R&D, Production, shipping, and licensing... for a crappy product that wont get bought as much as other stuff. And an annoyed fan base for either not making a viable faction for play, or wasting time with going into Clone Wars.

What concerns me is if the VEN ends up being a better ship than the ISD.

Not necessarily in raw battery power... I don't think the designers will do that- probably make it on par with the Liberty is what I'd expect. No, how it'll be overpowered is combining Libery-esque attack powers with the Fighter command and control abilities of the ISD-Is combined with rebel-powered fighters. With the Republic, could you get incredible firepower on top of an unstoppable fighter wing?

Why do you think the Rebels don't have a carrier on-par with the Empire? They'd be unstoppable with rebel fighter synergies and the overall supremacy of their fighters next to the hyper-specialized Empire.

While we're in the midst of heavy ship supremacy now, I think it's fine for the ISDs to be the kings of this category by being the best selection overall and wouldn't want them upstaged.

3 hours ago, Norsehound said:

Not necessarily in raw battery power... I don't think the designers will do that- probably make it on par with the Liberty is what I'd expect. No, how it'll be overpowered is combining Libery-esque attack powers with the Fighter command and control abilities of the ISD-Is combined with rebel-powered fighters. With the Republic, could you get incredible firepower on top of an unstoppable fighter wing?

Then its not an issue with it being on par with Rebels or Imperials. Your real concern is squadrons and their power in the game. Now that we've seen what that is, that is easy. The Republic likely will have better fighters than the Empire. Because the Empire went with QUANTITY over QUALITY. Where Rebels are flipped on that. The Republic will likely see expensive QUALITY fighters. Likely more expensive than the rebels. CIS will likely have QUANTITY fighters that are cheap as **** and fielding far more than we are used to seeing.

3 hours ago, Norsehound said:

Why do you think the Rebels don't have a carrier on-par with the Empire? They'd be unstoppable with rebel fighter synergies and the overall supremacy of their fighters next to the hyper-specialized Empire.

While I would like to say lore, thats not correct. The Rebels have shown they can aquire what they need. So... Game Design?

7 hours ago, CDAT said:

Here are some of my thoughts after looking up the Venator.

What Victory Venator Imperial
Length 900 meters 1137-1155 meters 1600 meters
Engines Hoersch-Kessel Drive (1??) 10 (type not listed) KDY Destroyer-I Ion Engines (3) also has back ups
Shielding 2880 SBD's Powerful Shields 4800 SBD's
Hull 1360 RU Sturdy Armor 2272 RU
Weapons Double Heavy Turbolaser Cannons (20) Dual Heavy Turbolaser Turrets (8) Dual Heavy Turbolaser Turrets (6)
Turbolaser Battery (20) Dual Medium Turbolaser Cannons (2) Triple Medium Turbolasers (3)
Heavy Ion Cannons (10) Heavy Proton Torpedo Tubes (4) NK-7 Ion Cannons (60)
Point Defense Laser Cannons (52) XX-9 Heavy Turbolaser Batteries (60)
Dual Heavy Ion Cannon Turrets (2)
Quad Heavy Turbolasers (2)
Medium Turbolasers (2)
Complement 24 Fighters 460 Fighters/Gunships 72 Fighters
5 Shuttles Unknown number of Shuttles 8 Shuttles
35 Ground Walkers/Vehicles 24 Ground Walkers/Vehicles 65 Ground Walkers/Vehicles
Crew 6107 7400 37085
Troops 1600 Unknown number of Troops 9700
Other Modular Planetary Garrison

So what does this mean? To me it tells me that the Venator is much closer to the Victory overall than to the Imperial. But it will have less firepower (with the exception of anti-squadron), shields I am guessing about the same, but less hull (yes it says sturdy armor, but still lots of room is used for small craft and it does not matter how strong your armor is when there is no support pillars), however it will be faster (maybe much faster).

More to come later, but out of time for now.

What Victory Venator Imperial
Length Medium Base I see it as top end of Medium base Large base
Engines Speed 2 (1, -/1) Speed 4 (1, -/1, 1/-/1, -/1/-/1) Speed 3 (1, 1/1, -/1/1)
Shielding 3/3/1 3/2/2 4/3/2
Hull 8 7 11
Weapons Front 3 red/3 blue or 3 red/3 black 1 red/2 blue/1 black or 2 red/2 blue 3 red/2 blue/3 black or 4 red/4 blue
Side 2 red/1 blue or 2 red/1 black 1 blue/1 black or 1 red/1 blue 2 red/2 black or 2 red/2 blue
Rear 2 red 1 blue/1 black or 1 red/1 blue 1 red/2 blue
Anti-Squadron 1 blue 1 red/ 1 black or 3 black 1 blue/1 black or 2 blue
Complement Has no direct effect on game states, used to adjust stats.
Crew Has no direct effect on game states, used to adjust stats.
Troops Has no direct effect on game states, used to adjust stats.
Other Has no direct effect on game states, used to adjust stats.
Command 3 2 3
Squadron 3 5 4
Engineering 4 3 4
Defense Brace/2 Redirect Brace/Redirect/Evade Brace/2 Redirect/Contain

Thoughts on this here, first I see lots of people saying that it has to be a large base ship but right now the smallest large base ship is 1200 meters, and the largest medium based ship is 1129 meters so with this being 1137 to 1155 it is right in the middle of those so either it becomes the smallest large ship or the largest medium ship, so my thought is go with them as the new largest medium as that just feels better for me. Next on to speed/shields/hull/weapons first to make it different from both the VSD and ISD with ten engines it sounds fast, strong shields give it basically the same as the VSD, but just adjusted a bit (again if nothing else to make them different), it is heavily armored but still has so much space devoted to fighters that I can see not way it would be a tough as either, but still tougher than the Quasar Fire. Its firepower is low, but as a medium ship not super low, and with the speed 4 I think people would still play the ship, by reducing the command makes it a bit more responsive to help counter the lack of fire power, upping the squadron as it is a carrier first (from what I can tell), and then reducing the engineering as they all can not be better. For defense starting with the VSD, but as it is faster and more maneuverable thought giving it an evade fits. So that is my thoughts anyway, they are worth at least what you paid for them.

Forgot to talk about anti-squadron, it talks about how it has lots of point defense weapons, but I can not see them letting a main stay ship be able to one shot three hull squadrons at anything but maybe the closest range (hence the red/black or three black up close).

3 hours ago, Ling27 said:

Then its not an issue with it being on par with Rebels or Imperials. Your real concern is squadrons and their power in the game. Now that we've seen what that is, that is easy. The Republic likely will have better fighters than the Empire. Because the Empire went with QUANTITY over QUALITY. Where Rebels are flipped on that. The Republic will likely see expensive QUALITY fighters. Likely more expensive than the rebels. CIS will likely have QUANTITY fighters that are cheap as **** and fielding far more than we are used to seeing.

Right... what I'm saying is, would you consider the game fair if, for example, ISDs were commanding Rebel fighters? You combine hard-hitting high-health reliability and great fighter synergies with a tanky platform that has lots of guns. If your enemies don't die to the excessive fighter-bomber supremacy then a powerful battery will finish off almost anything easily.

So if the Republic has the best of both (large batteries, high squadron count), does that seem fair?

Of course the converse is also true for the CIS; do you think lots of many cheaper ships on top of massive amounts of cheap fighters is a positive play experience? You can be easily out-deployed and then out activated by the amount of stuff that brings to the table. This is also to say nothing about ballooning playtime. Does this work?

24 minutes ago, Norsehound said:

Right... what I'm saying is, would you consider the game fair if, for example, ISDs were commanding Rebel fighters? You combine hard-hitting high-health reliability and great fighter synergies with a tanky platform that has lots of guns. If your enemies don't die to the excessive fighter-bomber supremacy then a powerful battery will finish off almost anything easily.

So if the Republic has the best of both (large batteries, high squadron count), does that seem fair?

Of course the converse is also true for the CIS; do you think lots of many cheaper ships on top of massive amounts of cheap fighters is a positive play experience? You can be easily out-deployed and then out activated by the amount of stuff that brings to the table. This is also to say nothing about ballooning playtime. Does this work?

Or maybe the people playtesting won’t be dumb and ignore game balance...

14 minutes ago, The Jabbawookie said:

Or maybe the people playtesting won’t be dumb and ignore game balance...

Well, rather than dismiss this topic out of hand perhaps we can speculate and discuss this perceived issue? I mean, we don't have anything else to go on for a while...

20 minutes ago, Norsehound said:

Well, rather than dismiss this topic out of hand perhaps we can speculate and discuss this perceived issue? I mean, we don't have anything else to go on for a while...

Sorry, I was too prickly. It just feels like a contrived issue in the first place.

14 hours ago, Ling27 said:

Then its not an issue with it being on par with Rebels or Imperials. Your real concern is squadrons and their power in the game. Now that we've seen what that is, that is easy. The Republic likely will have better fighters than the Empire. Because the Empire went with QUANTITY over QUALITY. Where Rebels are flipped on that. The Republic will likely see expensive QUALITY fighters. Likely more expensive than the rebels. CIS will likely have QUANTITY fighters that are cheap as **** and fielding far more than we are used to seeing.

I wouldn't expect the republic to have generally more expensive fighters than the rebels honestly. My guess is that they will sretch from cheaper (V-Wing, V-19 Torrent) to more expensive (B-Wing, ARC-170) than their rebel equivalents.

As for the CIS I'm confident that you are right about lots of cheap (even more so than the empire?) fighters. I'm guessing that this could be achieved by a droid keyword making them rely even more on squadron commands. (When on their own, mass produced droid fighters brains aren't exactly smart).

31 minutes ago, LennoxPoodle said:

I wouldn't expect the republic to have generally more expensive fighters than the rebels honestly. My guess is that they will sretch from cheaper (V-Wing, V-19 Torrent) to more expensive (B-Wing, ARC-170) than their rebel counterparts.

The only reason I think the Republic will have better, more expensive fighters, is the number of Jedi, and the fact Clones were bred for it, thus making them actual, professional, combat hardened soldiers over the Rebels, that let some farm boy join their elite fighter squadron after a week. I expect them to be better than the Rebels, and thus more expensive.

12 hours ago, Norsehound said:

Well, rather than dismiss this topic out of hand perhaps we can speculate and discuss this perceived issue? I mean, we don't have anything else to go on for a while...

For my part I'm more concerned about the impact of the CIS on game balance, because they will arguably have the second tankiest ship in the game, and will have access to cheap capital ships and squadrons. They seem to me to have on paper a lot of gameplay overlap with the Empire.

A large part of my own guesswork is going off of precedent. Working within the same structure saves on development time and allows testers to focus on the values of the mechanism, rather than test the mechanism and the values together. Besides, fighter-command structures seem to work well enough to be playable now... any major upheaval of the squadron dynamics is something in the realm of an edition change- which I don't think we'll see for a while yet. Not unless CW wants to be a 2.0 release as well... we'll see.

For the time being let's presume FFG will rely on the current fighter dynamics. That said, if the CIS is the swarm faction, we can look to the Empire as a model of what already works. There, competitive empire players seem to abandon massed generics in favor of running aces. It makes sense- aces give you more leverage and are better protected. Would this be the future of the CIS as well, massed aces? Is this list behavior to encourage or discourage, and how?

20 minutes ago, Norsehound said:

That said, if the CIS is the swarm faction, we can look to the Empire as a model of what already works. There, competitive empire players seem to abandon massed generics in favor of running aces. It makes sense- aces give you more leverage and are better protected. Would this be the future of the CIS as well, massed aces? Is this list behavior to encourage or discourage, and how           ? 

One approach would be limiting most AOE buffs to non-unique squadrons. You would then potentially have 2-3 aces and a horde of generics.

2 hours ago, The Jabbawookie said:

One approach would be limiting most AOE buffs to non-unique squadrons. You would then potentially have 2-3 aces and a horde of generics.

If they draw from X-Wing, they could also introduce limited squadron which can be fielded more than once. That might factor into massed aces.

I see the Venator coming out similar to the MC80 Command variant. Large broadsides and enormous squadron capacity for around 100 points. Perhaps a little faster as well, supposedly according to the Incredible Cross Sections it was capable of running down blockade runners (similar speed to ISD?)

On 4/26/2019 at 11:01 AM, >kkj said:

Get that Star Trek heresy out of here 😁 Jokes aside, i dont think the Venator should have less firepower than a Victory. About the same amount seems reasonable to me, since it has to fill the role of the mainline battleship of an entire faction. Also, the Episode 3 Incredible Cross Sections Books suggests that a Victory and a Venator have about the same amount of firepower. So juding both from lore and a gameplay perspective, giving the only large ship of your faction a firepower worse than a victory is not a good decision in my eyes and also not really fun to use. Keep in mind that you always have 2 different versions of a ship, so one could be more firepower oriented and one more carrier focused.

So, while I agree from a "Gameplay" perspective that it should be on par with the Victory, in lore it did have far less overall firepower. The firepower came from the fighters, bombers and other support craft it had on board. The Victory Stardestroyer which was released on the tail end of the Clone wars, was created for use in DIRECT Capitol Ship to ship combat with heavier over all firepower.

10 hours ago, Zeoinx said:

So, while I agree from a "Gameplay" perspective that it should be on par with the Victory, in lore it did have far less overall firepower. The firepower came from the fighters, bombers and other support craft it had on board. The Victory Stardestroyer which was released on the tail end of the Clone wars, was created for use in DIRECT Capitol Ship to ship combat with heavier over all firepower.

This is precisely why I hope they do something different with the Venator. Another large base, big gun platform will be both obvious & a little dull. This is an opportunity to do something quite novel & interesting- a large base, fighter/bomber platform that can survive a scrap but can’t compete with dedicated gun platforms by going head to head.

On 4/26/2019 at 9:01 AM, >kkj said:

Get that Star Trek heresy out of here 😁 Jokes aside, i dont think the Venator should have less firepower than a Victory. About the same amount seems reasonable to me, since it has to fill the role of the mainline battleship of an entire faction. Also, the Episode 3 Incredible Cross Sections Books suggests that a Victory and a Venator have about the same amount of firepower. So juding both from lore and a gameplay perspective, giving the only large ship of your faction a firepower worse than a victory is not a good decision in my eyes and also not really fun to use. Keep in mind that you always have 2 different versions of a ship, so one could be more firepower oriented and one more carrier focused.

I can not talk about Cross Sections Books as I have never heard of it before, my information is coming form wookapedia (see information below) and based on it there is no way in world that they have the same firepower, also I am not sure why people are fixated on that it must be a large base ship and not a medium ship, right now the smallest large base ship is 1200 meters (MC80), and the largest medium based ship is 1129 meters (Interdictor) so with the Venator being 1137 to 1155 it is right in the middle of those so either it becomes the smallest large ship (45-63 meters smaller) or the largest medium ship (9 to 26 meters larger) so at least to me looks more medium. But even if it is a large based ship based on the information available even making it as powerful as a Victory is giving it something like triple the firepower that it should have, now yes I understand that they need to make some tweaks to balance for game play but that is taking it a bit too far if you ask me (even what I suggested is still about twice what it really should have, but that was about as far as I thought it could be for game play). And as far as comparing it to a the Imperial it is just not even in the same nation let alone ball park (except for as a carrier where it out shines it about as much as the Imperial does as a warship).

What Victory Venator Imperial
Length 900 meters 1137-1155 meters 1600 meters
Engines Hoersch-Kessel Drive (1??) 10 (type not listed) KDY Destroyer-I Ion Engines (3) also has back ups
Shielding 2880 SBD's Powerful Shields 4800 SBD's
Hull 1360 RU Sturdy Armor 2272 RU
Weapons Double Heavy Turbolaser Cannons (20) Dual Heavy Turbolaser Turrets (8) Dual Heavy Turbolaser Turrets (6)
Turbolaser Battery (20) Dual Medium Turbolaser Cannons (2) Triple Medium Turbolasers (3)
Heavy Ion Cannons (10) Heavy Proton Torpedo Tubes (4) NK-7 Ion Cannons (60)
Point Defense Laser Cannons (52) XX-9 Heavy Turbolaser Batteries (60)
Dual Heavy Ion Cannon Turrets (2)
Quad Heavy Turbolasers (2)
Medium Turbolasers (2)
Complement 24 Fighters 460 Fighters/Gunships 72 Fighters
5 Shuttles Unknown number of Shuttles 8 Shuttles
35 Ground Walkers/Vehicles 24 Ground Walkers/Vehicles 65 Ground Walkers/Vehicles
Crew 6107 7400 37085
Troops 1600 Unknown number of Troops 9700
Other Modular Planetary Garrison

2 hours ago, CDAT said:

I can not talk about Cross Sections Books as I have never heard of it before, my information is coming form wookapedia (see information below) and based on it there is no way in world that they have the same firepower, also I am not sure why people are fixated on that it must be a large base ship and not a medium ship, right now the smallest large base ship is 1200 meters (MC80), and the largest medium based ship is 1129 meters (Interdictor) so with the Venator being 1137 to 1155 it is right in the middle of those so either it becomes the smallest large ship (45-63 meters smaller) or the largest medium ship (9 to 26 meters larger) so at least to me looks more medium.

The problem here is, that (at least Canon, seemingly) the Venator is the largest ship, the republic can field. So making it medium would kind of deny the republic an whole classification.

Gameplay wise I still feel like it should essentially be a mini battlestar, performing carrier stuff and long range barrage (i.e. high squadron and mostly red dice more evenly spread than for the ISD).

Venator should be a large ship, the cheapest large ship in the game basically. It's essentially the Republic version of the ISD in that its the main battleship so it has to be a large size ship. Combat capability wise I'd like to see similar stats to the VSD, but it should not be substantially better. I'd envision slightly less firepower, higher squadron command value, very similar hull/shield/defensive tokens (maybe 1 more hull-point due to its larger size) but speed 3 rather than 2 and slightly more expensive than the VSD.