Thanks to a post in another thread, I started thinking of things we haven't seen yet, weapons designed specifically to soften up huge ships. Below are two ideas I had that DEFINITELY need refining, but I think there's some value to he found here and would love to read people's thoughts on them as well as anyone's ideas for similar weapons!

Two new torpedoes that should be familiar to anyone who played TIE Fighter, XvT, or X-wing Alliance: space bombs and heavy rockets. Both do insane amounts of damage, enough to completely delete any small or medium base ships if they hit, but they're easily avoidable for anything with more than 1 defense dice.

So, heavy rockets, let's give it the target lock requirement and takes 1 torpedo slot, range 2-3, roll 2 red dice. If this attack hits, the target suffers 8 critical damage. The attack dice cannot be modified or re-rolled. Obviously, i haven't put too much thought into this and the cost would be insane...

The other one? Space bombs! These would be similar to buzz droids in that you launch them from either the front or rear of your ship. Once you do, they travel forward each round at say speed 2 or 3. They can be shot down. If they hit a ship, they do massive damage to it and minor damage to any other ship at range 1 of its final position. Because of the nature of space bombs, I wouldn't want ANY ship with a torpedo slot to use them, so it would need either a torpedo AND bomb slot or double torpedoes to use. Like a device, these wouldn't need any deployment requirements, the difference is that since they're TECHNICALLY a torpedo, they "fire" during the engagement phase.

Those do sound crazy strong. Huge ships must be considerably tougher in Second Edition to warrant anti-huge ship tech.

As much as I like bringing in good ol' TIE fighter video game mechanics, these don't feel quite right. And we already have a party good anti-huge ship weapon in Plasma Torpedoes, right?

I do like the idea of using a remote for space bombs so they can be shot down. But in order to avoid confusion, they should probably be called Heavy Rockets or something because they aren't technically bombs. Kind of like how the Gunboat and Missileboat got combined.

Anyway, my thought is that they should be extremely short-ranged weapons, so once launched, that do straight 1 maneuvers until they hit an object or fly off the mat. The damage they do friends on the object:

- Obstacles are immediately destroyed, but no aoe effect like Seismic Charges.

- It rolls dice depending on ship size: 3 small, 4 medium, 5 large, 6 huge. If the attack hits, add 1 crit result.

That's my take for the sake of brainstorming. I'll probably change my mind in an hour, but this ought to help get the conversation moving.

I see this suggestion a lot (especially for differentiating torps from missiles) and I think it’s kind of the wrong approach to the right idea.

Here’s what I mean: the devs have almost entirely moved away from bonus damage upon hit (the only exceptions I know of are plasma and concussion, and they’re pretty small). Bonus damage has the effect of unfairly punishing low agility, because it’s free of any kind of variance. It’s like: “flip a coin. If it’s heads, your ship is destroyed” which is just really un-fun for both players. Even a 1-die attack with huge bonus spike would have a 3/4 chance of half-pointing a ghost.

That said, there ARE ways of kitting against big and slow ships that can be fun to play and to play against! Heavy Laser Cannon is on the right track (though still overpriced). It deals a lot of damage, but it’s hard to set up. I could easily justify rolling more dice if you make it harder and harder to set up. Suppose HLC was R3 only? Or it was Attack [Lock + Focus]. You’re almost never getting that off so you might as well make it a 6 dice attack.

One more mechanic I’ve thought of is a timing-dependent one. Wording like “Spend 3 charges to perform this attack. After you engage, if all your charges are active, lose all of your charges” 3, recurring.

So it works only one turn out of three, and if you miss it, you have to wait 3 turns anyway. All of these requirements that make something skill-dependent (and ergo can be counterplayed) make for a MUCH more rewarding and meaningful mechanic than low-probably high-bonus-damage attacks.

Take this for example:

•Composite Laser Beam

2 cannon slots, 8 points.

Bullseye attack, R2-3, 6 dice

”Setup: You may lose any number of charges.

Attack: Spend 3 charges and gain 3 Ion tokens to perform this attack. Turn all hit results to crit results.

After you engage, if all your charges are active, lose all your charges.”

Very hard to set up, and easy to avoid or focus and shoot down before it gets the chance to fire.

BUT if you let it hit you, it leaves you in a world of pain. And then they’re ionized and vulnerable so they probably won’t get to do it again.

i actually like how turbo lasers were handled in V1, where you roll double the number of defense dice. The other thing i have been tempted to do is rework the missile and torpedo ordinance to work more like they do in the video games where they are actual moving pieces on the board, kinda like discord missiles and the remote.

Well back in 1st edition anything that was good against other ships were also good against huge ships. Against Twin Laser Turret the only thing Hug ships had as defense was recover which constantly removed all energy.

right now the only thing Huge Ships have is just a lot of shields and hull. There is no agility so anything that hits will hit and reinforce will not likely work any different. So whatever puts damage on the table will likely work against Huge ships. Huge ships seem so much more simpler than before.

I think the biggest question I have is how will Ion tokens affect Huge ships?

I 1.0 epic, my favorite weapon was the Ion Torpedo. You would target a Huge ship and almost certainly hit. In the process you could Ion any ship at Range 1 of it. I once Ioned 7 ships with a single Torpedo (2 were Friendlies). And the Ion would kill the Huge Ship's energy reserves.

I think that Proton torpedoes with their Crit potential will be the king as far as small ships taking out Huge Ships goes.

I liked the Turbo Lasers from 1.0 where they rolled a lot of dice at long range against big lumbering targets, but were not accurate against small nimble ships.

All in all, I don't think we need a specific "Huge" ship killer if everything is balanced well enough.

44 minutes ago, pickirk01 said:

I think that Proton torpedoes with their Crit potential will be the king as far as small ships taking out Huge Ships goes.

Agreed, though we should never underestimate the HLC. So cheap and crazy easy to use against huge ships. Lists that take too many will probably struggle against all-small-ship lists though.

45 minutes ago, pickirk01 said:

I liked the Turbo Lasers from 1.0 where they rolled a lot of dice at long range against big lumbering targets, but were not accurate against small nimble ships.

All in all, I don't think we need a specific "Huge" ship killer if everything is balanced well enough.

I liked the turbolasers in concept. In execution it made for some extremely high-variance attacks and probably also punished agility 0-1 ships too harshly. More red dice (but with no mods allowed) would basically accomplish the same thing.

Generally speaking though, you're right that existing mechanics are sufficient for dealing with the huge ships. I imagine they'll be balancing the huge ships around existing elements rather than creating a game-warping effect that requires new mechanics to deal with.

2 hours ago, ClassicalMoser said:

Agreed, though we should never underestimate the HLC. So cheap and crazy easy to use against huge ships. Lists that take too many will probably struggle against all-small-ship lists though.

So true. Really anything that gets a bonus from bullseye arcs is going to be much better in Epic. Even if the enemy has no huge ships, there will be so many targets that something will be in the bullseye, at least in the early rounds.

Existing Ordnance/Cannons that will probably be dramatically better in Epic:

Plasma Torpedoes
Diamond Boron Missiles
Ion Torpedoes (depending on how Ion interacts with Epic ships now)
Concussion Missiles (especially with the Wing mechanics spreading damage around)
All Bombs, particularly paired with Trajectory Simulator
Heavy Laser Cannon