Starship Combat My Way

By HappyDaze, in Rogue Trader House Rules

I've taken to reworking how lances and macrobatteries work in part after looking over the squadron combat rules.

1) Remove any mention of combining the damage of multiple macrobattery components. This is to be replaced by a system similar to and compatible with that of Squadron combat.

2) Remove any mention of lances scoring additional hits per 3 DoS. The Strength value of lance components will work differently.

Macrobattery components will score 1 hit on a successful Ballistic Skill Test plus 1 additional hit per DoS (to a maximum number of hits equal to the Strength of the Macrobattery component). The damage for each hit from a Macrobattery component is cumulative and is then compared to the target's armour.

Multiple Macrobattery components can be fired together as a combined volley using a single Ballistic Skill Test. The combined volley will use the lowest Strength, Damage, Crit Rating, and Range of any of the Macrobattery components used but the volley gains +10 to the Ballistic Skill Test and +1 Strength per Macrobattery component beyond the first. Macrobattery components with the Broadside feature are more impressive in a volley, adding +20 (rather than +10) to the Ballistic Skill Test and +2 (rather than +1) Strength per Macrobattery with the Broadside feature beyond the first. Special features applied to/by the damage of Macrobattery components (like the Vapourisation rule of the Ryza) are only applied to the volley if all components used in the volley share the feature.

A Lance component makes a number of Ballistic Skill Tests equal to its Strength. All of these must be directed at the same target, but each can score critical hits based upon DoS. Each hit applies damage individually and ignores the target's Armour.

I'm also going to be upping the bonus provided by turrets against torpedoes and attack craft to +10% (rather than +5%) per turret beyond the first since the existing bonus is just too small IMO.

After a bit of testing, I'm considering adjusting ranges. Instead of +10 to BS at 50% range and -10 to BS at Range +1 to twice range, I'm considering universally increasing ranges to x/2x/3x. This means a Titanforge Lance (Range 6) can fire 6 (+10)/12/18 (-10). The reason for the longer ranges is that ships seem too capable of completely escaping weapon range with a single turn's movement. Maybe that's intentional, but it just seems odd when a vessel can zoom in and ram a target without ever allowing the target a chance to fire upon it.