I just can't seem to wrap my head around starship combat. It seems overly complex and slow. In the couple of battles that I have run so far it takes a long time for anyone to do any damage. The macrobatteries seem like they are just there to take down shields and that lances will do all of the heavy damage work. The degrees of success necessary to do any significant damage also seems a bit much.

Can anyone offer some good advice on how to run a starship combat effectively?

Have the character with the highest BS do all the shooting, youll get more degress of success out of it. Or, just dont run starship combat, have your guys do boarding actions while the ships fight in the background

I wish I could help but I have problems with it as well, primarily stemming from my players not having a very good grasp of the rules, disliking the process, and generally not being a very well constructed party for the purpose of ship combat. I've got a voidmaster built primarily around piloting things which is great, but the other two are an Ork and a bookish Rogue Trader who generally gets pushed around by the other two and uncannily rolls high on fellowship tests every **** time. Apparently I have an Explorator coming which would help, but I've also got a Kroot coming so what the hell is he going to do in ship combat?

I've already almost reached a point where I just avoid ship combat like a plague.

Don't the Kroot player paths get BS as a cheapest-tier upgrade? It sounds to me like what your party needs for ship combat is something with the Ballistic Skill to reliably put out a few hits with their salvos and lances. Assume he's been on ships before and let him get Void Tactician as an Elite Advance (if his path doesn't get it already anyway) and maybe let them loot a arch/xeno component that gives a boost to BS, let the Kroot get behind the guns and blow everything to bits.

Get a void master (or make a Void Master NPC) character to specialize as Master of Gunnery (allows him/her to reroll BS tests on a Starship). The Rogue Trader character can use his special ability to give one character within line of site an order as a free action, which gives that character a + 10, use that ability on your shooting.

Here is what we did in the game I was part of:

1) Move

2) Lock on target.

3) My RT orders the Void Master, Master of Gunnery to fire Macro Batteries, giving him one BS Skill at +10.

With Lock on Target being a success it would bring the bonus up to +20, if it was short range and a success, it would be +30, and if it was a huge success and short range, it would be +40.

With his characters BS Skill, he almost always hit on a 75 or less, plus he is the most lucky roller I have ever seen, making him almost always roll a 10 or under.

We almost always had 3 or 4 degrees of success, and so knocked down the shields, and did quite a bit of damage.

4) He then fires the lances without the +10 for my order (it only applies to one test), but still has the +10 for being short range and what not.

My most successful ship combat where my ship was attacked, we lined up perfectly behind it, and we would be right on it's take for two turns. It was already damaged from an earlier turn bombardment. We did that list, and had a 90 percent chance to hit, we hit with maximum degrees of success, caused a massive fire in their ship, then when the lances hit, they lost all power, and their life support caught fire, their generator caught fire, and it was bad.

I borded their ship to accept their captains surrender, and to take him as my personal servitor for his previous insults to me.

Yeah, I'm ruthless, if you refuse my earlier attempts to make you surrender, and you insult me, kill my crew by ramming me, and being an overall unsportly captain, I will turn you into my servitor.

gatherer818 said:

No it's mid tier for them and they start off with a 25+2d10 base BS like a human does, their advantages are primarily based around strength, perception and agility with intelligence and fellowship as their dump stats. Although that would still probably make him better at it than either the bookish Rogues Trader or the Ork, see the primary problem we were having was that they were never able to make enough degrees of success to do real damage to the enemy ship as our frigate has no lances. Since the fight was in an asteroid field and the pirate eventually failed a piloting roll really badly I just had him pile his ship into an asteroid out of exasperation. With a hopefully soon to be better balanced party I'd be willing to try again but the players seem really soured to the entire concept.

Throw them a couple of bones, just to let them get the taste for it…

Start with this… next time they arrive in a system after completing a Warp journey, have them receive a hail from a Passage Watch Naval vessel, asking for loyal servants of the Emperor to aid them in hunting down the remnants of a Pirate fleet they ambushed deep in-system and who are trying to get to the outer edge to flee into the Warp.

Obviously, this outer edge is where your players have just translated into real space, so they can wait and pick off the damaged pirates as they appear.

You can halve the hull integrity of the Pirate ships to represent the beating they've already had from the Navy (even disable a weapon if it suits) and it might be that only the slowest Pirate ships, converted transpots etc, have not already escaped, so should be even less of a challenge for your crew.

Keep any complications such as Asteroids, Nebulae etc to a minimum and tell your players that their own Navigator advises them that it would probably take the Pirates at least 3 hours (so 6 strategic turns) to prepare for Warp translation. This lets them know they need to work with some urgency.

If they get some easy kills in such a scenario (and maybe get some Profit from Naval bounties, salvage rights on the pirate ships, claiming the contents of the Pirate holds etc) it might change their attitude to the potential of space battles.

Best of Luck