so I remember seeing a thread on ship combat that was supposed to simplify the damage etc.
I also remember reading the thread and not understanding exactly what the changes were out of all that was being said.
can anyone please summarise the whole ship combat houserule for me?
The thread you're thinking of is here , and there's a summarized copy of it here . The thread was designed to balance ship combat and make Cruisers more of a threat to Destroyers and Frigates, as the RAW allows for one lucky Macrocannon salvo to basically kill everyone.
The most important change, and one that I play with and strongly encourage you to is that Ship Armour is reduced by 12, and every macrocannon or attack craft hit is reduced by this modified armour value. In the RAW all macrocannon shots are rolled together and then armour is subtracted once, whereas with this change each individual macrocannon shot will only do a little bit of damage to large vessels necessitating lances to take them out.
There are more proposed changes, like how to deal with extra lance hits (every 2 DoS instead of 3), and Broadsides halving their Strength but gaining Storm, but the armour/salvo changes are by far the most important.
Or, if your players love big numbers too much and kick up a stink, increase all damage by bombers and macrocannons by 12 but don't allow them to combine damage rolls. Same rough thing happens.
Could someone post the summary again? The link above 404s
Could someone post the summary again? The link above 404s
Don't use the Macrobattery Salvo rules, have each hit be counted against armour. Either add +12 to each hit to balance things out, or reduce all ship armour by 12 so you don't have to do the math every single time.
You count armour against each hit, making it more useful against macrobatteries and making the other weapons useful.
Some, like our group, added the "Storm" quality to Broadsides and the "Tearing" quality to Lances. Some use 2 degrees of success for additional Lance hits.
In whatever variant, it makes ship combat not trivial,
Don't use the Macrobattery Salvo rules, have each hit be counted against armour. Either add +12 to each hit to balance things out, or reduce all ship armour by 12 so you don't have to do the math every single time.