True True about capital ships, but PCs while cover this distance asap with their starfighters to get to short or close.

If you have the time, can you put an example to depict which is the situation that the range band mechanic does not cover?

True True about capital ships, but PCs while cover this distance asap with their starfighters to get to short or close.

If you have the time, can you put an example to depict which is the situation that the range band mechanic does not cover?

Let alone the 37-38 ships + 1 station envisaged in the adventure in the book.

True True about capital ships, but PCs while cover this distance asap with their starfighters to get to short or close.

If you have the time, can you put an example to depict which is the situation that the range band mechanic does not cover?

I've pointed it out a half dozen times already: ANY F*ING TIME YOU'VE GOT 3+ SHIPS ON EACH SIDE.

Let alone the 37-38 ships + 1 station envisaged in the adventure in the book.

Well, the rules are able to cover those situations, just they become very cumbersome

Let alone the 37-38 ships + 1 station envisaged in the adventure in the book.

Treat them as minion groups, that move and act as a single character. After all, the bulk of the enemy pilots are minions, right? By clumping them into minion groups of three fighters, you've cut down on the number of NPC fighters you need to keep track of.

Or better yet, only worry about the ships that are directly attacking the PCs. If the bad guys roll a Triumph, or the PCs roll a Despair, have one of the allied fighters get blown out of the sky simply by force of narrative, but otherwise don't worry about those other ships unless you absolutely have to.

Let alone the 37-38 ships + 1 station envisaged in the adventure in the book.

Treat them as minion groups, that move and act as a single character. After all, the bulk of the enemy pilots are minions, right? By clumping them into minion groups of three fighters, you've cut down on the number of NPC fighters you need to keep track of.

Or better yet, only worry about the ships that are directly attacking the PCs. If the bad guys roll a Triumph, or the PCs roll a Despair, have one of the allied fighters get blown out of the sky simply by force of narrative, but otherwise don't worry about those other ships unless you absolutely have to.

Groups of 4, actually, fits the canonical organization better

which is still 9 groups of fighters, a lambda, the station and the shellcracker.

THe Agl 3 tie groups as minions get significantly more dangerous as you increase.

1: GGG 1.875S 1.875A

2: YGG 2.083S 1.91A 8.3% chance of triumph

3: YYG 2.29S 1.96A 15.9% chance of tirumph

4: YYY 2.5S 2.0A 22% chance of triumph

5: YYYG 3.1S 2.562A 22% triumph

6: YYYGG

That increased chance of triumph is a major risk of crits. A flight of 4 (the canon number of fighters per flight) is 2.5x more likely to include 1 triumph, and has a significant chance (just a hair shy of 2%) of 2. But, given that only the first triumph really matters, or in the case of autofire or linked, the first 2 advantage really matter, a flight of 4+ is suddenly hitting twice and likely to get a crit every 5 rounds...

I suggested three per minion group due to the PCs in that adventure generally being freshly-created and not likely to have a bunch of defensive options to pull from, thus keeping the dice pools to YYG for a full group.

As the GM, you don't have to have every minion group attack the PCs' ship all at once. If you do, not only are you deliberately making more work for yourself, but as a GM you're also being an utter ass to your players since the odds are so heavily stacked against them that you might as well just screen-wipe to "you all die, making new characters for the next session" and not bother with the rolling.

Frankly, a lot of your problems with starship combat that I'm seeing are ones that you've creating for yourself. In which case, I don't see how it's FFG's responsibilities to fix the issues you're creating with how you're running the game. The tools are already there to resolve most of these, but you quite frankly come across as being far to obstinate to even consider that maybe there's a different approach to a scenario than what you've used in the past.

Donovan - the scenario calls for playing it out. Playing it out as written means way too much to keep track of. When a player dispatches his target, he needs to know what he can target, and how far it is. I see no tools in the beta for doing so. Nor are there in edge.

It's cumbersome with 3 fighters operating - and that's before looking at the big brawl in Ep 3 of the adventure.

3 fighters is going to be a not uncommon PC squadron (5-6 players in Y-wings).

The minon mechanics are a help, but do not eliminate the excess tracking. If nothing else, Ep 3 of the adventure needs to be done away with, because it's not workable to play it out as it's written.

If there is a more streamlined mass combat mechanic coming, great - but the vagaries of the current movement system remain at the scale used for PC battles, and are far more pronounced as more ships get added.

3 ships per flight is counter to extant canon - while it's a good balance point, it's a bad story point. 6 of 2ea or 3 of 4ea is much better in terms of story than 4 of 3ea...

And knowing the balance point, I've used both for dramaturgical reasons. Flights fo 4 when wanting to damage PC ships with crits and slow them down, elements of 2 when I want some hull but for the PC's to gun them down.

When is this week's Beta Update supposed to be released? They didn't even have anything for last week.

Donovan - the scenario calls for playing it out. Playing it out as written means way too much to keep track of. When a player dispatches his target, he needs to know what he can target, and how far it is. I see no tools in the beta for doing so. Nor are there in edge.

Then I'd say that this is a fault of the adventure, which from what I've read is pretty darn lackluster, having a slew of other problems in addition to this, to the point that if I were to run it, I'd likely deep-six all the mechanical stuff listed and just keep the core story idea.

When is this week's Beta Update supposed to be released? They didn't even have anything for last week.

At this point, your guess is as good as anyone else's that's not working on the Beta.

They probably didn't have much for last week, thus no update, though there were promises of "big changes."

I'd think it'd be sometime today, but it could just be the "big changes" aren't ready to be revealed just yet.

I want them to add the Cathor race to the game.

So what's going on with this update?

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4477

As always, thank you. We look forward to hearing your feedback!

Wow!

That was... actually worth waiting for...

The Recruit Universal specialisation and the starting XP/Credits rules are EXACTLY what I was waiting for!

Thanks, FFG guys!

Love the Recruit specialisation, some of those new talents are really cool!

Love the new capital ship actions, looks familiar

The rules and suggestions for integrating EotE with AoR (read: Obligation and Duty) were exactly what I had in mind. Thanks!

I'm assuming that the new capital ship actions should be possible to use in EotE too, I'm just thinking about the Wayfarer, Starwind pleasure yacht and Space Master medium transport, and any barely armed medium transport (silhouette 5)... considering that these have turrets (except the Wayfarer) would

• Blanket Barrage apply to all fire arcs?
  • or do you pick one?
  • Is it required to have more than one weapon to use this actions? or could the wayfarer perform a Blanket Barrage with the quad laser?
• Concentrated Barrage
  • Again pick one fire arc or would turrets apply to all?
  • Is it required to have more than one weapon, or could the wayfarer perform a Concentrated Barrage with the quad laser? (not that it would matter much I guess, it being one weapon and all).
• Overwhelming Barrage
  • Again with the turrets.
  • Again with the minimum required number of weapons.

1) I assume that there is a minimum of 2 weapons for these Actions, but I could of course be wrong. At least for Overwhelming and Concentrated Barrage, as these are based on having many weapons, that is at least where their benefits comes from. Blanket Barrage could perhaps be used with only one weapon, but again I think that there should be a minimum of 1 in each fire arc defended, one turret blanketing all fire arcs seems a stretch, but I'd be ok with it too, if that is the intention.

I gather that these Actions are for the much more massive battleships that have lots and lots of cannons, the intention is not to be used with a lowly medium transport of some sort.

Blanket Barrage as currently written requires ALL weapons to be used. This really should be changed to all weapons of a given type so that a capital ship such as a Nebulon-B can blanket barrage with the laser cannons while keeping the turbolasers for shooting other big ships. IMO, Blanket Barrage should be limited to point defense weapons.

With just a cursory examination the new large ship options seem like a good start towards running capital ships. Would still like to know how to build the dice pool. Whether groups of minions or a commander, etc. If it is one minion per turret, these options would be almost useless.

I think that the action should be rolled by the gunnery officer directing fire. This should be a Rival with actual levels in Gunnery rather than Minions with group skills.

Interesting changes.

Nice to see the Recruit brought back (I'm assuming it's the "combat training universal spec" that Fiddleback mentioned in his "5 things about AoR Beta" GSA article he did), and the talents are certainly primed towards turning a non-combat character into a combat-savvy one and making a combat-capable character even more dangerous. It's also nice to see how a non-Force universal spec would work, particularly in regards to career skills.

Also saw that the mines were changed to use Mechanics instead of Gunnery... so does this mean we'll be seeing rules on setting explosives and general demolitions in a future update? If nothing else, this update presents a strong case for using Mechanics for demolitions and setting charges.

Interesting change on Duty... if nothing else, it'll curtail the whining about folks not having enough starting credits to get what they feel they need/want for their character.

On the Combining EotE & AoR... I figured this would be a given for the final version of the AoR core rulebook, but it's still nice to have it now instead of several months from now.

I like the attention given to capital ship actions but Overwhelming Barrage seems odd:

1. It needs to say that the initial attack must target the most difficult thing to hit (like autofire). Otherwise you could take the easy shot at Home One to take out multiple A-wings on the cheap.

2. If I could fire 10 weapons why wouldn't I do that instead of take one chance at possibly hitting a few ships separately and maybe missing everything?

3. This might be my answer to #2 but I think there's an exploit in this. It says it can be triggered multiple times. So if I only have 1 turbolaser in an arc and take this action I could hit a capital ship and 3 additional starfighters with 3 advantage on one attack with one turbolaser? That makes the skill used to attack way more important than the number of guns in the attack.

FWIW I don't think turbolasers should be effective against starfighters at all from what I've seen in the movies.

As far as other capital ship combat I would like clear roles on: When does the commander's leadership matter? How are dice pools created? Are they based on discipline, leadership, or gunnery? Do guns attack in minion groups? Seems like that would make things go faster.

FFG opened the door to the outstanding weaknesses of this great game: starship combat, mass combat, rules for vehicles at personal scale, and capital ship combat. I'd be very impressed if FFG would take a step back in these areas and present some rules as slick as the rest of the system. I've had to house rule a lot on vehicles.

Dood!! Recruit specialization is awesome excellent. Upon further reading, it is quite frankly excellent. My new favorite specialization.

The additions to the Game Master section (Compatibiliy with EotE, and Repeated Specializations) are also very welcome, and should settle A. LOT. of the arguments in the General Discussion forum

Kinda curious why the rolls for the new starship actions are Gunnery instead of Leadership, since you are basically directing a bunch of gun batteries, not actually standing at the controls and shooting them.

Recruit, at first, seems a little crazy. Mainly you can use this to pick up every combat skill you may need as a class skill. There are a lot of possible skills to buy into especially considering you get skills just from the spec itself. All told there are 12 class skills for this spec.

The rest looks awesome, and I am happy to see the clarifications on a lot of other points.

SWEET! This renders my play-out of an assault on an interdictor rather... out of date.