During the last session I had with my players I pulled out a ton of counters I had made for a Star Wars strategic battle game based on the TIE Fighter Flight simulator. I kind of fudged my way through how it worked, but I tracked starfighter movements and rolled dice for combat. Between this and managing player actions on their capital ship, one of my players seemed to like the idea and I thought it might be worth developing.

The thought is that this would be an abstracted system to track larger space battles occurring outside the periphery of the players, but giving more of a context to the battle than just "It's happening out there". I also figured it would be a simpler system than rolling for every NPC that are not immediately concerned with the players.

For instance, while players are managing their own ship, allied starships are assisting the players by intercepting reinforcements before they can get close to the player starship.

At the core of it is allowing each ship to have a dice pool of their own to check against a target. Green is the base laser cannons, yellow represents any anti-capital weapons (used only against Silhouette 4+ ships), and Blue representing Ion cannons.

Right now I'm wondering what kind of defenses fighters would need against these weapons checks, and what the results could be. Red I was thinking of representing a ship's armor, and Black represents any shields the ship has. Purple remains as a range check.

And I'm not sure if I should count success as automatically destroyed- for fighters at least. I don't know if I want to saddle the GM with keeping track of damaged starfighters when the point is to just track abstracted fighter movements.

Whenever the player gets into range of a starship he or she is about to engage, the combat reverts down to standard tests.

All of this would be on a hex playing field to help players with establishing range bands. When I was doing this little test Monday night I was using X-Wing dice, but I think I want to develop a system using the RPG dice for commonality with anyone trying out this system.

So what do people think? I know there are those who enjoy EoTE not being such a rigid system, but I can't be alone in wanting to represent grand space battles with something more than just "they are out there, fighting." I want to know if Red Squadron is being successful on the other side of the field, and what kind of targets they are attacking, in our huge space battle.

I'd definitely be interested in something more. I loved the X-wing/TIE Fighter series, and while I like the ground combat mechanics for EotE, the space combat seems just a little too simplified/abstract, especially for more than just a few fighters.

Depending on how you solve it could be cool. Have you looked at the alternate combat resolution optional rule at page 323? May be a starting point? Tweaked of course.

Right now I'm wondering what to do for the defensive checks. Range is still there, but what else? Does a fighter's agility factor into the defensive part of the pool and how is this exactly represented? And in what way that it isn't tedious on the GM running the event?

The objective here is to look at an attack from one ship based on the stats and resolve it in one go. If a stack of ships are attacking the same target, it's just a boost die added, not a whole separate attack.

Well range isn't really a factor in space combat, silhouette differences are.

But I'm not sure what you mean, you have already developed some ideas for what factors represent which dice.

I'd go with silhouette attack values for silhouettes, then upgrade that based on the presence of adversary talents, perhaps also if attacker is outnumbered, setback dice for defence, like shield... Handling could also be setback dice to difficulty, but also boost dice for when attacking... I mean it depends on what the outcome of one check is supposed to do: completely wipe out ship or squadrons, or remove one ship per success? In this case capital ships needs some help...

I wonder if silhouette differences is to compensate for a lack of tactical action? It was harder to hit targets at range in the flight simulators... and up until now I figured space combat was like personal combat but at increased scale. I'll look over the space combat rules in-depth, but at a glance it looks like silhouette was the difficulty determinator and range was important only in which weapons could hit the target?

What I wanted to accomplish was when GMs (or whomever) was considering a combat check, the player was to note the dice on the ship's attack (and their target), consider the range, add dice defending on the target, roll that check. Successes might result in destruction, or at least a critical hit. Capital ships are a different matter and would have to be tracked, but in an abstracted way *shrug*

This isn't the thread for that and it's technically a hijack...

Still don't quite know where I can resolve defensive checks for targets. I had the idea of adding a red die for armor values and any setback die for a shielded target. Now, would speed be a factor in combat? X-Wing gives us an agility value with targets like the TIE Fighter and A-Wing having high agility versus the weapons systems of the attacker. I'm thinking this could upgrade the check when attacking a faster vehicle. I DID want to have a value on the counter for how many hexes it could use, and tie to to the check, but I'm thinking now that the rule should be if the target is faster, upgrade the check.

So the formula would be;

Attacker: Green dice for raw power (Boost for ion cannons, replace a green)(Proficiency for missiles, downgrade to a green if shooting fighters).

Defender: Range similar to ground combat ("Engaged" is close range, 2 purple), A setback die if the target is shielded (more for capitals and silhouette +4?), Challenge dice if the target has armor (Like capital ships, or craft with unusually resilient hull).

Roll this, and on a success the target is hit. Most starfighters are destroyed, larger ships suffer a critical hit which the GM would track.

Whenever a player ship interacts with a target the EotE rules apply for that shooting. Everything else is interpretive.

Thoughts?