Starships, Speed & Game Balance

[Thia Halmades]

We all have spoken, at length, about the various "flaws" in the HERO system, i.e., vehicle design. And in a more recent thread, the flaws within the TE v. Alien Wars ship design. As you're all aware, I'm still designing HERO: Combat Evolved. So I'm putting this question to you, the reader, and ultimate user of the game.

 

How do YOU think starcraft should be balanced? Here are my initial thoughts on the topic, and bear in mind, I put together the current spate of capital ships fully aware of the fatal flaws in the system; that these are "characters" with lots of DEF, BODY & Guns, and don't ever have that "vehicle nitty gritty feel" that I so desperately need and want from my game system. With that in mind.

 

Your CHARACTERS generally don't do more than 2d6, except when they get crazy with the rocket launchers & sniper rifles. In my original design I tried to split out 'regular fire' from 'vehicle fire' but it didn't work, so I skipped it. Those characters have pre-standardized DEF for their Armor. Good 'nuff.

 

Your VEHICLES should be a small step up; still more than capable of being blown apart by standard weapons, except for the three tanks (the Scorpion, Banshee & Wraith). Those may take an extra hit or two from a heavy weapon.

 

Your CAPITAL SHIPS are where I have problems. I can't quite seem to get the feel I want out of them; by all means, DL the ones I've designed already and give me feedback, but I think I totally ball parked it.

 

So what levels of weapons & defense do you want the capital ships to have? Should ventral mounted railweapons deal 16d6 (see the Frigate & Halcyon class) to nearly guarantee enemy annihilation? They're SUPPOSED TOO, but does it make for good game design?

 

Assume a rocket pod is a 6d6 autofire weapon with Delayed Effect (traversing distance). Covenant plasma storm cannons are likely 12d6 RKAs, built on the same "plasma thrower" technology that the Wraith MBT uses. Those are covie ship main weapons. The UNSC only seems to have rocket launchers and rail guns; not much else. They put all their eggs in the magnetic weapons basket and moved on.

 

Now. You can give the Covenant force fields! But it seems that their FF are largely energy resistant on their ships, despite the fact that the Elites shield is more kinetic resistant and energy vulnerable (something I'm not going to model, most likely, but we'll see if I can get it neat).

 

ANYWAY. I could go on like this for hours, but what I really need is feedback and opinions. You're in a position to help me design the "next great vehicle combat game" for HERO. What are your thoughts on the topic?

[JmOz]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

I personaly perfer the idea of catagories for ships, with the catagory below being able to lightly effect, with a lucky shot may be able to cripple

 

So we start with

 

Characters

Small vehicles (Most ground vehicles)

Mediam vehicles (Most air vehicles)

Large vehicles (Most ships)

 

Of course a vehicle may act more like a different catagory

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Sure, but what I'm trying to divine is where to approximate things like armor & damage for those appropriate sizes. So we'll say:

 

Characters

Vehicle Class: Single Operator Vehicles

-- Warthogs

-- Ghosts

-- Mongoose

-- Banshees

-- Wraiths

-- Scorpions

Vehicle Class: Multiple Operator Vehicles

-- Covenant Spirit

-- Covenant Phantom

-- UNSC Pelican

-- UNSC Albatross

Capital Class Ships (where the real 'work' is)

-- Covenant light-frigates to super cruisers

-- UNSC frigates to carriers

[Nolgroth]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

This is an idea that has caused me some severe thought. Right now, I am in the process of organizing my own thoughts on a Starship Construction Method. I have the greater part of a rough draft written and I plan to go back and edit it in a couple of days to clean it up.

 

I think the important thing to consider in scaling weapons is to do what fits the genre convention you are looking for. If some personal weapons can damage light vehicles, then make it so. If space fighters can damage cap ships, then give them weapons that will let them. On the other hand, if a fighter's weapons are deflected harmlessly by the cap ship's shielding or armor, then build it that way.

 

Trying to find the balance is hard, but start with the big guns. What is the most powerful man portable weapon in your game? What can it conceivably damage? What is the most powerful ground based vehicle weapon in your game? What can it conceivably damage? Carry this on up to the most powerful cap ship weapon that your spaceborne fleet can field. Once you set those benchmarks in terms of general idea, then building the stats should be a little easier. Maybe.

 

I would not even try to balance the weapons and defenses in your setting versus say Terran Empire or Traveler HERO. It's conceivable to do so, but I assure you that the authors of those settings had no interest outside of their own design philosophy. Stick with your own guns (pun intended) so that your setting has the internal consistency it needs.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Don't forget to use Disadvantages to help replicate flavor.

 

If light ships get blown away by really big gun simply because the really big gun has a blast twenty feet across then the little ship gets "Physical Limitation: Really Big Guns Vaporize Me"

[Starwolf]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

I personaly perfer the idea of catagories for ships, with the catagory below being able to lightly effect, with a lucky shot may be able to cripple

 

So we start with

 

Characters

Small vehicles (Most ground vehicles)

Mediam vehicles (Most air vehicles)

Large vehicles (Most ships)

 

Of course a vehicle may act more like a different catagory

 

I would affect damage/defenses against the different class sizes as follows...

 

attacking one class above grants the target 25% damage reduction, 2 level 50% and 3 levels 75%.

 

Attacking targets of at least two levels lower grants Armor Piercing and Penetrating, and 3 levels grants NND does body.

 

This is assuming the four classes listed above. You may wish to actually break the vehicles down by Size and DEF. Say Size 20 and below are small vehicles, Size 21 to 50 are medium Vehicles, and Size 51+ are large Vehicles. Then further filter that any armored vehicle (like Tanks) are automatically +1 class (so our tank will automatically be a medium vehicle regardless of size). This would make an armored medium vehicle defend like a large vehice for purposes of being attacked by lower class weapons.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Actually, it's one DC per doubling, IIRC. So a size 8 ship takes an extra DC from a Size 16 ship's guns.

 

I think.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

The doubling rule breaks down outside of STR Lifting Capacity. Do what makes sense for your game.

[mikesama]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

The d6 starwars had an interesting idea for how to deal with scale, you limited the top/bottom of the dice rolled. All dice rolls went for high numbers so they would cap the top, and sometimes the bottom.

 

Example:

Oro Antillies has a 5d+2 in blasters, he tries to shoot a freighter. he rolls 5d6 and adds 2. his rolls are 1 1 3 4 5. Against annother character he'd have a 16. since shooting against a starship is listed as a 3-6 range his roll becomes a 20 as both 1s act as 3s in this case. His heavy blaster does 5d of damage and he rolls 2 3 4 6 6 for a total of 21, his damage range however is listed as 1-3 so he does a grand total of 14 for damage.

 

 

Institue interscale mods like that and give an adder to some powers +5 Out of scale to represet weapons that are made for a larger or smaller scale than the people/vehicles that use them.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Okay Mike.

 

The idea sounds good, but.

 

I don't get it.

 

Start again, please.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

In d6 Star Wars, there were different scales used in combat. If the combatants were at the same scale, then the rules were used as normal, so capital ship combat was the same as personal combat. If you mixed scales, though, you had certain minimums and maximums imposed on each die to account for the fact that it's easy to hit the Death Star with a pistol, but hard to actually damage it.

 

In Hero, there is a DCV penalty for large targets, so that's already accounted for. If you wanted to do something similar for damage classes, you could add a damage class or two for "IFV class" or better vehicle weapons used against "personal class" targets, another DC for "Tank class" weapons used against "IFV class" or lower targets, and so on.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Okay Mike.

 

The idea sounds good, but.

 

I don't get it.

 

Start again, please.

 

Let's pick three scales, Personal; Fighter; Capitol Ship

 

Personal Blaster does 4D6

Fighter Blast does 4D6

Capitol Ship does 4D6

(just for an example)

 

When moving up the scale you have a Die Cap Limit, say 2-4 for one step up and 1-3 for two steps up.

When moving doen the scale you have the same but in revers, one step down is 3-5, two steps down is 4-6.

(just as example, I forget the actual D6 SW progress - greatest Star Wars game Ever BTW).

 

You take your personal blaster and star shooting away at the escaping fighter on the landing platform. You're firing at something one step above you weapon classification, so you have a Limit. Every 1 he rolls becomes a 2 (nice) every 5 and 6 he rolls becomes a 4 (not nice). Basically his dice are limited to the range of 2-4.

 

It's kind of funky, involves another step but isn't to hard to deal with.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Well, not quite.

 

If you were attacking something in a larger scale, you'd have a minimum on each die of the attack roll (it was a roll-high system), but a maximum on the damage roll, so one step up each attack die would roll 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 and each damage die would roll 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 5.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

*pauses*

 

WHAT?

[NuSoardGraphite]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Its about balancing how much damage your ships can do vs how much damage they can take.

 

Ships on scale with each other should be able to take each other out with only 2 or 3 average damage blasts from their "Main Cannons". A ship the next scale down, should be easily destroyed by that same amount of damage in a single shot. Anything less should be utterly vaporized.

 

Weapons should be balanced against defense based on their average damage. Oftentimes it seems that they are evaluated based on maximum damage, but this is wrong and will create a situation where average damage (which is what you will see at least 50% of the time) will be insufficient to the task. Evaluating a weapon based on its Damage Class is a good method, or use its actual Average Damage. (a 30 DC attack, or 10D6K averages 35 Body damage)

 

Thus once one decides where your damage levels lie, the Defense should fall right into place. If the main cannon on your capitol ships is 30 DC (10D6RKA) then the defense of the ships in that category should be around DEF 25-30. Against a DEF 30 ship, our vessel with the 10D6K main cannon can routinely do around 5 Body per hit. Thats not very much with the Body levels that such large vessels posses

 

Force Fields can add to the basic DEF of the ship for added protection, but these should be limited in some fashion...Ablative is a good one. Also, the DEF of the Force Field should be low enough that an average damage hit from our main cannon above will be able to get a few Body through and weaken the FF. Its okay if the FF and DEF of a ship together can completely deflect a big attack, but they should only be able to do so for a limited amount of time or for a limited number of times. Also, Force Fields are notoriously power hungry and Increased End cost is a good limitation to apply to Force Fields, so that balancing weapon usage and Force Field becomes extremely important (can't run with 100% shields, max damage on the Plasma cannon battery and full maneuvering at the same time!) Personally, I think a good size for a capitol ship FF is DEF 20.

 

Keep in mind now, a DEF 30 capitol ship with a DEF 20 Force Field still can't completely deflect the 10D6K main cannon on a critical-hit....60 body damage...10 will still penetrate! Without the shields, thats 30 Body damage, which simulates a direct hit to multiple critical systems. Considering that a large capital ship probably has at most 50 Body, thats pretty hefty damage.

 

Thats all I have for now, I'm sure I'll be back later for more discussion.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Well, go take a look at the Halcyon class & the In Amber Clad then let me know your thoughts. The material is up, I just need some serious board member activity. I can work in the dark, but doing a portrait is a lot easier with good lighting, you pickin' up what I'm layin' down?

[Zeropoint]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Also, Force Fields are notoriously power hungry and Increased End cost is a good limitation to apply to Force Fields, so that balancing weapon usage and Force Field becomes extremely important (can't run with 100% shields, max damage on the Plasma cannon battery and full maneuvering at the same time!)

 

This may make for good drama, but it's poor engineering practice. Speaking from my experience as a reactor operator in the US Navy, a realistically designed warship should be able to run all of its systems at full power at the same time.

 

With just ONE of its two power plants.

[ghost-angel]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

This may make for good drama, but it's poor engineering practice. Speaking from my experience as a reactor operator in the US Navy, a realistically designed warship should be able to run all of its systems at full power at the same time.

 

With just ONE of its two power plants.

 

Indeed.

 

No one would commission a multi-billion dollar spaceship that had power problems. Too many lives at stake.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

This may make for good drama, but it's poor engineering practice. Speaking from my experience as a reactor operator in the US Navy, a realistically designed warship should be able to run all of its systems at full power at the same time.

 

With just ONE of its two power plants.

 

That's not to say that that won't change in the future. US Navy warships don't use much in the way of high-energy weapons or force fields, and few use much in the way of life support.

 

If there was an energy weapon that would cut right through an enemy ship, even if it meant exposing its own ship for a short period of time due to lack of power to run defenses, I have no doubt that someone would mount it anyway. And if there was a defense that would be nigh inpenetrable but would render the ship effectively weaponless, I have no doubt that that would get use too, perhaps even on the same ship. I suppose it would be possible to add more power supply, but that adds bulk and expense to the ship. At some point all that becomes a major issue.

[mikesama]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Okay basically you institute a series of caps on the dice rolls. However in certain situations the minimum cap comes into play.

 

For a hero game it would work like this.

 

Character shooting at a character 1-6

Character shooting at a speeder 1-5

Character shooting at a starship 1-3

Character shooting at a Capitol Ship 1-2

 

What does this mean?

Take an attack roll 2 5 6 for a total of 13.

That same attack roll becomes a 12 against a speeder (now acting as a 2 5 5)

It becomes a 8 against a starship (now acting as a 2 3 3)

 

It works the same way when dealing damage.

 

I fire a heavy blaster rifle and hit rolling 3d6K for damage and get a 3 5 6.

Against a character I get 14

Against a speeder I get 13

Against a starship I get 9

Against a capitol ship I get 6

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Okay basically you institute a series of caps on the dice rolls. However in certain situations the minimum cap comes into play.

 

For a hero game it would work like this.

 

Character shooting at a character 1-6

Character shooting at a speeder 1-5

Character shooting at a starship 1-3

Character shooting at a Capitol Ship 1-2

 

What does this mean?

Take an attack roll 2 5 6 for a total of 13.

That same attack roll becomes a 12 against a speeder (now acting as a 2 5 5)

It becomes a 8 against a starship (now acting as a 2 3 3)

 

It works the same way when dealing damage.

 

I fire a heavy blaster rifle and hit rolling 3d6K for damage and get a 3 5 6.

Against a character I get 14

Against a speeder I get 13

Against a starship I get 9

Against a capitol ship I get 6

 

I know you're trying, but as many people here are aware, when I encounter new things sometimes they just have nothing to stick too. so I need a complete, small word break down of this because I am just not getting it.

[mikesama]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

I know you're trying' date=' but as many people here are aware, when I encounter new things sometimes they just have nothing to stick too. so I need a complete, small word break down of this because I am just [i']not getting it.[/i]

 

Basically the cap sets a minimum and maximum each die can count as. If I hit a capitol ship with a character grade weapon each 1 counts as a 1 each 2 counts as a 2. Because the cap between those scales is 1-2, every number over 2 still counts as a 2 when you add it up.

 

So even if you roll a 4 a 5 and a 6 each die roll only counts as a 2.

[GothKidSamurai]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

When you shoot something in Star Wars d6, you roll a dice pool of six sided dice to see how much damage you did to it. So normally if you rolled a 2, a 3, a 6, and a 5, your total would be to deal 16 points of damage to your target stormtrooper or bounty hunter or whatever.

 

However, if you go up in attack something in a larger size category, a max is placed on what you can get on each die. One size up, the max you can roll on each d6 is a 5. Thus, the 6 from our precious example would be a 5. Now your total is 15.

 

Two size categories up (shooting an X-Wing or transport with your hand blaster maybe) and that cap becomes 4. So now your originally rolled 6 counts as a 4, and your originally rolled 5 also becomes 4. So your total damage roll against this size of an opponent would be a 13. (2 + 3 + modified 4 + modified 4).

 

And so on up the size chart.

[Thia Halmades]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

Until you get to Capital Ships, which have (check his notes on In Amber Clad) which has a size of 28; so a character weapon might have a cap of 4 on a regular vehicle, and a single-man vehicle may have a cap against a multi-man vehicle, and all of them are capped against (or ineffective) against Capital Class Ships.

[shadowcat1313]

Re: Starships, Speed & Game Balance

 

one big problem here being that most of the ships in the TE books have enormous amounts of body on top of the layered defenses.