Large scale space battles

[Gathur]

I’m about to try a large scale space battle between mostly capital ships. It seems capital ships in Star Wars are more support ships, as seen in episode 4-6, but I like the concept of capital ships fighting each other, as in clone wars.

From the core rulebooks (mostly second revised) I lack rules for large scale space battles. Has anyone worked out some rules for a large scale space battle between mostly capital ships?

Cheers
Gathur

[Raven Redstar]

I've been a player in one such large scale battle before. Honestly, the best thing you can do, is to do most of the rolling beforehand. Each capital ship has many guns at many fire arcs, and rolling attacks and soaks will generally grind your game to a halt and end up with your players bored out of their minds. If you do the rolling beforehand, you can lay out the scene cinematically, and the players can be doing their stuff while the battle is raging around them. Cut between what's happening with them, and what's happening in the battle, but focus more on your players. Otherwise, you end up with your players listening to you spiel on and on about this epic capital ship battle they they may or may not actually be able to see from their current position.

Work out objectives that each ship, or perhaps group of ships will be working on throughout the battle. If the players are on an enemy ship, perhaps some of the ships are waiting for word that the player's objective has been completed before they lay into the ship to destroy it.
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RR
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[Gathur]

Your suggestions are all good Raven but in this upcoming space battle the PC:s themselves have a smaller fleet of capital ships (around 10 capital ships). My intension is to let the PC:s decide the actions (objectives of each ship) of their side of the battle hence I was looking for some “mass combat rules” to significantly speed up the process (otherwise I agree with you that it will be tedious and plain boring).

I need to come up with some rules of my own but was hoping for some help and suggestions to avoid a game grinded to a halt and my players bored out of their minds.

[Guardian_A]

A lot of this will depend on how detailed you want the battle to be.

If you want a simple set of rules to work your way through the battle with, look up the WotC Starship Battles rules. You may need to fudge some things to make it all work, but it is a simple rule set that works well with multiple capital ships.

If you want to run a more detailed battle, I think Raven has it right. Do most of the rolling before hand and it will save you a TON of time. Also, if you can group enemy ships for movement and attacks, that will help a little too.

Are you going to be including fighters in the battle? Running fighters as a squadron instead of individual ships will save a lot of time as well.

While I commonly have characters in the thick of small battles, or playing a small roll in a much larger battle, I tend to allow the main battle to play out independantly of the heroes actions, (The main battle goes on with or without them, but their actions can have ripple effects that will either help or harm their side's chances at victory.) If the heroes can take down a capital ship, that may be enough to significantly influence the main battle, but taking out an enemy fighter will rarely have any noticeable affect on the overall battle.

[vanir]

We found the simple trick is using combined actions to create a WH40K style of strategy tabletop. With capital ship combat the PC and NPC action focuses on the ship commanders and lead ship bridges where the force commanders are stationed, the two flagship bridges basically.

Simplifying the battle, you want to bring most of the action onto the bridge of the two command ships, with your PCs in one and their opponents in the other. In addition we usually have a PC/NPC starfighter wing commander on the field, combining actions for the respective starfighter forces.

Use Tactics for initiative. So you get your PC fleet, tell them to pick their best tactician and he rolls Tactics: Fleets, for the overall starting initiative in the opening battle, all your forces against all their forces. They roll counter. You decide your general movements (eg. gunships go here, starfighters go there, cruisers up the middle), they do theirs (eg. flank their cruisers, skirmish with their gunships and hit their starfighters with mass tactics).

Then you use individual commanders to combine actions. A starfighter wing commander will combine up whole squadrons using combined action rules against theirs (command skill MAP with his piloting actions for the round), so the quality of commanders will determine the size of coherently combined groups of starfighters, you might have 6D and combine up a squadron, but they have 9D and combine up the entire wing.
You roll the dice totals for one combined action exchange, but describe it cinematically as "long rounds" or minute long rather than second long combat exchanges with lots of things happening represented by the combined roll.

Generally a combination of higher skills, better starships and just as importantly: the quality of your commanders will determine how many dice each of you have for every combat exchange. Small numbers of TIE won't stand up to X-Wings, but with good command/tactics very large numbers of TIE can be devastating in line combat because if you can combine more of them than the enemy, you have terrific combined dice bonuses for the exchange. So it becomes as much about command skills as equipment quality and soldier skill. Wing commanders need to be trained in Tactics: Starfighters (for initiative phases), and Command skills (for combining actions), as well as very highly experienced pilots themselves (to handle the MAP requirements to command and fight in the field).

Similarly the ship battle is run from the Flagship bridge. Assign PCs with good command skills to combine up subordinates for specific tasks. You need a high command skill for the guns on the flagship. You need a bridge commander to combine up the fleet of capital ships. You want a separate pilot with good skill, a shields operator. You need a set of skill codes for the individual ship commander/bridge crews.
Then if you wind up in one-one ship combat with your flagship, you use Tactics: Capital Ships for initiative phases, if you act as a fleet against their fleet you use combined actions for all the ships on each side, under the flag commands and use Tactics: Fleets for initiative.

It's pretty simple in action. Does work well, we did the Endor battle this way.

[Bren]

[Gathur]

Thanks all for your suggestions.
Now I have something to start with

I'll let you all know how it goes - we have our next 5 day meeting in October - hence I still have some time.

Cheers
Gathur

[atgxtg]

What might help would be to adapt from the minatures battle rules. That is, reduce the die rolling to 1D6+1 per D of skill/fire control,/whatever, rather than rolling lots of dice. Do the same for damage, hull codes and other such rolls. It is much simpler. Give the capital ships a Move score equal to their SPACE rating.

A Type 1 ISD would look something like this;

SPACE;6
PILOTING: 1D+6
HULL ROLL: 1D+7
SHIELDS: +3

Turbolasers (60, 20 front, 20 left, 20 right)
Attack: 1D+8
Damage: 1D+5
Range; 3-15/35/75

Ion Cannons (60, 20 front, 15 left, 15 right 10 rear)
Attack: 1D+7
Damage: 1D+3 (Ion)
Range; 1-10/25/50

Tractor Beams (10, 6 front, 2 left, 2 right)
Attack: 1D+8
Damage: 1D+6 (Tractor/Move)
Range; 1-5/15/30


I suggest using an older version of the combined fire table and just giving the combined bonus automatically. FYI, it would work out to +1 per D.

You can handle any fighters either with the nornal scaling rules, or just treat a fighter sqaudron like it was one big ship. Damage would reflect the loss of some ships.


The closest thing to rules for running laerge ship battles was in the Rules Upgrade/Comaprion for 1st Edtion. The important things from that were the use of combined fire, and a different way of tracking damage. In the Upgrade, Captial ships could take up to 9 pips of damage. Each level of wound servirty was worth a pip, and the table progressed beyond what would be a Kill/Destoryed result in the normal rules. Something like;
0-3 Shield
4-8 1 pip
9-12 2 pips
13-15 3 pips

each +3 +1 pip


Or, if you wanted to simplfy things further, you could just trat the hull bonus as "hull points" and have each point (or maybe 1 per 3 points) that the damage exceeds the soak come off the hull bonus. When the Hull Bonus hits 0 the ship is dead in space. If hull goes negative then roll 1D vs. the absolute value of it's current hull to see if it explodes.


You also might want to make you own, simpled combine fire table, dividing the normal bonus in half, but applying it to BOTH attack & damage., The idea is to cut own the step of assigning the bonus.

Using the 2R&E combined rules (which I wouldn't use for this( it would work out to a +1 bonus to hit & damage per 6 guns.

[Fallon Kell]

I assume all combined fire attempts from weapons aboard each individual ship to be successful without rolling. I roll and record hull and shield soak for each ship and damage for the first 10-20 successful hits ahead of time, for NPC ships.

I "streamline" anything that doesn't interact with players. So if an ISD attacks a rebel medical frigate, and a MC80 cruiser under NPC command sends it's fighters to screen for the frigate and engages the destroyer directly, the frigate will escape, the ISD will be lightly damaged and lose it's shields and fighters, and the MC80 will explode, all without rolling. If, however, a player-commanded dreadnaught-class heavy cruiser dives in just after the destroyer's shields fail, and scrapes the gun mounts off of the port hull trench, then the fight gets rolled out.
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Or that excessively long "Noooooooooo" was the Whining Side of the Force leaving him. - Dustflier

Complete Starship Construction System

[vanir]

I must admit when we did the Endor battle my way it took four days and a kitchen full of intoxicants, but everyone had a ball, the players had a small fleet involved, with some bulk cruisers, frigates and strike cruisers, and there were starfighter pilot PCs leading rebel wings.

they loved rolling armfulls of dice and watching the action unfold with an element of randomness to it, but respondant to their actions and decisions.
It was the climax of a couple of years of gameplay with that PC group, so worth it.

[atgxtg]

I wonder, if there were a streamlined "lite" version of the rules for captial ship combat, would people be interested? I can visual a pretty simple system based off the RAW and the mini rules, but how often would we really want to use it in the RPG?

[Bren]

[atgxtg]

[Gathur]

[atgxtg]