Starfighter combat

[Gry Sarth]

Thanks a lot for your input. And I agree that a non-pilot getting bored during a space combat is not a fault of Star Warriors, it would be the same in any rule. You just have to find something to keep that player occupied, be it helping keep the ship together, or maybe from time to time cutting away from the space battle to his own private duel or something.

Yesterday I made a trial solo adventure with a player of mine to try out the Star Warrior system, and I have to say it was a very good experience. Of course we never considered just accepting the Star Warriors rules at face value, and immediately started eliminating aspects of it, adapting others and replacing other stuff. What's gold in Star Warriors is the maneuver system. It felt very realistic, satisfying and challenging to choose what maneuvers to perform in order to gain an advantageous position to your enemy, rolling your skill to see if you can pull it off. The whole "turn number" system is genious, you find yourself trying all sorts of different things (looping, banking, decelerating) in order to reduce your "turn number" and make a tight curve and tail your enemy. We tried to bring back as many things from the RPG rules as we could, so we replaced the Hazzard table for the Starship Movement Failures table (though it needs some adjustments), and replaced the Fire Table for the Starship Damage Chart. We handled initiative, attacks, shields and damage according to the normal RPG rules, and they melded perfectly.

Some of the house rules we implemented: The base movement difficulty is your speed and you add your maneuvers on top of that, otherwise we found it too easy and people stacked too many maneuvers. Firing difficulty uses the RPG weapon ranges, and we changed how speeds add up to that. If you and your target are headed in the same direction, then it's higher speed minus lower speed, if you're going at opposite direction it's your target's speed, if you're going at "perpendicular" direction you add both speeds. Seems to make more sense this way. We discarded actions such as Pinpoint Fire and Snap Fire. Firing is an extra action (-1D) and you can do it anywhere in your movement and as many times as you're able. We're still working one some things to enhance the feeling of simlutaneous movements, specially when tailing a ship, and when we've sorted it all out I'll post it here.

For now, let me say that I think using partial Star Warriors is really the way of creating a realistic, engaging and challenging space combat. The game moved at a fairly brisk pace and the mechanics are not clunky (if you loose and replace some things as we did). Most of our wasted time was spent considering what maneuvers and movements we would make that round, not crunching numbers.

We also did a test run with a realistic missile which was lots of fun. Basically the missile is a very fast "ship" with low Turn Number that tries to occupy the same hex you're on. The missile can't use maneuvers or change speeds, it can just make normal turns. We tried a missile with speed 7, Turn Number 2 and a flight time of 5 rounds and it felt very realistic.

One issue is creating stats for new ships. Speed is easy, it's 3/4 of the ship's Space score. The only things we have to create is the Turn Numbers for each throttle setting and the maneuvers difficulties. There are the stats for the classic ships to use as an example, but the problem is that the RPG Maneuverability score doesn't always seem to reflect in the Star Warriors stats, as would seem reasonable...

I made a buttload of counters with all sorts of ships using the great pictures at ColonialChrome. I figured that each Star Warriors hex represents 4 space units from the RPG rules (or 400m), so I made a Star Destroyer, Victory SD, Interdictor, MonCal Cruiser, all to scale. pretty darn cool. Funny thing was noticing that my 3x2 sheets board would barely hold half the length of the revised Super Star Destroyer!!

A quick question that's not really Star Warriors-related: How do you folks divide shields stats? Say the ship has 1D Shields and you split that between two arcs, what would each arc get? +1/+1 ? +2/+2 ? +2/+1 ?
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"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[Xynar]

[Darth Mischevious]

Hi Gry,

Glad it worked so well. I'd be very interested in any revisions you try out. Although Star Warriors worked fine in my original gaming group, the players I'm in touch with these days are less into the use of miniatures and gaming out tactical situations - so I'm as keen as you to bring in parts of the RPG and make things smooth and fast.

I agree with you that it is really satisfying to pull off those manouevres to get into the right position in Star Warriors. Much more so than simply describing it as an RPG outcome.

Another thing that we found was highlighted in Star Warriors was the differences between various fighters - it doesn't really show up within the RPG. The Y Wings are really based upon WW2 fighter-bombers, and they wallow a bit in dogfights. The X Wings perform best around speed 4-5, where they can keep their turn mode really low and keep pulling turns inside any opponent. The best thing for standard TIE fighters is to do what you often see in the movies - keep together in twos or fours, keep the speed up, and make high speed passes straight through, then regroup at a safe distance and make another fast pass. Getting in to close dogfights doesn't suit TIEs because they can rarely out-turn an X Wing. TIE Interceptors, on the other hand, are rather like WW2 German FW190s - fast, agile, and nasty to tangle with in dogfighting!

The original WEG crew really did think of almost everything... There are some conversion tables for RPG stats to Star Warriors in the 1st Ed SW Rules Companion. Plus of course the rules for modifying ships in the 1st Ed Tramp Freighters book. I don't remember seeing an update of the RPG to Star Warriors conversion rules for 2nd Edition - so the speed system is a bit out of date -but I suppose that most of the manouevre codes etc are probably pretty similar to 1st Edition stats anyway. Or it might be possible to just convert from 1st Ed ship stats to Star Warriors where a 1st Ed version exists.

If you don't have the Rules Companion handy, I could probably copy the tables - think I owe many of you guys anyway because I did manage to download most of those .pdf files before they went away! (Cheers everyone!!).

I like the addition of the missiles. I never played the PC games, but the X Wing novels described quite a lot of missile combat, particularly long range launches against fighters that had yet to spot their attackers.

Not sure if fighters should be able to fire more than once per hex. I think I'd be inclined to limit them slightly based upon blaster loading/recycling time or something. In the films, X Wings are sometimes seen to fire alternate diagonal cannon as paired shots, and at other times to fire a quad shot. It could be argued that they have to conserve their fire to shoot full force, or can fire several reduced power shots...?

Maybe we also have scope for a stat book for modified Star Warriors ships and fighters?

BTW, there are a few people manufacturing small scale fighters - and 1/10000 and 1/20000 fleet vessels - and of course the new WOTC Starship Combat range that launches this month. I'll post a few links when I get some time to track them down.

Please keep posting if you continue this project. I'd be happy to try out the ideas and feed back on how they work here too.

Cheers!

[Gry Sarth]

Thanks a lot for pointing me to the Rules Companion, I would never have thought of looking there for conversion rules. These rules seem pretty easy to follow. Do I understand it correctly that after finding out all the numbers for your ship by converting the RPG dice to Star Warriors numbers, you have to process those numbers through that "Offset Chart", picking the ship that's closer in type to the one you're converting? Seems a bit esoteric, but alright... Or am I mistaken and the Offset Chart is only for when improving those specific ships?

The only thing is that I fail to see how to come up with the ship's Turn Numbers. Am I missing something or did they just ignore that crucial aspect?

PS: Isn't it odd that the Maneuverability conversion table goes all the way to 10D? Whoever heard of that? I think the max Maneuver. I've ever seen is 5D or something....
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"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[vong]

[Liam (Gunman) Kissane]

[vong]

[Gry Sarth]

Yeah, we've never used the shield arcs system ourselves, but I was thinking of bringing it in.

Here's an idea, tell me if you think it's unbalanced. I'll only be using two arcs (front and rear) to make things simpler and specially because that's how it was in the X-Wing games. But each of these 2 arcs has the shield's full strength (so if your ship has 1D shields and you split them evenly between the two arcs, both have 1D) and you can move all power from one arc to the other, adding them up (so in the above example you could leave the rear unprotected and have 2D in the front).

I think this works very well for ships with weak shields, but I worry about the effect of this rule on ships with Shields 3D and such...
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"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[vong]

Exactly, with 1D its ok to have it cover both, because 1D is weak shields, but if you h ave it cover all arcs, then you have a fairly strong shield (equivalent to 4D in the rules) but the weapons have a chance. when yoy get to 3D, your rolling your 3D shields and your 3D hull letting you resist 6D againts 5D. your gonna win alot more often, and things will start to break down. and it gets worse if they move the arc to all front, giving them 6D shields. so i guess you could give them a choice. 3D everywhere and never have to move them around, or 3D among arcs and they have the choice of moving.

But then again, if you want your players to have an advantage in the shields department its ok, and since ion cannons work through shields, then you can always bring their shields down with ions, then pummel their hull directly.

What i do, is not let the players worry about shields, default with no roll ever is evenly spread among 4 arcs. i let them know when it might be a good idea to try to switch the arcs to cover one arc, and at the beggning of some sessions i remind them that they can do that. so that if a player wants too be good with shields and tweak them durnig combat, they will have an advantage in doing so as their shields will do much more.
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[MA-3PO]

[Gry Sarth]

Agreed. I think I'll stick with dividing the total Shields among the arcs, with the only difference being that there are only two arcs instead of four. This makes things simpler and keeps all arcs a bit more protected if you're splitting it evenly. In the case of uneven divisions (like splitting 1D two ways) I'll default it at leaving the extra pip on the rear arc, though the pilot can reverse that with a non-roll Shields action (you don't have to roll it, but it counts as an action).

In using only two arcs, I think it's better to alter the difficulty table a bit. So it's an Easy Shields roll if your trying to move the power from evenly divided to all front or all back (and vice-versa), or a Moderate Shields roll if you're trying to move the power from all front to all back (and vice-versa). Waddya think?
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"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[vong]

personally i think putting it on its default settings should be a non roll action.

but yea, moderate for changing it around sounds about right.
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[Darth Mischevious]

Hi Gry,

Hmm... it appears that the original WEG crew only thought of ALMOST everything...! Have been searching thorough all the material I can think of, and I don't see any methods to relate the RPG to the Star Warriors turn modes. I have a vague recollection that I worked something out myself, but I seem to have mislaid the notes (it was more years ago than I prefer to remember!). It's a shame, looks like we are stuck with just deciding based upon comparing with existing Star Warriors ships.

The way I read it, the Offset Chart is used only for modifications for ships and to fudge the original Star Warriors ships to make the conversion tables work, and not for general use. They do say that future RPG ships will work for conversion without needing to fudge, so I interpret this as not needing the Offset Chart. I'm open to correction on it though!

Yeah, WEG's tables reading up to 10D do seem a little excessive, don't they?!

Darth M

[Gry Sarth]

You're right about the Offset Chart, apparently it's just there because the ships included in Star Warriors are not quite consistent with the conversion method they invented.

I already went and created a full set of conversion tables for converting 2nd Ed to Star Warriors. I did the Turn Number conversion taking a long hard look at all the existing Star Warriors stats (including those in other adventure books), and figuring out the "logic" of it. I think it turned out pretty well, you just have to cross your ship's Maneuverability and Max Speed and you're all set. I'll post it here later on.
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"He's Gry Sarth, of course he has the stats for them."

[Liam (Gunman) Kissane]