This is the forum.

We are a small community, many of you have been around for years, so I feel I would be unfair if I imposed on you a VP rules overhaul without a little discussion first. I will definitely introduce some things like 1.5 spinners, but first I would like to redo the combat rules in a way that is slightly more mind-sized and varied.

Without entering in too much details as to why I am thinking of these changes, here are the rules I have been working on. Shots are solved in 4 steps.

1) Compute to-hit-threshold (THT). This is obtained by summing:
- The fighter's shields (current values will be translated in 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).
- Subtract the attacker's Gunnery/HMS.
- Add one for each hex-side the attacker has spun.
- Add something for each hex the defender has thrusted, depending on the Evasion (was: piloting) skill more or less as follows

Evasion  0  1  2  3  4

0        0  0  0  0  0

1        0  0  0  1  1

2        0  0  1  1  2

3        0  1  1  2  2

4        0  1  2  2  3

[...]

For example, the defender has 6-points shields (+6) and thrusts twice at piloting skill 3 (+1) and is shot at by an attaccker with 2 gunnery/HMS (-2) that has spinned twice (+1). THT: 8.

2) The attacker checks the dice s/he has to roll on the following table
http://www.takeaplay.net/zwz_guide_tables_2.0.php
for example, an OFC 6 at range 5 rolls 6d6*.

3) Die rolls are open-ended. When rolling a dX*, when you roll X, you can add another (dX-1), and repeat until you keep rolling X. That is, when rolling a d6, when you roll 6, you can add another d6-1, and keep adding as long as you roll 6.

In the above example, the attacker has to roll 8 with 6d6*. He rolls 6d6, and gets: 1, 3, 4, 2, 6, and 6. The first four rolls are misses. The last two are re-rolled, and a 1 and a 4 is rolled, giving a total of 6 and 9 (6+1-1 and 6+4-1). One miss, and one hit.

4) This is straightforward: the attacker hits once, and deals one point of damage for each roll >= THT. Rules on crits and shields damage will follow.

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Effects on interface, which will be a bit simpler:
- "Sturdiness" will go away.
- The thrust chits will contain a number with fighter's total THT effect of shields, Evasion skill and number of thrusts done. In the above example, the defender will have four thrust chits, with THT numbers +7, +7, +8, +8. (+6 if no chit is played)
- The spin chits will contain a number with the fighter's total THT effect of gunnery and spinning. In the above example, the defender will have spin chits with THT attack numbers of -1, 0, +1, +2 (-2 if no chit is played)

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Effects on fighters construction rules:
- Shields will be translated to values ranging from around 4 to around 8.
- Armour will be divided by ten, giving values between 1 and 20.
- Possibly, armour locations will be introduced for front/cockpit (60°), left (90°), right (90°), thrusters (120°).
- Weapons will be identified by just two values (size and angle) instead of three (damage, range, angle). 6-range weapons will deal a maximum damage of 6, for example. 3-points, 5-points and 7-points weapons will be made available.
- Additionally, cockpits, which currently contain 3 different values (gmax, hms/gunnery, piloting) will be separated in different items: HMS (gunnery) and cockpit (evasion) can be bought as items, and combined with gmax, gunnery and evasion, which will be racial and campaign skills.

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Effects on game balance.
- I am carefully making computations to keep the game somewhat balanced, although this isn't a major preoccupation since, as you know, variable prices and ELO keep things balanced anyway.
- A major impact will be that d4* and d6* (which replace old accuracies in the range of 10%-40%) will have a much increased chance of hitting, or a much decreased one, depending on THT.
- This means that shields, evasion and gunnery will have a major impact on OFC and QGP accuracies.
- This will provide some kind of rationale for why Imperian pilots have high gunnery (since they favour OFC and QGP) and Comcon pilots have low gunnery (since they prefer LB and lasers).
- My balancing spreadsheet is available for the mathematically inclined on request.

(The effects of thrusting and spinning on THT might be higher, up to -2 per hex-side when spinning, and average values of +1 per thrust-hex when thrusting).

Also: a fighter's armour and damage received will be represented as green/red boxes on its sheet.

This will be a simple addition but will add a lot to the game.
Adding life support to the game
It's not something that can be damaged (it could be but then it will change the game much more) Life support will last x number of turns where the number of turns is a reasonable amount. This will prevent those drifting games, dead boring games or I'll-stay-out-of-conflict games. This will make the choice for fight or flee more obvious.

neko wrote:

Hmm, the threshold and variable damage mechanic is pretty interesting, but the die rolling mechanic seems to make it hard to estimate your performance. For example, the odds of getting to a threshold of 7 when rolling a D4 is 1/16 (you need two 4s in a row). If you're making a really extreme shot and the threshold is 11, your D4s still have a little over a 1% chance to hit (it's exactly 3/256: you need 3 fours in a row (1 chance in 64), followed by a 2, 3 or 4 on the fourth roll). On a D6 those odds would be 5/36 and 1/36. Thinking about calculating those odds during a battle is giving me a headache.

BlckKnght wrote:


Calculate the odds? ah - thats where I have been going wrong!

Hmmmmnnnn.... do you think we could have an option with more rocks? (and less missiles)?

Also maybe an option for a limited subset of ships?