Smurf's New Style of Rules

I'm using the playtest bugs.

BTW I don't think the swarm idea on one base works.  Plus the levels of complexity you added with different drones.  I know it is bouncing ideas but that is moving from spaghetti to noodles. 

There must be some common ground for ships for both Terrans and Bugs.  The exception was Gunboats albeit the bugs have the Monarch now.  Moreover, I believe that players are used to the idea of 'bubbles' of support.  After all, 40k is practically made with bubbles all over the place.

We may need another thread.  The reply chain is getting confusing to read.

Possibly making a  counter or "ship" on the board that creates the illusion of a swarm doesn't work, but if you could offer some advice as to what I may have overlooked to make it so? Gauss tech comes to mind, I would allow it to apply damage to each swarm fighter track, but that's at a range of 3 for a Mjölnir, and 5 for the Gungnir, but its speed restriction hampers it quite a bit. A Bifrost Cannon could make short work of them.

The swarm acts much like a unit of trolls in a tabletop game: you don't track shooting hits to individual models, you apply wounds to a single troll. Once a quantum of damage is reached the effectiveness of the unit is then lowered (3 wounds for a typical troll, 5 for the proposed swarm). The swarm stand is essentially a single ship with 15 wounds, a weapon it can't lose that starts out as an X-Beam, then degrades to a pulse laser by the end.

Compare to a Hound:


                     Hound/Swarm

Damage Track- 14*    15

Drive-                17     19

DV-                    14      16

DR-                     2        0

BPV-                  19      ??


The damage track of the Hound has a 9th hit critical. A crit should be added to the swarm track. The Hound never loses its impulsegun, as long as it doesn't blow up or have the pilot get 6'd, the worse that can happen is it jams for a turn. It does High coded damage. The Hound carries  2 Mk. 20's.


I didn't go fishing for a good example, the Sigurd PFD was open while I looked at the Gauss rules. I was wondering when other small craft typically loses their mounts and the Hound was the first fighter I looked at.


The main reason I invented the flight stand of swarm ships is to demote the swarm concept to an aesthetic instead of a design goal. After some thought,  I decided a +1 to hit carrot on a stick as an incentive to close ranks in formation isn't a useful goal unless you are training new players that sticking to formation is solid force doctrine. We have the excellent Fighters Tactics Manual for that.


As to the common ground, I don't understand what that means or is eluding to. That Terran wouldn't have a swarm-type stand of Strella or Saucer Shuttles?


The drones were a response to your feedback: drones can quickly get ridiculous and are "S-Tier"  munitions, so regenerating them is a no-brainer; and beam weapons need to be toned down. So rather than tinker with each issue separately, I nerfed the whole drone quagmire into the dirt, left the beams alone, and implemented your mood concept as buffs from drones as a replacement based on the following reasoning:

• With mood bubbles there is very little the opponent can do to interact with that system, whereas buffs from an object on the board can at least be targeted and destroyed.
  
•  Since the opponent can't interact with the mood bubbles, they aren't meant to.
  

• So to balance mood bubbles, the roster first nerfs shooting & DV, and then they get back to parity sort of via exercising the bubble buffs. I.e. Lower beam accuracy by -1, lower DV by 1, raise ONE of those back through mood selection (+1 to hit, or +1 to DV, not both, so the net effect is a nerf bringing the fleet to a more reasonable power level).
  

If this reasoning is in the ballpark, then the bubbles are more yielding back a portion that was first nerfed than a true buff, yes?

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Here is what a new thread should ask:

"Since a survey would generate garbage data, maybe this line of questioning could serve useful: How does the playtest beta do compared to the old rules? An improvement? Only compare the Brood to itself, not to the Terrans. Playtest vs. Original. Was there progress?"

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     Also, there was a consensus on the old board that was essentially not to worry about it. I've always appreciated that sentiment. I see the Silent Death lore as mirroring that of Bladestorm making the Night Brood the 'bladestorms' of our fictional universe. So do they need to have parity with the Terran fleets? Depends on how you plan to use them at your table. I think they serve better as a handicap force for a player knocked out of a campaign, or a villainous foil for the campaign to deal with than a playable faction.  Bring them in at the end of a campaign to unite the once-warring factions in a grand finale where everybody can collectively win once dominance by a player or alliance of factions is achieved. The campaign arbitrator can adjust these closing scenarios as needed to create the desired desperation. Let the players decide their fate by temporarily setting aside their differences and banding together. Would make for a gratifying narrative ending for a casual group. Perhaps they should be left alone and let each group tinker, use or fix them as they see fit. Make Silent Death more like Necromunda and Less like 40k. Competitiveness has its place, but the narrative is the focus and the Brood are the MONSTERS of the narrative.

The bugs are not beginner friendly way to start.  My goals with the bugs was to make them play differently eg swarming, and not over powering them like the Clans in Battletech or the Marines in 40k.

I prefer the drones doing half damage ignoring armour.  Fits with the UNW fluff.

Yes I see the bugs as the bogey man faction.  A thing to overcome.  I do have some campaign rules that requires the terrans not to wake the bugs up... and if they do they are coming for you.

The Mood of the fleet was trying to buff the bugs to deal with their situation.

Gammas are most likely to be DV12 (+1 for Gamma and -1 for Rookie).  Not great so giving them a buff that requires an Alpha to have a good Pilot to command the fleet.  Moreover, it was something that made it different from the Terrans.  Note the +1DV has to be an Ace Pilot.

The balance has to be there is a familiarity between Bugs and Terrans.  There are a few nuanced differences that are easy to implement without unnecessary convoluted rules.  The use of drones, spores, and J-pods etc is enough complexity without over doing.   

My opponent and I have been involved in game balancing with Alien Squad Leader.  A game that uses Multi Factions with various units with buffs and nerfs etc.

My fear is your ideas are throwing the baby out with the bath water.   I think conceptually they look great but how does it work in the game?

I prefer the drones doing half damage ignoring armour.  Fits with the UNW fluff.

So D6's. Promising.

I do have some campaign rules that requires the terrans not to wake the bugs up... and if they do they are coming for you.

Optimal Hatchling use.

My opponent and I have been involved in game balancing with Alien Squad Leader.  A game that uses Multi Factions with various units with buffs and nerfs etc.

Nice!

My fear is your ideas are throwing the baby out with the bath water.  I think conceptually they look great but how does it work in the game?

I agree with all of the points in your post, and even this one. As I may have said before, my personal homebrew goal is to pare down the game into a form that would allow more ships on the board that can be played in a shorter period of time. A different game mode essentially. I have no qualms with SD as is for an afternoon of fighter shootouts. I'd like to have a version that is slightly larger in scope. Not to the scale of 40k Epic or Star Wars Armada, but halfway there for sure. See Amarillo Design Bureau's Federation Commander. Our table has a minimum of 6 up to as many as 8-9 players on a typical night. We couldn't get to a satisfying conclusion in many of our Star Fleet games in a 4-hour time slot. Three to four turns on average. A turn of positioning, a turn of early engagement, a turn of all hell breaks loose, a turn of regrouping or repeated pounding. After skimming the rules for Federation Commander I was practically begging to give it a try. There was reluctance at first. Then another player showed interest and we finally did give it a try. It was a better fit for our player pool size and time limit (we can't seem to cut back on off-topic table talk, so streamlining the rules was the next best thing). It was a breath of fresh air. The game table agreed that losing the granularity of the 32-impulse move phase into a truncated 8-phase plot saved time. The newer damage allocation system sped up that part of the game as well. You still get to do all of the tactical spaceship gaming thought processes minus the time-sucking rules cruft.

My thought process is: Can we still have a fun but larger space battle without this rules sub-system? If the answer is at least maybe, I'm for at least cutting it out and testing it. No sacred cows. Baby! Get in my belly!

A 6-9 person game of SD with 2-4 warhounds and fighters that nears completion around the 4-hour mark. Unlikely -The escorts eat up time just for what they are. Torpedos and Drones as they are now just compound the problem once the escort vessels are added to the mix.  If warhounds are in, mines and seeking weapons have to make way. There isn't enough time for both.  I want a version of SD that abstracts and removes them from the board. [Armada, Full Thrust does this if memory serves]. So my options are:

1. Play another game that encapsulates this playstyle using their miniatures. (more $$, more crap to store. Yuck! Just play your friend's pet game)
   
2. Play another game that encapsulates this playstyle with SD miniatures.
   
3. Houserule SD by taking a cleaver to parts of it. (I am stubbornly here)
   
4. Play scaled-down games of SD and let it be its own thing. (give up and settle)
   
5. Slot longer timeslots for these larger games. (pfft!)
   

I like aspects of options 3 & 4. I'm too invested in SD to opt for options 1 & 2 even though they are practical solutions, they just aren't SD. Option 5 isn't something I can pull off -- 6-8 hour Saturday night marathon games are a thing of my past. [Edit: it can be said that once I'm finished hacking the torpedo phase it would be a different game. That's a fair criticism. Warhounds dips its toes into a fleet scale game - it could use a tweaked ruleset to keep things snappy]

 I think conceptually they look great but how does it work in the game?

Same as any other ship really. It's just a visual trick of the display sheet to suggest that instead of a single vessel, the space is occupied by multiple swarming expendable chaff. Every 5 points you do you are blowing up a ship (not really). A sleight of hand. It's a piece on the board like all the rest. Functionally identical to a spirit rider or pit viper but made to appear as three stacked ships in a hex. It eliminates any need to incentivize a playstyle that would bunch up ships into a swarm. Players will instinctively get the trope and understand how to use them if you put a little flavor text in the write-up. Make these the torpedo equivalent of the Terrans. Now they have something in common. Terrans send out metal swarms of Mk.10's, and Brood sends out living swarms of nano-fighters. Give them short range. Heck, launch them from alphas and betas making them torps for Brood. Ditch the drones as a counterbalance. Make them even weaker. This is catering to the stated desire to make them feel like a swarm. It's not new mechanics at all. Just a different way of describing the same mechanics we already use: a stat sheet with a corresponding marker on the hex grid.

To get the feel of a swarm you need cheap fighters in numbers that the Terrans can't easily match. The Brood list doesn't have that by a mile, and there is no shortage of Terran ships already occupying the design space of the lower end.  Brood will have to fake it or come to terms that they are a smaller force of elite ships. Simple as. Does overwhelming your foe with numbers even pair up with defensive mine laying stylistically? What does an angry hive of fire ants have to do with setting pit traps?

 If an updated rule set ever saw the light of day and advanced the timeline even a couple of years, I would hope the Night Brood would have at least adapted better to torpedo defenses than the Type 1 Drone [edit: and jump pods, forgot about those at time of writing]. ICE released Universal Night Watch on the heels of Night Brood with Terran answers to some of the problems they faced or in other cases exploited weaknesses further in the case of hammerhead torps. Unless they get a total lore rewrite, the Brood used a symbiotic relationship with tree-like beings to create their ships. They won't remain idle for long. Active torpedo defenses are going to be the first request they place with their architects. [Edit: way off base. Replace torpedo with missile defenses].  Perhaps their last encounter with a space-faring civilization required a drone-heavy doctrine and when they went into hibernation they just left things at that. I like how Starship Troopers critters have a variety of bugs that fill different roles. We have jump pods, drones, and beams on every ship, with drive leeches, and spore-mole launchers scattered about, so few of the ships with those other mounts feel like specialists at the role. Except for Shaggai. Shaggai comes off as crew assassins with their limited armament. There is no defensive ink specialist per se. Ink should be a drone type you can allot at the start of the game as with homing torps. mark it on the sheet somehow the ones you replaced as ink. Doesn't need to be an add-on to a beam mount, does it?

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Final thought; broader topic:

Silent Death works well BECAUSE of all the little options for deflection, torpedo types, speed variations, individual crew skill levels, etc. I don't think these rules are problematic in the main, they just don't ALL work well together when you scale things up. The Silent Death series offers us a large basket of options for each table to choose from a la carte for adjustable levels of crunch. Few games offer as rich of a selection of options for customization as ours. This is mainly to its favor and sometimes a slight detriment. I'm trying to invent some new options that allow SD to be played in a way that it currently struggles with: Bigger yet faster. What's the old saying? You can have Speed, Quality, or Price - Pick Two. Let's call our aspects:  Speed (of play), Quantity (of miniatures), and Granularity (of rules). I'm not just throwing a baby out with the bathwater, I'm stuffing multiple rules babies down the drain with a plunger. How important are those rules to begin with? That's a personal call.

A typical skirmish game has, let's say, 10 miniatures per side and can wrap up in 2-3 hours. Design me a two-player scenario of Silent Death that can be played in the same timeframe with as many ships per side and you are most likely playing Blizzard and Kosmos value game. A fun game too! This is where SD shines. Now, scale up the designs a bit, including a carrier and a command ship to one side, similar for the other,  and add 3 players to each side - each with their own tactical preferences, player-vs-player grudges, and extraneous cross-chatter. If granular rules depth doesn't yield,  Speed will make up the difference.  I want to essentially play Silent Death, with the sheets and ships, but the larger group demands exceptional rules truncation. It's NOT the typical game size and I can't think of many games that can accommodate what I am asking of it right out of the box. So read 85% of my opinions with this bias in mind.
I see a potential for as many as 19 torpedos in this image if those were Pit Viper IIs -not counting what the non-MX gunboats and escorts have. Prepare for turn 2 to bog down with launches. Can I get a game length estimate?
This is an excellent example of what my circle of players has come to expect visually from a game of stellar pew-pew. Anything less would elicit thoughts of "Where's the Beef?".
(this is a game of Full-Thrust, so they should be fine)

Since the last time I have not had chance to play test anything.  Been a bit busy but I will leave the latest update for review and to be play tested.

Since the last time I have not had chance to play test anything.  Been a bit busy but I will leave the latest update for review and to be play tested.

Well just downloaded the doc, I will look it over and give you any commnet, concern's, etc. I have.

We had a bit of a break. My opponent's brother joined in. Forgot a ton of stuff, so bodge a refresher game. I knew the game was over by then end of the movement of turn 1. It was like why! Why fly straight at each other fire torps and follow them! Yup turn two it was over. I just said why would you two do that, they argued they had not played the game in a while.

Upshot was I sorted all my resources, new massive box for SD and some packing stuff that I need to drill holes in to sit the minis... cunning. However, other things have taken precedent which is annoying.

I have been looking at old books and sort of stumbled on an idea for why would a design have a big gun on flat dice (ie no to hit mods) be an option with design with a twin, triple, quad options etc.

In the current proposed rules I allowed Plazguns to fire first. My thoughts on changing this are:

Instead of skill of Rookie through to ace etc determining who fires first what if we decided how many guns tied with skill level.
Single barrelled weapons fire first, the twin, then, triple, and quads+

This may give some single flat dice weapons some minor benefit in shooting.

Been Thinking of the Critical hit chart.  So much info what about:

2 - Pilot Dead
3-4 If the Crit was caused by a Low weapon take one more damage, Medium take two damage, High take three damage, All take 4 damage (includes Torps and protobolt projectors) in addition roll a d6 and on 7+ a gunner is killed adding 1/2/3/4 if it low/med/high/all respectively
5 no longer can jam torps, in addition may not attempt lock on next turn
6-8 -1 decoy, -1 to hit, -1 PD
9-10 Turns cost one extra
11 - Engines Splutter, reduce drive to 0 until next run. If the ADB was top score then one random gunner was killed.
12 - Boom - that ought to do it.

This can be adapted for Gunboat and Warhound tracks too.

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I have also thought of a major bug shake up, with the edits I have employed so far what if these ships had the hit tracks of their respective Terran equivalents. I will try to find some time to do 'templates' for some Gammas and that ought to reduce their point costs.

Just imagined via the SB3 that a Larva if built on a 300t single fighter with a DV12 DR15 Ar4 and some massive fudging stuff. It should have 27 damage boxes and be 25pts.