Barf Forth Apocalyptica
the swamp provides => Rogue Trader: Apocalypse => Topic started by: Arvid on July 02, 2011, 11:05:11 AM
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Hey John, could you tell me about ship battles? Is there anything more to it than the battle moves in the ship doc, some overarching structure? Does a tick mean anything more than a turn, like the AW optional battle mvoes?
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To be honest... we haven't actually had a proper ship-to-ship battle in the game yet, so the rules in the document are completely unplaytested. I haven't really yet finalised how they work, or even finished writing the rules.
That said, what's in the document doesn't fully explain what I'm picturing at the moment. I see ship battles as taking place on an Agon-style positioning chart - a two-dimensional representation of the various ships' relative positions - with "close" range being 0-2 increments away and "far" range being 3-4 increments. Boarding actions take place at 0-range, torpedoes and bombers probably move 3-increments per tick. Ticks are pretty much similar to AW battle ticks, but without the clock, as the positioning chart sort of renders it irrelevant; everyone gets to take one concrete action per tick.
Ship scale works as in AW - small ships inflict -1 harm and take +1 harm against medium ships, and so on. This is why Rogue Traders with small ships get no obligation endeavours; they're bloody dangerous to fly about in.
The current void battle moves array - manuever, brace, broadside, and ram - isn't entirely complete; I need moves that cover evading oncoming fire (Profile), launching torpedoes (Power), directing fighter squadrons (either Hard, Sharp, or Augury; haven't decided yet) and boarding actions (Hard from the boarding action's leader).
Notes about various moves:
- The ability to fire lances while maneuvering is meant to represent their status as precision weapons, and give them some advantage over the more powerful battery weapons.
- Launch a devastating broadside probably only implies using one weapons system, as I feel that firing the whole weapons suite of a ship in one tick seems likely to end the battle far too quickly, especially if we're talking about a naval ship-of-the-line. At least, at the moment. Not really sure about this one; it's a complicated balancing act.
I suspect the whole system will undergo serious revision once it meets the playing field.