A Lunar Class Cruiser in Squadron Strike (3D)

While my goal for this series of articles was to port the Lunar-class to each of the five systems, Squadron Strike’s ship design engine was the definite outlier. It’s the one where I had to make the fewest compromises to get the BFG ship to work. Indeed, my temptation while doing the conversion was to go deeper into Squadron Strike than the conversion called for. In this section, I say “hello” to temptation. As long as I’m doing a deeper dive, I also decided to make the ship fight in 3D.

While this ship is based on the 2D design of the Lunar, I wanted to make something that wasn’t as constrained by BFG, but would fly like a Lunar ported to a more detailed system, and that could be competitive against “native” SS ships. You’ll notice a lot more internal systems. Some of these include: Cargo (free hits in the game but very important in campaigns), ECM and ECCM, auxiliary reactors, shuttles, missile reloads, roll thrusters to let the ship spin on its long axis in a fight, and infantry platoons to defend against enemy boarders.

Additional Defenses

I added two defenses (and a counter to one of those defenses) as ship’s systems for the revised Lunar-class. I added ECM (which will be a happy find for anyone playing the Eldar), and I added component armor. ECM is a straightforward die roll modifier; a ship’s uncountered ECM is added to the Accuracy numbers of any weapons fired at the ship. ECCM is the number of dice you roll; each die that equals or exceeds your ship’s Crew Rate cancels one point of ECM on all targets. I like how Squadron Strike ties ECM to Crew Rate. The default Crew Rate is 6+.

Component armor is shown by the “double dagger” symbols after some system names, like ‡1‡. When damage hits a system with component armor, the box absorbs a number of additional hits equal to the component armor rating. So, damaging a group of boxes with 1 component armor takes two damage points, rather than one.

And then there’s 3D defenses. Perhaps the most significant differences with the 2D sheet are the side view showing top and bottom defenses. I used the Top and Bottom defenses I put into the sheet on the 2D version.

Weapons Arcs and Weapons

Where 2D arcs are shown as a 12-point ring, in 3D, we rotate the arcs by 90 degrees and make them into squashed out spheres. The white spaces are arcs you can fire through, and the black spaces are obscured. The tool that lets you select those arcs allows you to position the center of the firing arc, and select a span (Span 1, span 2, span 3) that automatically opens up parts of the arc that are within that distance from the location chosen. You can also select “Custom” which sets it to Span 3, and you can turn off windows individually, which is what I did here.

Because I designed this in the same worksheet that I did the 2D version in, the weapons I’d made were available. However, I wanted to use weapons that were more in line with what Squadron Strike allows, so I made new ones to do the same basic roles.

I replaced the Lances with a Volcano Cannon to do the same basic job. It shoots out the same 2D arc the lances have, but extends up by 60 degrees to give some coverage when firing at targets above the ship. The Batteries got replaced with the Plasma Destructors, which cover the 2D arcs I chose earlier, but have a 30 degree traverse below the ship. The turret weapons were particularly tricky; getting the full coverage arc is easy – I just select “Top” or “Bottom” – what’s tricky is deciding whether to follow the miniature (which puts them both on the top of the ship) or to split them up to give full coverage. In the end, I decided to put them on the top, like the mini. It’s a weakness that fighter pilots should definitely exploit!

In re-imagining the weapons, I also let myself play with the deeper toolbox in Squadron Strike. I loved designing weapons in Starmada: Admiralty Edition. In Squadron Strike, I’ve got a weapon design system with an even deeper toolbox, and some ground rules. One of them seems to be that doubling a weapon’s range triples its cost. Another is that doubling a weapon’s average damage seems to triple its cost, and doing both (!) gets really expensive, in a hurry. While I’ve not played with them, there appear to be toggles on the Universe Settings tab that change these ratios…but it was illustrative, just to see what was under the hood and playing with things.

When I re-imagined the Lances into Volcano Cannons, I kept Halves Armor from the Lances, and replaced the damage 6/High Impact 1:1 combo with Damage 4, and Penetration 4. With Penetration, you use a die roll called 2d10- – roll two ten sided dice, subtract the smaller result from the larger, and that’s your result. With a Penetration roll of 4, any die roll of 5 or higher is treated as a 4. Finally, I added 2xHits SI, which means that when the weapon gets to the SI track of a ship, every point of damage it does removes two boxes; this can turn it into a ruthless shipkiller pretty quicky! I changed the AP costs on the Volcano Cannon, so that they take 1 AP to fire (this is shown by the shading of their range bands.)

I did extensive modification on the Deathstrike Missile – the replacement for the BFG Torpedo. It’s still using the SS Missile rules, but it now has the Bursting trait. With normal damage allocation in SS, every group of boxes absorbs enough damage to mark off one box. With Bursting, each group of boxes absorbs enough damage to mark off two boxes. This makes the missiles more likely to shred something important as they chew their way through the ship.

The Plasma Destructors lost their High Impact trait, and got changed to a weapon with a fairly high Penetration value, and Multi-Pen (choose 2) – this means when I roll the weapon, I roll four dice and take the two of my choice to determine the penetration damage, which makes it much less likely I’ll get a low value.

The Nova Cannon remains unchanged from the 2D version, except it has Double Penetration which allows you to Roll Penetration twice and add the results together.

Conclusion

This brings us to the end to what I hope you found to be a comprehensive review of the options available to recreate some of your favorite space ships. Each of them has their strong suits and weaknesses and some work better for specific genres than others. It’s probably not much surprise to all that my personal favorite is Squadron Strike. The wealth of options and support from the designer are simply the best in my opinion. Heck, the way they manage how to build ships in a competitive campaign is better than anything I’ve seen out there, just because they try to let players decide what the dimensions of the box are through a bid-and-reveal process.

I know some people might not have checked out SS’s design system, because they think a 3D game is going to be too difficult to play, or too hard to get onto the table. I hope this article has shined some light on its capabilities. I also hope that this article has shown that Squadron Strike can be played in 2D and, depending on ship design, can dial down to the same level of complexity as the other systems presented here, or played in 3D with additional interesting, crunchy detail and flavor.

Regardless of which system is your favorite, may you have many happy ours of ship tweaking and may your dice always roll high!

For links to all the posts in Tim White’s first series comparing five popular 2D squadron level space combat games, see here.

For links to all the posts in Tim White’s second series working through a complete ship design in each of those games, see here.

A Lunar Class Cruiser in Squadron Strike (2D)

We’ll be re-building the good ol’ Lunar Class Cruiserin Squadron Strike by Ad Astra Games. While we’re going to design the ship for 2D, there are parts of SS that work for 3D; in fact, the ship will be designed in 3D and automatically converted to a 2D sheet when we print it out.

Squadron Strike

For play in 2D, I wanted to stay as faithful to Battle Fleet Gothic as possible. In SS ablative shields come in groups of 6 – so I started with weapons doing 6 damage and turned off Penetration, which is variable additional damage. This made Lances and Batteries 6 damage weapons. Scaling by 6 means that most ships need to take 48 points of damage to blow up. SS’s damage allocation system is more variable (and more detailed) than the other games here, which makes pre-determining how much damage it takes to kill a ship more like picking the center of a statistical range, rather than a hard-and-fast number. To me, this is a feature, but people’s preferences may vary.

SS’s damage model has ships taking hull damage, damage to internal systems, and finally damage to structural integrity, which, when it runs out, causes the ship to explode. Ships can get hit repeatedly on the same hit location track and have damage fall through to structural integrity more frequently, and die fast. Sometimes, ships will take damage to multiple hit locations and spread the damage out. I picked an structural integrity rating of 16, and bought 16 hull boxes as a matching value. While Squadron Strike uses Cargo to set a ship’s cruise endurance, it’s not part of the Battlefleet Gothic design space, so I skipped that. I set the number of non-Hull/non structural integrity internal boxes at a cap between 32 and about 40 total.

Structural integrity also sets your ship’s budget for space points to allocate to the design; it also sets the ship’s “surface area”, which show up as points you can allocate to length, width and height.

Defenses

Converting the shielding over was easy – two shields on the base Lunar convert to 12 shield bubbles on each facing. Defensive facings are the first place where 3D shows up in the design process, and to play it fair, I put the same defenses on the Top and Bottom of the ship as I did on Nose, Aft, Left and Right.

Inside the shields, there’s armor. I decided that 4+ armor in Gothic would be “no armor”, 5+ an armor rating of 2, and 6+ a rating of 4. For armor I decided that the 4+ from Gothic would equal no armor, 5+ would represent an armor rating of 2, and 6+ a rating of 4. You can see on the SSD below that the ship has 2 shield-shapes in the side and aft facings, and 4 shields on the prow. I decided that the top and bottom facings would have 2 armor as well, since Gothic didn’t specify. This was the only system that allowed us to have different armour ratings on different facings. It would’ve let us set different shield bubble values on different facings as well, of course.

While there was no way to replicate the omni-shield of BFG, one of the things shields in BFG does is regenerate. I put in a general shield regenerator system that’s rated at 12 bubbles per turn, which hit the shield strength and regeneration capabilities quite well, and, like armor, was a closer match than any of the other systems.

The length, width and height I allocated when I set up the ship determined the cost of the ship’s shields and armor on each facing. It also set up a “Profile” number, which is a die roll modifier for weapons hitting the hip. When designing ships for campaigns, you have a set of universe toggles which can turn this to “all ships have the same size modifier” or “flat size modifier” or “size modifier varies based on facing as set by the ship’s dimensions.” For the Battlefleet Gothic setting, I kept it as a flat size modifier. In particular, for the Lunar-class, it turned into a modifier of 0, which nicely reflects how things work in BFG.

Maneuver

To more closely match BFG, I set the ships to Mode 0, which has no turn-to-turn momentum tracking. Movement, and the ability to change heading (pivoting in SS terminology) are tracks of internal boxes on the SSD, in fixed locations. Movement is in row 10, and Pivot is in Row 6. Bridge boxes generate an in-game resource called Action Points, and I set the bridge to 4 APs, and I used AP costs on systems to match the BFG “orders” system, sort of upping the granularity.

I’ve roughly divided the BFG movement of 20cm by 5 to derive the engine power, and assumed average dice for the “all ahead full” roll to arrive at a max speed of 7. I set the ship’s maximum move to 7, and gave it an AP cost of 3. I also set the “1” box to AP 3. This simulates the “all ahead full” and “burn retros” special orders from BFG (i.e. if they want to go fast or very slow they will not have many AP available for other things – like weapons, turning etc.). I set the maximum pivot rating to 3, since the ship could cover 90 degrees in BFG in a single turn. I assigned AP costs as follows: Pivot 1 (light gray) is 1 AP to use the box. Pivot 2 and costs 2 APs, and pivot 3 costs 3 APs, meaning that this ship has make interesting maneuver decisions about where it spends its APs. This reflects the range in special orders from “lock on weapons” (no turning) to “come to new heading” (makes two 45 degree turns).

When assigning boxes to the movement and pivot tracks, you can freely decide how many copies of each box are on the track – I turned off the display of the “5” and “6” boxes on the move track. You can assign AP costs to each box with the same value, and while the values in the boxes and the AP costs need to be in descending order (I kind of cheated for the 3 AP costs on the “1” box of the Movement track). I also cheated another way – I didn’t fill in the Roll track, which works the same way, because not only is this ship going to mostly fly in 2D, but I didn’t want the boxes there both eating precious hull points for construction, and acting as “free hits.”

Weapons

Now the exciting part – Weapons! One of the early decisions I made was that my atomic unit of damage was about 6 points. I set a base range of 12 hexes as the conversion factor for the 30 cm range weapons (it’s about a foot, my hex map has 1″ hexes, so it even “looked right” with the models.)

Setting accuracy took a little more calculation. I took the relative ratio of firepower versus the number of dice rolled versus a target moving away (median values), and modified by the basic 50% hit chance. In Squadron Strike, accuracy is expressed as N+, for a d10, so lower Accuracy numbers are more accurate. This got me an Accuracy target of 6+ at long range and 7+ at short range. To match BFG, batteries had a rate of fire of 3.

I used the same process to make Lances. Lance accuracy doesn’t change with range, so that was easy – I needed a 6+ (50% hit chance, same thing as a 4+ in BFG). Squadron Strike doesn’t have “ultimate” counters on defenses, so I needed to come up with something different than just “ignores armor.” There are two options available, Ignores Armor N+ (usually 8+, 9+ or 10+) which, if your raw Accuracy roll exceeds the threshold, means that weapon ignores the armor of the target. I went with “Halves Armor”, which halves the armor rating, rounding down. Mostly this was to reduce the “which weapon got the special effect?” chatter at the table.

Interestingly, the Lance and the Batteries came out at about the same hull point costs – the size of what I need to put on the ship. This matches how BFG has them, which was a nice coincidence.

To simulate BFG’s exploding die re-rolls, I had two choices – I could use the Continuous Trait, which like Ignores Armor, is a “if your Accuracy die exceeds a threshold, the weapon fires again, immediately.” It matches the mechanics pretty well, but experience tells me that these ships are a little more fragile inside than their BFG baseline. I went with “High Impact 1:1” to make it fit the “lock on weapons” fire order. With High Impact, I get a bonus point of damage for every point that I exceed the Accuracy target by on the die roll – for example, if I roll an 8 on a d10, with an Accuracy 6+ weapon, I get two points of damage added to the result. High Impact can never add more damage than the base damage of the weapon, but I wasn’t going to hit that mark in any case. While this isn’t mechanically the same as BFG’s rerolls, I believe it achieves the same idea (i.e. pour power into weapons to net more pain against the enemy ship).

I added an AP cost to the High Impact trait to simulate the “lock on fire” order in BFG. It’s paid individually per firing of the weapon – with an RoF of 3 on the Batteries, this is going to get expensive, and fast; a single broadside is going to use all the APs generated by the ship. My experience with Star Fleet Battles and Federation Commander made it really tempting to add more APs and more uses for them on the ship, but my goal this time around is to make something that brings BFG to Squadron Strike’s rules to show the game off to my friends.

That same reasoning applied to firing arcs. Both weapons have side arcs of 3 windows (each window is 30 degrees, so this is a 90 degree firing arc). This exactly matches what they have in BFG. SS lets you really pick exactly what arcs you want, both horizontally and vertically. That size equivalence I mentioned earlier made it easy to retain consistency with BFG, where 3 points of battery firepower equals a lance

I designed “torps” to use the “missile” rules in SS. This means they are launched on one turn, and impact (or miss) on the next turn, up to their maximum range. SS also has “torpedo” rules, which involves a counter on the table which accelerates and pivots from turn to turn – and in general are harder to destroy. I felt the missile rules of SS depict the low-tech torps from BFG pretty well. They work well in another way too: I simulated the BFG “reload” order by requiring an expenditure at the start of each turn, per launcher — this is the grey box before the rate of fire on the weapon table. SS also has rules for tracking specific amounts of ammunition and reloading procedures, but I felt this was a bit truer to BFG. These “torps” have a Profle number of 3, making them hard to hit with lances and batteries. I also gave them “Ignores Shields” as discussed earlier. For the defense against torps, I recreated the BFG turret weapon: it has very high accuracy, and a 360 degree arc, but can only damage small targets (i.e. anything that is not a ship). I’ve given them superior accuracy so they hit regular “torps” on a 6+.

Finally the Nova Cannon. First, if you take this weapon it is keel mounted. It fires only through the single nose window (so 30 degree wide arc instead of the 90 degree arcs of most of the other weapon on the Lunar). It has a one-hex radius area of effect. I’ve also given it some random damage – as it has in BFG. This weapon can do anywhere from 6 to 18 damage if it hits.

The SSD was created using the Excel design sheet provided, and well maintained, by Ad Astra Games. Ken Burnside is constantly updating this sheet to improve its functionality and to make tweaks as exploits pop up. Like both CB and Starmada, if you have question you just need to go to the Ad Astra forums and ask. Either Ken or helpful minion will be along to provide answers quickly. The spreadsheet is huge and allows you to design weapons used in common for all ships, plus fighter design, fifteen ships, and now, five fortress designs. The SSDs here are from an Adobe AIR program. You copy XML from the Excel export tabs and paste it into the Adobe AIR app, and it generates a nice JPEG or PDF SSD – actually, it’ll generate a multi-page file in PDF format. The art you see – the top down image of the Lunar-class – is something you set in the ship design tab.

One thing that really separates the SS ships sheets from the others is a post-processor called SSPDF. This is installed on your computer using Adobe AIR and that takes the Excel XML from the design sheet and outputs the beautiful SSD you see here. Ship images of the top and side can be used (you can see the top image of the Lunar in this one), to really add a nice touch to the sheet.

Below is a 2D SSD:

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For links to all the posts in Tim White’s first series comparing five popular 2D squadron level space combat games, see here.

For links to all the posts in Tim White’s second series working through a complete ship design in each of those games, see here.

A Lunar Class Cruiser in Starmada Nova Edition

Welcome back for the third to last article in this series. This week we’ll port the Lunar-class Cruise from Battlefleet Gothic to Majestic 12 Games latest version of Starmada – Nova Edition!

Starmada – Nova Edition

Starmada Nova Edition (SN) is more than just a minor upgrade to Starmada Admirality Edition (SAE); it is a complete overhaul of the system. It is, in many ways, a backport of Starmada: Fleet Operations down to classic Starmada scale.

One big differences is the new online ship creation tool. Once you’ve signed up for an account, you can save your ships online, letting you access them from anywhere. Overall the ship output is more compact and better looking than in SAE, though it is missing a “weapons library” where you can store your weapon designs. This means you must redesign the weapons on each ship, which gets annoying if you want to replicate the same weapons across multiple classes. If you are a die-hard Excel fan, or find yourself missing the weapon library, there are some fan-based design spreadsheets available on the Majestic Twelve forums.

SN provides “conversion” instructions on how to change you SAE ships into SN ships. But where is the fun in that? I knew I wanted to keep some things the same (e.g. weapon ranges), but I always like to start from scratch in a new system, as some of my previous decisions may have been compromises with the old system I don’t want to carry forward.

Internal damage allocation is different in SN than SAE; technically, there isn’t any. Much like in Full Thrust, after a ship has passed a damage threshold, you make tests to see what happens to its internal components. Imperial ships are supposed to be robust, so I went with double its BFG value for 16pts. I was initially excited to see that SN offers armor as a main defense and not just armor plating like in SAE. Upon further review, though, I noticed that while there is a weapon trait that reduces the effectiveness of shields, there is no “anti-armor” trait. That was a shame, as I wanted Lances to rip through armor. In the end, I decided to model the armor and shields the same way I did in SAE (1pt of shields for every void shield or armor rating over 4+), though I did give the Lunar-class a bit of armor to represent the heavier bow protection (4pts or 25% of its hull value). I could have used the ship trait “directional defenses”, which makes it harder to hit the front of the ship and easier to hit the aft, but decided this was a better trait for the Orks, who are notorious for armoring their bows at the expense of the stern.

I kept the thrust the same as in SAE version, and for the same reasons. Unfortunately, SN offers no way to distinguish between raw engine power and maneuverability.

Standard Version:

Weapon design is where the bulk of the changes between Starmada AE and Starmada Nova occurred. Accuracy, rate of fire, impact, and damage are all gone, replaced by a single number: how many dice you roll when firing without modifiers. It represents rate of fire x impact, with multipliers to account for accuracy. Increased damage can be added as a trait (double damage is Dx2 and triple damage is Dx3). From what I understand, these changes were implemented to streamline the system and reduce “math at the table”, but I still lament the loss. When weapons are distilled down to a mere handful of dice, a lot of their flavor disappears.

The changes to seeking weapons, on the other hand, are entirely positive. Instead of building them like disposable fighters, they’re treated as weapons with fire arcs, maximum ranges, and you can more explicitly control the number of seekers you dump on a target. There are still “drones” which are basically one shot “fighters”. This provides some nice differentiation: drones feel like cruise missiles while the new seeking weapons feel like super-fast anti-ship missiles. The new seeking trait is somewhat abstracted (you don’t actually track the movement of it on the table), but is very slick and is probably one of my favorite parts of SN.

With this in mind, I modeled Torpedoes as seeking weapons with only a front arc. I decided to make them slow (fire every other turn), piercing (halves the target’s shields, because torps ignore shields in BFG), guided (no range modifiers) and do double damage (each torpedo does one point of damage in BFG. Since I’ve doubled the hull points, I need to double the damage too).

Lances were similar: accurate (hitting on 4+), double damage, and piercing. The arcs on the ship card show that they are on both port and starboard sides, and that the column should be shifted 2 to the right in each of those arcs. This results in a 2 die attack, which is just what I want. It was easy to model batteries as the no frills weapon that they are. There was no appropriate ship system or defense to simulate the turrets, I made them into short range weapons with a 360 degree arc and the diffuse trait (doubling range penalties) and pinpoint trait (ignoring penalties for targeting seekers and fighters). All this makes it hard to use them effectively against other ships, but since you always get a chance to fire at seeking weapons at range 1, they should work well as point defense.

I had to revise the Nova Cannon significantly from the SAE version as the key trait (increased hits) is no longer available. I was still able to replicate the no minimum range (with the ballistic trait), and used the guided trait to ensure no to hit modifiers for long range. Proximity made it an area of effect weapon like before. To make damage more variable, I added the Catastrophic trait, which means it deals d6 damage per hit instead of 1 damage. While I don’t love the design as much as the one from SAE, it gets the job done and works a lot better than the FT or CB versions.

Nova Cannon Version:

Overall, it’s quite straight forward to design ships in SN. I think the new format and rules actually facilitate larger battles than could be managed in SAE. The only two disappointments are are the blandness of most weapons and the lack of an anti-armor trait. Why would you use shields that can be trumped by “piercing” when you can take good ol’ armor that cannot be thwarted?

That’s all for this week. Tune in next week for the first part of the coverage featuring Squadron Strike.

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For links to all the posts in Tim White’s first series comparing five popular 2D squadron level space combat games, see here.

For links to all the posts in Tim White’s second series working through a complete ship design in each of those games, see here.

A Lunar Class Cruiser in Starmada Admiralty Edition

Welcome back to fourth installment of the Lunar Class Cruiser design walkthrough. This week, we’re porting the ship from Battle Fleet Gothic to Starmada – Admiralty Edition.

Starmada – Admiralty Edition

The biggest difference between Starmada Admirality Edition (SAE) and Full Thrust Cross Dimensions (FT) and Colonial Battlefleet (CB) is custom weapon design. This allows greater design freedom in terms of matching the original Battlefleet Gothic (BFG) weapons rather than trying to make do with pre-built weapons. I need to make sure relative effectiveness is the same. I went with a hull size of 12 (150% of the BFG Hull size) because I like the number 12. It also gives me lots of smaller hull numbers for converting smaller escort ships over.

Now, truth be told, my gaming group has actually converted up all of the Imperial, Chaos, Marine and Eldar ships from BFG into SAE. So a lot of the design decisions were made in the context of the setting and went well beyond just the Lunar-class Cruiser.

Our group was really only interested in the “Movement point” option in SAE. We did not use the default pseudo-vectored movement method. For Engine power on the Lunar, I went with a rating of “5.” We picked “5” by dividing the BFG speed divided by 5cm, and adding 1 to the result to cover the free “heading change) in BFG. This gives the ship 5 movement points to spend on turning one hex side or moving one hex forward. As with both FT and CB, there is no way to disconnect maneuverability from engine power.

Defenses were trickier. SAE does not have an armor-as-damage-reduction option, nor does it have ablative shielding in the conventional sense. I lumped the effect of both the BFG armor and Void Shields into SAE’s “shields”. For each point of armor above 4+ and each void shield I gave the ship 1 shield in SAE. This became “shields 3” in SAE. Because the Lunar Cruiser has a more heavily armored prow, I gave it the special ship trait “armor plating”, allowing it to ignore any internal damage roll of 1. SAE also has an option for shielding that varies by hex facing (faceted shields). I thought would be more appropriate for the Orks, that have a more varied armor rating. To represent the 2 turrets I gave the ship 8 anti-fighter batteries.

With those parameters set, it was weapon design time.

First up: Lances. In BFG each lance has about a 50% chance to inflict one point of hull damage to a ship (provided the shields are down), with the Lunar class having 8 hull points. Now in SAE, only about half the hits on a ship will result in “hull” damage, so it takes approximately 24 damage to destroy the Lunar. As a refresher, in SAE, weapons have dice they roll for Impact, having to equal or exceed the target’s shield rating, and a separate die roll for damage. In translating the Lance over, I gave them Impact of 2 and damage of 2, which means each one could potentially do 4 damage each (a bit more than their BFG counterpart). I give them “halves shields” to represent that they ignore armour in BFG. I make them range 12, which is longer compared to their speed in BFG, but feels more right. I decide to make them behave normally in terms of the “to hit” modifiers in SAE (so they will hit on 5+ at long range and 3+ at short range) because I always felt the lack of to hit penalties for Lances in BFG was always just for the sake of staying as simple as possible.

I calibrated batteries based on the percentage of a ship’s fluffy interiors they can hit in BFG. Because they’re less accurate (and more widely variable in their outcomes) in BFG, I went with a 5+ to hit, giving a 4+ at short range and a 6+ at long. The tricky part is getting six batteries to come out approximately equal in hull spaces to two lances. As batteries have a ROF of 2, it allows them to spread their fire. Batteries can also shoot at fighters and missiles, which made me revise Lances to give them the “starship exclusive” trait.

Both weapons are mounted with 60 degree fire arcs to either port or starboard. The groupings of letters reflect each individual weapon and its associated arc. With the 12 individual arcs to pick from this was easy to do. SAE can handle much more complex arcs – MJ12 Games got most of the firing arcs from Federation Commander to port over.

With Lances and Batteries out of the way, we’re down to the torpedoes. To me, torpedoes are things that chase enemy ships on the map, and which can be outrun…and making them in SAE is a bit of a trick. In SAE, torpedoes have to be modeled as fighters if you want to allow them to be shot down before they impact their target. Using the “seeker” trait for fighters requires they be assigned a target and that they must move closer to it at full speed; once they attack, they’re removed from play. While not a terrible solution in terms of how they act post launch, it means that restricting other aspects, like the firing arc or launch rate can’t be done. This size ship can launch 3 flights per turn. Minimum recommended flight size in the game is 4, so that means the Lunar can launch 12 torps a turn, which is double what it is supposed to. We can easily adjust the expected damage by dropping from 2 points to 1 point of damage per torpedo that hits. I’ve given the torps the trait “Halves shields” to the BFG role, where they ignore shields. Halving shields kind of stealthily puts the armor back into the system. Using SAE’s rules, the Lunar-class cruiser can hold nine launch spreads of torpedoes. This translates into three turns of launching at the full rate of fire, before running out of ammunition. This is a decent match for BFG. I’ve also given the Torpedoes the “bomber” trait, so they can only attack other ships and not enemy fighters (or other torps).

This completes the standard Lunar-class. Now, this took a few iterations I’ve glossed over, because I did this with the other conversions over a year ago, and I didn’t record my entire thought process. SAE could get a fairly close match the BFG ships (as can be seen from its 2 lances per side and 6 batteries per side).

Just like in FT and CB, I also wanted to make the Nova Cannon variant. For SAE, there wasn’t a really good fit for the BFG version of the weapon, so I chose to get creative – working from the intended role of the weapon rather an exact match that took the same amount of space that the fighter-like torpedoes took up.

What I got was a weapon using the longest range band (27 hexes), can’t fire in its short range band (9 hexes), has a narrow arc (30 degrees to the front only), is area of effect (can hit anything within a one hex radius) and has the opportunity to really pound the target. The SAE Nova Cannon targets a hex and attacks all units in or adjacent to that hex with a four-dice attack. There is to-hit penalty of -1 at long range, and a second to-hit penalty of -1 versus units in the adjacent hexes.

I dialed up the effectiveness with the “increased hits” trait. Every point I exceeded the to-hit target by adds another hit on the target; shooting a ship at medium range and rolling four “6s” would hit 16 times! While that’s a low-odds result, it’s pretty memorable. It also means those to-hit penalties really mitigate the damage. It definitely fills the same combat role that the BFG version of the weapon does.

The ship design for SAE was done in the publisher provided Excel Spreadsheet. Weapon designs are done on one tab and can be selected from the ship tab. This is a nice feature so that you don’t have to redesign the weapons on each ship. You can also copy and paste ship tabs, which makes it fast and easy if you want to do a variant of an existing ship class. There are also a number of fan created design sheets with added features, mostly prettier outputs.

This wraps up the SAE design. Next week we will review how things have changed in Starmada – Nova Edition.

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For links to all the posts in Tim White’s first series comparing five popular 2D squadron level space combat games, see here.

For links to all the posts in Tim White’s second series working through a complete ship design in each of those games, see here.

A Lunar Class Cruiser in Colonial Battlefleet

Welcome back to the third installment of the Lunar Class Cruiser design walkthrough. This time, we’re porting the ship from Battle Fleet Gothic to Colonial Battlefleet, by Steel Dreadnought Games.

Colonial Battlefleet

Colonial Battlefleet (CB) comes with a download link to its integrated ship design worksheet. This sheet is complete – it’s got everything needed to design ships, and is used by Harry Pratt, the designer, to make the ship he sells as completed products. It’s well supported, and the Steel Dreadnought Games forums are always happy to answer questions.

Before you design ships in CB, you make a few broad-strokes choices about your faction, though you can disable this and just go into “free design” mode. There are pre-built factions and the ability to make trade-offs between factions and design your own. I’m definitely in the “design your own faction” camp, which means I started by setting my factions levels in the 6 different technologies. This set of decisions constrains what weapons, defenses and other systems are available for all Imperial ships. I won’t detail those selections here; suffice to say they were driven by what I wanted the Imperial ships to be able to do. They are shown on the SSD below in the “Notes” section. The existing factions all have faction-specific advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately there is no list of advantages or disadvantages to pick from when designing your own faction. The game designer suggests you can just make them up, but I was worried about balance, and so skipped it.

After selecting the faction I just made on the ship design tab, the next step is picking the class, mass, and role of the ship. Logically, I decided to make the Lunar class Cruiser a “Cruiser”. I chose a relatively high mass within the range of available cruiser sizes, both because the Gothic Ships are large and hulking, and to provide more space at the bottom for small escort ships. The Lunar class is supposed to go toe-to-toe with enemy ships, so I gave it the “Battleline” role, giving the ship a bonus point of Fire Control, which would allow the ship to use all its weapon banks at once.

The difference between “power that moves your ship: and “power used for other things the game abstracts” is called “Delta.” For the Lunar-class cruiser, I chose a Delta of only 1, which is quite slow. While this may seem harsh, bear in mind Delta is extremely expensive for anything size class 3 or larger , CB has no speed cap, and each point of Delta permits the ship to make a 60 degree turn. Imperial ships are intended to be lumbering behemoths, so I decided anything speed 20 or slower in BFG could have a delta of 1. This leaves room for faster ships with a higher Delta.

Standard Lunar Class Cruiser:

Colonial Battlefleet has a default of 3 armor on ships. To keep with the “armored behemoth” theme of an Imperial ship, I felt that needed to increase, so I dithered between adding 3 and 2. Ultimately, in the interests of leaving more head room for future ships in this conversion, I kept it at adding 2, for a total 5 armor. If I were building a Space Marine ship I would give it 6 armor, and if it were a Chaos cruiser I could have given it 4 armor, while an Eldar ship would’ve kept the default of 3 armor value. and an Eldar would have gotten no extra armor at all. CB mandates minimum armor values, because in some ways, it’s a derivative of WWI/WWII naval games. Even the fragile Eldar ships would’ve had more armor than I’d’ve liked.

When looking at shielding, I wanted about 20 points of shields on the bow (10 times the BFG void shield rating). The bow shield strength is determined by multiplying the class size (3 in this case) by the shield rating, so by giving this ship a shield rating of 7, I got a bow shield strength of 21 – close enough! CB uses a similar method to generate the side and stern shield strengths, as well as the shield regeneration, so I couldn’t tweak those values. I also gave the ship a pair of point defense installations to match the two turrets it has in BFG.

There are two entry points on deciding weapon loadouts: Fire control limits and simply stuffing them on the ship. I chose the latter. Weapons in CB have accuracy that just falls off with range and you roll dice and exceed the range to the target to hit. Batteries and lances have 30 cm ranges in BFG, which is medium-short range for the game. I looked at medium range weapons in CB, which means d6s for the attack die. This lets me use d10s for the longer ranged stuff coming later.

I went with Heavy Autocannons for the batteries and Anti-Neutron Torpedoes for Lances. The autocannon are relatively light, so I could mount a lot of them to whittle an opponent down. The Anti-Neutron Torpedoes are direct fire weapons (I’d expect a seeking weapon from the name) that penetrate armor very well, much like lances do in BFG. The Anti-Ship Guided Missile (ASGM) was as close a fit to the original BFG torps as I could find.

I wanted to have one set of ASGM in the front, and a set of each Anti-Neutron torps and Autocannons on each side. Firing all those weapons, on the other hand is tricky. It would require a fire control rating of 5. Even with the bonus fire control rating from the Battleline role, I simply couldn’t afford any extra.

I decided to max out the Heavy Autocannon bank by giving it three weapons, and then give it both Port and Starboard arcs so it could fire to either side, but not both simultaneously. I then balanced out the rest of the weapons based on the mass available. The final design had a point of mass left unused.

Nova Cannon Variant:

This completed the standard ship design. CB has a fairly short list of equipment options, and aside from wishing I could get more fire control without gutting the rest of the ship, there wasn’t a lot I wanted from it. All ships come with an integrated security force, so I didn’t have to buy that – and I’d save buying marines for BFG forces with battle pods, which the Lunar-class doesn’t have.

So, onto the Nova Cannon! Or maybe not…

I was unable to find a good choice for the Nova Cannon. The only area affect weapon in CB is the “Spatial Torpedo”. That wasn’t available based on the Techs I had chosen for the Imperials, and I didn’t want to make the compromises needed to get it to fit. If forced to pick a weapon at gunpoint, I’d probably pick phasers. These have a high accuracy die (D10), which would represent the long range of the Nova Cannon fairly well, and they also do a fair heap of shield damage, but are really nowhere near the capabilities of the Nova Cannon. Also because of the Fire Control limits and the limitations on the amount of weapons you can cram into one bank of weapons, you’d have to really mess with the other aspects of the ship to get it where it should be. So no Nova Cannon design.

CB is a fine game, but the constraints the designer put on the ship design engine to keep it “unbreakable” also mean that it’s not a “toolkit” game. You’re basically making CB ships that sorta-kinda meet the parameters of different settings. Now, I know you can’t do everything with one game engine, but on the trade-off between player flexibility and the designer curtailing broken designs, I’ll take flexibility eight times out of ten.

That’s all for this week’s installment. Come back next week for a look at Starmada.

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For links to all the posts in Tim White’s first series comparing five popular 2D squadron level space combat games, see here.

For links to all the posts in Tim White’s second series working through a complete ship design in each of those games, see here.