Fleet Captain tries to keep the basic concept but trims it down. And in the case of fleet elements not commanded personally, the allocation is automated. Here's how it works: every ship is rated in three dice. A small escort ship might be rated d4/d6/d8. A cruiser gets d6/d8/d10. Your flagship and other big kickass vessels get d8/d10/d12. Each turn you get to decide which die powers your shields, which die goes to weapons systems and which one goes to movement. The other captains stinking up your fleet decide via a d6 roll:
Do you loathe these other captains yet? If not, don't worry; you will.
We don't want our capital ships to be ridiculously fast compared their destroyer escorts, so each size vessel has a Slowness Factor. For small, fast ships that's a 1. Medium ships have a Slowness of 2. Big fat ships have a Slowness of 3 or 4. The Slowness Factor is how many pips it costs to move a hex.
Example: A smuggler flying a corvette is trying to escape some imperialistic douchebags in a big ol' wedge-shaped cruiser. Both max out their Move die this turn. The corvette uses a d8 and roll an 8. The douchebags get a d10 and also rolls an 8. It looks like a push but it's not. The corvette has a Slowness Factor of 1, so it moves 8 hexes the hell away from the cruiser. The cruiser has a Slowness of 2, so it pursues only 4 hexes in the direction of the corvette. The space between the two vessels has just grown by 4 hexes, much to the relief of the smuggler.
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Very cool mechanic, Jeff; simple and elegant, but evocative. This sounds like a game I would play. And, yes, I suspect the "other captains" have the capacity to destroy your carefully-laid plans in an orgy of random incompetence. "No, you idiots, power to the weapons! THE WEAPONS!"
ReplyDeleteI like it.
I love this idea, and I think you can avoid a lot of swinginess by replacing "bigger die" with "more die." The way it is right now, you could still roll a 1 on your biggest die and end up gimped. But if you replace "biggest" with "three" then there's a minimal roll you'll get which makes things a bit less swingy.
ReplyDeleteUnless having the shields suddenly poop out on you in the middle of a fight is a feature and not a bug. ;)
This is awesome and I want to play it.
ReplyDeleteOh, and I just noticed that the way you have this table set up, you can add in a captain personality factor. That is, Captain Joe "Ramming Speed" Straczynski might roll with a -1 on his die, while more cautious Arthur "Not the Face" Mothman would add +1 to his die rolls. Which might add a nifty tactical component as to which captains you put where.
ReplyDeleteShields failing to shield you is definitely a design feature. I did kick around dice pools as an option. I rejected them because I wanted the systems to be wonkier and also physically managing the dice would be harder.
ReplyDeleteYep, I can absolutely understand that. So do you roll once for your shields for every round, or do you roll every time someone shoots you? The latter makes having a high die there more important, but does add more rolling to the game (which can be either bug or feature, depending).
ReplyDeleteI'm leaning towards roll against every attack. Otherwise, low shield die results will draw fire unless I add a fire declaration phase, which I am trying to avoid.
ReplyDeleteI like what I'm seeing so far. Here's one suggestion: I know the game's called Fleet Captain, but since an admiral should concern himself with the overal battle and leave the tactical operation of the flagship to its captain, you might want to include optional rules allowing a player to run his whole fleet a tthe abstract level.
ReplyDeleteFor simplicity of play, I'd also suggest dice pools (using d6s because they're easiest to read), but if you want to give the game a certain flavor with the dice it uses, nothing wrong with that! :)
Each turn you get to decide which die powers your shields, which die goes to weapons systems and which one goes to movement.
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly how it works for Starfleet Battles the game Desert Scribe has written about and run for us down here. It's a real sweet spot mechanic: simple and elegant, but with a lot of tactical choice.
Also agree with DS that you should think to sticking to one die. If you have more than one ship going it's a lot easier to deal with a dice pool at the table.
That looks very interesting. I'd really like to see this full game.
ReplyDeleteThat's cool, Jeff. One question: do the dice all have to be of different sizes? Can you have something like d6/d4/d4 or d12/d6/d6? How about something like d6/d4+1/d4?
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, you only have 3 different types of ship. What say you?
amp108: I'd lean away from doubling up on dice-sizes like that, since it takes some of the fun randomness out of the game. There may be lots of other ways to distinguish other classes, or sub-classes, of ships. For instance, we don't yet know how Jeff intends to handle ships getting damaged; perhaps some ships are hardier than others. We also don't know how far weapons can shoot or how many times each ship can shoot. Maybe the difference between a vanilla cruiser and a battle-cruiser is that the latter can shoot as far as a battleship, or as often as a battleship.
ReplyDeleteI'm also thinking you could create space stations or asteroid bases by replacing the unnecessary movement (since these things generally don't move under their own power) with "MOAR weapons" (or, if you prefer "MOAR shields", but I think that might make the game drag out longer, and I'm pretty sure keeping the game quick and relatively short is a design goal here).
Fighting s space station that decides to put up MOAR WEAPONZ seems like it would make the game a lot shorter ;P
ReplyDeleteLikewise, a friendly station you must defend that has MOAR SHILLDZ up will last longer and thus make the station last a bit longer while you ignore it and accomplish selfish secondary objectives.