Talk:Battle Cry

Roll20 Hints

Along the upper left of the sidebar you will see a gear shaped icon. It is the settings menu. To stop Roll20 from attempting to activate your webcam and mic (if you have either) when you enter the game, click on it then scroll down to the bottom. Under the Video + Voice heading disable Broadcast and Receive, and set Video/Player Avatar Size to whichever you please.

When given control over a token you will have to fill in the three fields for Shields, Armor, and HP in that order from top to bottom. Remember:

<3 Bar 1 = Shields
Z Bar 2 = Armor
~ Bar 3 = HP

Along the upper left of the sidebar you will see another set of icons. The Comb shaped icon is the Ruler which is very useful for measuring Movement and determining Range. If you suddenly can not select any of your tokens, make sure you have switched from the ruler to the select tool.

Symbols
Thunderbolt = Full Offense stance
Tower = Full Defense stance
Flag = Flagship

GM prerogative space

AA to be folded up into ECM just to clean up things, AA was a artifact of when this game was going to have fighters and carriers expansion became vaporware anyway.
New missile stuff proposal:
Range 10 burst mode mode (2 damage shield armor/ 3 damage HP)
Range 20 spotting mode spotting mode (ECM counts double against the attack roll)

FBH Rules Proposals

Squadrons

In engagements of more than a few ships, let PCs move, shoot, etc. their ships in 4s, with the same result being applied across the squadron. Squadrons can only target other squadrons, and are assumed to equally distribute damage. So if a squadron of 4 battleships targets a squadron of 4 battleships, they all take equal shield damage.

Offensive and Defensive Maneuvers

Rather than just firing weapons on one another and reactor power (and shields) give the PCs more maneuvers and reactions. Every turn, each ship gets an offensive action and one defensive action against each attack. A successful command roll may trade the offensive maneuver for an additional defensive stance.

Offensive Stances

Chase Attack

Attacking while closing or retreating from a target, with beams having to be vectored through more than 90 degrees

Attack with 2 out of every 3 usual beam dice. Missiles unaffected.

Jardin Ships have powerful chase armaments and may make chase Attacks when moving towards the enemy without penalty.

Abeam Attack

Attacking with an optimal angle to target, all emitters angled at the target or with a sheer of less than 90 degrees

Ships attack with full dice.

Next turn, a ship may not move directly towards or away from the enemy, though they may move laterally to them.

Naval (IE not pirate scum) Ships are well practiced at firing in line of battle, and use differently coloured beams to deconflict targeting. Add +1 to ship attack rolls when multiple ships are firing in line abeam (IE, the first step of multiple attack penalties is negated).

Spiral Attack

Attacking by aggressively rolling back and forth to present successive beam emitters to target.

Target must be within 5 Hexes, and must be moving at equal or slower speed than the firer, firing ship must move its full distance in the turn

Attack 2 targets at once with full attack dice. A successful navigation roll allows the combination of a covering barrage and attack maneuver, both at full dice

Main Gun Attack

The ship engages with its keel mount

A ship making a main gun attack cannot fire other weapons in the same turn as the main gun attack.

Ventris ships are very well practiced with main guns, and may fire main guns and attack with other systems without penalty. Due to their large size, Dreadnoughts or other units with more than 30 hits may also engage without penalty

Crossing Attack

The attacker dives across the attacker's engines, blasting them with vector beams and lances

Requires a movement of at least 2 more than the targeted ship, the attacker must move through the hex of the target

Adds +50% to amount of attack dice for all weapons, beam and missile.

Defensive Stances

Evasive

The ship maneuvers erratically to prevent hits

Trade X movement points next turn for X additional difficulty on the targets attack dice, with 10s always hitting

Especially effective against spinal cannon fire. Ships succeeding in a (navigation) test automatically avoid a spinal cannon strike but move out of its path

Cavalry ships and Ventrisian destroyers have vectored thrust capacity, and can trade movement points at a rate of 1 per 2

Counter Barrage

A ship uses lasers to shoot down incoming projectiles and revector incoming beams

Roll X laser or AMG dice, each success negates one hit

Spinal cannon rounds may intercept one another

Ships may fire Counter barrages to protect any ship next to them, or within 6 hexes if they are in front of that ship.

Brace

Ship braces for damage heavily

Roll command, gain twice the number of successes in additional virtual "shields"

Blow Through

DAMN THE TORPEDOES

No defensive maneuver

Gain 50% (round up) additional movement next turn.

Equipment stuff

External Add Ons

Rifle Grenade AMG missiles

Tech Base: Jardin

Fires anti-matter driven missiles at a target

Gain half the AMG fire in missiles

External Missile Racks

Tech Base: Jardin and Imperial

External racks carrying one shot ordinance

Gain a one shot volley of missiles equal to a standard vessel of your class

Reduce movement by 1/4th while carrying unpurged racks

External Booster System

Tech Base: Rifter and Imperial

Allow a +4 movement dash, once

If a hit goes through armour on the carrying ship, the external booster detonates, causing 1d10 extra hits

Armour Materials

Stealth Armour

Allows strategic stealth

Reduces effective enemy ranges fore fire against the stealth ship by 50% until the stealth ship fires weapons

A ship may regain this bonus by making a successful command roll to return to silent running (and not firing its weapons)

Weapon Modifications

Main Guns

Draw a line from the firing hit to edge of range. Every ship along that path is potentially hit, but may make a navigation roll to evade damage.

Plasma

Plasma works unmodified but cannot be used for defensive barrages against beams

Other weapons can still parry plasma though.

I00thlurker Retcon Proposal

Formation

Get rid of formation bonuses and demerits. See Stances.

Ship Initiative

Propose to change initiative to hull type, which modifies TN to hit:

• 0 = Capital Ships and above.
• 1 = Cruisers or Frigate Destroyers.
• 2 = Frigates or other unrated ships.

Crippled

Previous system was too harsh. Recommend changing to two states. Damaged at 3/4th health which stops a ship from passively spotting or using EW actively (see Electronic Warfare). Crippled occurs at 1/3rd health which halves efficiency across the board.

Point Defense (ECM and AA)

Point Defense represents strongly vectored Quick-Fire Vector Lasers that can be used to damage ships or disrupt enemy fire. One point of PD can be used either to do one flat damage to an enemy ship in 6 hexes or subtract one dice from incoming fire. PD refreshes at the start of the next round.

1.) When the ship is targeted by the enemy, announce how many points of Point Defense will be used on the defense before they fire weapons.

2.) When using Point Defense to fire, note which ships you are firing upon.

3.) Point Defense can shoot down any missiles passing within three hexes of the ship, like when shooting at an enemy ship.

This replaces ECM and AA both.

EW

What was once ECM is now free to do more than simply add another layer of passive defense. I suggest evolving ECM into a general Electronic Warfare stat.

EW is in essence an additional kind of weapon as well as a light passive defense. It is easily one of the most expensive components on a ship. It is normal for battleships and cruisers to have no EW not compromised by their own emissions. There are passive and active uses of EW. Passive uses:

• ECM: By default ships generate noise as a passive defense, adding one TN to hit per every two points of EW score. ECM degrades as other sensors that are harder to fool come into play: -1@8, -2@6, -3@4, -6@2.
• Passive Spotting: Ships normally provide telemetry data and vector corrections for friendly ships, enabling Predicted Fire. Use the distance between the Spotter and the Target for the purposes of determining penalty from ECM.
• Distortion Fields: If a faction has Distortion Fields, the radius of the distortion field bubble a ship passively projects is equivalent to its EW score.

To use EW actively, ships must enter the E-War Stance.

Stances:

General Orders

• Damage Control: When a ship is in the Damaged or Crippled states, the Captain may order every non-critical hand to fight fires and make hasty repairs. The ship can not fire any weapon pools or use reactor power. Each turn the ship is in Damage Control, make a command check to bring individual systems back up to normal function such as sensors, weapons or drives.
• Ram: When initiating a ramming attempt, treat the ship itself as a weapon pool equivalent to its Speed multiplied by 3 for Capitals and above, 2 for Cruisers, and 1 for Unrated craft. Base TN is 6 + Target's Hull Type. The target ship takes full damage while the rammer takes half.
• Retreat: Player surrenders all control of the ship, which immediately makes best speed out of the battlefield. Ship in Retreat cannot be taken out of Retreat stance except with a command check. The ship can not use weapon batteries but adds +1 Speed and +2 to Point Defense.
• Smoke: A ship discharges zephyr-charged smoke from its drives that dissipates at the start of the next turn. Designate a hex as the center of the cloud with its radius determined by the generating ship's Speed. Shooting into or out of zephyr smoke adds a +1 TN penalty.

Gunnery

• Missile Launch: When launching missiles a ship must announce its attention to do so at the start of its turn. Weapon pools at half. Every three units of speed the launching ship travels toward the target zone negates one enemy Point Defense.
• Spinal Weapon: When firing a spinal weapon the ship takes a relatively predictable course and emits a large spike of exotic particles. No EW protection of any kind, can not use weapon pools, and reduces TN to hit by -1.

Electronic Warfare

In this mode ships can not fire their weapon pools. They may choose a variety of actions.

• Jamming: Target an enemy ship and attempt to counter its Spotting or Jamming. Both ships roll their EW score as a dice pool, base TN 6. If the ship targeted loses, nullify target's EW.
• Active Search: The ship improves its degradation of enemy ECM to -1@12, -2@8, -3@6, -4@4, -5@2 for the purposes of Spotting.
• Spoofing: The ship grants friendly ship its EW score for the purposes of passive defense, so long as they are within a maximum range of twice its EW score. Ships that use their weapon pools lose this EW protection.

Weapons + Range brackets

Weapon Pools

• Antimatter Gun: Fires bolts of suspended Anti-Matter, destroys both armor and hp on the same damage roll on unshielded hulls. Base TN is 6 + Target Hull Type. Reactor power doubles range.

-[Danger Close]: Range 0-1. Some of the AM bolts may burst too close to the firing ship, causing 1 damage to both ships for each 1 rolled.

-[Direct Fire]: Range 2-5.

• Anti-Ship Lasers: High intensity vectored lasers, the primary weapon of most ship to ship combat. Base TN number is 6. Hull Type 0 and 1 ships may choose to use reactor power to take off the Hull Type penalty from Predicted Fire rather than overcharge.

-[Direct Fire] range 0-10, ER type 0-15

-[Predicted] range effectively infinite, requires Spotter, Base TN 6 + Hull Type

• Lances: Powerful pulsar beams based on Rifter sciences of gravity manipulation.

-[Close] range 0-3, murderously effective against armor, however base TN is 8. Each unit of speed a ship moves in a turn brings the TN to hit down by one.

-[Long] range 4-8, base TN is 10. Each unit of speed a ship moves in a turn brings the TN to hit down by one.

• Plasma Cannon: 20-16 Range (Half Damage, requires spotter), 15-10 (1 Damage), 9-5 Range (2 Damage), 4-0 (3 damage). Base to-hit number is 6 + Target Hull Type

Special Weapons

• Missiles: To fire the Ship must declare Missile Launch stance at the start of their turn, lasting until the start of the next. Ammunition is limited, one point = one missile flight. Ships can launch as many missiles flights in a turn as they have loaded. One point of PD can destroy one missile flight in 3 hexes before it reaches its target zone, however PD can not effect blast damage. Weapon pools can also fire on missiles at TN 8. Range is unlimited.

-[Standards]: The ubiquitous Burst Munition tipped missile. The player designates either a ship or a hex as the target zone for each missile flight. A Burst Missile flight that successfully reaches its target zone does 6 damage in a blast to any ships in the center hex and those in each hex around it. In hexes where two blasts overlap add 3 damage, any further overlapping blasts add 1 damage.

-[Anti-matter Torpedo]: Instead of a traditional warhead, these La'Vienne Corporation-patented warheads use a strong vector field to safely contain anti-matter. Destroys both armor and hp on unshielded hulls. Act like Standards in all other respects.

-[Gravitic Warhead]: A particular Rifter gravitic technology, these missiles create brief fields that disrupts circuits in one hex. Ships in the target zone lose power to a subsystem until a command check is made to restore them. An overlapping blast shuts down another system that still has power.

-[Smoke]: Discharges zephyr-charged smoke which dissipates at the start of the next turn. Designate a hex as the center of the cloud and each adjacent hex as the outer limit. Shooting into or out of zephyr smoke adds a +1 TN penalty.

• Spinal Gun: Single shot weapon seen specialized anti-fortress ships and occasionally battleships. Base TN to hit is 6 + Hull Type. Recharges in 5 Turns. 30 Damage. Must use Spinal Cannon stance to fire.

-[Second Generation Spinal Gun]: Base TN to hit is 6 + Hull Type. Recharges in 4 Turns. 40 Damage. Must use Spinal Cannon stance to fire.

-[Cruiser Spinal Gun]: Base TN to hit is 6 + Hull Type. Recharges in 5 Turns. 20 Damage. Must use Spinal Cannon stance to fire.

CHASES

When a battlegroup wants to disengage and flee from a fight, the rules are constrained to portraying this in the . Speeds being what they are, relatively small bonuses, making the destruction of a flagship imperative to continued survival.

Wider maneuvers and pursuits are the general makeup of battle.

Ship mockups

Phoenix Empire

Battleships

Dreadnought: Speed 2 (Type:0), Shields 10, Armor 8, Structure 20, EW 0, PD 6, 12 Heavy Lasers
Armored Cruiser: Speed 3 (Type:1), Shields 8, Armor 6, Structure 15, EW 0, PD 6, 4 Heavy Lasers, 4 Lasers
Frigate Destroyer: Speed 4 (Type:1), Shields 6, Armor 4, Structure 10, EW 3, PD 6, 6 Lasers, 6 Missiles

Unrated

Frigate: Speed 4 (Type 2), Shields 4, Armor 2, Structure 6, EW 5, PD 3, Lasers 3

Jardin Republic

Battleships

Dreadnought: Speed 2 (Type:0), Shields 10, Armor 8, Structure 25, EW 0, PD 6, 10 Heavy Lasers, 4 AM Cannon
Armored Cruiser: Speed 3 (Type:1), Shields 8, Armor 6, Structure 15, EW 0, PD 6, 4 Heavy Lasers, 4 AM Gun
Light Cruiser: Speed 4 (Type:1), Shields 6, Armor 4, Structure 10, EW 3, PD 6, 6 Lasers, 6 Missiles

Unrated

Frigate: Speed 4 (Type 2), Shields 4, Armor 2, Structure 6, EW 5, PD 3, Lasers 3

Ships & Weapons Proposals

100thlurker:

Heavy Cavalry: 8 Armor, 5 Lasers, 8 Lances, 6 Shields, 3ECM, 2AA, 14HP, 4 Speed (Init 2)
Amendment to Lances:

Lances: High power lasers that have range 0-2, murderously effective in destroying armor, however base-to-hit is 8. Each unit of speed a ship moves in a turn brings the target number to hit down by one. Approved

Lokar

Missiles: Increase the ammo from 3 to 4. Going full offensive takes 2 (two) rounds of ammo. So an Imperial battleship/cruiser/destroyer can have four rounds of normal missile fire or two of full offensive fire or two normal/one offensive.

Making a spaceship!

While building a spaceship, there are two stats that must be tracked; Space and Cost. Cost (represented with the $ symbol) is simply the Ducat price-equivalent; how much labour, resources and whatnot is required to build one. Space is a holistic measure of volume and tonnage, representing how big a ship is; Space is added up and determines what size class a ship is and consequently how expensive its engines and its ECM suite are.

Component List

Components that require 1 Space.

1 Lance ($2)

2 Hits ($2)

Components that require 2 Space.

1 Laser ($4)

1 Missile [3 reloads] ($4)

1 Antimatter Cannon ($4)

1 Shield ($6)

1 Anti-Air ($10)

Components that require 3 Space.

1 Missile [8 reloads] ($5)

1 Armor ($1)

1 ER Laser ($6)

Components that require 4 Space.

+1 Command System ($8)

1 Fort Cannon ($6)

Components that require 20 Space.

Spinal Cannon ($40)

Examples:

Destroyer; size 13

Heavy Cruiser; size 45

Battleship; size 92

Fast Battleship; size 82

To determine Space multiplier, divide the ship's Space by 10 (keeping all fractions) and then square it. Thus a Battleship would have a Space multiplier of 9.2 x 9.2 = 84.64.

ECM costs $2 x multiplier per +1

• Note: These assume all speeds boosted by 1 to bring dreadnoughts to 1 hex/turn and laser range increased.

Engines with speed 1 [dreadnought speed] cost 0.25 x multiplier

Engines with speed 2 [battleship speed] cost 0.5 x multiplier

Engines with speed 3 [slow cruiser speed] cost 1.25 x multiplier

Engines with speed 4 [fast cruiser speed] cost 2.5 x multiplier

Engines with speed 5 [slow escort speed] cost 4 x multiplier

Engines with speed 6 [fast escort speed] cost 6 x multiplier

Heirlooms

These are things you can plug into your ship - presumably via some sort of baroque contraption - that provide performance bonuses.

• Oscillation Overthruster: +1 Speed
• Epitaph: +3 Laser range, +2 AMG range, +1 Lance range, -1 Kira
• Mimetic Polyalloy: 1 armor regeneration/turn
• Dilitium Chrystals: 5 shield regeneration/turn
• Flux Capacitor: Roll 1D10 for every point of damage taken to shields; on a 1-2 the damage is ignored. Does not apply to damage taken to armor or hull.
• Zohar: Once per battle, may go on to all special orders at one time.
• Song of Nephilim: Once per battle, may reduce all sign ranges to 1D5 hexes (applies equally to all ships, friendly and enemy) until the next action of the host ship.
• Jedi Holocron: +1 Command