Cosmoprincess Fleet Rules

This should give you a general feel for how I'm planning things out.

Much of the intent is to give not just a ship statblock but continued options of 'What do NOW?' to make a more dynamic battle. I imagine there will need to be significant balancing over time, but that's life.

The list of battle orders and drills is currently pretty abbreviated, I'm thinking 6-8 of each would be a good number.

Fundamentals:

• Dice rolling is generally dice pools
• Crew/technical quality will determine your target number
• to-hit penalties at more distant range brackets
• Ships not locked have double range penalties

Ships have several defensive layers;

• Deflectors - these are a saving throw against each hit. Note that shield-piercing weapons can still be deflected. (the shield is thicker at the critical point or something)
• Shields - First layer of ablative hit points. Can be recharged.
• Hull - Hits on the actual hull. Critical chance based off how many hits you took, can be field-repaired.
• Vitals - Core damage. Every point of vital damage is a critical hit roll. Go to spacedock and do not pass Go.

General flow as I imagine:

• 1) Captain Phase 1 (orders and drills)
• 2) Engineering Phase (adjust power allocation, move ships, etc)
• 3) Captain Phase 2 (remaining orders and drills)
• 4) Gunnery Phase (pew pew pew pew!)
• 5) Crew Phase (end of turn cleanup, apply locks, etc)

You may not perform a drill if it would duplicate the effect of an order (ie failing a Break and Evade cannot be followed up by a Hard Break drill)

[u]Food for thought: Orders (Which are limited in how many you get per turn) can be used to reroll a drill? You can use an order in the following Captain Phase to 'overwrite' a drill? Thoughts and opinions?[/u]

Command system allows bonus Order(s), can also be used to 'push' an order to another ship.

Battle Orders

A ship is limited in how many orders it can take per turn; every point of Command allows one order per turn. They essentially represent the captain (or the command crew) taking direct action and more or less is where the elite nature of named characters matters.

• Fast Lock: Roll FC to acquire a lock immediately. If failed, you get a lock at the end phase as per the Lock-on drill, if you succeed the lock comes into effect immediately. You may perform this action once per unassigned director.
• Break and Evade: Roll Shiphandling to attempt to break all locks on the ship. All ships with a lock on the ship performing Break and Evade must immediately reroll a lock-on with the successes on the Shiphandling roll as added difficulty. A success means the lock is maintained, a failure means the director is now unassigned. This order imposes a -1 to-hit on all weapons that do not have the Vector tag and costs 1 movement as the ship surges in an unexpected direction.
• Release Limiters!: Roll Engineering to get additional power, every success nets one power point. Zero successes means something broke and your ship is -1 power until it can be repaired.

Battle Drills

Drills are rehearsed actions taken by the crew; they are generally less effective than orders but are not limited by command like battle roders; a ship may perform as many drills as it desires within the limits of each drill (ie, no more lock-ons than it has unassigned directors)

• Lock-on: Roll FC to acquire a lock on an enemy ship at the end of the turn (lock comes into effect next turn). A ship may only have as many locks as it has directors, and a director must be unassigned to acquire a new lock.
• Shift Target: You stop locking one or more targets, unassigning your director(s). This drill may be followed up by a lock-on or by a fast lock, but no single director may attempt to acquire a lock more than once per turn.
• Hard Break: Roll Shiphandling to attempt to break a lock, as per Break and Evade. This drill will immediately unassign all directors on the ship performing it and costs 1 movement.
• More Power!: Roll Engineering to get additional power, every two successes nets one power point. Zero successes means something broke and your ship is -1 power until it can be repaired.

Power Assignment

Ships will have a number of Power Points (3-5 probably, with bigger/better ships having a few more?) which can be used to improve various performance aspects. The specific effects of each might vary from ship to ship, a battleship would get many more bonus laser shots per power point than a corvette would!

Ideas:

• 1 power to energize weapons
• 1 power to energize deflectors
• 1 or more points to get more lasers, speed or deflectors
• 1 or more points to regenerate shield bubble
• Special abilities
• Other things?
• Run silent?

Weapon Functioning

Missiles
Gunnery weapons are resolved as they are fired, immediately returning a result. By contrast, missiles have a time of flight; this is represented by a modified turn order for missile fire.

• Uniquely and unlike other weapons, missiles are launched earlier in the turn order, in the Captain Phases. They impact in the Weapon Phase alongside all other weapons - damage effects from missiles happens when all other damage effects do.
• Missiles are launched as a Drill. There is no roll to launch missiles.
• Missiles may have more than one range value; this range value will be noted by what Captain Phase they are launched in. Missiles launched in the 1st Captain Phase will have longer ranges (ie, more flight time) than those launched in the 2nd Captain Phase.

The concept here is that there is enough of a delay in firing missiles that the target may be able to react defensively; a target further away thus has more time (or at least more opportunity) to react.

Quick Weapon List

• Short Beam: [Vector] A conventional beam weapon of modest range. Ubiquitous.
• Long Beam: A large-caliber, long-range energy cannon. A very stock weapon.
• Fort Beam: [Unstable] So called because turreted weapons of this caliber was first fitted to space forts. Today however they are often found on warships as well, though the name endures.
• Keel Beam: [Axial] [Power Hungry 3] [Unstable] A powerful axially-mounted beam cannon designed to punch through heavy defenses. (special to hit and damage rules TBD)
• Railgun: [Mag-Fed] [Shield-Pierce] A short-range kinetic cannon who's high-velocity coil-wrapped projectiles ignore shield bubbles entirely.
• Type 1 Missile: [Missile] [Mag-Fed] [Vector] The smaller of the two common types of missiles used for centuries by the Great Empires, compact and affordable.
• Type 2 Missile: [Missile] [Mag-Fed] [Damage: 2] A much larger and individually more dangerous missile, these weapons have a serious knockout punch or a nasty first blow.
• AMG: [Butcher] [Haywire] A signature weapon of Jardin, the anti-matter gun. Only truly effective at short ranges but exceedingly unpleasant to be on the recieving end of.
• Hunter-Slayer: [Missile] [Mag-Fed] [Shield-Pierce] [Smart] A highly sophisticated missile of Rifter make, pricy in the Empire and of dubious legality but deadly.
• Cutting Beam: [Shield-Pierce] [Hull-Pierce] A weapon believed to be of Rifter origin, the cutting beam is a highly-focussed laser with excessive penetrative ability. This does, however, fall off; at Medium range it loses Shield Pierce and at Long it loses both piercing abilities.
• DEMP Gun: [Haywire] [Dampener] [No hull damage] The directed electro-magnetic pulse gun is a key policing tool to bring fleeing suspects to a halt. While its military value is more limited, it does find some use.

Tags: (non-inclusive list, but it seems to have gotten long!)

• Vector: Represents any sort of weapon that suffers minimally from aggressive maneuvering, be these actual vectored beam weapons, fast-turning stabilized turrets or self-guided missiles.
• Unstable: The conceptual opposite of vectored weapons, these are weapons that require significant time to 'settle down', simply reorient slowly or have very limited arcs of fire; extremely large turreted cannons or fixed weapons such as gunbanks, rocket-torpedoes and keel mounts all apply. Unless otherwise noted, unstable applies double penalty from maneuvering-related complications.
• Axial: This weapon is aligned with the ship's direction of motion, be it a spinal supercannon or a cluster of forward-firing blasters. This weapon must be fired at a target that can reasonably be construed as in its 'forward arc' based on the firing ship's movement.
• Magazine-Fed: This weapon has low or no power requirements and thus can be fired even when its parent ship has not spent a power point on energizing weapons.
• Missile: This weapon is a large projectile, large enough that it can - in theory - be shot down.
• Shield-Pierce: This weapon, if not stopped by deflectors, ignores shields and does damage directly to hull.
• Hull-Pierce: This weapon ignores conventional armoring and can poke holes right into the core citadel of a ship with ease. All damage it inflicts ignores hull entirely and is done to vitals.
• Power Hungry X: The weapon or other system in question has a particularly immense power demand (such as a spinal mount beam cannon or a jump drive) and thus can only be ued when it has been fed X amount of power points. These can be accumulated from turn to turn to charge your (super)laser.
• Reserve Power X: The ship has unusually large emergency power reserves, these can be tapped to get extra power. They cannot be replenished during combat.
• Smart: The weapon never needs a lock and has no range modifiers as it had sophisticated onboard targeting. Smart weapons generally skirt legality very closely.
• Butcher: This weapon is extremely brutal in its effects and for every point of hull damage inflicted the target suffers 2 hull damage and 1 vital damage.
• Haywire: This weapon has a particularly significant effect on electronic systems and every hit reduces the target's FC and Sensors by 1 next turn (to a minimum of 0).
• Dampener: This weapon induces energy fluctuation in the target, disrupting onboard power systems. A target struck by this weapon loses one power point per hit; a ship reduced to 0 power points then loses 1 speed per hit until it reaches speed 0 at which point it is effectively disabled. A ship suffering dampening may not spend power until it has recovered its speed (at 1 power per speed). Some other rules for hitting large ships blah blah.
• Hardened: This ship's components are hardened against most shenanigans and ignores various effects such as Haywire, Shield-Pierce, etc. If specified (eg Hardened Shields) it only applies to that, otherwise it applies to everything.
• Heavy {modifier}: Bashing through Hardened via sheer force of force, Heavy is essentially an extremely powerful version. If used on an item that has a quantitative effect (eg Dampener) against a non-hardened target, it has double effect. Otherwise it operates as normal (you can't double-penetrate armor!)
• Skirmish Director X: The ship has one or more close-in auxiliary fire control networks, enabling it to rapidly acquire and engage fast-moving enemies that get close. This allows a [u]reaction drill[/u] against the first hostile ship to come within X hexes during the movement phase, whereapon if successful it may [u]immediately[/u] fire any weapons that do not have the Unstable tag.

Cosmo Science

Read: Spells

Notes: Spells do not have friend-or-foe, they affect everyone equally.

Energetic

• Shield Transfer - heals target shields
• Tachyon Beam - Shield drain
• Screen Hardening - improve target's deflector rating
• Deflector Disassembly - Reduce target's deflector rating
• Tractor Beam - Reduce speed of target ship
• Deuteron Transfer - for every 2 power used, target ship gains 1 power.
• Sand Cast - Spawns hazard in target hex that reduces energy weapon damage into or through it. (-2 in target, -1 surrounding, cumulative)
• Sabotage - Reduce target ship's crew quality by 1

Electronic

• Jam Target - Unassign all directors on target ship
• Carcinotron - Reduce target's initiative on its next activation
• Sensor Mask - Increase difficulty to lock target ship
• Viral Hack - laughingman.gif
• Missile Redirect - Hack a missile attack to cause the entire cluster to self-destruct or acquire a new target. 0 successes means it retargets on the science ship

Exotic

• Tyken's Rift - Spawn hazard in targeted hex, reduces power (-2 in target, -1 surrounding)
• Gravity Well - movement hazard near target hex (-2 in target, -1 surrounding)
• Gravity Burst - all ships next to the target hex are pushed one hex away. Ship(s) in the target hex are pushed 2 in a random direction and take 1D6 hull damage per size class.
• Minovsky Burst - Spawns hazard in target hex that inflicts a to-hit penalty (as well as acquiring locks and other sensory stuff) into or through it. (-2 in target, -1 surrounding, cumulative)
• Seffle Particle Spray - Spawns lingering hazard into one or more hexes. Any energy weapons fired into or through a Seffle hazard ignite it on a 10 (once per volley), which ignites it and any adjacent Seffle hazards, inflict 1D6 damage per size class to all ships in or adjacent to an ignited hex. Clouds disperse harmlessly after battle.