BroAdso wrote:One to lower enemy ATK
One to lower enemy DEF.
These two are tricky, because they effectively mean +1 DEF or +1 ATK to a friendly unit. I think there might be a way for this to work if applied to a versatile support role, however, but it overlaps with the +1 ATK bonus that a supporting ground force already confers. The two components could be combined so that a supporting ground force could give either a +1 DEF or +1 ATK to a friendly unit, but this is an extra decision point that might not be very interesting for the player as +1 ATK is almost always going to be the "right" answer. But I'll have to see what happens when ground battles start popping up in my test game.
One to further reduce landing penalties.
Marines!
One to allow unit to engage attacking flights.
I think Anti-Aircraft did that in 2E.
One to allow unit to have a flexible bonus, like Missile.
Maybe repurpose Shock into this, so that you pay more for the unit but get a +1 bonus to ATK or DEF?
One to make it easier to transport
Compact will still handle this.
Core ship/base/minefield abilities:
CR-manipulating: Carrier (additional fighter CR), Command (additional ship CR), Minelayer
Additional stats or damage: Missile, Minesweeper, Boarding, Shields, First Strike
Strategic movement: Fast, Slow, Stealth, Explorer
Scout family (manipulation of stats) : Scout, Guardian, Disruption, Suppression, Targeting, Jammer
Transport, building, and strategic help: Assault, Supply, Hospital, Atmospheric
These all look good.
So let's say I have two Midway Class Carriers 6 CV each, and each carriers two Assault 1 and two Supply 1 flights, and then two standard combat flights. Those two carriers plus their flight load could carry and land a Light (4EP) ground unit on their own, right?
That seems fine and WAD. But let's imagine this player designs all their flights with Strikefighter. Could the 4x Supply and 4x Assault 'strike' into an adjacent system with their ground cargo, invade, then return to their carrier? If they lose one of the flights during the Strike, which rules do we follow when asking how to damage or destroy the ground units within?
So three developments - Supply (costing 2CP) counting as 1EP of transport capacity and allowing you to operate out of supply range, Assault (costing 2CP) counting as 1EP of transport capacity for ground units only and lowering landing penalties, and allowing flights to take either for a 4EP cost per level. Creates some interesting (expensive) fleet design choices!
This would depend on when we have the Strikefighters returns to their carriers. I was doing that in the old Update Phase (removed, now End of Turn Phase), so that would leave the Strikefighters in the system for the duration of the Ground Combat Phase, so yes the Light ground unit on the Assault strike shuttles would have a chance to land, and if they took the system than the Supply strike shuttles could land their other troops (or if they were Marines, they could invade from the Supply ships at a penalty). That would certainly all be legal moves for those units.
It would be hideously expensive hardware, and you'd be putting a lot of units in harm's way to try and pull off the strike, but I don't see anything immediately wrong with it. Even if you had each carrier filled with Assault shuttles, that would be much more expensive than having a single Assault ship and you'd be more vulnerable.
My ruling on what to do if you don't have enough transport capacity left is that you just have to destroy the unit. That is the simplest way of handling it, and much better than trying to do the half-and-half solution in 1E where the unit was still there, but just couldn't auto-heal anymore. The auto-healing ground forces in 1E were a major part of the ground combat balance issues that led to one-sided combat situations.
We may need to revisit the cargo transport rules entirely, however, with Galaxies. That's part of the reason I haven't finished those and left them in limbo; I think we need to decide if we need to go back to the 1E verbiage of Supply as cargo capacity, with Assault as a special case and convoys having a limited cargo-only application of it, or find some other solution.
I'm still not clear on why mines effecting movement in a special way is a plus. Having mines 'deployed' in a system could just treat them as a sort of mini-fleet that automatically engages opponents who move into the system, forcing them to leave ships behind if they want to move through. This reduces the need to have mines both act as ships with a bunch of special rules sometimes, and a terrainlike effect cleared by minesweepers other times.
Mines are individually weak in combat (much like flights) and if you allow an enemy force to directly attack them then it becomes trivial to clear them and makes Minesweepers unnecessary. As for the tactical application of mines, there are some settings where mines are a component of space combat, so that demands that there be some way of handling that. I don't mind mines showing up a damage sponges in Defensive scenarios or when Minelayers are present.
I will admit some of that bias is because Babylon 5 Wars included such weapons and there were a few defensive races (Abbai in particular) that made heavy use of minefields as a significant component of their tiered defenses.
Example: I want to move to Hariss, but to get there I must move through Antares. Antares has planetary defenses in the form of a station and numerous planetary flights, but I could ordinarily move through the system despite that. However, Antares, a PR 4 system, has eight minefields deployed there (its maximum). When my fleet moves through Antares, I have to leave ships behind to "fight" the minefields in a Deep Space scenario while the rest of the fleet moves on towards Hariss. In the same scenario, if I was trying to invade Antares itself, I would still have to fight a Deep Space scenario against the mines first.
There is no maximum to the amount of minefields that you could place in a single system, beyond the realistic economic limitations to build and maintain them. If you want to throw 100 light minefields up in a system, go for it! They aren't going to have much impact on combat, but they are going to take the enemy forever to sweep, which will make the system difficult to move through the system.
If the fleet in Antares could actually "fight" the minefields directly, there again you would have no use for specialized Minesweepers because any old ship could sweep the minefield. I think it is more interesting to require Minesweepers to perform this task, in much the same way that Towing ships help keep a ship moving at speed even when units are crippled.
If any simplification for minefields is necessary, I would say it would be to add a note in task force setup that in a Defensive scenario a player may add a number of minefields equal to the flagship CR before the battle, but that is the limit of how many can be included. Each Minelayer can deploy all the mines it is carrying, too. That would remove some confusion and make it clearer what should be happening.
As an aside, and going back to the direct ships vs. minefields contest, during 2E I experimented with trying to have minefields attack ships as they entered the system, but that just derailed the order of operations in movement and caused problems. That's why with the contested movement it becomes easier to have each minefield count as a ship and "pin" ships in the system.
This would make a great optional rule. However, in the base rules Refits (a ship may be changed into another ship of its class for a reduced cost and bulding time over building a new ship) do a good job of letting you represent extensive upgrades of existing ships if you want to do that.
Yeah, we have the Refit rules already, it just becomes a question of whether you want generational versions of every ship that you unlocked, or require you to have the upgraded ship on your force list.
A related question at this point, too, might be if the +10% tech bonus is too much, or if it would be better to have a +5% instead? That would lead to much shallower/slower tech advancement with less meaningful advances, but it would better accommodate the addition of incremental class updates.
Right now in 2E, a Heavy Cruiser costs 6 EP and at 3012 it would be gaining +3 CP in abilities. In Galaxies, this same ship costs 8 EP and has 20 CP. 12 years would probably be just on the edge of Era II (+20%), which would be +4 CP. So already the ships are gaining points a bit faster. If it was only +5% per Era, then we'd be at +2 CP, which isn't really very fast at all for most units.
I think we're in a good spot right now, with units gaining just enough to be interesting.