VBAM Games Forums

japridemor wrote:Looking forward to the community putting up excel workbooks to design starships, bases, fighters and ground units.

I actually have a couple of these built for my own use right now. I'm loathe to post them however because of all the rulebook data they contain (data, tables, etc). Maybe an official word from Tyrel on whether or not posting something like this is acceptable?

Mahalo.

Go right ahead, Haukea! As long as you aren't replicating huge swaths of the rules in text form I have no problem with you putting up spreadsheets that make it easier for others to create their own force lists. We encourage players to share those kinds of things with each other because they're valuable resources for the playing community.

Okay, here it is, the one I've been using for creating a fun little set of lists I'm tentatively calling "Carrier Wars".

It's really, really basic. And you need the rulebook for the special abilities, but it does help calculate how many points you have to spend on building, and will auto-calculate point increases for tech bonus based on the rules. (I used 0 instead of 3000 as a starting point for YiS, just to keep it a little more simple for the formulas.)

Other than that it's a really easy sheet for creating lists. Just create a new sheet, copy over the headings, and copy over each class as needed.

I've also added a Beta version of my "Carrier Wars" list, so you can see how my template works. I got the idea rewatching BSG, and have tentatively named two of the powers Colonials and Cylons.

I'd be curious how the Carrier Wars ships end up working out when you run a campaign with them. That concentration of superdreadnoughts in each fleet means that both sides are going to be able to soak up a lot of damage, but it also means that losing one of those ships is going to hurt a lot. I'm particularly interested in what the fleet battles end up looking like in that scenario, with multiple superdreadnoughts duking it out in each battle.

I'm surprised that you didn't have a special battleship or superdreadnought with the Mobile Shipyard ability on the Colonial side to cover things like the Pegasus being able to build new fighters. Granted, that would make the ship extremely expensive, even more so than they are right now.

Did you run into any major problems when you were creating all of these units, Haukea? Anything that seems to be out of place or certain breakpoints that people should be aware of?

I think once we have a large repository of player created force lists like these it should make it easier for people to jump in and start playing campaigns.

I should point out that this is my first time creating fleet lists, and I was going for a few core unit types that receive upgrades. That and the uber-carriers. They were designed to be tough and the centre pieces of fleets; look at the beatings Galactica took and what it finally took to put her outta commission.

Tyrel Lohr wrote:I'd be curious how the Carrier Wars ships end up working out when you run a campaign with them.

So will I. Was thinking of just drumming up some fleets and having them go at each other to see what happened; see if anything fell apart using that many small units.

Did you run into any major problems when you were creating all of these units, Haukea? Anything that seems to be out of place or certain breakpoints that people should be aware of?

The one thing that did come to mind as I was working on the "Tender" fleet was the nesting of tenders. While thankfully (and by accident mind you) none of my units work out to have this problem, let's posit this example:

A Super Tender (Cost 16, DV 13, AS 6, AF 4, CR 8, CC 7, CV 4, Tender 6) carries 6 Frigates (Cost 4, DV 2, AS 1, AF 1, CR 2, CC 1, CV 1, Tender 2), and each Frigate carries 4 Gunboats (Cost 1, DV 1, AS 1, AF 0, CC 1/2); and let's say Heavy Fighters (DV 2, AS 2, AF 2). I could, at a minimum, create a squadronconsisting of 2 Super Tenders, carrying 12 Frigates, 48 Gunboats and 20 Heavy Fighers , plus a single Frigate with 4 Gunboats and a Heavy Fighter. That's a total AS of 77, AF of 21, plus the 21 HF. All with no tech bonus, and all for a total of 8 CC.

Realize it's too late now, but maybe an errata on the nesting of tenders?

Haukea wrote:I should point out that this is my first time creating fleet lists, and I was going for a few core unit types that receive upgrades. That and the uber-carriers. They were designed to be tough and the centre pieces of fleets; look at the beatings Galactica took and what it finally took to put her outta commission.

That's a perfectly legitimate approach to building a force list. I think it's interesting that these forces are really going to rely on their big ships to carry them through, and the loss of even a single battleship or superdreadnought is going to be painful. Luckily, they are strong enough that it would be pretty hard to take them out without a concerted effort.

I think the way that I modeled Armor (coincidentally, BSG was in mind there!) does put the Colonials in a much better position to hold on to their capital ships, at least until they are crippled, because they can keep the enemy from getting free directed damage against them.

Haukea wrote:So will I. Was thinking of just drumming up some fleets and having them go at each other to see what happened; see if anything fell apart using that many small units.

I think the biggest question mark is if a straight up SD vs. SD carrier duel would end up being a bloodbath. A really good fighter strike could cripple/destroy one of the SD, which means that they'd absolutely need to have some Guardians or damage sponges available. That works to your favor for the setting, as it means the Cylon Basestars are going to crumple faster than the Colonial Battlestars. However, they may not be able to shoot down fighters quick enough to equalize the numbers.

From a starting fleet perspective, I think the Cylons have an edge if only because they start with their Mobile Base I already available. They can purchase 4 of them and fill them with fighter flights and have a very powerful fleet. Toss in some Fast Picket I for escorts to fill our the two squadrons and they will be able to deal a lot of damage to the enemy.

The Colonials can attempt a similar strategy with their Battleships, But the lack of AS and reliance on CL/CA for AS dilutes their firepower and leaves them scrambling to get their Escort Frigates online. If I were in a game as the Colonials, I'd prioritize tech advancement up to Year 5 and then start mass producing SD as fast as possible. If I thought I had 14 turns to prepare, I'd just lay down as many of them as I could; otherwise, I would use the Crash Production rule (if possible) to pay extra to quickly get at least two of them operational.

Haukea wrote:The one thing that did come to mind as I was working on the "Tender" fleet was the nesting of tenders. While thankfully (and by accident mind you) none of my units work out to have this problem, let's posit this example:

I talked to someone else about this, but he was more worried about the Tenders deploying carriers with fighters, which didn't bother me, but the "Tender accordion" is a problem. Luckily, I think I'm able to shorten one sentence in that description and add a very short rule to this effect without breaking the layout. At least it looks that way right now! Good catch!

Tyrel Lohr wrote:Anything that seems to be out of place or certain breakpoints that people should be aware of?

Yes. Ungodly amounts of fighters are an unholy pain to manage. Ran two engagements with a Colonial vs Cylon fleet, Year 5. 3 SD, 4 BB, and 4 CA squadrons (and 149 fighter flights) vs 5 SD, 4 CA, 2 CL (165 fighter flights). Roughly a 3:2 mix each on bombers to interceptors. (Go big or go home, my philosophy in stress testing things.)

Ran the first one, got about 3 rounds in before there were almost no fighters left; had decided that the Colonials were going to do mass strikes on the Mobile Bases, while the Cylons were going to spread out and hit the weaker BBs. There were also some rather amazing 6s rolled for AF rolls, which did skew things a bit. But keeping track of all the 'mini-battles' of fighter squads vs each other was hectic at best.

The second one I ran I took a slightly different approach; pick a squadron, kill it! Basically Bombers vs interceptors. Very BSG, with clouds of fighters ripping into each other. Giant dogfights. Much easier to track combat, but the attrition was about the same.

So while I'm going to keep them around, flesh them out a bit, and make up a bit of a back story for them, I don't know if I'd say that on a fleet level engagement they work the best. It looks like you run out of fighters (attrition units) before the battle is over. When I catch my breath, I'm going to run a couple of smaller, not maxed-out fleet engagements, maybe 1 or 2 SDs and some support ships, see what happens.

The fighter attrition rates are part of the reason that we added the flight recovery rules to the game, so that each side could recover some of their flights at the end of each battle to replenish their losses.

Tracking squadron locations for flights is something that can require some extra bookkeeping during battle, but usually there aren't that many squadrons for them to be assigned to and it becomes pretty easy to figure out where each flight is, especially if you write down your assignments at the start of each round and refer back to that.

The Carrier launched flights are at an advantage in battles like this because they get their +1 DV bonus which makes them considerably more difficult to kill. At DV 3, the flights should have been whittled down just bit by bit, but if all of the flights are converged in a single squadron it still wouldn't take too many good die rolls for them to eliminate each other.

Nice work on the spreadsheets!

We circled back on these new fighter and carrier rules because of a similar carrier war test I was running. Then we saw a similar problem in the Dilgar War playtest in May and June. We wanted to encourage the right use of carriers and we didn't want the "packages of fighters" issue that 1e had. It made a big difference, especially for the Dilgar as they leveraged the Thorun fighters against the Drazi.

I am biased though. I generally increase my headache level for players in any of my "carrier" settings with big construction times and finicky carrier rules.

-Jay

Here is my attempt at a Unit Creation spreadsheet. It has macros to clear the current design and to transfer the current design over to the appropriate record sheet.

Cool unit builder!

Nicely done!