First off, Hello I have own VBAM for awhile now and only done a few things with it for my rpg games. Now I have a few of my friends that do not live by me and we want to use it for a pbem war game.
Well I have a question or two and hope your experience with this game will help me.
1st. Combat- Doing combat by e-mail since no one can get togwther and do it, they would rather send fleets out and leave the combat to me, What would be the best way to handle it since in the rules you have to choose all the targets, combat scenerio such? Any suggestion would be appreciated.
Actually thats the only question I have for now. But if you have any other suggestion I am all ears, gamers helping gamers.
Thanks
A little Help please from exper. pbem moderators
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Tyrel Lohr
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I ended up having to run all the combat operations myself in the PBEM games I ran as a CM, too. I found that it actually speeds up play quite a bit, as you can just sit down and resolve the battles and then send out the updates to the other players without having to wait for orders to come in or else hope that the players can fight it out on their own via email in any kind of timely manner (they usually can't).
As for which types of space combat scenarios should be generated, that is mostly up to you as the CM. However, it might be simplest to create a chart that you can roll against so that it is completely randomized. Something like this might work:
(Roll 1D6)
1-2: Interception or Breakout
3-4: Deep Space
5-6: Defensive or Deep Space
You would roll once to see what kind of scenario is generated. After resolving that scenario, the forces can choose whether they are retreating or not, at which point you will have to choose whether or not it is in their opponent's best interest to generate a Pursuit Scenario against them.
For which ships or other units actually get damaged in combat, the simplest solution is to assign damage yourself. However, you could also randomly choose a squadron and then Cripple or Destroy a unit in that squadron, then keep doing this until all damage has been assigned. This makes damage a bit more random, and would make it so the larger ships may actually damage damage instead of just having all of the smallest (read: weakest) ships eat up damage, which unfortunately is what usually happens in 1E battles.
To speed up combat resolution, one thing you might want to consider is to take a page from what we have planned for 2E and have all Flights that are attacking just add their AS/AF values to their squadron's AS/AF totals. That eliminates a die roll (but also prevents Flights from potentially rolling better/worse than the rest of the task force), and also means you only have to run through damage resolution once per combat round instead of once for Starships and a second time for Flights.
-Tyrel
As for which types of space combat scenarios should be generated, that is mostly up to you as the CM. However, it might be simplest to create a chart that you can roll against so that it is completely randomized. Something like this might work:
(Roll 1D6)
1-2: Interception or Breakout
3-4: Deep Space
5-6: Defensive or Deep Space
You would roll once to see what kind of scenario is generated. After resolving that scenario, the forces can choose whether they are retreating or not, at which point you will have to choose whether or not it is in their opponent's best interest to generate a Pursuit Scenario against them.
For which ships or other units actually get damaged in combat, the simplest solution is to assign damage yourself. However, you could also randomly choose a squadron and then Cripple or Destroy a unit in that squadron, then keep doing this until all damage has been assigned. This makes damage a bit more random, and would make it so the larger ships may actually damage damage instead of just having all of the smallest (read: weakest) ships eat up damage, which unfortunately is what usually happens in 1E battles.
To speed up combat resolution, one thing you might want to consider is to take a page from what we have planned for 2E and have all Flights that are attacking just add their AS/AF values to their squadron's AS/AF totals. That eliminates a die roll (but also prevents Flights from potentially rolling better/worse than the rest of the task force), and also means you only have to run through damage resolution once per combat round instead of once for Starships and a second time for Flights.
-Tyrel
[i]"Touch not the pylons, for they are the messengers!"[/i]