First Starship Combat Experience
My group alternates weeks between a 5E and SF game. I'm the DM for the 5E game and I get to be a player in the SF game. Starfinder is a new game system to all of us, so we expected our first starship combat to run a little slow. Either we missed some stuff in FG or there doesn't appear to be much automation in starship combat? We are playing the first Dead Suns module and having a blast so far. We have had character to NPC combat a couple of times and didn't really have any issues there. However, we ran into some issues trying our first starship to starship combat.
Please note: The issues we had might not be SF/FG issues, but may be centered more on our inexperience playing SF in FG. Some of the issues we encountered:
1. We, the players, didn't seem to have any permissions to use the ship sheet. For instance, when we wanted to re-distribute our shields, the GM had to do everything. We could view the ship sheet, but couldn't make any changes to it.
2. The players also could not move our ship on the space map. The GM had to move the token for us. (This might be a setting issue?)
3. There didn't appear to be a way to to use alternative skills/stats for abilities in starship combat. For instance, I played the gunner and, if I'm understanding the rules correctly, I have the option to use my ranged weapon skill or my piloting skill to fire the weapons. My ranged skill gave me a +6 modifier while my piloting skill would have given me +11. I didn't see any way for me to tell FG that I wanted to use my piloting skill in lieu of my ranged combat skill. We ended up doing manual roles.
4. When I tried to use FG to fire the weapons the first time, it kept saying the weapon was out of arc and wouldn't let me roll to hit. I was using a FA weapon and our target was 2 hexes directly in front of us. Not sure if that's a bug or I was doing something wrong, procedurally. We ended up rolling manually for the rest of the combat.
In short, we ended up just doing many things manually.
I know that SF is not currently supported by a full time developer/rule set developer right now so I'm not complaining about automation here. I'm really just looking for ways to make things easier on our group. Any help/ideas that can be offered would be greatly appreciated.
This was just my own perception of some of the things that we struggled with. Some of our other players may chime in with some additional thoughts/hinderances.
None of this took away from the game. We still had a fun time. It just took us a long time to work through.
Thanks, in advance, for any insight/help you guys can offer.