Thread: Starship Frustration
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March 14th, 2019, 06:49 #31
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March 14th, 2019, 09:43 #32
- Join Date
- Feb 2017
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- 3
I'm not saying that I like the situation with the starshipsh, however giving up the whole ruleset alltogether just because there is no automation for starship combat seems a bit much imo :P
I've played several ship battles and it's doable, if anything feels simillar to playing on an actual mat with minis. I've found that it works best with moving the ships one hex at a time. As for figuring out firing arcs, you'll start to 'see' them as you play, or use the arrows to draw them when it's not clear.
The Starship sheet is good enough to keep track of modifiers and system damage. For the rest, good old pen and paper works just fine. There's definetely no reason to quit on Startfinder just because there's no automation in FG for ship combat.
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March 14th, 2019, 10:33 #33
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- Sep 2018
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- 27
Yes its a little bit over dramatic to quit the game entirely but i can understand the frustration considering 5e seems to be the favourite child at the moment. i haven't run starship combat yet and im secretly dreading it, does anyone have any good tips for running it?
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March 14th, 2019, 13:35 #34
To put this all in context - 5E is a fully developed system, has been for a number of years. From the recent patch notes, we see that there hasn't been a huge amount of purely 5E functionality introduced recently: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/filel...atchnotes.html So 5E is not getting a disproportionate amount of FG full-time developer attention.
As Doug (ddavison - one of the owners of Smiteworks) mentioned a couple of months ago (post #20 in this thread), they've already had two developers assigned to this, but both have dropped out due to illness. It's not insignificant work, so Smiteworks don't want to take one of their limited full-time developers away from their current high priority tasks - one of which is trying to progress FG Unity to fruition. If anything, FG Unity is the favourite child at the moment, in terms of developer priority, even if we're not seeing the results of that effort at this point.
I understand the frustration but this needs a new developer, outside of the Smiteworks full-time devs, to replace two previous ones.Private Messages: My inbox is forever filling up with PMs. Please don't send me PMs unless they are actually private/personal messages. General FG questions should be asked in the forums - don't be afraid, the FG community don't bite and you're giving everyone the chance to respond and learn!
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March 14th, 2019, 17:35 #35
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- Oct 2012
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- Kentucky
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- 123
Yeah, I agree. While I would like Starship functionality (and am equally bothered that's been delayed so long), I'm actually more concerned with the drop in Starfinder content in general. For example, Signal of Screams, which I've been wanting to run for a while, released back in November and still it hasn't been ported over. Not much to be done about it, but it is frustrating.
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March 14th, 2019, 20:42 #36
I myself am pretty disappointed there is no ship combat tracker.. but the starship combat really isn't that bad I have run 2 SF games and typical Starship combat does not go much more than 1/2 hr. most of the time consuming stuff is the DC's involved. Get that all together beforehand and as a GM keep things moving and make sure your players know what they are supposed to do in the position they occupy..
As far as the DC's it can be a pain to calculate all of them beforehand.. (scan dcs. computer hack dc so on) but I have a program that calculates everything and builds the PC , PC style NPC and NPC ships with NPC crews abilities automatically calculated and all DC's in the ship sheet .. so I guess I have the edge on that.
*************** The only constant in the universe is change. *****************
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March 14th, 2019, 20:58 #37
We have a few community folks who have volunteered to look into this around the start of the year but we haven't seen anything tangible for it yet.
I would very much like to see this release but you are correct in your assumption that it isn't a priority. It's important, but it isn't our main company focus for now and probably won't be for a while. We did spend a large sum of money on it last year with nothing to show for it... so it's been a disappointment for us as well. The rest of the ruleset and the content available is pretty well done though, IMO.
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March 14th, 2019, 21:58 #38
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- Jul 2016
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- 2,482
Make your own starship tokens with labeled arcs (F, S, A, P), as it can be difficult to tell which side is which if you aren't zoomed in (and sometimes even then). Have a cheat sheet (with the updated, errata'd) DCs handy (edit: also send a link to your players), e.g. this one. Note down 5 % of the PCU in advance (restore shields). Call the combat once it's clear which side will win, don't drag it out till the last hull point (unless you or your players want to). If the ships are about equally good at maneuvering, it might also make sense to simply place the ship going second in an arc of its choosing without counting hexes (as they usually have enough movement/turns to get there anyway). You could also use a ship builder (e.g. this one). Tell your players to decide on rudimentary starship roles in advance and let them read up on their starship role's possible actions (especially the pilot). The PC starship sheet works relatively well for at least tracking this side of the combat (e.g. percentile rolls, bonuses), the enemy ship you'll have to track manually (in a note or on a piece of paper).
Last edited by stephan_; March 14th, 2019 at 22:16.
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March 15th, 2019, 00:05 #39
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- Apr 2015
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- UK
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As a 'quick-fix' I think what would REALLY help is being able to use the PC Ship template for NPC ships: This would make it a million times easier to keep track of damage etc.
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March 18th, 2019, 23:55 #40
Theres really no reason you cant make a npc starship using the pc starship sheet.. That's what I have done and it works fine..
Edit: Theres really no reason you cant make a npc starship using the pc starship sheet.. That's what I have done and it works fine..
Edit : here is an example of a npc ship using pc ship sheet .. I built this tier 15 ship in about 10 minutes using starship design studio, Unlike other ship builders this exports it directly in a module to FG. Once the ship is built and saved just a flick of a radio button makes it a PC ship, or PC style NPC ship or NPC ship. I have included all 3 versions of one ship.. its very usefull if your players capture an npc ship to convert back to PC ship etc...
I included several security features which DC and computer dc can be accessed in the "Computer" (click on computer in systems for that) many other dc are in notes. For npc skills (PC style NPC ship) are accessed in systems, once again it calculates all these dc automatically ..
Anyway just a demo of how pc ship sheet can be used as a npc shipLast edited by Octavious; March 19th, 2019 at 06:54.
*************** The only constant in the universe is change. *****************
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