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VendoViper posted:For anyone following along at home, for context check out "The Balance Of Terror" from ToS Season 1. The Romulans make their screen debut. In that episode they are piloting a much older "Bird of Prey" without warp engines. These War Eagles are much more advanced, developed in response to their encounter with the Enterprise. As I recall (from SFC, which took its ship designs straight from SFB), these War Eagles are basically their old, pre-warp ships refitted with warp engines. Romulans in SFB have three broad 'categories' of ship. The War Eagle belongs to the first one, the Pre-Warp designs, which are generally refits of older, pre-war ships. They have powerful weapons and good shields for their cost but really lovely power and secondaries, and you can kind of see how. Technically, War Eagles are heavy cruisers (CA), and right now you're being matched with a destroyer (DD) and a light cruiser (CL, although the sheet refers to it as a CA). Notice that the light cruiser has more power than you do despite being smaller. The Romulans also have a series of Klingon Refits, which are Klingon hulls (good maneuverability, but poor secondary systems and aft shields) with plasma/cloaking, and then they have their new series, which are top of the line high-tech vessels. Interestingly, War Eagles have Armor, which is rare on Star Fleet Battles ships. SFB warships are very much designed like modern ones, in that they are largely unarmored and rely heavily on active defenses (shields, ECM, point defense, stealth in the case of the Romulans) over just tanking poo poo with their hull. The closest you get to that are probably the Gorn, who build ships tough, with hard hulls and tons of system redundancy to soak up damage. Outside of some weird edge cases, armored ships are generally primitive hulls, and you can sort of see why. The War Eagle has 5 points of armor on its hull, which might have been adequate in those pre-warp days but will maybe stop a single Ph-1 at close range, if at that.
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Jun 21, 2017 09:28
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 21:42 |
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VendoViper posted:Looks like their deal is fighters and fusion beams, while I don't have them in my rule book, guessing from the SSDs I see floating around the internet, they look like they are probably the heavy weapon version of Phasers. Fusions are basically high power super short range death cannon. Hydrants also have the Hellbore, a long range heavy weapon that always focuses damage on the weakest enemy shield.
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Jun 24, 2017 07:17
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wedgekree posted:Wow, that's a pretty brutal first exchange and haven't even firred the plasmas yet. Maneuvering out of sync cost them - one ship is nearly crippled, and the two can't support one another effectively now. Think it's worth it to when done put all plasmas on the fresh ship to try and cripple it quickly so can kill both Gorn ships or go for a guaranteed kill on the nearly disabled one? Generally two crippled ships are better than one fresh ship and one dead ship. The Gorn DD has lost half of its phaser firepower and its power is not in great shape, crippling the cruiser will probably reduce the amount of incoming damage further than attempting a guaranteed kill. Something to note is that plasma torpedoes have travel time-they move 1 hex per impulse (they actually move at Speed 36 but as I vaguely remember the rules those moves are on Impulses 33-36, which ships don't act on anyways). They also lose damage with range and can be attrited down via phasers, so they're actually pretty tricky weapons to use. What is important is that plasma torpedoes are fire and forget. This means that if you fire your plasma torpedo, the other guy has time to fire his own plasma torpedoes back at you.
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Jun 25, 2017 11:17
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Kavak posted:How long is an impulse in real seconds? I remember there was a lot of talk about relativity when I tried to learn how to play this game. Each turn is 1 second, because in combat situations apparently warp power accelerates the ship's timeflow relative to the rest of the universe? Added Space posted:I told you these ships should have surrendered or run first round. This was an absurd mismatch. The War Eagle is a bad heavy cruiser, but that's still in comparison with heavy cruisers and therefore is pretty nasty against a CL and a DD, especially non-refit Gorn ones. But it's still a bad heavy cruiser. The tournament-balanced new-era Romulan version (which IIRC is actually inferior in many ways to some of the better CAs), is listed below: http://starfleetgames.com/sfb/tournament/ssd/2005_Tournament_RFH.pdf It has 2 plas-S and 2-plas-F versus a single Plas-R (which means its peak output at close range is 80 points rather than 50), 37 power to the War Eagle's 26, the same shields, an extra Ph-1, and 2 extra Ph-3s. It's also significantly more maneuverable (Turn mode C rather than D).
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Jun 29, 2017 00:12
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So drones. Drones are like plasma torpedoes in that they're seeking weapons. Unlike plasma torpedoes, they don't lose damage when hit, but rather they have their own hull points and are destroyed when those are exceeded. They have a relatively low amount of hull points. They are much slower than plasma torpedoes. Plasma torpedoes move at Speed 36. The normal drone moves at Speed 24, while fast drones are speed 32 and slow drones are Speed 16. You also get a very limited number of drones. They are not fire and forget-if your ship blows up, your drones lose lock. So why use them if they have so many disadvantages compared to plasma torpedoes? A drone rack uses no energy and fires once every turn. As long as you have drones, you can fire them. This means drone-heavy warships like Klingon and Federation drone cruisers/etc can move real fast while running tons of ECM and shield reinforcement. Drones do full damage even if they hit their target with 1 hull point remaining. Drones don't lose any damage at range and do pretty hefty damage for something that fires once every turn. And drones can stay active for a surprisingly long period of time, allowing some pretty extreme-range attacks. Your two CLs only have a single drone rack each, which means you'll likely be using drones more to soak up enemy phaser fire than to deal damage, but if the other guy has fired all their phasers and a drone will reach them before they can recharge, they can put out some surprising damage. Use them to bait the enemy into mistakes or force them to make decisions about mitigating damage or dealing damage, don't think that you can just volley them off like a modern AEGIS cruiser and win.
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Jul 21, 2017 20:17
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Gnoman posted:I think you're mixing some information from Starfleet Command in here. I actually didn't know that SFC used different rules for drones than SFB, given that pretty much everything else was taken straight from the boardgame. Thanks!
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Jul 21, 2017 21:47
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Gnoman posted:No, they're from SFB. They're just not in the rules the OP has access to. There's a whole bunch of other races which never showed up in SFC too, right? Like the Andromedans and the Tholians and the WYN? What is up with those guys? Because I know every race in SFB has a gimmick or a specialty. The Federation build well-balanced, multirole boats. Klingons are fast and optimized for frontal assault at medium range. Romulans are sneaky fuckers with heavy alpha strikes. Gorns build everything with tons of power, shields, and hull. The Lyrans have the ESG (RAMMING SPEED). Hydrans are optimized either for close-in knife fights or medium-range hellbore sniping. The Kzinti/Mirak use missiles and missiles and more missiles. The ISC build extremely good, expensive boats and have the PPD, which has a minimum range but puts out a lot of accurate, efficient damage. Etc. MJ12 fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jul 21, 2017 |
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Jul 21, 2017 21:54
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