Balancing a Fighter Squadron for SFS APs


General Discussion


I like options. I know it's not the most OP or odeal, but it would be fun. Viability though is debatable.

My group hasn't gotten to any starship combat yet, but reading the CRB on things:

Multiple Starships wrote:
If the PCs have more than one starship, use the highest-tier ship’s tier as a base and add 1 to this value for each additional starship within at least 2 tiers of that starship. If none are within 2 tiers, add up the tiers of all the additional starships and add 1 to the base value if the total is equals or exceeds the base starship’s tier. Use this modified value when determining the encounter’s difficulty. If there are multiple enemy starships, treat every pair of enemy starships of the same tier as a single starship of the pair’s tier + 2 (and every trio as a single starship of the trio’s tier + 3). If there are a number of ships of different tiers, use the formula for multiple PC ships to determine the final difficulty. For example, if the enemy consists of three tier 1 starships, a tier 4 starship, and a tier 7 starship, the final result would be a tier 8 challenge.

There's no rules for how PCs get multiple ships, so ignoring that lets put it to the test.

Assume a team of 4-5. The PCs will need one carrier ship, and we'll say four tiny one crew fighters. The carrier ship is either piloted by the 5th PC or it's an SRO with a GM controlled AI so it's not a sitting duck.

The PC's tier is supposed to equal their APL, so with 5 ships, they could at max be APL-5. Could four APL-5 fighters feasibly take on AP starship combat?

Sovereign Court

The biggest issue will be that they won't necessarily have access to the engineer, captain and scientist options as they will all be pilot/gunner for their individual ships. There is an option in the Pact Worlds books that can link them together to share these rolls, but it might be a bit weird.

As for progress in combat, they might do ok, but with tier ships that low, they may be running very low on BP to get a gun and shields sufficient to avoid being destroyed in just a couple of hits.


Without simulating it, there are two obvious things - action economy and durability.

Actions: fighter pilots will have to fly slow and shoot at full bonus, or fly at full speed and shoot at a penalty. And they have no other support from crew actions. My (limited) experiences with starship combat so far make me believe that positioning can be a big help and the fighter pilots will lack that most of the time. ("The weather gage")

The other thing is durability. I'm going to make life easy for a sec. APL is 6, so the fighters are tier 1 ships. Assume it's versus a tier 5 enemy ship.

If my party's ship is any indication, you'll start to see heavy weapons come out. An 8d6 particle cannon on a turret will be 28 damage on average. A tier 1 Burning Nail fighter example ship has 20 shields total, 35 hp and a CT of 7. So one shot takes out the shield, nearly destroys the fighter doing 23 out of 35 hp, and registers 3 criticals. On average. Assuming no other weapons on the enemy ship to help finish the job.

My guess would be that the fighters would get destroyed one by one before they could do any substantial damage to the target ship (which probably has 60-140 shields total)


First modest proposal: Give them each an astromech droid, something to handle Sensors or Engineering.

At this point you need to make some pretty heavy trade-offs; the fighters should probably focus less on having all-round shield coverage and instead just pile shields to the front, for example. The "eggshell armed with a sledgehammer" design that seems to be the PC-ship default won't cut it. Action economy advantage is real though; this would definitely make combats much more thrilling.

Wayfinders

No, the fighter squadron is not viable. Primary reasons are action economy and individual fragility. We recently experienced several combats with multiple small opponents against a Pegasus. In all cases, the opponents were not able to inflict enough damage to last past 'divert power to the shields' in the next engineering phase, while on some turns I was able to 'divert power to weapons' as the shields were undamaged. In each case, it was pretty simple to destroy the smaller craft one by one.

Oh, and Commodore_RB, having shields in only one facing means if you lose the piloting roll, you're a vapor cloud.

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