Kolokotroni wrote:
Dale McCoy Jr wrote:
I was thinking of this problem over the weekend and here's my conclusion:
Regular combat is fun because you have alot of options. Classes give you lots of options in personal combat. Sure they give you a few tricks out of combat, but mostly they player have lots of options. Fighters choose feats to tailor their unique attack style to how they want to play their character. Rogue players have to figure out how to set up their sneak attack. Various classes have some resource to manage (various pools of points, abilities that work x/day). Spellcasters have to figure out which spells they prepared that day work best on the monster at hand. And at the end of the combat, players get to feel that their choice of tactics, the way they maneuvered through combat, their choice of spells paid off.
Ship combat (and mass combat as well) is not fun because all those options are gone. I know mass combat better than ship combat, but from what I've seen, they are similar in this respect. In mass combat, all those spells you prepared, all those class options and feats you earned, all those tactics you honed are simply gone. You have one options: have your mass combat unit attack/fire your ship's gun and do damage to the enemies hp. That's it. There is no rewarded feeling of "something I earned or choice I made really helped." A mass combat unit of fighters feels identical to a mass combat unit of rangers.
For Ship Combat to be fun, it has to integrate with class abilities and have LOTS of options in it. In regular combat, a rogue has to set up a flank with a teammate. But in ship combat, the ship moves, and not necessarily where the rogue wants it to go. This means the rogue already has less options. In order for ship combat to be an integral part of Starfinder, class options/feats/etc have to present a reason why character X should be at the plasma guns while character Y should be arming the torpedoes. Does one class provide a bonus to energy weapons (i.e. a tech
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Couldn't agree more with both posts.
Another way they could tweek the system to be more inclusive, could be to consider different rules for different scales of ships.
Early level encounters could evolve smaller ships, with a focus more around maneuvers, basic weapons, simple role actions and low HP. Short, sweet and full of suspense, the engineer is still doing basic things like repairs, but with lower ship HP, the chances to repair are more significant.
Then have your larger, longer engagements between the big ships. In these you'd probably spend more time deciding what to do, and would have more option/opportunities per role due to the duration of the fight, but also when those actions are decided, the outcome would be more significant.
