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Can I choose to have a lower tier ship?
I know the tier determines how many build points I have; what if I don't spend any of them? Is the tier of my ship lower when I do so?
Then, going by the ship progression in the SF Society Guide, you slowly start to lose.
The effect looks more gradual, but it is effectively the same as not leveling up, but still being expected to fight higher CR foes.
Can I choose to have a lower tier ship?
I know the tier determines how many build points I have; what if I don't spend any of them? Is the tier of my ship lower when I do so?
I think you must be able to choose to have a lower tier ship. After all, you can presumably capture a generic ship of some type (say, a Norikama Dropship, which is Tier 8), and choose not to upgrade it, even if your APL is higher than 8.
Suppose you can choose to take a lower tier ship. Is it ever worth it to do so? I suspect it will depend on the party composition, in a weird way.
--If most people in the party can make their crew action checks a decent percentage of the time in a ship whose tier equals their APL, they should go for a max tier ship.
--If most people in the party can't make their crew action checks a decent percentage of the time in a ship whose tier equals their APL, but they could if the DCs were (say) 4-6 points lower, then they should go for a tier-2 or tier-3 ship.
--If most people in the party can't make their crew action checks a decent percentage of the time in a ship whose tier equals their APL, and they could only make such checks a reasonable percentage of the time if the DCs were *much* lower, then they're probably best off ignoring most skill-based crew actions, and just doing basic things which don't require skill checks, like the Fly and Shoot actions, and picking a max tier ship for the AC, HP and weapon advantages it offers.
So I suspect that parties who are generally *close* to being able to reliably make their skill checks would benefit from a lower tier ship. But parties who can reliably make their skill checks, and parties who are far from being able to reliably make their skill checks, are best off with a max tier ship.
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Based on the DC 70 thread, once you get to higher levels, it becomes more and more difficult to do the special actions for your ship, to the point where it becomes impossible for some maneuvers (like overcharge) to be performed at all by level appropriate PCs in level appropriate Tier ships.
At that point, taking a lower tier may actually be better, so you can actually pass your skill checks.
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Your choice of weapons, armor, defenses, and shields (the most important of starship qualities for combat purposes) is not hindered in the slightest by your Tier (at least, not explicitly so). You can be Tier 1 and buy a Maser, arguably one of the best heavy weapons, with no penalties. You can be Tier 1 and even buy Mk 15 armor. The largest BP purchases which would be gated out from tier 1 ships would be the computers or the frame, since larger frames can't be purchased at tier 1 - but it's implied you're not supposed to have a frame larger than large, anyway (or at least the game's not designed around PCs have such ships). Because of this, it's easy to see a ship capable of reaching peak performance relatively quickly, probably around Tier 9 or 10, with future upgrades merely being conveniences or minor adjustments.
Since a bulk portion of the ships statistics are based on the party members and their levels, that means that you'll still gain in power overtime. The ship, on the other hand, just loses out on gaining maybe an extra weapon and maybe an extra bit of armor - the latter of which is solved easily by Pilot ranks rising as level does, potentially overcoming the bonus the armor could provide while taking no penalties.
What you then gain in exchange for not upgrading is the ability to make all your DCs at an easier rate, potentially being auto-succeed the higher level you get.
Some upgrades don't even really get that much better - armor actually causes problems, particularly with mobility, at higher ACs, thrusters at top-speed cause penalties to piloting, sensors get at best a +4 and only increase in range, and even most weapons feel more like options and choices with their own pros and cons until you reach Capital weapons - which, as mentioned before, probably aren't meant for players to use anyway, since you can only mount them on Huge or larger ships.
The most critical of upgrades are shields and computers, with computers draining more on BP and shields draining more on PCU. The best shields cost only 40 BP, where the best computer costs 200.
With all that information in mind, with a level 20 crew, what's stopping a Tier 10 ship from being able to absolutely demolish a Tier 15 ship? Keep in mind, that fights as a Tier 14 combatant for the sake of determining difficulty, and even then, according to the difficulty chart, that's well beyond an Epic challenge encounter. And maybe that's an exaggeration, but even then, it's not hard to see how a ship of much lower tier with a high-level party can completely trash a ship many tiers higher than them with the right upgrades.
So there's very little reason to upgrade a starship beyond a certain point, and there's a big reason as to why you wouldn't (skill DCs). Yet, currently, it appears that you're forced to upgrade as you level.
Yeah, I am wondering exactly at what point you can safely go 'Yeah, I'm done upgrading the ship'. I'm betting you could make a mighty nasty cruiser at T8-10 that would ruin the days of larger and higher tier ships with your better crew.
Put the wide arc weapons in the side arc so you can take advantage of your obscene turning ability.
Your choice of weapons, armor, defenses, and shields (the most important of starship qualities for combat purposes) is not hindered in the slightest by your Tier (at least, not explicitly so). You can be Tier 1 and buy a Maser, arguably one of the best heavy weapons, with no penalties. You can be Tier 1 and even buy Mk 15 armor. The largest BP purchases which would be gated out from tier 1 ships would be the computers or the frame, since larger frames can't be purchased at tier 1 - but it's implied you're not supposed to have a frame larger than large, anyway (or at least the game's not designed around PCs have such ships). Because of this, it's easy to see a ship capable of reaching peak performance relatively quickly, probably around Tier 9 or 10, with future upgrades merely being conveniences or minor adjustments.
Huh... my quick attempt to build a "maximal PC combat ship" that doesn't require further GM approval (so something no bigger than Large -- namely, a destroyer) ended up at around 900 BP, well above the 270 BP limit at Tier 10...
Would you mind spelling out the kind of ship you had in mind a bit more? (Maybe you were envisioning a much smaller ship, with much weaker weapons?...)
With 270 BP, I can have a Transport with two heavy forward-mounted long-range weapons (particularly a Heavy Antimatter Missile Launcher and a Maser), a chaingun and heavy laser net on turrets, a light plasma cannon on the aft, M10 thrusters, Nova Ultra power core, a Mk 4 Trinode computer, Advanced Long-Range sensors, a drift engine, and Mk 4 armor and defenses, 480 shields, and 85 HP. In fact, I have all of this with BP to spare.
Armor causes penalties to maneuverability and TL at higher levels. Defenses only really provide a good defense against sensor locks - otherwise, missiles can be countered by with decent success from point-defense - the fastest missile currently is a DC 26 to shoot down with a +12 point, meaning basically a 35% miss chance on top of existing TL.
Oh and with a level 20 party my AC and TL is 34, my gunnery is +29, and I can perform most of my DC's with relative ease (the hardest being 10+3* tier, which at worst is a coin-flip). And according to Tier Challenge, I'm supposed to be fighting ships of Tier 9 with "average" difficulty, since, as per RAW, having a high level crew at most adjusts your effective Tier Challenge by 1, ever.
Accordingly, against a Tier 9 enemy as listed in the book (Hivonyx Titan Hauler), my ship can only be hit on a 17+, meaning there's only a 20% chance to hit me with then a further base 35% miss chance if firing a missile, and within short range I can broadside the ship from the front for an average of 135.5 damage, only missing on 1s. From that, on the ship in question, I've depleted its arc shields and dealt an additional 125 damage, making it hit 3 critical thresholds in a single attack, and being able to completely disable the ship in the following round.
And this encounter is an average, typical encounter to be facing. Not "easy" or "mundane" or whatever.
Even against much higher tier ships, my crew still has the advantage of being able to make the DCs for key actions far, far more often (or at all, in some cases).
The issue is that even encounters with other ships, RAW, scales almost exclusively with your ship tier, only partially modified by level.
Even then, why shouldn't I just grab 5 ships with full crews for each of my party members at a "lower tier" to tackle harder problems? Let's not forget - you're punished for upgrading your ship tier, and get very little back. My weapons might be able to be upgraded a bit in the picture above, maybe do a bit more damage, but as-is it's able to tackle encounters "meant" for it just fine.
With 270 BP, I can have a Transport with two heavy forward-mounted long-range weapons (particularly a Heavy Antimatter Missile Launcher and a Maser), a chaingun and heavy laser net on turrets, a light plasma cannon on the aft, M10 thrusters, Nova Ultra power core, a Mk 4 Trinode computer, Advanced Long-Range sensors, a drift engine, and Mk 4 armor and defenses, 480 shields, and 85 HP. In fact, I have all of this with BP to spare.
Armor causes penalties to maneuverability and TL at higher levels. Defenses only really provide a good defense against sensor locks - otherwise, missiles can be countered by with decent success from point-defense...
Thanks, that's helpful. This helped me see several ways of reducing the BP cost I came up with that needn't hurt combat capability that much. As you point out, maxing out armor comes with a cost, and so you're not clearly much worse off saving BP and getting lower armor. And you don't need to have a Mk 10 duonode computer if you can easily make the skill checks anyway. That saves a bunch of BP as well. Interesting...
And according to Tier Challenge, I'm supposed to be fighting ships of Tier 9 with "average" difficulty, since, as per RAW, having a high level crew at most adjusts your effective Tier Challenge by 1, ever. ...
The issue is that even encounters with other ships, RAW, scales almost exclusively with your ship tier, only partially modified by level.
Yeah, that does sound funny. To make the "lower tier ship for easier skill checks?" trade-off an interesting one, the GM would definitely need to set the opposition using APL instead of starship-tier-w-minor-level-adjustments. Otherwise, as you point out, there's no real downside to sticking with a lower tier ship... Good point.
An added thought: This discussion makes me think that it's a good idea for GM's to allow players higher level players to build Huge+ size ships. Once you get to the larger ships, a lot more BP-expensive options become available, and you're back to facing real, painful choices about what to focus your BP on. Which is as it should be!