gunnery skills and npc, makes armor useless and pc irrelevent

[Julien Marchal]

so npc gunnery is counted as a skill and they get 4+1.5tier to their gunnery check...
This is wrong for the following reason:
1.Pc only get 4+lv on that check (assuming 18 dex)and there is very little to increase that number. An extra 1 at lv4 by buying a stat boost item, 1extra at l10 for reaching 20dex... So pc ends up way behind compared to npc
2. Pc might as well not put any point in defenses on their ship. The npc have 95% hit chance at mid lv as armor doesnt keep up vs npc gunnery.

[The Cyber Mage]

I haven't looked too closely at the math for this, however, keep in mind that the expectation is the PCs are going to be fighting lower level ship opponents.

[Porridge]

Julien Marchal wrote:

so npc gunnery is counted as a skill and they get 4+1.5tier to their gunnery check...

This is wrong for the following reason:
1.Pc only get 4+lv on that check (assuming 18 dex)and there is very little to increase that number. An extra 1 at lv4 by buying a stat boost item, 1extra at l10 for reaching 20dex... So pc ends up way behind compared to npc
2. Pc might as well not put any point in defenses on their ship. The npc have 95% hit chance at mid lv as armor doesnt keep up vs npc gunnery.

In some ways, I think you're underestimating the problem, because for some ships (e.g., the BMC Mauler, the Atech Immortal, and the Vindicas Tyrant) they're treated as "master skills", and given values equal to 9+1.5*tier, not 4+1.5*tier.

In any case, I completely agree that these values seem too high, since, as shown here, virtually all of these Gunnery values are higher than it's possible for a PC to obtain.

One possible source of this mistake is that they mistakenly treated Gunnery as a skill (instead of an attack bonus), as you suggest.

Another possible source of this mistake is that they modeled these stats after the Starfinder monster stat blocks. And with Starfinder monster stat blocks it isn't a huge deal if NPCs have (say) higher attack bonuses than a PC could have, because PCs have significantly higher ACs (by comparison) to balance things off. And so maybe they generated these values using the same rules they use to create Starfinder monster stat blocks.

But since PC and NPC ships have the same ACs, giving them this kind of big boost to their attack bonuses results in NPC ships having a big advantage over PC ships.

[Julien Marchal]

The Cyber Mage wrote:

I haven't looked too closely at the math for this, however, keep in mind that the expectation is the PCs are going to be fighting lower level ship opponents.

Not really. Of the 3 starship fights I have read in official scenarios a single one has a ship lower tier than the PC level.

[Ellias Aubec]

It has been stated that starship combat will be looked at with the super high DCs etc.

[Wrath]

Interestingly, NPC have different stats and build philosophies than PCs. Maybe the ships will too.

I guess it's a bit harder with a ship, because technically you can loot the ship at the end of a combat.

[Maezer]

Ellias Aubec wrote:

It has been stated that starship combat will be looked at with the super high DCs etc.

Where? I really wish these boards had a dev finder search function or something.

[Hithesius]

The discussion that prompted that comment was specifically about starship combat DCs rather than skill levels, so I'm not certain that NPC gunnery values will also be changed. But they're topically related, so it's certainly possible.

And yes. The search function does unfortunately seem to be somewhat lacking, in my experience.