One complaint I've heard rather often so far is that starship combat takes too long. I personally enjoy its depth, and I get that some of the time spent is due to players working out the new rules, but even taking those into account it seems to take a disproportionate amount of time relative to the rest of the scenario, making it sometimes difficult to fit into a 5 or 6 hour timeslot. At least one player I've played with has expressed the opinion that he finds it tedious and would rather not play scenarios with them.
I have two suggestions that might make starship combat work better for the SFS Roleplaying Guild.
Firstly, make it a point to mention when a scenario features starship combat. It will help players and GMs set time expectations.
Secondly, consider making a houserule for SFS whereby if the GM proposes and all the players agree, the gunnery phase will occur twice each turn. Between the first and second gunnery phase, each science officer can make one attempt to balance the shields or aid another's science officer's attempt to balance the shields.
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In my experience, if the players are on top of it, with the role sheets and run through the phases quickly, starship combat can be fairly quick. I can understand an opinion of tediousness, but you are playing a level based game so....it is kinda inherent to that whole idea. (Plenty of PFS scenarios with tedious combat, so tediousness is not unique to starship combat.)
Phase 1 engineer rolls
Phase 2a all pilots roll and the sci off rolls
Phase 2b ships move and pilots roll for maneuvers
Phase 3 Gunners roll to hit and damage
If you encourage planning and pre rolling it be super quick.
I am all for making things run faster, but it is definitely not okay for SFS to add an additional gunnery phase, as that is substantially changing the rules.
I definitely remind teams that they can switch roles at the top of the round, so the engineer or science officer can spend some rounds firing off weapons. Two gunners helps a lot to speed things up.
I also think it's important to just call the battle if it's getting extremely drawn out and it's obvious that the PCs are winning.
In SFS I'm seeing ship combat rounds taking 5 minutes at most, unless the GM has a number of ships to deal with. But 1-on-1 ship combats are going fast since half the players make 1 roll, there is 1 set of movement (instead of 1 for each player) and gunnery phases take the longest but they are still quick (x to hit for Y damage on Z quadrant). Next round.
Admittedly, your players have to be:
1) Awake
2) Thinking about what needs doing.
Have role cards helps immensely.
Have 1 person track shields helps also. For us it isn't even the engineer, it's the captain or science officer.
One complaint I've heard rather often so far is that starship combat takes too long. I personally enjoy its depth, and I get that some of the time spent is due to players working out the new rules, but even taking those into account it seems to take a disproportionate amount of time relative to the rest of the scenario, making it sometimes difficult to fit into a 5 or 6 hour timeslot. At least one player I've played with has expressed the opinion that he finds it tedious and would rather not play scenarios with them.
I have two suggestions that might make starship combat work better for the SFS Roleplaying Guild.
Firstly, make it a point to mention when a scenario features starship combat. It will help players and GMs set time expectations.
Secondly, consider making a houserule for SFS whereby if the GM proposes and all the players agree, the gunnery phase will occur twice each turn. Between the first and second gunnery phase, each science officer can make one attempt to balance the shields or aid another's science officer's attempt to balance the shields.
Product Pages for Scenarios are supposed to be tagged with things like that already.
While I have noticed my groups of 4 having more difficulty with Startship combats then when, I have full tables I don't think an extra gunnery phase is needed. Most AC and TL values I've seen so far are very low. Most of the difficulties my groups have had could very easily happen with regular combat since the PCs just rolled trash. Like they needed 13s to hit the enemy ship and cant seem to roll above a 5 on die.
Having the role handouts from Into the Unknown for all combats is a must in my opinion and it has made most of my Starship combats go much faster.
I do recognize my experience are a limited sample and it is something that will need to be watched. Even my group that lost their Starship combat in 1-03 enjoyed it though and didn't fault the rules for their difficulty.
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Part of it is experience. Things get faster as the players get more familiar with the roles.
One key thing is to strongly discourage dithering and constant group discussion on everything. Once the player gets a basic knowledge of the roles, the character makes the decision after just a bit of advice.
The other thing I do with NPCs is
1) Not think too hard about their tactics
2) Go with memory on difficulties. If I'm off by 1 or 2 I don't really care
If it is dragging and the result of the combat is reasonably obvious I also call it, not dragging it out to the last crit.
I've got it so almost all combats take 1 hour or less, which seems to be the time allocated to it
I have found starship combats to go smoothly once players understand their range of options, and which ones to key in on & when. So perhaps highlighting the better moves or having suggestions for when to do each could aid newer starship players.
What I do find a hassle is the ships themselves. It's like learning a new PC, but only for one combat and with an unfamiliar stat system. Experience will amend that, but anything to make the presentation of data easier would help. Mainly, having the sub-stats (i.e. weapons) presented as if on a pregen would aid with some of the published adventures.
I'd hope SFS/SF-APs would move to having player handouts (with room for ink) for starships they utilize (if there aren't any already).