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I'm currently playing in a Starfinder Campaign and it is very fun except when it comes to space combat. Every time we enter space combat the game grinds to a halt while we go through the same motions and actions almost every turn trying to slowly grind the opponents hull points down. It's ridiculous how much punishment a spaceship can handle before being destroyed. In fact we haven't been able to destroy a ship yet, only disable them enough that they become inoperable. When I think of starship combat I think of X-wings carefully outmaneuvering tie fighters lining up for the perfect shot only to make a killing blow. Not a couple of space tanks shooting BB guns at each other.
To make the problem worse my GM absolutely loves the system and tries to use a space combat at least every other session, each such combat taking between three and five hours to complete. So far none of the combats has been very challenging and our ship has only suffered minor damage.
Given we're low level, only level 4 and the GM says space combat becomes more interesting at higher levels but after reading the rules I don't see how. I'm not sure where the other players stand, they seem to enjoy it for the most part but did understand my arguments.
Now with the Starship operations manual coming out my GM is more excited about Starship combat than ever and I hope something in that book will make it more interesting but I'm seriously considering skipping any sessions with space combat.
Are there anyone else that has similar concerns about Starship combat and has anyone found any ways to make it more exciting (and faster)?
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a few things happen that make space combat.. well I won't say great but definitely more tolerable in a few levels
1) you hit level 6 and start getting some additional actions you can do. Intstead of the science officer scan and then beating feet over to engineering, they can lock on for +2 to hit against a ship.
2) If you're using the captain gunner science officer engineer paradigm presented by the book, that starts working a lot better (as opposed to low level where you should have pilot gunner gunner gunner maybe engineer)
3) ship weapons start outpacing shield recovery by a lot, so the bb gun against a tank thing stops being so much of an issue. (the higher you go the more you're playing literal as well as figurative rocket tag...)
But yes. A lot of people have the same problem. I've often said that the gunners have the impact, the pilots have all the agency, and everyone else is just rolling the same skillcheck to aid the gunner. Many of the reviews I've seen to starfnder cite the same problem.
I've had a 5th level captain tell me "I make the diplomacy check on a 1, I'm aiding our gunner hit with the biggest gun and getting coffee... later..."
So you're not cra..well. I can't say you're not crazy but you're definitely not wrong.
3 - 5 hours does seem a bit long for a normal starship combat. Especially with all of the players already having a fixed routine for each round. What is the bulk of each round being spent on?
Also, in the starship combats that I have run, the win condition isn't to destroy the enemy ship. Usually it is to drive them off. Damage them enough for them to decide to go pick on someone else. Mindless enemies don't captain starships, and intelligent enemies know when to stop risking their life-sustaining metal containers.
3 - 5 hours does seem a bit long for a normal starship combat. Especially with all of the players already having a fixed routine for each round. What is the bulk of each round being spent on?
Also, in the starship combats that I have run, the win condition isn't to destroy the enemy ship. Usually it is to drive them off. Damage them enough for them to decide to go pick on someone else. Mindless enemies don't captain starships, and intelligent enemies know when to stop risking their life-sustaining metal containers.
We have a fairly large party (ranging from 6-8 players depending on who shows up) so it takes a while to get through all the player actions. The GM also spends a lot of time deciding what the enemies are doing which doesn't help.
We've been mostly fighting unmanned ships piloted by some sort of undead A.I? that doesn't register any lifesigns on scanners and seems to be fearless.
We've been mostly fighting unmanned ships piloted by some sort of undead A.I? that doesn't register any lifesigns on scanners and seems to be fearless.
Sounds like something homebrew or at least obscure (there is a shipmind aberration that runs a ship but that is living). Your GM may be taking such a long time to make its decisions because he has some sort of action priority list or special rules he's using.
I suggest the next time you disable one of those ships you should definitely board it and find out what the heck is going on. Your GM may be wanting you to do so for plot reasons, and if you can gain insight IC into what it is and how it works you may be able to find a weakness or a way to stop them turning up to kill you. At the very least it guarantees a session or two without ship combat as you do the boarding action.
(also if your GM is just wanting to run ship combat to the death and just pulled 'yeah, they're undead AI so you can't negotiate", then stating IC that the ship behaviour is weird/unheard of and you want to board to find out why might cause the GM to rethink what they're doing or write some plot).
We're actually going to start the next session by boarding one of the ships :).
I think he's running a premade adventure, although he may still use some homebrew stuff, but that's ok because he told us beforehand and he allows us to use homebrew stuff also.
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One of the big things I've found for ship combat is customizing your ship. The ships provided by APs (both NPC and PC initial starting ship) are pretty poorly designed.
Redesigning your ship can go a long way for combat efficiency.
Max your shields and armor and speed, put your strongest weapon on a turret. Don't worry about having weapons in every arc, just make sure you have a good pilot to out maneuver the enemy.
I will agree that starship combat can become tedious because you do tend to do the exact same thing every round (with the pilot having a few other things to do) and the GM can make things worse by having the NPCs follow the optimal combat strategy of trying to focus fire on one arc of the PC ship or moving and turning in such a way that the PCs cannot focus fire on one arc of their ship, and on enemy vessels that in theory have enough crew using the Engineer action to Divert energy to the shields and the Science Officer action to Balance the shields.
If the GM does those last two it can really be an incredibly long boring fight...and honestly the rules should just tell GMs to almost never use those actions. Certainly not every round like it seems like the PCs (or at least my group does).
One of the big things I've found for ship combat is customizing your ship. The ships provided by APs (both NPC and PC initial starting ship) are pretty poorly designed.
Redesigning your ship can go a long way for combat efficiency.
Max your shields and armor and speed, put your strongest weapon on a turret. Don't worry about having weapons in every arc, just make sure you have a good pilot to out maneuver the enemy.
I will agree that starship combat can become tedious because you do tend to do the exact same thing every round (with the pilot having a few other things to do) and the GM can make things worse by having the NPCs follow the optimal combat strategy of trying to focus fire on one arc of the PC ship or moving and turning in such a way that the PCs cannot focus fire on one arc of their ship, and on enemy vessels that in theory have enough crew using the Engineer action to Divert energy to the shields and the Science Officer action to Balance the shields.
If the GM does those last two it can really be an incredibly long boring fight...and honestly the rules should just tell GMs to almost never use those actions. Certainly not every round like it seems like the PCs (or at least my group does).
I agree, as a GM I literally never use engineering or computers actions. I just turn, maneuver and shoot.
Refusing to rebalance the shields especially gives the PCs the opportunity to finish a fight quickly.
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I'm currently playing in a Starfinder Campaign and it is very fun except when it comes to space combat. Every time we enter space combat the game grinds to a halt while we go through the same motions and actions almost every turn trying to slowly grind the opponents hull points down. It's ridiculous how much punishment a spaceship can handle before being destroyed. In fact we haven't been able to destroy a ship yet, only disable them enough that they become inoperable. When I think of starship combat I think of X-wings carefully outmaneuvering tie fighters lining up for the perfect shot only to make a killing blow. Not a couple of space tanks shooting BB guns at each other.
To make the problem worse my GM absolutely loves the system and tries to use a space combat at least every other session, each such combat taking between three and five hours to complete. So far none of the combats has been very challenging and our ship has only suffered minor damage.
Given we're low level, only level 4 and the GM says space combat becomes more interesting at higher levels but after reading the rules I don't see how. I'm not sure where the other players stand, they seem to enjoy it for the most part but did understand my arguments.
Now with the Starship operations manual coming out my GM is more excited about Starship combat than ever and I hope something in that book will make it more interesting but I'm seriously considering skipping any sessions with space combat.
Are there anyone else that has similar concerns about Starship combat and has anyone found any ways to make it more exciting (and faster)?
I think you're in luck. The problems you describe seem like an advertisement for the Starship Operations Manual that just came out.
Some highlights, relevant to the issues you raise:
This makes starship combat much more balanced and challenging.
Moreover, SOM has some new squad-specific stunts and crew actions, in addition to the usual stunts and crew actions, and some new squadron-specific systems you can install (like the unification matrix, which allows the squadron ships to merge together into a single higher tier ship!).
It introduces rules for constructing space creatures (for very different kinds of challenges).
And it includes a discussion of various alternate win conditions (win a race, capture the other ship, getting some key cargo from an opposing ship, either by social means, by boarding them, or by some other means; track a ship to their destination, protecting a key ship from damage, escape to avoid destruction from an armada, drop off some cargo to a certain location and then getting out of there before you get caught, etc).
A liberal mix of these rules can make starship combat encounters feel very different.
For example, you can add some sweet buster weapons (very high damage to shields, half damage to hull), and some attachment weapons which allow you up to send boarding parties onto ships once their shields are down, or some boarding pods (with boarding parties aboard) which you can fire at opposing ships whose shields are down.
You can add a hacking weapon and have your science officer hack their ship, turning all of their computer bonuses into minuses you can selectively deploy as you wish. You can deploy mines to scatter around the enemy to box them in. You can use teleporting weapons to teleport opposing ships into environmental hazards, or into suboptimal positions. You can use force ramming weapons to use you shields to bash them into submission.
You can add a VI/AI to your ship, to do valuable but repetitive actions which none of the players want to be stuck with.
You can add some TIM modules which allow characters with various feats to gain unique new actions they can use during starship combat, some of which are pretty sweet, or load up with mystical weapons, which allow you to use mysticism ranks and your wisdom modifier for gunnery, opening up the range of attractive options available to people in different roles.
And so on.
Lots of ways to spice up starship combat. Hopefully some of these will help!
1. Regarding combat being boring because your custom ship is indestructable: SOM includes (sorely needed) optional Budget Design rules, which go a long way toward making custom ships more balanced. Using those rules, you can't just pour all your BP into top notch shields (no more than 10% of the ship's BP on shields), or just mount you big super-gun on a turret and ignore facing entirely (no more than 15% of your ship's BP on adding turrets, turret mounts, and turret weapons; though you can spend up to 35% of your ship's BP on weapons).
This makes starship combat much more balanced and challenging.
While this does seem like it would make combat more challenging and more balanced, it actually is counter productive in my opinion, at making combat more succinct and fun.
Having your Starship with their big gun on a turret makes it a lot more likely that you can finish off the enemy ship quickly
And having less shields than you could otherwise afford is more likely to draw out combat by forcing PCs to run away or do other actions to avoid taking damage, which again I agree makes it more challenging by not necessarily more fun.
I think the biggest thing is for GMs to not run NPC ships optimally, primarily by not using the engineer action to divert power. Balancing the shields is fine, if the players can see that the ships shields as a whole are getting weaker.
These changes can work if people are bored only specifically because you're indestructible, though that hasn't been my personal experience. It's boring because there's really only 4 roles that matter, and 3 of the roles have only 1 meaningful action. Those are the pilot, the engineer, science officer, and gunner. Engineer and science officer basically should only divert and balance. Gunner shoots obviously. The pilot is the only one who ever really has choices.
Apologies if I've missed it, but have you talked to your GM about this ?
Simply getting them to tone it down until more varied and interesting options are avaible to your party (be it from new rules or just higher levels) seems like a decent first step.
Having that much time dedicated to ship combat is a lot, even when everyone's okay with it.
Apologies if I've missed it, but have you talked to your GM about this ?
Simply getting them to tone it down until more varied and interesting options are avaible to your party (be it from new rules or just higher levels) seems like a decent first step.
Having that much time dedicated to ship combat is a lot, even when everyone's okay with it.
We're going to have a discussion at the table on our next session when we have had a chance to read the SOM.
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Have you played the Warframe computer game? They have a ship combat mode that has some decent ideas for space combat. Your squad (of 4 players) has a ship, one person can pilot and fire the forward guns. There's several other gunner positions that other players can man. When your ship takes damage, there will be fires and things that break out that someone needs to run around and repair. Enemies will launch boarding pods that, if you don't shoot down, will unload troops onto your ship that will try to sabotage things. You can also launch yourself out of the airlock and fly around with your personal jet pack, board enemy ships, fight your way to the bridge and commandeer them, or sabotage their reactor to destroy them. Combats also always involve multiple ships of various sizes from fighters to cruisers to capital ships.
Have you played the Warframe computer game? They have a ship combat mode that has some decent ideas for space combat. Your squad (of 4 players) has a ship, one person can pilot and fire the forward guns. There's several other gunner positions that other players can man. When your ship takes damage, there will be fires and things that break out that someone needs to run around and repair. Enemies will launch boarding pods that, if you don't shoot down, will unload troops onto your ship that will try to sabotage things. You can also launch yourself out of the airlock and fly around with your personal jet pack, board enemy ships, fight your way to the bridge and commandeer them, or sabotage their reactor to destroy them. Combats also always involve multiple ships of various sizes from fighters to cruisers to capital ships.
So far I've avoided Empyrean expansion because they made it too much a pain in the ass to get the ships when you're a newish player still trying to get through all the other content.
Overall I don't feel Empyrean was that well received, but the specific ideas you're highlighting here are things that I do think are good are and these ideas applied to Starfinder could make space combat a lot more fun.
Personally, I'd really like for "space combat" to have an option for pirate privateers players who are sitting in the cloaked ship waiting for another ship to get within range, and then they launch a boarding party (all the PCs) which must then board and capture the enemy ship.
Of course, that's really just saying "screw space combat/archwings" and "I want to use my cool powers", which is coincidentally a lot of the complaints I heard about Empyrean.
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Redesigning your ship can go a long way for combat efficiency.
Max your shields and armor and speed, put your strongest weapon on a turret. Don't worry about having weapons in every arc, just make sure you have a good pilot to out maneuver the enemy.
Building a death-sphere is a good way to end starship combat earlier. But it doesn't make the starship combat itself more enjoyable for all of the players at the table.
It actually exacerbates the problems that BigNorseWolf pointed out. It reduces the impact of the pilot since it now doesn't matter as much where you position your own ship. And with only one big gun, you can't even have the other players manning additional weapons to increase your damage output for a round.
So there is still only one player - the pilot - who has any agency, and that has been marginalized. And there is only one player - the gunner - that has any impact, and now there can indeed only be one of them.
In a group of 6 to 8 players, that would make things worse, not better.
Redesigning your ship can go a long way for combat efficiency.
Max your shields and armor and speed, put your strongest weapon on a turret. Don't worry about having weapons in every arc, just make sure you have a good pilot to out maneuver the enemy.
Building a death-sphere is a good way to end starship combat earlier. But it doesn't make the starship combat itself more enjoyable for all of the players at the table.
It actually exacerbates the problems that BigNorseWolf pointed out. It reduces the impact of the pilot since it now doesn't matter as much where you position your own ship. And with only one big gun, you can't even have the other players manning additional weapons to increase your damage output for a round.
So there is still only one player - the pilot - who has any agency, and that has been marginalized. And there is only one player - the gunner - that has any impact, and now there can indeed only be one of them.
In a group of 6 to 8 players, that would make things worse, not better.
I think you misunderstood me.
I did say have one big gun on a turret, but I didn't say it's you're only gun. And piloting has been important to my group because we try to stay behind the target in their rear arc (or any arc without weapons). We've relied on the pilot to keep us in one arc on the enemy so that we're constantly pelting the same set of shield and wearing them down to get to the hull underneath. We've also been lucky to break down shield and then use things like spore torpedoes to disable enemy ship systems.
Typically I recommend the biggest gun you can afford on the turret with one more in the front and port/starboard arcs each.
A typical turn is one pilot maneuvering behind the enemy (or an arc without weapons) while we try to focus on disabling any weapon they have and cracking their shields. If we're getting lucky with the pilot being able to stay behind them and avoid hits then the engineer might make some shots and the science officer might buff chance to hit.
Otherwise pilot does their thing, gunner shoots, science officer balances, and engineer diverts. Repeat ad nauseam.
It's not very fun I'll give you that, but it is unfortunately the most effective method of fighting.
Before my group started doing this we actually struggled with a lot of starship combats, which was even less fun.
My group has played a lot of Starfinder society and adventure path starship combat. We struggled with the same things you did when we first started. Starship combat just went way too long and it wasn't fun.
So, we as players decided to change our tactics and that has made starship combat much more fun for us.
First we realized that you can either play the long game or the short game in starship combat and since the long game is a fun killer we pursued the short game.
To be more clear the short game means we decided to fly our ship as aggressively as possible and fire as many weapons as we could every round as opposed to always diverting power to and balancing shields. The goal being to force a resolution to the combat as quickly as possible.
We wanted to overwhelm the enemy starship as opposed to fighting a battle of attrition.
The GM was allowed to rebalance or divert power to the enemy's shields anytime he or she wanted to.
Each round we tried to attack as aggressively as possible if we won initiative with the understanding that we were going to take some damage in return.
If we lost initiative we would go for a Flyby maneuver so we could continue to attack aggressively on the enemy starship's side of our choosing.
Under level 6 we used multiple gunners and over level 6 we made use of the broadside action along with as many bonuses as possible we could add on to it from the other positions.
The main thing that makes starship combat monotonous and boring is if it runs too long. We made it way more fun by pushing the action and creating a dynamic environment. Not only has this made starship combat exciting and fluid, but we're undefeated in every dogfight we've been in since we adopted these tactics. On top of that I've had great success with these tactics playing with random groups of strangers in PBP games.
Scotty, that was how my group tried to do things at first, but our GM at the time (and this was our beginning with Starfinder and space combat) kind of assumed that the enemy ship was crewed with enough people to try basically one action of every possible role (which makes sense to us) which means that they were divert power to shield and balancing every turn.
So if we didn't do the same, we found our shields dwindling quickly while the enemy's only decreased a small amount.
Since then our GM has stopped using the divert action to shield and uses it for the enemies weapons instead, and only balances after a shield arc is completely depleted.
Since then ship combat went from something that would take several hours to something that takes maybe an hour to complete, but probably less.
Honestly the version that took several hours we'd get about half way through and go "yeah, we're going to win eventually can we just say this is over?"
What it amounted to is if both the GM and players use the maximized survival strategy then obviously it takes a really long time, so the GM just needs to not play optimally.
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I had the same problem at my table, but was able to turn it around by applying some concepts from normal encounters to space combat:
1. NEVER do a 1vs1 "shot-out" on a plain field.
2. Incorporate the Environment in your encounter design
3. give the enemies weaknesses for the players to identify and exploit
4. if it's a important fight play it out in different phases
For space combat this means:
1. a) Give the enemies additional ships. This don't have to be APL ships. Some small low-tier fighters can be enough to spice up the combat and give the players the feeling of "BAM!" when they blow one of them out of the sky with a good heavy weapon hit. Especially if you give them special abilities. So the players can decide to either kill the small ones first to deny the abilities or concentrate on the big one.
1 b) Give the players additional ships/roles/abilities. Especially at later levels nothing says that you can't have NPC gunners or ships which are controlled by the players. Or give them some nice "special tricks". For example: I added a new trick for the gunner called "Tachyon" warhead. it cost one tracking weapon but allows the gunner to lay a 2 hex radius "cloud" which give cover or kills tracking weapons.
2. Add asteroids which block LoS, clouds which give a bonus/malus to shield or movement, Singularities which move ships closer to them etc.
3. Don't build perfect ships. Only give them front weapons or maybe weak side shields, something the players can feel good about when they figure it out. Maybe you can even place hints in the non-spaceship part of your adventure (Note on a Datapad "Scotty, the side shield emitter are still buggy, FIX THEM!")
4. Let events trigger at specific phases or actions. In round three, additional reinforcements arrive. The sun emits a radiation burst every 1d6 rounds, which deals X shield damage to the sun-facing side and destroys all missiles.
Last but not least: encourage your players to be creative and think outside the rules and award good ideas. Example: The enemy is closing in, the players ship is already heavily damaged. One player asked: can we route our remaining shield energy to the weapons, overloading them and blast the enemy out of the sky? YES - Engineering roll, you loose all your shield but will do double damage to the enemy ship!
Be creative, don't let starship combat become a game of dice!
For space combat this means:
1. a) Give the enemies additional ships. [b]This don't have to be APL ships.[b/] Some small low-tier fighters can be enough to spice up the combat and give the players the feeling of "BAM!" when they blow one of them out of the sky with a good heavy weapon hit. Especially if you give them special abilities. So the players can decide to either kill the small ones first to deny the abilities or concentrate on the big one.
I want to say, these absolutely shouldn't be APL ships. Space combat can be pretty easy in 1 v 1 against a single APL ship, but if you're going to use superior numbers against PCs then you can't use multiple APL ships.
Players might be able to take on 2 and survive, but they'd need to be lucky. And it will be very hard.
I would recommend giving a slew of "fighters" that basically can only take a single hit and only deal very minimal damage, maybe just 1 point, but have like 10 of them. It feels very rewarding knocking them out but they're not a serious threat.
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Mechanical tweaks will not fix out of character problems, especially if the other people at the table are enjoying those mechanics you want changed.
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Building a death-sphere is a good way to end starship combat earlier. But it doesn't make the starship combat itself more enjoyable for all of the players at the table.
It actually exacerbates the problems that BigNorseWolf pointed out. It reduces the impact of the pilot since it now doesn't matter as much where you position your own ship. And with only one big gun, you can't even have the other players manning additional weapons to increase your damage output for a round.
So there is still only one player - the pilot - who has any agency, and that has been marginalized. And there is only one player - the gunner - that has any impact, and now there can indeed only be one of them.
In a group of 6 to 8 players, that would make things worse, not better.
I think you misunderstood me.
I did say have one big gun on a turret, but I didn't say it's you're only gun. And piloting has been important to my group because we try to stay behind the target in their rear arc (or any arc without weapons). We've relied on the pilot to keep us in one arc on the enemy so that we're constantly pelting the same set of shield and wearing them down to get to the hull underneath. We've also been lucky to break down shield and then use things like spore torpedoes to disable enemy ship systems.
Typically I recommend the biggest gun you can afford on the turret with one more in the front and port/starboard arcs each.
A typical turn is one pilot maneuvering behind the enemy (or an arc without weapons) while we try to focus on disabling any weapon they have and cracking their shields. If we're getting lucky with the pilot being able to stay behind them and avoid hits then the engineer might make some shots and the science officer might buff chance to hit.
Otherwise pilot does their thing, gunner shoots, science officer balances, and engineer diverts. Repeat ad nauseam.
It's not very fun I'll give you that, but it is unfortunately the most effective method of fighting.
Before my group started doing this we actually struggled with a lot of starship combats, which was even less fun.
I've been analyzing this for about 45 minutes now and I still can't decide if you are actually disagreeing with me or not.
You start off saying that I misunderstood you, but then spend the rest of the post reaffirming all of the points I made.
So color me confused and amused and call it good.
I can't speak for starship combat in a home brew game since I've never played in one, but what I've noticed from SFS and adventure path starship combat is the build of your ship makes a big difference too.
In SFS games you get a choice between a maneuverable, but lightly armed ship and a slower, but heavily armed one. The lightly armed one usually struggles to put out enough firepower each round to do enough damage against the opponent's shields. However, the more heavily armed one puts out enough damage to make up for the other ship's engineer and science officer rebuilding their shields.
When you're building your ship I think you need to prioritize firepower.
If both ships are trying to maximize survival then the game does take forever. However, if your ship has heavy firepower and goes on the offensive I haven't experienced an opponent who was running a survival strategy that was able to make up for the wall of firepower we were throwing at it.
With a tier 8 Drake in an SFS game you can throw out 10d6, 4d4, 10d10, and 3d6 damage in one round when you broadside with all the weapons in your forward and turret firing arcs.
I've been analyzing this for about 45 minutes now and I still can't decide if you are actually disagreeing with me or not.
You start off saying that I misunderstood you, but then spend the rest of the post reaffirming all of the points I made.
So color me confused and amused and call it good.
You seemed to disagree with my previous posts observations, so I was expanding on my view, which seems to be in alignment with your view.
That was why I though you misunderstood, because you seemed to be disagreeing with me.
What I describe is tactically the most effective way to play starship combat, it also just happens to be not very interesting.
Everyone but the pilot can basically just have a if then else statement to control their actions.
Example: Science Officer
if first round combat then scan
else if shield facing enemy >100% then balance
else if no shield damage then then fire extra gun
else if no gun available then Lock On