Is there an overview what fleets are active in the pact system (or at least based in it or operated by an organization within the pact)?
Obviously each planet has its own fleet, probably even several if they are not unified like Castrovel.
And then there are different churches (with the Church of Iomedae being especially heavily armed with T18 dreadnoughts).
And then there are Hellknights, Knights of Golarion or the Skyfire Legion which have their own line of ships.
Or the Overwatch fleets from the stewards.
But who else is out there? When you read the descriptions of the ships in SOM you can make a lot of money selling T15 Battleships (Starhive Vespinar) and even "budget-conscious police forces" are in the market for such ships (Norikama Valkyrie. I do not want to see what well funded police forces use).
Has the Devestation Ark AP some information on that?
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The Starstone Blockade only mentions the Eoxian fleet and the Armada by name; it's a bit too "macro" to otherwise get into specifics.
Not sure if it'll be the same but I was asking a little while back about fleet sizes and got told there'd be content in the new AP that'd help that. So its possible there might be something in there as it comes out that gives an idea of what the pact world has.
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No, for its purposes Devastation Ark abstracts fleets into a generic resource, basically.
You get 20 fleets around Absalom to assign to different missions and those missions can free up other fleets from other sources, but what exactly a fleet is composed of is abstracted. Not all fleets or squadrons should be equal, of course.
Oh that's dissapinting I was hoping for at least lore info on what kind of things are available to different groups.
Starfinders have a battleship flagship, now back in operation after years in repair. They also have a fleet of ships, though probably not a very large one.
To be fair, it was a big enough fleet to give the Jinsuls a kicking from 1 side of the scoured stars to the other...
That still leaves the question open what a fleet actually is. 5 ships? 30? 200? And how many are there?
When police forces have battleships what are we supposed to expect?
And in what composition?
Thats especially complicated as with the official ships tier scales with size despite there being no reason for it.
There are no advanced tier 10 fighters for example and everything above tier 13 is a carrier, battleship or larger.
This is my question too what is a "fleet" for a planet, a system, a multi-system empire? Are we talking multi-system empires fielding fleets of less than a hundred ships or are we talking them losing hundreds of ships in a war and considering it fine because they still have enough at home to keep it secure.
It doesn't seem likely that they'll define this clearly, even over time. Leaving the details, well, officially undetailed makes it easier for a GM to establish their own campaign's norms. Some people probably want Star Wars or Honor Harrington-style massed fleet actions in their games, others may prefer having capital ships be few and far between and the loss of even destroyers or cruisers be a serious blow.
FWIW (which is very little) the Armada combat system in SOM insists on calling a single capital ship (probably at least Gargantuan, but even that isn't specified) a "Capital Fleet" while a "handful of Large or larger" ships is a "Destroyer Fleet" and a "dozen or more Medium or smaller" ships are a "Fighter Fleet." About all that indicates to me is that they aren't using anything akin to the common naval parlance that military scifi often employs. Armada is so abstract it's functionally useless for guessing at the number and sizes of ships a given force or faction might field, which is probably intentional.
Cant screw up world building when you don't do any...
Still leaves a lot of problems how fleets are presented, even apart from the devestation ark AP where fleets are being used but everything has to be kept ambiguous.
Why is tier tied to size? Whats the point of having tier 2 fighters when the carrier is tier 13 and could destroy everything the fighters could touch?
It also means that the flavor text of the ships leave a very uneven picture, see the "budget battleship" Valkyrie peddled to police forces and rebel groups.
Ixal wrote: Why is tier tied to size? It isn't, except in the sense that it would be difficult to usefully spend all the points of a Tier 20 ship on a Tiny frame. The premade ships they've showed us so far have mostly followed the "higher tier = bigger" motif with the silly effects you noted (carriers hauling fighters that they could easily defeat themselves) but the rules don't oblige you to do this.
Important to note that tier mostly defines your BP budget, for NPC ships the quality of their crew, and a number of other things mostly related to DCs. BP does not reflect actual combat performance worth a fig or you wouldn't have to pay for totally noncombat features like lab bays, workshops, crew quarters, etc. You're paying BP for things that are only relevant outside of starship combat, so you can't use them as a "point value" to balance battles through direct comparison. I'm not even convinced that the tier-based encounter building guidelines are much use for that, but it's what Paizo has given us to work with.
Like it or not, we really can't easily derive a simple starship combat board/minis game from Starfinder's rules. They just aren't built for, unlike (say) the old FASA Star Trek RPG and its Tactical Combat Simulator boardgame spinoff.
Ixal wrote:
Why is tier tied to size? Whats the point of having tier 2 fighters when the carrier is tier 13 and could destroy everything the fighters could touch?
There are implicitly troop rules going on where the whole can function as a single entity stronger than the individual parts using the standard rule set.
Hanomir wrote:
It isn't, except in the sense that it would be difficult to usefully spend all the points of a Tier 20 ship on a Tiny frame. The premade ships they've showed us so far have mostly followed the "higher tier = bigger" motif with the silly effects you noted (carriers hauling fighters that they could easily defeat themselves) but the rules don't oblige you to do this.
Important to note that tier mostly defines your BP budget, for NPC ships the quality of their crew, and a number of other things mostly related to DCs. BP does not reflect actual combat performance worth a fig or you wouldn't have to pay for totally noncombat features like lab bays, workshops, crew quarters, etc. You're paying BP for things that are only relevant outside of starship combat, so you can't use them as a "point value" to balance battles through direct comparison. I'm not even convinced that the tier-based encounter building guidelines are much use for that, but it's what Paizo has given us to work with.
Like it or not, we really can't easily derive a simple starship combat board/minis game from Starfinder's rules. They just aren't built for, unlike (say) the old FASA Star Trek RPG and its Tactical Combat Simulator boardgame spinoff.
Yeah, thats what I said in my post before that. Rules wise there is no reason to tie tier with size for the most part, but the game still links it which leads to there being no strong small ships for no explainable reason and leads to the mentioned problem that the carrier is stronger than all the fighters it carries combined or that in an engagement there is practically no role for destroyers or even cruisers.
What would make a bit more sense is that Starfinder doesn't use modern naval methods but works more like the age of sail with battleships being the ship of the line and used for the actual fights while the smaller destroyers and cruisers are mostly there for commerce hunting.
Still, that leaves carries in the same weird role of having to play taxi for a bunch of low tier fighters despite being much more powerful than them.
Ixal wrote: Hanomir wrote:
It isn't, except in the sense that it would be difficult to usefully spend all the points of a Tier 20 ship on a Tiny frame. The premade ships they've showed us so far have mostly followed the "higher tier = bigger" motif with the silly effects you noted (carriers hauling fighters that they could easily defeat themselves) but the rules don't oblige you to do this.
Important to note that tier mostly defines your BP budget, for NPC ships the quality of their crew, and a number of other things mostly related to DCs. BP does not reflect actual combat performance worth a fig or you wouldn't have to pay for totally noncombat features like lab bays, workshops, crew quarters, etc. You're paying BP for things that are only relevant outside of starship combat, so you can't use them as a "point value" to balance battles through direct comparison. I'm not even convinced that the tier-based encounter building guidelines are much use for that, but it's what Paizo has given us to work with.
Like it or not, we really can't easily derive a simple starship combat board/minis game from Starfinder's rules. They just aren't built for, unlike (say) the old FASA Star Trek RPG and its Tactical Combat Simulator boardgame spinoff.
Yeah, thats what I said in my post before that. Rules wise there is no reason to tie tier with size for the most part, but the game still links it which leads to there being no strong small ships for no explainable reason and leads to the mentioned problem that the carrier is stronger than all the fighters it carries combined or that in an engagement there is practically no role for destroyers or even cruisers.
What would make a bit more sense was it Starfinder doesn't use modern naval methods but works more like the age of sail with battleships being the ship of the line and used for the actual fights while the smaller destroyers and cruisers are mostly there for commerce hunting.
Still, that leaves carries in the same weird role of having to play taxi for a... Based on the description of one of the carriers in SOM, they might carry the fighters to deal with other low tier threats while they deal with the big higher tier ships themselves.
As in the fighters go assault landing craft and other fighters while the big ships duke it out.
Maybe they also have some decent pilots and have a chance at hitting the opposing higher tier ship. A coupe dozen extra torpedoes and tactical nukes might make the difference, or at least buy a few rounds of the enemy ship not shooting at the carrier when they try and swat down the fighters.
The squadron rules in SOM provide a basis for making smaller fighters slightly more effective when cooperating against a larger foe, with the new crew actions that give to hit bonuses to a wingman.
I don't think the world building element becomes an issue until they start releasing Starfinder novels and/or comics. So long as the setting primarily exists as a sandbox for roleplaying, there's always got to be a balance struck between building an interesting setting & leaving enough blank/flexible to be filled in/changed by DMs looking to customize for their own preferences & purposes. Point is to give us the tools to tell the story; they give us the ships, we decide how many make a fleet.
FormerFiend wrote: I don't think the world building element becomes an issue until they start releasing Starfinder novels and/or comics. So long as the setting primarily exists as a sandbox for roleplaying, there's always got to be a balance struck between building an interesting setting & leaving enough blank/flexible to be filled in/changed by DMs looking to customize for their own preferences & purposes. Point is to give us the tools to tell the story; they give us the ships, we decide how many make a fleet. It already comes into play, for example in the descriptions of the starships in SOM for example.
I think I will switch my SF to a age of sail battle system, that would explain why high tiers are limited to battleships and larger.
Ixal wrote:
Yeah, thats what I said in my post before that. Rules wise there is no reason to tie tier with size for the most part, but the game still links it which leads to there being no strong small ships for no explainable reason and leads to the mentioned problem that the carrier is stronger than all the fighters it carries combined or that in an engagement there is practically no role for destroyers or even cruisers.
That's not actually true. The tier of a ship isn't actually tied to to the level of the crew operating it. I'm going to guess you're talking about their tier 14 Skyfire merc carrier in SOM and their tier 2 fighter brood. Yes, the carrier might beat all 16 of them as written, but the encounter guidelines (which are the closest we've got to a balancing system and still aren't very good) says flat out not to use crews with more than 4 levels of difference between them. Take those tier 2 ships, replace the crews with level 14 guys to match their carrier, and the brood will murder the crap out of their carrier in a straight up fight. They'd probably wreck a battleship or dreadnought up in tier 16 or so, although they'd lose a lot more planes doing it.
Those little tier 2 ships with higher level crews are AC 30, TL 29, and have something like a +20 gunnery and +30 piloting. Put even eight of them up against their carrier and the carrier's in trouble. Sixteen will smash it flat. They'd struggle against ships with high DTs (something SOM really enabled) but outside of that those little 3d8 attacks add up fast.
The conversion work to swap around crew levels is trivial. If you want dangerous but still somewhat fragile tiny ships that you can use in multiples it's probably better to do that instead of trying to build a tiny ship on a tier 14 BP budget. It's probably not balanced but I'm not sold that any of the CR/APL guidelines are to start with. You'll just have to do some playtesting on encounters to get a feel for what is or isn't a TPK in Space.
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