Starship Tactics (GM)

[lightwitch]

I just ran our second ever session of Starfinder, involving a ship combat for the first time. The players' Shuttle was surprisingly able to destroy the two CR1/3 ships via their linked light plasma cannons (by this point they were level 2 with 75BP), although I was intending for it to be an easier encounter to get them acquainted with the starship combat rules.
However, at several points during the combat, and despite the enemies having weapons in two full arcs, our Operative's Piloting check meant that the enemy fighters were unable to fire upon the players & essentially wasted their turn. (They didn't even get through the basic 40 shields).
So what I was wondering is whether you have any tactical tips for running starship combat as a GM, to make it more exciting & dangerous and less repetitive?

[Peg'giz]

I know exactly what you're talking about. I made the same observation in my goup.

Things I did to counter it:
1. NEVER do 1vs1 ship combats, always attack the players with multiple (lower tier) ships and roll initiative for each seperately (this way you have a higher chance to beat the players at least with one ship).

2. Add environmental effects/assets (asteroids, debris, micro wormholes, nebulas etc.) to your battlefield and give them special effects (blocking LoS, teleport, shield jamming but weapon boost etc.)

This helped me a little bit to make the fights more interesting, but it can still happen that the enemy will not be able to shot back if the players ship has a high speed and a good pilot.
Also let the enemy flee if only one enemy ship if left.

I plan to change the initiative order in my next game to the standard tactical combat order (highest roll first, which also means damage will also be applied directly). This should fix the issue, but have to see how this is working out in the long run.

Additional I want to add some new actions for some roles to break up the repetivity (e.g. give the Gunner the ability to slow the enemy or lay down some sort of inhibitor field).

[BigNorseWolf]

If a ship only has one gun, it really should be a turret.

If you only have a gun on the front, and you lose piloting initiative, you should flyby the other ship so you can ignore facing and shoot them anyway.

Some starship combat notes.

[Peg'giz]

I have to admit, I don't like "only turrets" on ships. This removes the complete tactical positioning aspect from the game.
Especially for NPC ships I would always add some weaknesses to the ships (strong front arc weapons, but weak rear arc etc.) so smart players can find it out and exploit this to get there time to shine.

[BigNorseWolf]

Do a Flyby then. your players won't complain when the pilots winning initiative gets them a free shot on the bad guys.