Situation:
- Flying a highly mobile destroyer with our pilot being sufficiently better than the opposing pilot that they won about 95% of the helm phase initiative checks.
- Enemy is a heavy freighter that has a tether turret and a Hacksaw Arm turret with an excellent gunner for each weapon. They had a forward gun, but it was something fairly weak and unimpressive.
- Operating in the upper levels of atmosphere, so limited to 7 move before we incur damage.
During the course of battle the enemy ship (which lost initiative and thus went first almost every single time) routinely used the flyby attack to ensure they got to use their two melee weapons against us. When we got to move, we positioned ourselves as far out of their flightpath as we could get and still bring our forward canon (persistent particle beam) to bear. Usually about 5 hexes away.
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Rules interpretation as best we can tell:
1. The ship that rolls lower in the opposed pilot roles must go first.
2. A successful fly-by attack allows the designated weapon arc (in this case they chose turret) to fire on us in the gunnery phase as if we were at range 1.
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Impact:
This seems to guarantee that, so long as a ship can keep to the general vicinity (within regular speed distance) of their target and make the flyby check, optimizing for melee and having the worst possible pilot (that can still make the flyby DC) is actually beneficial.
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Impressions:
Any time that the ships are positioned such that the enemy ship was likely to pick a flyby attack, we felt like we would have been better off having our pilot abandon the controls and assigning a no-name generic crew member with 0 ranks in pilot to take control (and then use whatever excuse we can to give said generic crew member all the penalties we can muster by interfering with their ability to pilot), since that is the only way to ensure that we go first; and it doesn't take any skill checks to just fly straight forward. And just doing basic forward flight but getting to go first would have been *far* preferable to letting them go first and do a flyby.
In other words, it seems that when a ship has short/melee range weapons and/or otherwise incentive to use flyby attacks, that having a pilot with high ranks and/or good luck is actually a disadvantage, since a high pilot score leads to going second, and less likely to be able to use flyby. (For ships with average or worse maneouverability, or lower speed.) So, less manouverable ships benefit from having worse pilots in this situation.
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Questions:
A) Is this actually correct?
B) Is flyby a situation where it is better to be sufficiently worse than the enemy pilot in order to go first?
C) Does the pilot who roles best in the initial opposed check *always* forcibly must go second? I know that in most situations going second is definitely the better situation to be in, but it seems weird that being a super-awesome ace pilot would be forced to do so and not given the opportunity to rush ahead and do something first if they so choose. After all, they *won* the opposed pilot check, right?
D) What happens when they do a flyby maneuver, and then we move and end up eleven hexes away, and they hit us with a tether during the gunnery phase? Do we have an eleven-hex long tether between us? Does our movement get retconned to have not left the 1 hex radius of the enemy ship? Do we drag them along with us?
Thanks for any extra info you can provide.
Most times the ship could flyby whether they win or loose so its not really being punished for winning.
Hmmm, not really. With an adversary that has average manoeuvrability, we were repeatedly in situations where if we'd been able to go first, their only shot at doing a flyby (or even getting within melee range at all) would have been getting the captain's order action or getting all the officer positions spending their action on boosting manoeuvrability &/or speed. And if they'd done that, well, they're not regenerating shields or patching things, and they'd be dead that much faster.
Against an enemy ship with good or better manoeuvrability and high speed, then yes, definitely, a flyby is probably a possibility regardless.
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I think this is a bit of an oversimplification: If the foe can't actually reach you, their best option to close as much as possible and try to end their movement outside of your frontal arc. This minimizes the damage they'll take this round, and limits your options in the next round:Hmmm, not really. With an adversary that has average manoeuvrability, we were repeatedly in situations where if we'd been able to go first, their only shot at doing a flyby (or even getting within melee range at all) would have been getting the captain's order action or getting all the officer positions spending their action on boosting manoeuvrability &/or speed. And if they'd done that, well, they're not regenerating shields or patching things, and they'd be dead that much faster.
Against an enemy ship with good or better manoeuvrability and high speed, then yes, definitely, a flyby is probably a possibility regardless.
- You can do a 180, kite away, and then do another 180 to try to bring your frontal arc to bear, but you just wasted 4 of your 7 speed to do this, so you're really too slow to avoid them.
- You can just do a 180 and fly away, but your foe will end up closer after they move (they probably don't need to turn like you do)
- You can try charging past them, but you are going to end up pretty close and they could possibly end their move adjacent to you, out of your frontal arc, or both (really depends on your exact positions, but remember that Back Off is an option if you end up adjacent to line of hexes directly behind your foe).
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This sounds like a weird confluence of rolls luck. Having your pilot's Piloting modifier high enough to consistently pull off a Flyby attack, but so poor as to consistently lose initiative, sounds, statistically, weird to me.
The Flyby stunt has pretty harsh penalties for failure, and the DC is as high as Starship Combat DCs get, so in usual situations, it's a high-risk/high-reward option. You shouldn't be able to consistently lose initiative but also consistently beat the Flyby DC (unless there's something else strange going on, like the ship you're trying to Flyby is much lower Tier than you are, which just raises more questions.)
That said - I agree, it sounds like a very easy handwave/house-rule to say "whoever wins Piloting initiative chooses the order they go in" rather than having to go last. Like, in regular person-scale combat, if you roll a high init but for whatever reason want to go later, you can delay/ready an action. It seems very reasonable to me to do the same in starship combat. (I honestly had to check the rules on this, since I thought that "whoever wins, chooses when they go" was actually the rule for SSC :D)
To be fair, our pilot is an operative with quite high Dex and has taken several abilities and feats that specifically boost their piloting/starship handling abilities. I'm not familiar enough with Starfinder to be able to say for sure if their piloting skill has outpaced the level of our starship, but it is certainly possible. We're doing the "Fly Free or Die" campaign, level 11, not sure how far that is into the story, and just managed to finagle our way into getting enough BP to get a Destroyer by deviating from the storyline.
I don't know for sure about our opponents as I'm not the GM, but I gather from post-game discussion that our enemies are a bunch of assassins who are great at in-person combat, but their pilot is merely "competent" for their level. Our GM thinks their pilot was built around the idea of being a reasonable opponent for a middling average group flying the Oliphaunt or the Rust Bug; not a group with a character that went "I want to be the best pilot in the galaxy!" as a career optimization, flying an actual built-for-speed warship. It may well be that it isn't that they have a bad pilot, just that we have a reliably awesome one.
It is a recurring bit of frustration for our GM that if we can't outfight it, then we're basically guaranteed to be able to outrun it.
In regards to the actual battlespace - we were in an asteroid field that made it so that it was rare that either of us could do perfect circles or 180 loops, or straight lines for more than 6 hexes. Occasionally possible, but rare.
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The only published ship I see with a Hacksaw Arm is the Dashadz Griffon - Tier 10 which sounds about right for your encounter (Tier 10 Large heavy freighter with Average maneuverability, but no turrets).
Piloting +19 vs. a hard DC of 30 (tier 10) or 31 (tier 11) would make a flyby stunt a pretty risky maneuver (50% or less baseline chance of success).
My own 'Best Pilot' build (Lashunta [Damaya (Hunter)] Operative(Driver) 11 Ace Pilot) would probably be at Piloting +28 at this point, so I can see you winning initiative every round.
Hmmm, interesting! Thanks for pointing it out. That description and outfitting sounds almost exactly like what we were facing, albeit with a custom crew.
I think we got hit with a flyby 4-5 times during the battle, and they succeeded every time they tried. Not impossible odds, but definitely on the lucky side. Our Destroyer is (by BP count, anyway) sitting pretty close to the line between tier 10 and 11. Not sure exactly which side of that we are on, but I think it's tier 11.
I contrast, our pilot lost the initiative check against them... Twice, I think? (out of over a dozen rounds)