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Greetings!
After finally getting my login fixed after several years away, I figured I'd start my comeback with a discussion I've been wanting to post for years but couldn't while my login was busted.
Let me start by saying I love Starfinder, maybe even more than Pathfinder, and I've gotten a lot of mileage out of 1st edition. However, during that time, I've really only had a single concern regarding the system and its many supplements. That concern is around design consistency, and with a new edition dawning, I feel now is a good time to bring this up - a new edition brings new opportunities for improvement!
Now what I mean by design consistency has nothing to do (mostly) with the starship rules at large. I love the shipbuilding rules and my group and I enjoy the combat system, especially with many of the additions that were added with the Starship Operating Manual. The starship stuff is so fun, in fact, that I've spent a fair amount of time really getting into the nitty gritty of it - I've built A LOT of ships. It was all of this fiddling around that would lead me to my concern as I noticed early on that many of the published ships didn't match up in build point properly for their Tier. . . so I started a spreadsheet.
Every time I used a published ship in one of my campaigns, I'd check the designer's math. Unfortunately, more often than not, my skepticism of the published content was rewarded. For every ship that was off in BP, over or under (usually over), I would alter the build, keeping it within theme for the ship, and add the change notes to my spreadsheet. As time went on, I just caved and did (almost) every single ship published.
(For anyone interested in my ship corrections and notes, I can start a different thread with actual spreadsheet details if there's enough interest).
The results of this spreadsheet includes nearly 150 ships currently. Of that number, only 23% of published ships have the correct amount of BP. Now, this wouldn't be a particularly major issue if ships were mostly flavor, but BP is directly attached to Tier and Tier functions a lot like CR. This would be the equivalent of Starfinder using a build-point system for monster design for CR and then having only 23% of the published bestiary be the correct CR, which would be a crazy-low number for quality control. Now, in some cases, the BP are only off by 1 to 3 which is no biggie (except at really low Tiers), but most ships are off by more than 5% of the listed BP for their Tier.
In the name of balanced encounters, I would like to request (nay, implore) the lead designers of 2nd edition to please double and triple check the math on submitted starships in the future. Luckily, I'm a big old nerd who doesn't mind spending some of his spare time doing this for his own games, but there are lot of other people who will use ships as is and while many times it'll be fine, there are definitely cases where if certain ships are chosen (for the PCs or the enemies) it's going to lead to feels-bad or feels-boring encounters.
And if this has already been noted/covered by the design team, then my apologies. I know the game is in good hands.
Now, the above was the gist of my request to the designers, but for anyone with the patience and interest to keep reading, here's some more context from my spreadsheet data:
2) Speaking of bestiaries, the Starship Operations Manual basically serves as one. I think this was worked on and published after the BP changes to the core as well. The number of correct ships in the ship bestiary is 34%. That's still not great, especially since most of the ships are out by over 5% of their BP or have other issues entirely unrelated to BP, such as illegal build choices or non-functional ones.
3) Speaking of illegal build choices, these often go hand-in-hand with incorrect BP allocation, but sometimes the ship has the correct BP but there's another issue. One example of this occurs with ships of Tier 1 or lower, where they don't have enough power to run their Drift Engine. Now most ships of Tier 1 or lower don't have Drift Engines, but of the small number that do, over half of them don't have a Power Core strong enough. Or if they do have a Power Core strong enough, it's only because they ran over in BP.
4) Now I noted earlier that if a GM uses specific ships in encounters it could lead to balancing issues. Even in most cases where the BP difference is over 5%, it should still be alright most of the time. However, there are a few cases where the BP difference puts ships in entirely different Tiers. This mostly occurs at the low end of play (which is also the most played) and is really only an issue for a select few corebook ships and ships from the early APs, again, due to the BP adjustments. I doubt this has ever blown up anyone's game but I think it's worth noting as it makes the case that the corebook ships should've been errata'd as well. My point is that if the 2nd edition corebook has BP errata'd in the future, they should definitely do the ships too.
5) The BP issue gets slightly rougher in the mid-Tier range where the correct BP ratio drops to 16%. Very few ships in the mid-range have exact BP. Tier 8, for example, has one.
6) Again, a lot of these ships are only off by a few points, so maybe these are purposeful choices. Especially in the mid-range, where 1 or 2 points doesn't make or break the CR/Tier scale. Let's call it designer's fiat. If I include all ships that are only off by a few points in the "correct" category. That raises the number of correct ships to almost 45%, but that's still below half.
7) My data doesn't include all the default ships for the Starfinder Society or anything that might have been introduced in a society module. I have to assume, for the good of the organized play community, that those ships are all correct.
As an addendum: I've only ever run ship combat and ship scenes with correct BP ships, so it's entirely possible the tolerance threshold is well beyond what most of these ships are at. I used 5% as the limit (which means almost half of all ships make the cut) because that's what is used for PCs with the advanced ship upgrade rules from FFoD and Ports of Call. It's entirely possible ships could go up to 50% of the way to the next Tier level and be fine.
If that's the case, ignore me and tell me to go pound sand.
I'm sincerely hoping that we get asymmetric starship combat so that enemy starships are vastly easier to build and run for the GM. If that happens, we would likely also get much more consistent starship encounters in published content.
I think for at least some of the small ships that seem under powered for their drift drive the concept was they basically shut nearly everything down while they are powering up the drift engine.
I do hope they take the lessons they learned from SF1 ship construction and help make a better system for SF2. I like being able to have the build to order ships but it would be nicer to have more viable stock ship types. While you could do that in SF1 the builds of the default ships were just weird and inefficient and it was pretty easy to just min/max your own custom one that would be unpleasant to live in but is way OP combat power wise.
I think for at least some of the small ships that seem under powered for their drift drive the concept was they basically shut nearly everything down while they are powering up the drift engine
Oh agreed, on the small ships powering down sort of thing. That's how I handle it in my games, but I wasn't even including those ships in my stats above. I was talking about ships that, even fully powered down, wouldn't have enough power to turn on their drives. The number of ships that have Power Cores with exactly enough power to run only their Drift Engines but couldn't run anything else actually triples the figures I listed above. How I resolve it in my games - I've lowered the power requirement for tiny ships running Signal Basic engines from 75 PCU to 50 PCU. But yeah, there are a bunch of ships (especially those with Boost or Major Signal engines) in the small to large range that have just enough power to run those fancier engines but nothing else.
I do hope they take the lessons they learned from SF1 ship construction and help make a better system for SF2. I like being able to have the build to order ships but it would be nicer to have more viable stock ship types. While you could do that in SF1 the builds of the default ships were just weird and inefficient and it was pretty easy to just min/max your own custom one that would be unpleasant to live in but is way OP combat power wise.
This is actually something I houserule in my games. I use a similar breakdown to the 10% rule where the BP has to be split relatively evenly across all systems (some exceptions apply) rather than allow for a ton of min-maxing. I like all the weirdness and inefficiencies in ship designs available on the open market. My groups always have to acquire existing ship models and then they can improve upon them. That's half the fun for my group.
For example, my current campaign features a bunch of corporate espionage and politics related to Verces and Vercite corporations. So the party is currently competing for contracts and some of them involve Vercite ship companies. At this point, they're soon set to acquire a new Tier 8 ship. Depending on which company they choose to side with for their contract, they'll get to pick a Tier 7 (or lower) ship from existing Opulos, Redshift, Terminator, or Ringworks models. They've been siding with Opulos a lot so I suspect that's what they'll settle on. They'll more than likely take something from Tier 4 or 5, which gives them several Tiers-worth of BP to work with: rip out an expansion bay there, install starmetal thrusters here, add an extra turret, and so on.
The other major houserule in my game is that I've taken every weapon and part that can go into a ship and assigned it a minimum Tier (based on BP costs and tech accessibility). Similar to the Level assignments for equipment. That means that while something that's rated for Tier 8 or higher can be picked up and put on a lower Tier vessel (much like buying a gun that's several levels higher than the party), it's typically much harder to acquire or could even be restricted.
This came about early on because I didn't like the idea of certain weapon types just being freely available for any ship. Things like antimatter or nuclear armaments, even the light tactical nuke torpedoes. Running into a ship that has nukes instead of plasma or traditional torpedo warheads should always be an oh-s+@% moment (see the early chapters and books of The Expanse for example) where it's a signal to the party that they're either dealing with a military vessel or some other serious business.
So tactical nukes are Tier 7, which means they only start becoming more common once you're dealing with frigates, military corvettes, on up to cruisers and ship-of-the-line type-stuff. Now, if they run into a ship below Tier 7 that's sporting nukes, they know it's serious business and there's probably a story there.
In addition, I have "tech-tree ratings" for different ship manufacturers and alien races that are better with certain types of technology. So while gravity technology, for example, has a minimum Tier of 8, some companies or species that specialize in such technology would be able to lower that threshold to 5 or 6 depending on their tech-tree rating for gravity weapons.
So if my party wants to install a particularly powerful type of weapon tech on a lower Tier ship by sacrificing a bunch of BP they should be spending elsewhere, they have to actually earn it in-story by cutting deals with the right company or aliens to get it installed. If my party is going to min-max, then by god, they're gonna have to generate plot hooks and complications while they're at it.