Big Guns Swinging the Game

[ActionButler]

I think Battletech and Alpha Strike could stand to borrow some things from 40K but, after a fair amount of consideration, I don't think army lists are one of those things.  Not if they start dictating what size units you can take, anyway.  It also stands to reason, I think, that most armies would have (noticeably) more light(er) units than heavy units anyway. 

On topic, I really like IronSphinx's solution.  It creates a happy medium between Alpha Strike and CBT.  My only concern is that it introduces a lot more dice rolling, which has always been one of CBT's weaknesses (IMO).  Though, I suppose you could resolve that by having pairs of matching dice instead of one big handful of identical dice.  Or the plastic divider box full of dice. 

[Louie N]

One advantage of AS over standard BT in those bucket of dice is that all the dice need the same number to hit.

[sadlerbw]

My suggestion in your post about this in the rules forum was to try using one of the existing Pilot Skills that gives you re-rolls. failing that, you could try some home-brew pilot skills like one of these to use on your damage monsters:

- If the MoF is 2 or less, the mech can deal half damage, rounded down on a failed attack.
- The mech may reduce it's damage dealt by the target's TMM in order to ignore the target's TMM on the attack roll.
- On a failed attack, the attacker may instead deal up to X damage where X is no more than one half of normal damage rounded down. The mech may deal no more than [pick a number] total damage this way per engagement.

I have no idea if any of those are balanced, but at least pilot skills are already a thing, they don't require more dice-rolling, and they can be applied only to the mechs with huge damage rather than having to change how ALL of the mechs play.

Dealing with swarms is, I think, a slightly different problem from what the OP was seeing.

[GoGo Yubari]

I've thought about alternative ways of applying damage in Quick Alpha Strike and had an old thread here where I suggested an alternative. This somewhat addresses the whiff factor of big damage shots missing, btw. I'm quoting the relevant bits from myself from the thread below:

I did some work on this and came up with a system that looks good numbers-wide.

The idea is that Target Movement Modifiers are divorced from the normal To-Hit Roll. So, you roll To-Hit as normal, but ignoring the effects of fast movers initially making hitting non-slow targets a little bit easier.

Added to the normal resolution is a Damage Roll. Every point of damage being applied is rolled as a die and a 2+ on each die will result in actual damage to the target. The TN of the Damage Roll, however, is modified by the Target Movement Modifier. So, a target with MP of 5 has a Damage Roll TN of 3+ and so on.

Like this, it does add a layer to the resolution, but it is less cumbersome than some which have been suggested because the resolution system itself is simpler: just roll the die and check for successes. Now the system does variable damage in an interesting manner, though.

But what is the effect on gameplay statistically? Surprisingly small, in fact. Hard shots with a To-Hit Roll of 7+ actually get minutely more damaging, because the Target Movement Modifiers are removed. The changes are felt most in attacks to quick movers where the initial To-Hit Roll is easy: 4 or below. The system serves to give better chances for survival on fast movers that get caught out in the open, for example.

You can look at my spreadsheet which details the exact change in damage here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQzdkY-IAeFdHRiNy01aXZDS1hUeklBaW5PcXQ2VlE#gid=0 DPS Delta is the value you are looking at to determine the change in actual damage per point of damage between core Quick-Strike and these house rules.

That's one system and I think it looks quite nice, but there's other ways of doing it, but I'm not sure they'd end up quite so elegant even if this doesn't accomplish reducing To-Hit and To-Damage to a single roll.

Edit - The spreadsheet has an alternative method on another page now, using range brackets to decide the Damage Roll TN (Short 2+, Medium 3+ and Long 4+). So, in this method you'd put the Target Movement Modifiers back into the To-Hit Roll and remove the effect of range. The connection between damaging and range is a little bit less intuitive than that of damage and manuever (to my mind at least), but the change in numbers is nicely smaller all across the board from the original Quick-Strike values so they don't end up really changing the balance that greatly. That said, this arrangement produces an oddity where medium and especially long range shots do significantly more damage than stock Quick-Strike at TN values of 6 and 7 which is a bit skewy and unwanted.

On a semantic note, in the above example, I wouldn't call the initial roll a To Hit Roll necessarily, but instead maybe call it a Target Acquisition Roll. Based on what I read earlier in the thread, I'd be curious to work in split fire mechanics into this as well.

I'd be interested in hearing any comments.

[Frantic Pryde]

I really love your ideas Gogo!!! I think using range brackets to dictate damage rolls is pretty interesting.

[Papabees]

We've been using a 2d6 per point of damage mechanic from the beginning and it has worked well and not seemed to slow things down. We use matched pairs so it's still just a single roll. We also haven't seen a tremendous slowdown in the actual length of games because while you don't have the large clumps of damage everyone is typically doing some damage.

[IronSphinx]

We've been using a 2d6 per point of damage mechanic from the beginning and it has worked well and not seemed to slow things down. We use matched pairs so it's still just a single roll. We also haven't seen a tremendous slowdown in the actual length of games because while you don't have the large clumps of damage everyone is typically doing some damage.

Pretty much my findings as well.

[NeonKnight]

I'm gonna try this in my home games. While traditional Variable Damage still has an All or Nothing effect (1 roll to hit, then some damage), this can help off-set, and being a gamer for over 30 years, you better believe I have oodles of dice!

[croaker]

- If the MoF is 2 or less, the mech can deal half damage, rounded down on a failed attack.
- The mech may reduce it's damage dealt by the target's TMM in order to ignore the target's TMM on the attack roll.
- On a failed attack, the attacker may instead deal up to X damage where X is no more than one half of normal damage rounded down. The mech may deal no more than [pick a number] total damage this way per engagement.

I have no idea if any of those are balanced, but at least pilot skills are already a thing, they don't require more dice-rolling, and they can be applied only to the mechs with huge damage rather than having to change how ALL of the mechs play.

I like these to some extent.

My own thought goes something like this:

On a missed attack roll, reduce the damage by 2 for every point of MoF. Any remaining damage is then applied to the target.

This will represent the fact that the attacker is firing several weapons over the course of a minute or more of combat, and some of them may hit, while others may miss.

For each attack, roll three dice. One die should be a different color from the other two. Only use the total of the two matching dice to determine if the attack hits.
If the attack is a hit, does not penetrate armor, and the third die matches the higher of the other dice, and the attack deals at least two damage, one point of the damage dealt is applied to the target's internal structure.

This represents attacks which have the good fortune to focus in on a particular area of the 'mech and get a solid penetration before other areas are significantly damaged, or the Through-Armor Critical extant in the normal-scale Hit Location Tables.