What aspects of the space rules are a turn-off for players?

[ColBosch]

Oh. No, they did not seem that interesting when I paged through them.

[idea weenie]

Things that annoy me:
* armor limitation based on internal structure
* internal structure limited by thrust
* fixed bay limit of 70 capital points no matter the size of the Warship
* Battlemech scale weapons obviously outdamaging capital scale weapons on a per-ton basis (IIRC this is why Fire Control tonnage was implemented)
* keeping as much detail for fighters, when you are fighting warships.  To me if the scale involves warships, then squadron mode should be the default, similar to platoons being the default for infantry when fighting Mechs
* threshold means you will punch through enemy armor in a maximum of 10 hits, instead of threshold being needed for extra crits
* capital armor vs Battlemech weapons should be able to resist/ignore the basic stuff (similar to an assault rifle shooting at a tank)  (Imagine fighters having to roll a critical in order to damage Warship grade armor)
* armor alone affects threshold (should be the internal structure)
* weapons have no difference when affecting threshold (to me lasers should have none, while projectile should be far more effective due to the kinetic impact.  Missiles are a funny area where solid impacts deliver more damage, while ranged shaped charge warheads are less likely to be shot down)

To hide as much of the accounting as possible, it would have to be done on the design side.  You have a warship of X mass giving you Y surface area, and you add several components to it that increase its surface area.  based on that resulting surface area, you get Z armor points per ton.  Based on the tonnage, you have a certain number of thrust points.  (The goal is to avoid obvious break points by implementing equations, instead of charts, though there will be a lot of designs around the X*50,000 tons due to Dropship Docking Point limitations)

The board game itself never sees that though, you just see that your front arc is down to 150 pts of armor, and the other guy is lining up a pair of 80-rated bays to fire at you.  You also try to keep the empty armor side away from the other guy's fighters so they don't shoot up your internals (they can't shoot through the armor, so they look for existing holes).

[Daemion]

Completely different games. Ben is referring to the alternate-history game that Catalyst published a few years back, not the ancient and clunky Renegade Legion spin-off.

Crap! I should have known that, because I helped playtest the system. Doh! [facepalm]

Aero needs less detail to start being playable, not more.

In some ways I agree. But, in some ways, I don't.  If for no other reason than the RPG level detail we get with standard BattleTech, I want that kind of detail with ships, too.  I've even played around with that detail for tanks and crews, or even infantry squads.

There's a storytelling aspect to Battletech that I sometimes want available for the right moment, but don't want to have to resort to RPG stat layouts for that completely. The level of detail in CBT is just about perfect for that.

But, when it comes to larger engagements beyond the 'perspective' character's scope of knowledge, and you want something resolved simply, with some level of tactical choices and BT aesthetic, yeah, you don't need remotely near that level of detail.

[sadlerbw]

Thought of a couple more things:

- Why do the vast majority of dropships weight 20,000 tons or less? If I'm counting right, the list of ships which weight more than that is: Mammoth, Behemoth, Tiamat, Castrum. That's it. If you can do almost all of what you want with a dropship using only one fifth of the allowed construction mass...something is screwed up with the construction rules. Dropships should end up with a more even distribution across their mass range like Mechs, Combat Vehicles, Fighters, and Warships.

- Unless you use the advanced heat/firing rules, the Suffren is incapable of firing any weapons in its nose arc. What this says to me is that the 'advanced' heat rule should really be the standard one.

- The mixing of levels of detail in the heat/firing rules. Under standard rules, I have to take the heat for an entire arc if I fire any weapons in it. However, I still have to resolve those weapons bay by bay for damage. It is a confusion and annoying way to split up the abstractions.

- The interaction of AMS/Point Defense and Capital Missiles is not all that balanced and somewhat frustrating to use. First, the AMS rules contradict the damage calculations for any other PD weapon, and they also break the heat-by-arc rule, even if you aren't trying to use the advanced rule that would let you do it. Second, the list of weapons you can use for PD is needlessly restricted. You almost never see any of the allowed weapons on a large craft, so it really only works for fighters that happen to have small lasers. Honestly, is there ANY Aerospace unit that mounts Flamers or Clan Micro Pulse Lasers? Also, the allowed weapons are so low damage its tough to get enough together to destroy a single capital missile, let alone a spread of them. Third, you are supposed to put the weapon into PD mode during the end phase of a turn...regardless of whether they are on a fighter or a Warship bay. Finally, I can completely ignore the whole point-defense rules and use targeting capital missiles instead to use my weapons that can deal non-trivial damage to blow them up. That is WAY more effective, except the way the rules read I can only fire at ONE missile per firing arc on a dropship or warship, and if I do, I can't fire at anything else with that arc. Just...why? The capital missiles are the size of aerospace fighters, so just make the targeting capital missiles stuff the standard rule and forget the PD stuff.

I get that missiles can be powerful thanks to the crit chances and occasional nukes...but the rules for point-defense against capital missiles are not very tightly written, have never felt all that balanced to me, and have too many corner cases and quirks that break other rules.

[I am Belch II]

I really wish that the Aerotech rules would be changed go more with Alpha Strike rules. It is along the same lines.

[Weirdo]

I really wish that the Aerotech rules would be changed go more with Alpha Strike rules. It is along the same lines.

Ba-ttle-face. Ba-ttle-face. Ba-ttle-face. Ba...

I keep telling folks who want Alpha Strike in spaaaace. It already exists, and has existed since 2011.

Grab a copy of StratOps. Movement is on page 224. Combat is on the very next page, with much of the ground shooting rules also applicable to space shooting. Advanced movement starts on page 277. Advanced shooting starts on page 292. Rules for creating fighter or DropShip squadrons are on page 326. Rules for moving them are on page 279. Rules for shooting with them are on page 295.

You now have the full ruleset you seek. Yes, they're scattered around, but that puts space combat in the exact same boat as ground combat. Go have fun, after bringing me some Excedrin. That wasn't a padded table.

[ColBosch]

You do keep telling us. But I read through those rules, and they did not look fun.

[Weirdo]

Then perhaps hexed Alpha Space is not for you. Ah well, c'est la delta-v.

[Daryk]

"C'est la Δ-v" is worth quoting somewhere... Exactly where that is, I'm not sure yet, but I have to tip my hat to that... :)

[Weirdo]

Feel free to yoink it. If it makes you money, send me minis. :)

[I am Belch II]

Games are so much easier after you play them...but finding some that know the Aerospace rules that is a lot harder.

[Weirdo]

At this point, your only real choice is to be the rules-fluent space player you want to see in this world.

Also, it's really not very complex. The movement system takes getting used to if your mind has been trained by ground movement, but the rest is either extremely simple, or special-case stuff that's rarely used except in special circumstances. For example, I can honestly say I have never performed a K-F jump during a game. Kinda want to someday.

[sadlerbw]

I read through the battleface rules last night, or at least I think I did. It looks like, in a nutshell, the unit cards and attack system used in Alpha Strike combined with the standard Aerospace hex movement, sans-maneuvers.

I admit, I only skimmed the air-ground interaction, since I was mostly interested in the use for space combat. However, the AS-style unit stats would solve a number of problems, although it looks like I would need to convert any units by hand. I don't like the movement rules any better or worse than I do in total warfare. They are ok, but still a bit lacking in defensive movement.

Overall, I think I would like it better than StratOps if I was playing with big units or lost of units. Im still. It entirely convinced that the base system is good enough to be worth salvaging rather than tossing and staring over, but battleface does look nicer to me.

In another note, are the Aerotech 2 record sheets a ailable for purchase as a PDF? I don't have a hard copy, and don't really want to buy a used one off the internet, but it looks like that product is the only place to get the recordsheets for most of the stuff in TRO:3057.

[CDAT]

Late to this, but here we go.

Oh, where do I begin? You know what, I'll make it simple: everything. Everything about BattleTech's space combat rules are terrible and deserve a complete re-imagining.

For the most point this, I liked and played AeroTech 1 (AT1), and in one campaign we are still using AT1 rules. Every time they tried to fix the game after that in my opinion they made it worse and more complex. With AT1 you had for the most part mechs in space, or close air support if on the ground map. Now you have glass hammers (Warships) that I just did a quick look and every one that I looked at can kill them self with one, or at the most two volleys, now this may be realistic but what fun is it to set up and first turn of combat game over? Dropships are not really any better, and fighters now are fast movers that can not provide close air support.

The biggest problem with revising aero rules is that any changes to stats or sheets is out of the question, since any such changes would leave the game unplayable for a lack of record sheets. What would you do within that caveat?

And how many times have they rendered sheets unusable? AT1 to AeroTech 2 to BattleSpace, when they changed how you calculate the rounding of armor just of the top of my head.

My suggestion would be to try and find a out of print game that had a good rule set and see if you can get the rights to it, something like AOG Babylon 5 Wars that did not die due to lack of interest or playablity but due to losing the license. 

[celem]

I'm actually something of a fan of aero v aero on the space map, I really quite enjoy working with the thrust and vectors rather than standard MP.  What I will say though is that I use MegaMek for this... I can fully see how this is significantly slower and harder to track for a tabletop.

My big gripe has been that spacemap aero is a lot more luck based than a ground fight.  Lack of torso twist gives everyone static firing solutions, provided your players are of fairly equivalent skill and forces are balanced, then the fight is decided mainly on the init rolls.  I was a big fan of the f100a Riever, but I noticed quickly that if I lost the init I spent the whole turn thinking evasively and often wouldnt fire at all.  If I won init then the 100a moved last and somebody died (it's a heck of a craft)

When playing regular aero matches against some of the MMNet 3025 campaign's players we even set up private rules between the players where we agreed to use an init-streak breaking system to smooth this out. (Theres one built into MegaMek though its optional and defaults off.  Works as a cumulative init penalty starting after 2 turns with init)
Having played a few guys a dozen times or more we came to the conclusion that it's still pretty random with this houserule in place and it was given as reason-to-avoid-aero by several community members.

[Daemion]

I really wish that the Aerotech rules would be changed go more with Alpha Strike rules. It is along the same lines.

Especially where Dropships and bigger are concerned. It makes perfect sense to just lump bays into damage blocks by location.

[I am Belch II]

Squadron rules needed some rework.

I guess another big reason for the turn-off is maybe the number of units to have a proper unit.
Lets say a McKenna....1 ship, 6 dropships, and at least 7 squads of fighters. So one ship would be 14 units on one ship. Sometimes its really hard to control more then 4 units during a battle.

[Weirdo]

There's no requirement that a Warship go into battle with full hangars and drop collars...

[idea weenie]

What I'd like to see would be a note on each bay listing the weakest weapon in it, and for squadrons it would list the weakest weapon in that arc.

For example, a current ASF with a mix of medium and large lasers in one arc might have it listed as 28-8-8, but it would be changed to (5) 28-8-8.  This notes that the weakest weapon in the group is the 5 pt medium lasers, it does 28 pts at short range, but only 8 at medium and long ranges.

The minimum damage is used to calculate if the weapons are able to even damage warship grade armor, or just cause a mild heat issue that can be ignored.

So the above fighter might choose to use a different set of bay arrangements:
LW: (5) 10-0-0
Nose: (8) 8-8-8
RW: (5) 10-0-0

A squadron of 6 of those fighters would look like:
LW: (5) 60-0-0
Nose: (8) 48-48-48
RW: (5) 60-0-0
This may look impressive, but note that the lowest damage is still kept.  If the Warship had armor capable of ignoring the first 6 pts of standard damage, that means the armor normally ignores all of the weapons fire from the wing mounted weapons, and the nose weapons only do 25% (1-6/8) of their listed damage (or 12 pts of standard damage).  The exception to this is if the Aerospace fighters manage to roll a critical for their hit location, in which case the armor provides no damage resistance (but how often do you roll snake eyes for hit locations).

Note that this is armor resisting the damage.  If the armor is gone from a section, those weapons will hit with their full strength with every shot, and no need to roll a critical hit to damage the warship.


This is to make fighters have to work to take down Warships, but Warships have to keep their wounded flanks away from those little buzzards.  Fighters going after Warships would have heavy weapons in dedicated arcs, but also lighter weapons to exploit holes made.