Does anyone have advice on how to deal with use of fighter like craft in ship combat? It seems to me that the benefit in real life to having fighters would be that they could swarm a larger ship with numbers, but I’m finding that is stiffled by the back and forth nature of combat initiative in general. If you run it as one side against the other the its hard to get that sort of effect. I was thinking of maybe splitting the combat into 3 or 4 ‘Sides’ with the PC’s ship vs the NPC Capital Ship, and 1 or 2 more seperate ‘Sides’ to represent fighter squadrons. Thoughts?
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Page 184 of the Federation-Klingon War Tactical Campaign book has an optional rule for using fighters as swarms of ships.
In 2e, to keep things moving along, I’d likely use a trait like Fighter Wing to represent the fighters and use that to modify task attempts as needed.
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Not sure if all this apply to second edition, still reading it and haven(t mastered all the technicalities.
As a matter of fact each ship has a number of actions equal to it’s size (or the number of players for players ship, On o Galaxy class with 4 players I tend to add 2 actions from the crew).
So if 2 size 5 ships confront each other and one deploys all its shuttles it adds 4 times 1 action
(or even 8 shuttles with extensive shuttle bay) but remember that shuttles with NPC as crew have 1 action unless you spend momentum so you may have to choose between moving or fighting.
PC in a shuttle have an advantage because they got a number of action equal to the number of players My team has a pilot with a combination of talents that makes them very annoying in a Danube shuttle which also have annoying talents) against anything of Size 4 or higher, I think they got a chance versus a Borg Cube but the fight will be so long and annoying that I will discourage to try it, handling a size 12 ship, especially if they never target the same subsystem, is far too long, My advice for the Borg do some rally actions you got 12 actions after all, during this time and use a Reversal of Fortune if you want to avoid the shame of being outclassed by a Danube)
As a side note shuttle are easily destroyed and having casualties has an impact at the end of the scenario, if my players use this too often I will do an area shot on the shuttles and increase the bodycount, that’s why you seldom see this type of battle in star trek (and of course the cost of the episode, the limit on the number of shuttles you can deploy at the same time is because of CGI costs)
Just a nitpick, but Borg get as many turns between them as their opponents do. If there are six players and no allies, then the Borg get six turns.
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