"Attack Vector/squadron strike damage?" Topic

I really love crunchy games……guilty pleasure I guess, and I am trying to decide which game to purshase (perhaps both). Can anyone give a little insight into damage In 3d…Are attack deflections taken into account? I am typing on this blasted iPhone and portly digits and a small keyboard are painful. Please, any additional info would be appreciated.

Damage in AVT is handled like the rest of the game; with a fair degree of realism and complexity, but once you get the basics down it flows faster than it reads. Basically, damage from weapons strikes the target at an angle and then you determine how far the damage goes. By that I mean that certain sides of the target have more armor than others, then you determine how much "stuff"(crates, chairs, beds, etc.) slows down the impact, then the damage continues through the ship until the damage total is reached. It is possible to punch one end of a ship and go through the other side depending upon where the shot strikes.

Thanks for the info on AV, how is squadron strike handle? Even though I have searched, I can't quite figure out the main differences between the two games?

Thanks again

AV:T is a single-setting game, and has a very high crunch-factor.

SS is a game designed to be applied to pretty much any setting, and is what Ken thinks of as a beer-and pretzels game (AFAICT). That's still pretty crunchy, by RoW standards.

If you want to design ships, SS is probably your best bet. If you're looking for maximum quasi-realism (for very carefully cultivated values of quasi-real), then it's AV:T you want.

Squadron Strike also supports much, much higher tech levels than Attack Vector.
-Kle.

Thanks Kle,
SS it is!!

Important factor that was missed here: each face of the ship has a different hit location table in AV:T (Nose, Port, Top, etc.). Each ship has a single hit location table in SqSt. It's a d10 roll, but hits from the rear treat ones as tens, making it more likely to hit the engines (on most ships) and less likely to hit forward-firing armament.

While SqSt damage allocation is much faster per weapon, there can be a lot of weapons to resolve, and there are often a lot of turns worth of fire to resolve. I really like the narrative detail produced by AV:T damage allocation. Because damage occurs less often in AV:T, I don't consider it a chore or too time consuming. "Aaaahhh! My full battery just exploded!!!" Good drama.

In Squadron Strike, damage is allocated by weapon:

Weapons interact with what I call 'external' defenses: Prismatic Globes, Shields and Armor.

Each prisma globe lets you roll a d10 per damage point coming in to see if the globe eats it, or it goes to the next layer in.

Shields absorb damage at 1:1, and when down, offer no protection (think Battletech armor)

Armor deducts its value from each weapon that comes in, and is only destroyed when a specific hit location is struck – it stays around forever.

If you have 4 armor and your opponent has a rate of fire 7 weapon that does 4 damage per hit, you laugh at him.

Once past skin armor, you roll a hit location on a d10. The ship is broken down into 10 bands (numbered 1 to 10). Each band can have up to 7 groups of boxes in it (most have 2-3) and ends with a # or > symbol.

When you do damage, you allocate 1 point of damage per group of boxes in the zone. When you get to the end of the zone, if it has a >, you take the remaining damage and go to the next zone down.

If it has a #, you roll 2 ten sided dice, subtracting the smaller result from the larger (2d10-) and do the lesser value of the die roll or the amount of damage remaining to the Structural Integrity track. When the SI track runs out, the ship explodes.

There are things you can do with your ship (component armor on a group of boxes increases how much damage it takes to mark off one box) and weapon traits that alter this (Bursting means that each weapon deposits enough damage to destroy two boxes in each group it passes through).

Squadron Strike's damage allocation is meant to be fast.

Attack Vector's damage allocation is detailed.

The mechanism is meant to give you a gripping narrative of what gets hit as that beam drills through your ship, spewing fragments of hot metal and debris in its path.

When you hit in AV:T, you roll a d10 to see where you hit on a hit location table; there are 6 of them, plus one for the core.

Each component on the ship has a component armor rating, from 0 to 3 or 4.

Every time you roll a hit location, the defender rolls a soak roll of 2d10-, and adds it to the component armor on that location.

So, you might hit Reactor which has 2 component armor, and roll 2d10- getting a 3 and a 9, and that reactor hit absorbs 6+2=8 total damage.

Now, when you hit a ship, each aspect of the ship has a hull depth number. When you've allocated damage points equal to or greater than the hull depth number, your remaining damage moves to a different part of the ship; when you exceed the hull depth number there, you move to a different hit location table. Exceed it again, and the remaining damage is lost.

Those hull depth numbers can change depending on which way you hit the ship:

The Wasp is shaped like a baseball bat. It has a hull depth from nose to aft of 42. It has a hull depth from port to starboard of 9, and it has a hull depth from top to bottom of 7.