Star Trek Attack Wing: Fixing Prices

[Fosco the Swift]

I've been playing Star Trek Attack Wing (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Attack_Wing) for a while now and I can't help but feel that a majority of the ships aren't properly balanced cost-wise. To buy enough small ships to defeat a stronger ship, you have to spend far more points to do it.
For example, the R.I.S. Apnex (14) is half the price of the I.K.S. Maht-h'a (28), but two Apnex's cannot destroy the Maht-h'a, in fact, they'd be lucky to even bring its shields down.
To fix this, I've been experimenting with different scoring methods to create far more balanced ships.

PASH stands for the 4 Primary Stats of a starship: Power (attack), Agility (defense), Shields (regenerating health), Hull (non-regenerating health) [I do know that these are in the incorrect order and a few are not the proper word, but it works better for this post]
When I refer to ships stats, I abbreviate it to P/A/S/H. So a ship with Power=1, Agility=2, Shields=3, Hull=4, is abbreviated to 1/2/3/4

Normally, Attack Wing prices a ship according to its PASH scores added together x2 (so 1/3/2/4 costs 20 points)
To replace this, I've created a chart where each Primary Stats have a certain cost for a certain score.



Score
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9


Power
-8
0
3
6
9
13
17
21
24
29


Agility
0
2
4
6
9
12
15
19
23
27


Shields
0
2
4
6
9
12
15
19
23
27


Hull
N/A
0
2
4
6
9
12
15
19
23



Ships always cost at least 1 point (this is important for ships with attacks of 0)

Using this chart, the Apnex 1/2/2/2 now costs 10 points, and the Maht-h'a 5/1/3/5 now costs 30. This means that 3 Apnex's can be purchased for the exact same price as the Maht-h'a, which is far more proportionate than it once was. However, this does not cover maneuverability, upgrades, abilities and ship actions, but that'll come later.

Tell me what you think of the new pricing so far, and feel free to put anything that you think will improve this.

[Chen]

The stat pricing has not been an issue from my experience. Multiple ships allow more action economy, more upgrades etc. Swarms of cheap ships have other advantages such as multiplying group buffs values as well. I think your stat pricing would swing things too far in the other direction and make swarms of low cost ships far more effective than any big ships. Comparing Attack wing to X-wing, it looks like they intentionally went with smaller fleets of larger ships instead of the swarm play of a fighter game. Thematically it makes more sense too since Star Trek is more about battleships in space, than dog fights.

The real problem in pricing is that special abilities on ships cost NOTHING. That's a huge issue since some are FAR better than others. And forget about Borg ships which don't pay for their inherent 360 arc or easy movement. Trying to find some way to balance the costs of the ship special abilities I think would be much better way.

[Fosco the Swift]

The real problem in pricing is that special abilities on ships cost NOTHING. That's a huge issue since some are FAR better than others. And forget about Borg ships which don't pay for their inherent 360 arc or easy movement. Trying to find some way to balance the costs of the ship special abilities I think would be much better way.

I definitely agree with this, except creating a static system to equalize ship abilities when there is such a variety is extremely difficult. I'll see what I can do.
Part of the idea I had to create better priced ships was to create a simple system to create certain prices for certain firing arcs. 360 can definitely be included in this. Let me get back to you on this.
I've already created a basic pricing for ship maneuvering, but not for Borg yet.


it looks like they intentionally went with smaller fleets of larger ships instead of the swarm play of a fighter game.

I completely agree with this, and I want to keep the gameplay this way. However, I have realized that I never buy cheap, small ships. They die far too fast and do too little damage to be worth a price that is more than half a far greater ship. And adding upgrades to small ships means that you can lose that 5 points so quickly that you never get to use it. I don't want to make swarms of small ships better or even equal to larger ships, but I do want to make it at least worthwhile to have smaller ships in the fleet.

[Magentawolf]

Personally, I believe that cloaking broke the game from the very beginning. Anything with 3 dice or less would rarely, if ever, get a hit, meaning you needed the 5+ attack dice if you wanted to break through. Of course, those same 5-attack ships would then also happily slaughter any of the standard ships with 1-2 defense dice...

Another issue is the ease at which you can pump up your attack values, and gain the actions needed to 'fix' them. It's trivial to get both a re-roll and a battlestations ability at the same time.

Then, of course, they never varied the points depending on firing arcs, maneuver dials, abilities... what-have-you. A Borg ship with a 360 degree arc and crazy maneuvers gets the same base cost as something with a 90 degree arc and red all over the dial!

Argh! I love the game, but I hate it at the same time.

[Fosco the Swift]

Personally, I believe that cloaking broke the game from the very beginning. Anything with 3 dice or less would rarely, if ever, get a hit, meaning you needed the 5+ attack dice if you wanted to break through. Of course, those same 5-attack ships would then also happily slaughter any of the standard ships with 1-2 defense dice...
Actually, I don't agree with this. I have played many a game where I've destroyed my opponent because he cloaks too often.
While attacks of 3 or less do rarely, if ever, get hits; they do hit sometimes. Cloaking means you get no shields, so any hits you receive go immediately to the Hull. Ships with cloak, don't get battle stations so every defense die has a 3/8 chance to successfully evade a hit. A standard attack has a 4/8 chance to hit (1/8 to crit), so the attacker immediately has a advantage. Then add battlestations, and the attack chance increases to 6/8, so there is a 75% of hitting. So the attacker hits 50% of the time without any bonuses, but the defender evades about 38% of the time. Shields block damage to the hull 100% of the time, until they're gone.
So it seems to me that cloak is only good when defending against multiple ships: you can roll that 4-5 defense dice against every attack, when you have limited shields to block every hit that occurs. But, there is going to be that lucky few hits that get through and damage the hull. That can't be fixed, but disabled shields automatically return at the end phase. The only time shields don't come back is from a crit, which happens about 13% of the time.
A cloaked Maht-h'a is attacked by the Enterprise who has battlestations. The Maht-h'a rolls 2 evades, but the Enterprise gets 3 hits. This means that the Maht-h'a takes one hull damage. If the Maht-h'a wasn't cloaked, it probably wouldn't have evaded any of the attacks but the three hits go straight to shields, which regenerate at the end of the round- unharmed. And if the enterprise instead got 2 hits and a crit, the crit would weaken the ship itself, putting it to auxiliary or even forcing it to move slower. But if it was not cloaked, the Maht-h'a would instead lose one shield but suffer no other problems.
Cloaking has its place, but is not a "solve-all".


Another issue is the ease at which you can pump up your attack values, and gain the actions needed to 'fix' them. It's trivial to get both a re-roll and a battlestations ability at the same time.
What do you mean by, "gain actions to fix them"?
It is not trivial to get both a re-roll and a battlestations. Assuming the re-roll is a Target-Lock, it is actually really powerful to have both. If you attack first, you can choose to save your battlestations for defense while use your Target-Lock to boost your attack. Or if you roll 4 dice, but got 2 blanks and 2 partials, you can use the Target-Lock to turn the blanks to something more useful and the battlestations to turn all the partials to hits. So if the Target-lock was lucky and you got a partial and a hit, using the battlestations then gives you 4 hits. Also, you can save Target-Locks for when you really need them, but you can't save battlestations to next turn.
It may be easy to pump up attacks, but I actually like that. It means that the attacker usually has the advantage in battles, so more often than not the defender is damaged in some way by the attack. This prevents extremely long games where the two opponents attack back and forth to no effect.

[Chen]

That can't be fixed, but disabled shields automatically return at the end phase. The only time shields don't come back is from a crit, which happens about 13% of the time.

What? Shields that take damage via hit or crit are gone. Disabled shields are shields you have voluntarily lowered (by cloaking) or via some other action. Those are the ones that come back in the end phase. Also crits do nothing when shields are up since they simply remove a shield token. They only cause extra damage when they hit hull (since that's the only time you can get damage card, which can then be turned face up).

You also say it's not trivial to gain battle stations and target lock, but the default Enterprise with Picard at the helm can do it every turn if they wanted to. Consider a combo like Dukat and Boheeka which not only allows battle stations and target lock but also a free blank to hit conversion. Something like Tactical officer for the Romulans allows a double reroll for target locks. There are tons of ways to "fix" attack dice.

[Gnoman]

What do you mean by, "gain actions to fix them"?

Get battle stations, a target lock (allows a reroll), have a captain ability to convert a die, a crew ability to convert, and a crew ability to reroll all misses. This is fairly easy (and not all that expensive) to do.