Updates in FSA v3 (beta 0.03)

Warcradle are moving pretty fast in the open beta to FSA with some amendments to 0.02. Warcradle have reiterated that they are only taking feedback through their Beta feedback form, which is fair enough, but will not, of course, stop my unofficial breakdown - I've cited the reasons before so they should be pretty obvious, so my comments are meant to encourage discussion. Feel free to drop comments below to correct anything I may have got wrong or misinterpreted.

Importantly, if you care about the game and don't like anything you're hearing, or want to get into the action yourself, make sure you get involved and submit that feedback form!

So, what's changed from v0.02?

Point Defence

This now removes successes from hits, not dice...the latter mechanic is such a bad one that I'd actually missed that in v0.02, so thank god it's now what I had assumed previously! Good catch everyone!

Unit Special Rules (USRs, the new MARs)

Aft Vulnerability has been added in a number of flavours, along with tweaks to some others - Burn retros, Come to New Heading and Squadron all affect movement, addressing some prior exploits. Command Ship added, which buffs command ships a bit (though apparently this is also "baked into" bigger ships...which leaves me scratching my head a bit....)

There are a few minor bits then which shore up some of these changes, and then we have;

AUTO DESTRUCT!!

At first I thought this might be a cool, last-ditch suicide mechanic like the old ramming, but no, basically if a ship can't maintain unit coherence, it just blows up. Wow.

The section on Manoeuvres has been re-written, preventing former move exploits and explaining benefits from being in squadron formations. I didn't mention these last time, but basically now there's almost no reason I can see to NOT have groups of ships in formation - you can ONLY link this way, you get boarding and defensive buffs etc...and I'm not sure how I feel about this...I guess continued playtesting will tell.

Catastrophic Damage is now twice the Mass value instead of three times. For me this is a bit...odd. For such a fundamental property I would prefer to see Mass being the value (like HP), not having to do some calculation - so doubling up all these values...you know what else that does? Opens up the design space...A heavy Cruiser or Battlecruiser could be Mass 5, a light frigate Mass 1 etc...know as Boarding and Cyberwarfare also work off this, you'd need to do a bit of tweaking here, but that's easy - especially with variable TNs.

There are some tweaks to Weapon Qualities, the biggest being the change to kinetics now being affected by Armour. One comment here is that having all of the qualities and what they do here is a bit confusing...I really hope there will be a summary table or something. Once again, I don't really see the advantage of moving from Weapon Types here, as having a weapon with the Torpedoes and Kinetic quality just means two things to look up. I know it means you can have "overlapping" qualities, but the way things are that could also make things very odd - potentially you could have a Beam Torpedo, which sounds cool but also has the potential to be as confusing as hell - what happens when the Quality types both affect the same thing? Now Warcradle could say that this won't happen in design of the ships - so the why have the option???

I guess I just think the Weapon Type plus occasional MARs is just a better, more elegant solution in my mind. Your opinion may be different - again, different strokes for different folks.

End Phase

The end phase has been substantially re-written. Now, I initially liked the idea of moving boarding and SRS to the end phase to prevent some shenanigans with (mostly) SRS and boarding that were technically possible in v2....BUT, there are a couple of issues. In this phase, one player does ALL their stuff, then the other does ALL theirs, like 40k. Now because models are IMMEDIATELY removed from play if they get 2xMass markers of a single type, then it's possible for an alpha-strike here, which I don't think is good. I need to try it out, but that's a concern. The other is that in larger games, especially with carrier-heavy or boarding heavy builds, one player could be doing nothing for quite some time - well, not nothing, but let's say having reduced player agency - something which is always bad. I would MUCH prefer either an I-Go-U-Go system here, or the far simpler option of having all the resolution of the boarding and SRS phase resolved in the Round End phase. Depending on where you have the Repair phase, this could have 2 outcomes;

(1) Repair Phase after Boarding/SRS - You could potentially save a ship from attack effects - representing desperate shoring up of specific areas targeted by the enemy. In-game result is likely to be to make ships more durable and lengthen the game a little.

(2) Repair Phase before Boarding/SRS - An attacker could specifically target areas that are not repaired, in an effort to kill ships - representing those targeted strikes up close and personal, that overwhelm a ships ability to cope as they're repairing stuff caused by main weapon impacts etc. In-game result is likely to kill ships quicker, and probably to encourage Boarding and SRS strikes to finish off damaged ships - would also give a different feel to carrier and boarding-heavy factions (if such things will exist in v3, I hope so).

What's still there that I'm unsure about (in no particular order);

1) Template weapons (No, you will never convince me these are any sort of improvement to the game)

2) Boarding Range is still 2"

3) What I'll call "token stacking" - even with Mass x 2 for same-system tokens, that's up to 30 tokens on a Battleship (admittedly, that's going to be VERY unusual), but 15 or so would be fairly typical I would imagine - again, play will show more.

4) Weapon Qualities - yeah, I think you know how I feel

5) The whole variable TN, slightly variable exploding mechanic, stacking effects....it's just...a lot. Others have commented, but there is no single STRONG CORE MECHANIC. For a new game, that seems...odd. You want to make this easily explainable, and I really don't think that it is in current form. I would HATE to try to run a demo game of this iteration to a group of kids and their dads (which, from experience, is the most common run-through at shows I've attended). 

6) Formations. I'm just not sure. I like the concept, but from my limited experience so far, it feels like the game cripples ships that aren't in formation from a mechanics PoV (other than the biggies, of course). That may be the intent, but then I'd just force that, as "choice" when there really isn't a choice is...pointless.

7) Planetfall "Influence". I know Stuart assures me that it's coincidence, but the similarities to PF mechanics are undeniable - someone in the design team or alpha feedback or somewhere along the line is either a PF fan, or has mechanics subliminally inlaid in there or something, because you don't get this much similarity from coincidence, sorry, I just don't buy that - I've never seen it before and I'm not seeing it now. If it looks like an orange, it smells like an orange and tastes like an orange, guess what...it's an orange. I don't think Stuart is lying, he's probably just unaware on the influence - by his own admission his day is not just involved with FSA...and even if he was/is, who's to say where the influence comes from. In any case, it IS there, plain to see, and I don't like it. Again, not because I didn't enjoy PF, but because it wasn't a finished ruleset etc (I've said all this before...).

TO BE VERY CLEAR HERE (added because some think this is an attack on Stuart)

I am NOT "having a go", "calling Stuart a Thief" of anything else personal here (Go back and re-read the paragraph above). What I'm talking about is the "end result", wherever that influence has come from, and as also stated, it's a PERSONAL VIEW. I could go and show all the similarities, but the point is just to make it, and then people can judge, make their own minds up, see if that's important to them etc, OK?

8) Does it still feel like Firestorm? Again, I'm not sure. No, I'll reiterate that - at the moment, no, it doesn't feel like Firestorm. It feels Firestorm-adjacent....I think it still needs a lot of work.

So, in summary, PLAY GAMES AND FEED BACK TO WARCRADLE!

Until v0.04, admirals...