Before I start making comments here, let me again list my caveat here that I have never played WAS, so that's the perspective I'm coming from. Which, incidentally, I think is probably a really good one, since both Eric and Dean HAVE played WAS, so I think you guys tend to forget to include some fairly basic things into the rules here. Anyways, here goes...
Engineer wrote:
Board setup
Place the three objective tokens along the center line of the map. Two spaces should be between each objective token.
Each player should place two terrain features (planets or asteroid fields). A single player can not place both of their terrain features adjacent to each other.
Can you place the terrain ANYWHERE on the map, or only on your own side of the map? In another thread, you mentioned something about asteroids only taking up 1/4 of a sector and planets taking 3/4 or something like that. How does that affect LOS issues?
Engineer wrote:
Ship types
BB (Battleships) – large battle wagons of the universe
CA (Heavy Cruisers) – lots of guns, but not as much armor as BB’s.
CL (Light Cruisers) – much smaller ships, less armor
DD (destroyers) – lightest capital ships in the game
SUB (subs, looking for a better Star Wars name) – ships that only a few other ships can target
F (fighters) – small fighters (either single uniques or small groups)
I know you are trying to mesh WAS with SSB, but honestly, I think almost ALL of these could stand to use more star-warsy type names. Destroyers really doesn't make much sense. When I hear the word 'destroyer' I don't think of the 'lightest capital ships'. The names don't necessarily mesh. I'll think about some ideas for better names, but for now, suffice to say, that as we played our test game, we could NEVER remember what types of ships were what.
In addition.....when do Destroyers Move/Attack? Part of this list should probably include something to specifically point out which ships are considered 'Capital ships'. We ended up assuming that anything which wasn't a Sub or Fighter was a capital ship, which I think is correct, but it wasn't immediately clear to us.
Engineer wrote:
Fighters with hyperdrives can setup anywhere on your half of the map (Gravity Well Projectors prevent the use of hyperdrives)
What about Fighters without hyperdrives? Or what do you do when the Interdictor is on the board? Is there were the 'Fighter Launch' ability comes into play? We had no idea how to work around this question, so we just simply started all our fighters in the first row along with everything else.
Engineer wrote:
Fighters attack
Fighter can attack other fighters, make torpedo or bomb attacks against enemy ships, or strafe enemy ships
When fighters attack other fighters, use the anti-fighter attack value
If the damage is less than the armor, no effect.
If the damage is equal to the armor but less than the vital armor, the fighter is aborted and can not make any attacks against ships this turn.
If the damage is equal to or greater than the vital armor, the fighter is destroyed.
When fighters make torpedo attacks against enemy ships, roll d6’s equal to the attack value
When fighters make bomb attacks against enemy ships, roll d6’s equal to the attack value
When fighter strafe enemy ships use the gunnery attack value (fighters that are strafing have -2 to both armor and vital armor)(make sure to make strafing fighters)
Player 1 fires all their anti-air attacks (ships and fighters)
Player 2 fires all their anti-air attacks (ships and fighters)
Player 1 attacks with any surviving fighters
Player 2 attacks with any surviving fighters
Apply damage to ships and fighters
This whole section needs to be cleaned up, IMO. It took us a good 5-10 minutes of reading and re-reading this before we THINK we finally got it sorted out. You need to re-word the 'anti-air' part of it, as that's ridiculously confusing, since in some sense, ALL SSB pieces are in 'the air', lol. We finally figured out that this meant that all ships on the board fire their 'Anti-Fighter' weapons first, and then you go back through and do your other attacks.
That's where we got confused next though. Can Fighters use both their Anti-Fighter weapons and their Main Gun weapons in the same round? Do you have to declare a Strafing Run whenever you do your Movement action? If you do a Strafing Run, can you make Anit-Fighter attacks still?
When a Fighter is aborted, does it still get to make it's Anti-Fighter attacks? If not, that seems incredibly powerful for whoever gets to attack first (it means I would WANT to lose init every round).
Slightly related, but more on Ship Stats....What does the 'Torpedo 1' SA mean on pieces like Obi-Wan's Jedi Interceptor? Does that mean he has only 1 torpedo that he can choose to use 1 time per skirmish? I assume that's the case, but it seems very low powered and hardly worth using in most cases. You're talking about the same as rolling roughly a 17 or higher on a D20, which from all of our experience in SWM is fairly rare. So I don't see how a one-time-use Torpedo really helps that much.
Lastly, why have a difference between Bombs and Torpedos? Are they supposed to be different things? We assumed so, and we figured that the Bombs (like the ARC-170's 10 attack) must be used like normal attacks, where you count 4's and 5's, and 6's as double, and then compare against the Armor, rather than the Torpedo method of just rolling for 6's. Might need to explain that better, or just come up with a different term. Concussion Missiles are typically the lesser form of Proton Torpedos in the Star Wars 'verse so perhaps consider that instead of 'Bomb'.
Engineer wrote:
Subs attack
Subs roll one less torpedo die for each enemy DD in the same or adjacent sector. Also subtract one torpedo die for each anti-sub attack during this turn. A DD that makes an anti-sub attack only subtracts one torpedo die not two.
Player 1 fires all their SUBS
Player 2 fires all their SUBS
Apply damage to ships/subs
Just for clarification.....if a Fighter with anti-Sub attacks hits a Sub, they just simply take damage, and are not 'aborted', correct?
Engineer wrote:
AttacksRoll the number of d6 equal to the attack value at the range (units in the same sector are range 0). 4’s and 5’s count as one hit. 6’s count as two hits.
If the number of hits is:
Less than your targets armor – nothing happens
Equal to or greater than your targets armor (but less than the vital armor) – one damage
Equal to or greater than your targets vital armor – unit destroyed
If your targets hull points are reduced to zero, the unit is destroyed
Sub torpedo’s hit on a 6 for 2 damage. This damage goes directly to the hull (bypasses armor and vital armor)/quote]
I REALLY like this damage method. Made it fun, and I don't mind rolling a bunch of dice. Just have to remember to bring more D6s with me next time, lol. We only had 5 total D6's to play with, so it made keeping track of things tough, lol.
Engineer wrote:
2) Each objective token is worth 50, 100 or 150 points respectively.
3) Defeating all your opponents capital ships is worth the same as an objective token
Which token is worth which points? Is the first one worth 50, the second worth 100, and the third worth 150? That's what made the most sense to me. If you defeat all of your opponent's ships, then which token does that count for? Whichever one hasn't been claimed yet? Need to flesh this out a bit more. Hard to understand how it works.
As I said, overall, it was a lot of fun playing by these rules, and I would definitely like to test it out a bit more. But I will say that we definitely got a bit frustrated throughout playing it, because we really felt like the rules, as written, were very hard to understand. If we had not had 2 guys in the shop that night who know how to play WAS, we would've been completely lost, IMO. So, I really think the rules need to be re-written in such a way so that people who have never even heard of WAS can print this out and play with it.
Side Note: to go along with our play-testing report....I'm noticing now that there are several things we probably did wrong with the game, the first thing being that we didn't do the Hull Points/Reduced Stats stuff correctly. For instance, we thought the Millenium Falcon only had 2 Hull Points total, and when you got hit once, then you were down to the Reduced status, rather than being 3 HP total, and needing to be hit twice in order to get knocked down. That makes a LOT more sense now, and probably would've made a bigger difference in how the game turned out. Will definitely have to play again now that I understand things a bit better.