This Week: The Combat Roll
In Sovereign Wars all combat is resolved with a single roll. This roll takes into account the skill of the attacker to fire their weapons as well as the defenders ability to avoid being shot. This roll also determines the base damage for a single attack. The idea is to speed up game play by removing all of the extra die rolling that many other games use. A basic combat roll starts with 2d6 being rolled. We then take the result and add the attackers Gunnery Value to the roll this total becomes the Attack Value. We then compare it to the defenders Defense Value, its important to note that this value may be modified by cover as well as other actions which we will cover in a later post. If the Attack Value is greater than the defenders Defense Value the attack is successful and we move on to damage resolution, of course if the defender's Defense Value is greater the attack is a miss the action is ended. If the attack is successful we then subtract the defender's Defense Value from the Attack Value and we get the base Damage Value. At this point we can then subtract the defenders's Shields Value and get the Applied Damage which will be covered in more detail later.
As you can see we are doing a lot with one roll and there can be a bit of math involved but once you have made a few rolls it becomes second nature and you can complete attacks in seconds.
Designers Tip: To speed up the game and make the combat roll even more simple compare the attacker's Gunnery Value and the defender's Defense Value prior to the roll. Determine the difference and then either add or subtract the difference from the die roll depending if the Attacker or Defender has the higher value. For example lets say Tom's cruiser is attacking Sam's frigate. The cruiser's Gunnery Value is 7 and the frigate's Defense Value is only 5. Since the cruiser's Gunnery Value is 2 higher that the frigates defense we would say that the roll is +2 meaning that whatever is rolled we are going to add 2 to the result which will give us the Base Damage Value. Since we already took into account Tom's Gunnery Value and Sam's Defense Value we can move onto determining the Applied Damage. Of course whenever the result is in question it is always best to go through each step of the Combat Roll to make sure everyone agrees with the result.
Until Next Week
