Board Thread:Homebrew/@comment-30996754-20170323042105/@comment-30996754-20170323054506

Shields down is a costing issue, which is down to my lack of experience. Maybe make it -1 per point of shields & limit it to small & large ships, since huge ones can restore their shields much more easily? The issue then becomes the ships with some, but minimal shielding. A FO TIE is only dropping one point for 1/4 of it's survivability & that's ignoring first-hit-crits, which seems a poor deal.

Reserve Force is very similar in tactical approach to the old (2nd ed.) 40k Imperial Guard ability (I've not played 40k since then; I took one look at 3rd & abandoned that arena - cover or armour saves? So, if a Marine is using a tree for cover & still gets shot, was he taking a piss & the bullet caught him with his ceramite trousers down?) but to be fair, it's a reasonably standard military tactic & variations of it appear in many games. Since timed games are a specific case it could be banned from such events, but even then, the more you keep off the board the greater the point imbalance between you & your opponent's in-play forces. If they can drop what you do have in play with a lucky shot or two before you pull in the reserves, you lose. If you're keeping a basic z-95 or Academy Pilot in reserve, the points difference might not be that much, but that's still a 17-point ship that's about as crappy as you can get, which will make a difference in a standard 100-point match. If you want to bring in something that is more likely to survive that vital last turn, you need something more resilient & therefore more expensive, meaning your in-play forces will be weaker & more likely to be wiped out with plaenty of time for the opponent to wheel around & take out the latecomer.

Regarding Taking Point, the obvious answer is to make it unique. If only a single ship can be acting as a forward scout, it separates it from Dormitz's more wide-ranging strategy. Also limit it to small ships only, to prevent it being applied to Dormitz himself (which would be a very nasty thing to do).

For the Caught Napping, Keyan doesn't get any benefit; you can't remove stress - either through green movement or pilot ability - until after attacking/defending. Once he's done one of those things, having the stress there is potentially handy, but by then he would have been able to do a red or use a stress-inducing talent already, so not a major issue. For Tycho, the stress simply means he can't pull red movements from the start of the game, which is the only limitation stress gives him anyway. With a pilot for whom stress is such a minor inconvenience already, anything that alters his stress pattern is going to be nearly impossible to balance compared to other pilots. If anything, I'd suggest that Tycho's ability is the imbalanced thing, as evidenced by the number of strategies that revolve around his stress-sponging capabilities.