Drazi Redux: Reimagining the Drazi in A Call to Arms, Part 4 - Balance Pass

About a year ago I decided to compose a Redux for the Drazi fleet in A Call to Arms to make it slightly more fun to play. As written, the Drazi fleet feels to me like a low effort attempt to meet a deadline and has some massive weaknesses that make it nigh on unplayable against a lot of factions. Thats not to say there arent some standout ships, the Patrol level Sleekbird is, for its cost, an incredible choice and the Warbird, provided you can line up your shot, can match the Centauri Vorchan, in this players opinion the best ship in the game, shot for shot with an even chance of emerging victorious.

The key changes I made were to add some non-boresighted weapons to the ships to make the fleet slightly less punishing to maneuver. Change the weapons to offer a selection of abilities and ranges, and to swap the Warbirds and Sunhawks over in regards to their Priority levels to be in line with the Babylon 5 Wars ship stats. in B5W the Warbird is the older and thus less capable ship, with the Sunhawk being newer, the reverse being the case in ACTA

After a fair amount of playtesting my intial Redux ships there are several things that became apparent.

Firstly, as initially drafted, the fleet is very close to being balanced. This is quite re-assuring since prior to this I had been creating single ships only and not attempting to draft an entire fleet, and my other project is to create my own space game and game balance is important so knowing I have a sense of how things will work is a massive boost.

The Warbirds were perhaps a little too finely tuned

Secondly: The culprits are the Patrol level choices, being the warbirds and their variants. They are a little too surviveable. The Hull 5 ,5+ Dodge and 12 damage means they stick around for longer than your opponent would like, meaning you can retain the initiative for longer since you will likely outnumber your opponent. Thats not to say they are tough, its just that the Drazi can attrit their opponents initiative sinks faster than their opponents can attrit theirs, and the heavy hitters, the skirmish and above level ships, have the freedom to maneuver and attack with little in the way of counter play. They are also a little too useful, and quite well armed. I initially tried to make sure they were inferior to the Kutai and while that is true, the Kutai is not taken in numbers, whereas the Drazi Patrol level ships will be

Third and Last, the interesting part of the Drazi fleet is the small stuff, they really did get a bit of a kicking in Powers and Principalities with the changes to how many ships of each priority level you can take depending on the priority of the game, meaning at higher Pririty levels you are pretty much forced to take the Firehawk since it is the Drazi's only Raid level ship. There are fan rules for the Deathfalcon but thats a specialist assault ship, not a combat ship and the Nightowl could potentially be a Raid ship. This is something that could be addressed in the future.

The Drazi enthusiastically 'inspect' a pair of Narn ships

Changes.

With the exception of the Sleekbird I reduced the Damage of all the Warbird Hulls to 10/2 and their Crew to 12/3. I did give some thought to reducing the hull to 4 instead but I wanted to keep to the rules I set out when I initially drafted my Redux and it is, in effect, about a 17% reduction in their surviveability.

In addition to that here are some additional changes. The Patrol level choices were perhaps a bit too strongly armed. This has mainly been fixed by removing twin-linked from a lot of the ships secondary weapons

Stareagle - Removed Twin-Linked from the Particle Repeater

Kestrel - Removed Twin-Linked from the Particle Repeater

Warbird - Removed Twin-Linked from the Particle Repeater

Strikebird - Removed Twin-Linked from the Particle Repeater

Strikehawk - Removed Twin-Linked from the Particle Blaster

Twin-Linked is a very strong ability and significantly increases the chance of landing hits. With the Warbirds having Mini-beams as their main armament it meant that you never had to choose which weapons to give re-rolls to if you managed to scout your opponent since the ships secondary armament would always have Twin-Linked as standard. now you will have to pick which weapon will get the re-rolls, unless you bring multiple scouts. 

War Talon: Reduced Anti-fighter from 3 to 2. Removed Twin-Linked from Particle Repeater

For the War Talon, in addition to carrying a flight of Star Snakes, it was exactly half as effective as an escort as the Guardhawk, allowing you to take 2 for the same cost, get 2 flights of fighters, and the same Anti-fighter ability. In addition, while the Range of the weapons was reduced compared to the Guardhawk, the number of shots is half, giving 2 War Talons the same firepower as one Guardhawk. The reduction of the Anti-Fighter gives the Guardhawk a significant advantage. I also elected to remove twin-linked from the repeater so that there is now a real tradeoff between taking a pair of War Talons and a single Guardhawk.

Eyehawk - Increased range on the Particle Repeater from 4" to 8", Reduce number of shots from 12 to 8

Scout ships are, in general, a lot weaker than other ships at their tier, the Eyehawk as I designed it was a little extreme. The offense while quite potent against ships if it got into range, meant that it wasn't in range most of the time. To rectify that I increased the range and decreased the number of shots the ship gets. I think its a buff, but its a sideways buff, better range, fewer shots

Shallana Breaching Pod - Reduce Hull from 5 to 4

This was perhaps just a bit too good. A breaching pod that is also a fighter. at the very least the weak guns meant it couldn't support ships as Interceptors, but can disrupt strike fighters. A slight nerf was in order.

Warbirds and Sunhawks escort a group of Freighteagles

I have also completed some useful Ship Control sheets for all the Drazi ships from my Redux. You can use the profiles from my Blog and create your own, or you can visit my patreon become a member and gain access to the ones I have created. I'm also planning to draft Control sheets for all the ships I've created over the past few years but that is for the future.

Coming Soon.

There are still plenty of ships the Drazi could have. In B5W the Drazi have a dizzying number of variants of the Warbird and Sunhawk, and while the main ones made it into A Call to Arms there are still a number of Variants that could be included, The Wareagle, Taileagle, Eyebird, Darkbird, numerous Preyhawks as well as larger ships that would be Raid level or higher, The Nightowl, Deathfalcon and Warfalcon, additionally there are numerous Raider Hunter ships. And thats before you get to the Fanon with ships like the Roc Battlecruiser, Swallow (and its variants) among others. I definately plan on adding some of them since Tyrel Lohr has recently finished (and not yet released to the general public.

I am also going to give an update on my progress as I pickup Infinity again. Its one of those games you will either love or hate, is quite unforgiving, has lots of counterplay, and is insanely good fun once you know what you are doing.

I've also dug out my Warhammer 40k 2nd Edition Sisters of Battle (All metal) and I will be making them presentable before (hopefully) playing some classic 40k with them. 2nd Edition being the Edition where the rules really were not at all well written, and the game itself is a crazy mess, but crazy in a good way

Next Time:

I've been hinting I've been up to something, if you've followed me for a while you will know my tempo of battle reports has significantly slowed. I have instead been working on my own set of rules. Its almost at the point where I would be happy to reveal. There are just a few more edits and explanations left in the core rules, but no scenarios, 2 of my planned 4 fleet lists are about half done, and points are not balanced. I've played some games so the core mechanics work. I will be giving a fairly in depth account of my thought processes about various decisions and how I envision the game being played.
More details next time, obviously

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think of the rebalanced Drazi ships, and I will see you next time.

STL's by Tyrel Lohr and Batrachian
Miniatures painted by me