Help with combat Dice, what do you like?

Take a look at Eclipse's combat system. I find that system to be intuitive and simple. lasers deal 1 dmg, plasma deals 2dmg, anti-matter cannon and torpedoes deal 4dmg. all neatly fit into a tile.

They even provide die of different colors to differentiate the damage types. Say you are attacking with 1 laser, 2 plasma and 1 antimatter cannon, you just roll 1 yellow die, 2 orange dice and 1 red die.

Specialized dice is an option. So lets say your ships basic weapon is a bank of 4 laser canons. You roll 4 of the dice and whatever the roll says is your result. Assuming a D6 you could have 3xhits, 2xmiss and 1xcritical hit.

Now, depending on the weapon, certain rules cou.d apply. Youncould separate your weapons into small medium and heavy with each type getting its own coloured dice. That way you can roll all dice at once and recognize what each weapon has done easily. It also helps for unique weapon mechanics. Lets say your medium weapon has a targetting system, you could use a yahtzee inspired move to save dice you like and reroll ones you dont 1 time, that mimics a auto adjustment of the targeting.

Being specialized dice also lets you make he dice individual. Heavy weapons dice could be red and have AoE on one side, representing he heavy duty nature of the weapon.

You could also just make special effects a burn on use card or a card you have to tap for an additional effect outside ofthe dice rolling. So many possibilities.

For some reason the blank for a miss just reminds me of a scene from the novel Startide Rising when a Terran vessel narrowly escaped a pursuing armada. The alien captain shouted "Consult the Library! What does nyaa-nyaa mean in their language?"

I'm going to cut and paste my reply to a similar question.

Basically, I'm a big fan of using custom dice to produce deep combat results by using a symbolic language of sorts.
It's a fantasy example, but can easily be adapted for a sci-fi space setting. Perhaps it'll spark some ideas.
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I've been experimenting with symbolic dice combat for quite a while now. And you can even build in some pretty sophisticated concepts that are all effectively "under-the-hood". In that, the math is all done beforehand and baked into the dice, so all the players need to do is compare symbols.

What I've found that works well is a symbolic language that is, essentially, "Do this offense, unless that defense." Where the offense and defense in question are represented as symbols.

This can be further broken down into having different dice for different classes of attack. (Melee, Range, Magic) (Guns, Beams, Missiles) (Attack, Bonus1, Bonus2) This way, you can include different buffs for offenses on the appropriate attack dice, and have the defensive symbols cross-over onto different dice.

So for example, say you are using a d6 for a Melee attack. As a baseline for a hit, you'd have some kind of universal symbol for a hit, like a star or pip, that appears 4/6 on that die.

So a normal unbuffed attack vs an unbuffed defense, is 4/6 chance to hit.

Then on the same faces of the hits, you have a smaller defensive symbol that can potentially cancel out the hit if the defender is showing the proper symbol.

So that face becomes, "Hit, unless the defender shows (armor symbol)"

You may then use this symbol more times on the die to represent more effectiveness, and or include it as a defense on multiple dice depicting greater versatility against multiple types of attack.

So multiple defensive symbols will chip away from that 4/6.

Conversely, you can add other offensive symbols that indicate a hit only if the attacker has the appropriate symbol. Thus increasing the 4/6 to 5/6 or more.

That face says, "Miss, unless the attacker shows (sword symbol)"

You can also combine the two concepts (and this is probably as complicated as you want to get) by further adding another defensive symbol paired with an optional offensive symbol.

Thus saying, "Miss, unless attacker has (sword symbol). But also miss if defender has (shield symbol)."

In this way, the dice are effectively disguised stat tables that the player never needs to worry about. You can build interesting relationships between offense and defense types far beyond simple +1, +2, etc. And they are even quicker to resolve.

Some defenses can work better vs certain offenses. You can build in diminishing returns for certain attack buffs. You can build rock-paper-scissors relationships (or not) with deliberate distribution of attacks and defenses.

There's lots of ways to implement this, so I'll just go over some broad concepts and lessons learned.

1) You need to spend time on clear symbols. Ones that can be quickly identified at any angle, and at varying sizes.

I highly recommend following a pattern for easily distinguishing offensive symbols from defensive symbols. For example, defensive symbols always appear as an outline, offensive symbols always appear as a solid shape.

2) No more than two unique symbols per die face. If you must break this rule, do it sparingly, and realize that this is going to really add to the learning curve for new players.

It should be noted that multiple pips representing multiple hits can probably be regarded as a single unit, if you go that route.

3) There's not much to be gained by using ever increasing die faces. Stick to d6 or d8 if some faces are going to have more than one symbol.

Here's what happens. Say you want your baseline chance of hit to be 50/50. On a d6, that's three spots for offensive buffs, and three spots with default hits. All of these spaces may also have defenses.

Ok, now say you decide you want to have room for more offensive options. So you move to d10. That gives you four more spaces, right? No.

You still want 50/50 as the baseline, so you now have five spaces instead of three. You've only gained two. Additionally, you've now watered down your existing buffs. Maybe one of them should remain strong, so you expand it to two faces, and now you only have one face left for your new buffs. To top it all off, d10 sides are much smaller and cramped, making your symbols harder to read, and increasing your production costs by using non-6 sided dice.

If you need further examples or explanation, just say so.

If it's just roll and see what happens, then I suggest to cut all the "shield checks and modifiers or whatnot". Make it as quick and simple as possible.

I had this same concept for several of my games (and for use with games like Axis and Allies and Warhammer 40k) and had a big batch of these dice made up by my manufacturer;

http://iwngu.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Hit-or-Miss-Dice-O...

Sets of 5 dice,
white has 1 hit 5 blank,
yellow has 1 hit, 1 critical, 4 blank,
orange has 2 hits, 1 critical hit, 3 blank,
red has 2 hit, 2 critical, 2 blank
black has 3 hit, 2 critical and 1 blank.

I started with, and always try to stick to, percentile dice. Modifiers never bothered me. I find them the best way to conceptualize what is going. IE I have a 50 percent chance "to hit" with my rifle. In high wind -15 modifier gives me a 35 percent chance. Simple and straightforward.

"But some have higher miss chances together with higher damage output on hits"

Do you mean like a DPS rating in a RTS video game??

I don't use CRT's in my Wargaming anymore, to many players nowadays complain of them. When I play other games with a CRT, I have converted the CRT to percentile chances. So if in low odds on CRT you can only get a result if you roll a 1 on a d6 then that is converted to a 16 percent chance on percentile die. This was a method I took from a Armor Magazine article on using commercial wargames for Training when I was in the Army. I like consistency and not having to learn a new system for every game. With this method I can keep the learning curve down between all my different genres of games.