Triplanetary Combat Question

[penneyft]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I can't see anything in either the 2018 or the 1981 rules that makes this explicit, but I think it would probably be D4 to each.

Applying logic, this is the only approach that makes sense. If you only apply D4 collectively to the entire group (e.g. D1 to each + 1, or D4 to a single ship), then you would have been better off attacking each corsair individually at much better combat odds (15:4 instead of 15:12), instead of lowering your odds, but still applying the damage to a single ship. And given that 15:4 odds would allow a 1-in-6 chance of eliminating the target outright, that would be a better approach. Instead, the dreadnaught has a 50:50 chance of disabling the corsairs for at least 2 turns, which gives it additional time to try to destroy them.

Since the rules allow attacking multiple ships, this would be logical way to make use of the combat table.

Conversely, since an attacker can combine multiple attacking ships, the same approach would apply -- the damage obtained would be applied once as the collective damage from all attackers, not as the damage per attacking ship. (e.g. 3 corsairs attacking the dreadnaught at 12:15 and rolling a 6 would result in D3 being applied to the dreadnaught, not D9 (D3 + D3 + D3).)