People on the Starfinder groups seem to either love or hate Starship combat and or Starships themselves.

Some dislike the parallel starship economy separate from the character economy. Paizo says it’s to keep balance between the power of characters not buying end game gear with their starship money. Two things, game designers have said for years that cost is a lousy way to balance high powered gear and two it just seems so artificial that it draws attention to itself.

Starship sensors base sensor reading priority off of weapon power useage, but many weapons use 10 or 15 PCU. Capital missiles use the same amount of power as some light weapons.

Weapons and armor for Starships don’t follow the same rules for Item levels as character scale equipment does, Starships by Tier don’t have the same predictably as Monsters by CR do and therefore starship combat has to be so biased in favor of PCs to avoid a party wipe which may still happen if the PCs aren’t built for starship combat or lack a critical role.

Bounding the items by level and letting PCs buy one or two levels above their Tier would allow for not every ship to feel the same and still have predicable combat results in a reasonable range.

Crew Quarters are a pay for luxury item that doesn’t take up more space even if it adds extra quarters volume or amenities. Crew Quarters scale for free with crew size, while Escape Pods and Life Boats do not. In Super Colossal ships all Expansion Bay items scale with the size of the ship to accommodate the needs of the crew. It seems like they should just push this down to all non-combat systems across all ship sizes. Space Fighters don’t have expansion bays and therefore cannot afford Escape Pods or Life Boats though one would imagine high end fighters having some kind of Ejection Seat which would act like a one or two seat Escape Pod, one might say it is scaled to the size of it’s crew.

If starship weapons and armor were bounded into a small range for the tier, it wouldn’t matter as much what the non combat items inside the ship cost. Could a wealthy merchant build a luxury pleasure barge out of a Tier 4 lightly armed transport?

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Paul

Evilrobotgames at Gmail.com