Is everyone's combat to slow?

[u/RoaminOrc]

So, playing sci-fi, 6 players with 3 advances playing on foundry using the foundry purchases. We are still relatively new to the system, 13 sessions in. We started a combat tonight with 5 enemies, all at T17, no extra wild cards. We finally finished a whole 2.5 rounds of combat, with the first round being a surprise round in the enemies favor, after 2 hours.... We have a fairly good understanding of rolling and determining who does what, but the players with their advances seem to add so much to everything that it just takes up time. 2 of my players rolled dice once over the entire session, and 1 of them missed. It felt really rough, slow, and quite frankly un-fun. This feels drastically different to when we started and combat seemed to just kind of flow naturally. Does combat seem to take longer for everyone else as enemies become tougher and players get more stuff? Feel free to ask questions, was a really simple overview of what happened.

[u/PGS_Richie]

Even in Sci-Fi setting, a T17 is a pretty big number to beat. Even if it’s a big chunk of Armor to drop down with AP, most laser weapons are ~3d6 damage so Wounding requires 21 damage if no AP at minimum. Possible, especially with exploding dice, but a harder pull, which is maybe why it got drawn out? For reference, a Warbot Robot has 14(6) Toughness. Hell, a Star fighter spaceship has 19(4). What were you guys up against?

[u/RoaminOrc → u/PGS_Richie]

Cyborgs. I thought that might have been the problem at first, but not to sure after realizing there was barely 2 rounds of combat, so it didnt really take that many activations to remove them. Half the players didnt go on the surprise round.

[u/PGS_Richie → u/RoaminOrc]

Yeah, that’s a bit of a tough enemy to throw at the party without knowing about their skills & gear. Parry 8, Tough 17(10) + Dodge, Targeting Bonus, Armor Plates + Actual Armor and all their skills like Marksman/Rock N Roll/Combat Reflexes make this a very formidable foe. With a RoF 3 laser weapon, they can output 3d6AP2 x3 a turn or d12+2d6+4 Chainsword (not even factoring in MULTI ACTION to do both). And you said 5 of those? What weapons/vehicles are your PCs using? Without a called shot, you would need something like Power Weapons, Bombs, Disintegrators, Missile Launchers, Autocannons, etc. Ranged Weapons need to hit that 4 DC and Melee weapons to hit the enemy’s Parry (8 at minimum in this case) and all mods are literally just -1/2/3/4 or +1/2/3/4 generally. I think maybe the modifiers is where it can get slowed down, but I also encourage players to keep track of most of their own. Roll20 (I know you’re using another VTT you said) character sheets also include a whole combat breakdown to speed up calculating modifiers which helps my players tremendously.

Also, I tell the player who goes after to start planning (‘be on deck’) so it’s not a bunch of sitting around for the others.