"MAATAC any good?" Topic

I have been looking around at Monday Knight Productions. On that site is MAATAC rules and miniatures. The rules are inexpensive and a lot of the miniatures look good. I am interested in getting some of this stuff. How many miniatures are used in this game?
Can anyone comment on the game and miniatures?

link

Superior originally brought these out over, gee, twenty-some years ago to provide a ground combat system to accompany their starships. I think it's great that Will at MKP has preserved the miniatures ranges. But to be honest, thinking back to, oh, about 1983 in Copperas Cove, TX, the one time we tried the MAATAC rules, it didn't go to well. Probably just do to our unfamiliarity, though.

The old "Starfleet Wars" rules were nicely simple, and worked well for big fleets; not sure if Will's "Galactic Knights" rules are derived at all from those.

Be advised that for 6mm, the MAATAC vehicles are *big* hunks of lead: the larger ones would certainly qualify as Ogres in other systems!

Allen

I don't know if Galactic Knights is derived from Starfleet Wars, either, but GK makes a wonderfully chaotic convention game, what with six or ten people all doing "hex-grid vector" movement with squadrons. This old Mayday player didn't have a problem, but the scatter across the rest of the table was impressive.

Never played the game but I've got a bunch of the Maatac minis and I really like them. They've got the same level of detail as the spaceships… and are very different from most anything else out there… big spider tanks and tanks on 'rollers'… good stuff IMHO.

I've played all the games discussed above. Galactic Knights really doesn't have anything to do with Starfleet Wars other than using the same setting and minis…the game mechanics are totally different, and GK is arguably a much better game.

MAATAC is…being generous, it's kind of simplistic. The minis are quite nice, but the rules show their age rather badly, and they weren't all that hot when they first came out. No scenarios, no point system to build you own scenarios, the infantry are nearly worthless, and some of the races (Terran, Avarian) vehicles are so much better than the others (especially Bugs) that you need a two-to-four to one ratio of equal weight classes to make an interesting game. It's just missing a lot of the elements you'd expect in a modern minis game…but of course, it isn't a modern minis game, it's about 30 years old.

I'll heartily recommend the MAATAC minis, but skip on the rules and use something else like Dirtside to game with them. Maybe Monday Knights will be nice and do a new set of rules for ground combat in the Galactic Knights setting someday. Asking them nicely about it when you order figs might be a good prod… :)

Rich

aecurtis indicates that the mini's are large. What are the meaurements of the Terran vehicles such as the Monarch, Conqueror, and the Devestation? Would these be to large comapared to the current 6mm's?

Castellan,

size-wise think of Keith Laumer's classic BOLO series; super heavy multi-turreted war machines crushing everything under their treads and guns that would be right at home on a 20th century battleship, and you get the idea.

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

Not all the Maatac vehicles are huge… like the spaceships there is a wide range in size between the smaller ones and the biggest…
The smaller vehicles would not look out of place next to Epic/Battletech tanks… but the larger ones will dwarf them… which is an effect I like.

Hi Castellan,

The MAATAC rules are very simple and very old… they were probably inspired by the old META GAMEs and OGRE.

If you want simple, they're fine… otherwise, go for something with more frills.

Shalom,
Maksim-Smelchak.
6mm-minis.blogspot.com

Thank you all.
I still plan on getting some of the models. I do like the look of the Terran tanks.