Warning: this is somewhat of a incomplete review since I’ve only played the solitaire tutorial games and read the manual. It's also quite long and rambling, which is just how I tend to write these things...
About a month ago I saw the announcement that Ad Astra Games was going to release an Honor Harrington wargame. Being my favorite source of space opera and a project that I’ve toyed with on and off for years I was quite excited.
After reading through the message board post on the topic (and earlier posts about their flagship game, Attack Vector: Tactical) I decided to plunk down my money sight unseen. I don’t often do things this way, but the stated design concept (make a 3D, true vector space combat game that is both playable and fun) was too close to what I’ve always wanted to see in a wargame.
I ordered via the website and set about waiting (im)patiently for the game to arrive. There was a bit of a delay as they got the pre-orders shipped but it still arrived within two weeks.
The game comes in a sturdy 3” deep black cardboard box with a slip cover. The box is nice enough, and will make a good transport for game parts, but the slip cover is going to get mighty beat up in no time. I’d have preferred if they went the Grendel Miniatures route and just glued color panels onto the box.
Inside the box was the main rulebook, ship book, sourcebook, 2 double sided paper maps, a few bags of stacking tiles and tilt blocks, dice, 6 sheets of punch out game pieces, dice and a bunch of laminated play aids. There’s no much room left inside the box, which does become a bit of a problem now that I have some ships punched out and assembled.
The main rulebook isn’t going to win any design awards with a color laser printed cover and inside printing that looks like a print-on-demand job. The ship book and sourcebook, while staple bound, are of similar quality, with some very nice pictures in the ship book (each ship page is accompanied by a very nice 3d rendered ‘vanity shot’ of the ship in question). I certainly get the impression that this is a ‘function over form’ product, which is just fine with me, as long as they hold up the function end of the bargain.
The maps are one of my only nitpicks with the included components. They are fine maps, double sided with .9” hexes on one side and 1.5” hexes (just big enough to hold 2 ships) on the other, with direction rosettes printed on each (hex sides have a direction from A to F). The only problem is that they’re printed in light blue on one side, white on another. An odd choice, but I’ve got enough black paper hex maps from various other games to not make it one worth fussing over. They do offer a 1.5” hex felt mat, which I might pick up eventually.
The stacking tiles and tilt blocks are smaller than I imagined from the pictures I’ve seen on the web. Without a ruler handy I’d say they were about .9” on a side. The tiles click together nicely, just enough to not scatted on an errant bump. I was a bit confused by the choice of red and green for the stacking blocks until I saw the matching ship control cards (more on this in a bit).
It’s nice to see that they obviously knew where to spend their money with the game pieces. The printing is very high quality, with punch out blocks (of three sizes) and counters, including embossed fold lines. Now, you’ll have to assemble the boxes yourself with tape or glue, but that’s not so bad. There are at least six sheets with ships from the different power factions and assorted utility counters (end of segment and end of turn markers) for enough ships to run a pretty good sized game. Each ship is rendered in 6 views, obviously from the same 3D models they used for the books. The boxes are a little light once assembled, and they recommend putting a BB inside each one to help it balance better inside a tilt block.
The play aids are also very high quality printing and nicely laminated. They include two reference cards (movement on one side, combat on another) and 6-8 ship control cards. The control cards come in red and green varieties. Coupled with the tilt blocks and the fact that the red ones are oriented 180 degrees from the green it means that if you set the map out in one direction, each sit at one end of the table, not only will your cards match the orientation of the map but your blocks will match your cards. Pretty clever.
Speaking just on the physical quality, I think they did a nice job of prioritizing where the money should be spent. All of the stuff you’ll actually play with (and admire on the table) is well made, sturdy and attractive. The book is less attractive, but there’s enough on the cards that it won’t be used much as a reference source (I think) once you know the rules. So far so good…
Warning 2: I read the rules in a few sittings, mostly with a sleeping baby in my lap, so my perceptions might be skewed a bit towards confusion. :-)
The main rulebook is arranged in what I consider the Avalon Hill style. Everything has a number, section 1.34 would be the 4th subsubsection in the 3rd subsection of the 1st section. Easy enough really, though not as “stylish” as seems to be the trend these days. However, for a middle aged curmudgeon like myself it’s kind of refreshing. Also, combined with the headers, it makes it really easy to find cross referenced rules.
The sections on movement are very well written, very clear and contain a good set of examples and sample scenarios to really get the hang of what most will consider the major hurdle of the game.
As mentioned elsewhere, movement is true vector and in 3 dimensions (though you can toss out 3D easily enough if you like). A game turn is divided into 8 segments (Car Wars style) with movement and weapon fire occurring on each segment. The ship control card (SCC) is used to keep track of the ship’s vector in terms of hex sides (and up or down). So a ship might be moving 3A, 2B, 1+ meaning that each turn it will have moved 3 hexes in direction A, 2 in direction B and 1 up. As I mentioned above, if you sit on the ‘green’ side of the table, A is on the top of the card, while if you sit on the ‘red’ side of the table, D is on the top, making it easy to orient yourself.
Since each turn is divided into segments, each ship has a movement chart that tells it how far to move in each direction each segment. A ship can pivot or roll to face any direction (facing is also indicated on the SCC) while continuing to move along the same vector.
Thrusting is a bit more tricky than I had expected, having dealt with pseudo vector systems such as that used in Full Thrust. Instead of magically reaching your new velocity with no change in position, during your acceleration you may move small amounts as you gradually gain velocity (or gradually change your vector, as the case may be). It’s all encapsulated in a tidy little chart, so each segment of thrust you know how much velocity you are accumulating and whether or not you get bumped a hex in the new direction. Accumulated velocity is added to your regular A-F and +/- vectors as appropriate and then you recalculate your movement chart.
Nothing difficult so far, though there is a bit of record keeping involved, as is to be expected. Being used to both Car Wars and Champions I was a bit surprised to find that if you’re moving, say, 4 hexes in direction A you don’t always move on the same 4 segments. It took me a while to figure out that you need to juggle the movements a bit to draw as close as possible to a straight line from your start point to end point. So, once you know your final vector, you need to do a chart lookup to fill out your movement chart correctly.
All told, it took maybe 30 minutes to read through the movement section, and I was fully comfortable with moving, pivoting and applying thrust inside of another 30 minutes playing the sample scenarios. It will take a bit more practice to be able to pick a point and fly to it with accuracy, but that’s the nature of the game.
Overall, I’m really impressed with the movement system. They’ve taken a very complex problem space and distilled it into something that retains the accuracy (as close as possible with discrete time units and hex sizes) while still making it a playable system.
Yes, it is a lot of recordkeeping, and you’re going to be erasing and rewriting on your sheet a lot of times during the combat, but as I’ve said before, that’s the nature of the beast. Nothing here is difficult (though I have to add the caveat that this is my kind of game) but there’s just so much of it that it can seem overwhelming. That said, I don’t think I’d want to run more than 2 ships at a time. Luckily the game is designed with that in mind.
The next big chunk of rules covers combat, which falls into three major types; beam weapons, coilguns and missiles.
Beam weapons are pretty easy overall. There is a pretty simple procedure to find out “where in the sky” the other ship is, whether or not one of your batteries can ‘see’ it and then take the shot. As far as I can tell, they don’t “miss” per se (ranges are short, ships are slow and predictable and light is fast) though the effectiveness of a shot can be low enough that it might as well be a miss.
Coilguns (railguns with semi-guided projectiles) are a really interesting concept but I’m afraid that I’ll just have to play to really figure out how they work. I’m not sure that the rules are really unclear, but without going through the procedure to figure out where the enemy ship will be (it’s a ballistic weapon) and where you want to fire in relation to them is more than I can internalize just from reading the rules (baby was waking up, so I was skimming at this point as well). The entire back side of the reference card is dedicated to developing a firing solution, and like the rest of the game it’s more recordkeeping than difficult math.
Interestingly, once the shells are fired, they don’t appear on the map at all. Instead, the targeted ship is given a card that basically tells it that X projectiles are coming in from Y direction and will arrive in Z segments, unless they maneuver out of the way and/or shoot them down.
Since the coilgun fires so many projectiles, one of the tactics seems to be to fire them in an arc, forcing the enemy to move in a certain direction, thus bringing them closer to your beam weapons. This is certainly an appealing concept, though I haven’t experienced it firsthand to know how well it works in practice. If the enemy figures out what you’re doing, they can decide to maneuver into the shells and hope to shoot as many down ad possible before they arrive.
The final weapon type is the missile, a slow (but still faser than a starship) seeking weapon. I was REALLY skimming at this point and can’t comment past the point that I think it works kind of like a coilgun but rarely misses unless shot down.
Once a weapon hits it does damage, using a system that I can’t really tell if I like or dislike. Again, I haven’t playtested this part, so I can’t comment on how it plays, only on how it reads.
Basically, a weapon does X points of damage, determined usually by a roll and quick chart lookup. The target ship needs to figure out where it gets hit (the same “where in the sky is it” calculation) which determines which components can get hit as well as the armor protecting them. Once a weapon penetrates the armor +d10, then each system it hits “soaks up” another d10 of it’s damage pool until it’s got nothing left. So if 20 damage impacts a section with armor 5, the outer armor takes off 9 points with a roll of 4, leaving 11 to hit the first system (fuel), which takes off 6 points with a roll of 6, leaving 5 to hit the next system. I think I’ve got this right, give or take a die roll.
There are also rules to cover so much damage that it goes through to the core of the ship and even out the other side, but I remember them even less clearly than the above so I should probably stop while I’m ahead.
I really can’t give an objective comment on the combat or damage system until I play a few games. What I can say with some certainty is that the rulebook is not as streamlined in this section as in the movement section. However, even that might simply be that I knew what to expect with the movement system and not what to expect for either of the others.
Anyway, the rulebook covers other topics such as power management, fuel management, ECM, damage control, crew types, radiation and a myriad of other details. Each is as well organized into topics and subtopics as the previous sections, allowing you to skip to bits of interest as necessary (since these parts will be the most referenced in-game, having no quick reference charts).
The shipbook has a couple dozen ships all told, representing a range from gunboats to heave cruisers. Each ship has one page with the aforementioned vanity shot and lots of technical data and a one page sheet for use in the game. Everything here is well organized and nicely put together, but since I was only maneuvering and not shooting I didn’t get to use the ship sheets much.
I only paged through the sourcebook briefly, since I’m not (at the moment) all that interested in the backstory. Rest assured that there IS a backstory, and a pretty well developed one at that. Even if you ignore the rest, there is a nice collection of ‘historical’ scenarios in the back of the book.
Overall I think the designers have accomplished what they set out to do. Once you assemble everything together and wrap your mind around the paradigm what you have is a starship combat game that makes a 1 on 1 battle truly interesting. This is a game of maneuver and counter maneuver, made all the more challenging by the fact that you’re stuck with Newton’s laws in the process. This isn’t a fleet game and doesn’t pretend to be one. I could see playing with 2 ships on a side, even 3 once I got really comfortable with the system but that’s about the limit.
I might change my mind once I play a few games and actually start trading coherent light with my opponents, but I don’t expect that to happen. Honesty compels me to admit that I’m much more interested in seeing this translated to the Honorverse, but that’s more of a background preference than game preference.
I’ve skipped big chunks of the rules here, including the use of the tilt blocks, pivots, rolls, and a myriad of other things, but I’ve probably also lost all but 2 of the readers by this point anyway. I know it’s a rather long ramble, but hopefully it’ll be of use to anyone considering this game.
I’m happy to answer any questions or requests for clarification, and I’m sure the designer will chime in at some point to correct all the mistakes I’ve made.
paints two Adder Combat Cars as support vehicles for his Magrav force in Age of Madness.
