"Your Favorite Spaceship Gaming Rules" Topic

Starfire, Starmada, A Sky Full of Ships.

Each is very good and choice would in part depend on scale.

To clarify I'd probably use 1st or 2nd edition Starfire. Possibly 3rd but nothing beyond that.

Wow, folks really use Full Thrust as a Fleet level set of rules? I played the heck out of it for over a decade but never had major fleets on the tabletop. The threshold checks alone would seem to be a major game play speedbump for very large fleets. A Sky Full of Ships is a perfect Fleet level game. I have been wanting to try Starmada Fleet Ops since I figure it'll do the job well. Regular Starmada X could readily handle 15-25 ships plus loads of fighters per side.

Thanks,

John

For me, Squadron Strike if I want cinematic stuff, or "Let's do the Enterprise versus Cylons." Attack Vector: Tactical if I want to do realistic space combat.

For "Build a fleet in 15 minutes, put it on the table, drink beer while talking smack", I like Starmada and Colonial Battlefleet. Both are a little bit WWII or WWI Navals In Spaaaaaaace, but that's what some people really like.

Leland's spot on: Silent Death. And I'm not a fan boy – they're just great rules.

John T

Keep in mind the OP states large fleets.

So it depends on what you mean by "large."

In my book, 15 isn't "large." It's a "small fleet." 25 ships is a "headed towards large." "Large" would be 50 ships or more. There's no way FT can handle more than 20, max, and I doubt Starmada gets much higher.
Silent Death is fighter combat, not fleet combat, and I don't think it hits the numbers implied, either.
I think at a bare minimum, "large" assumes the ASFoS range of rules.

The OP specified "small to large" not just large.

If you want REALLY large, I like De Bellus Antiquitatum, with stands of 100 spaceship minis each.

At that scale, it's just a matter of attrition anyway.

War Rocket is a fun game which will handle small and large fleets easily.

The Starmada: Fleet Ops rules seem a lot simpler than Full Thrust and much easier on the record keeping.

These are the bigger fleet, fast play version of the Starmada rules.

Actually, for Starmada X we could easily run 4 player games 8-15 ships plus lots of fighters per player. In our 8 player game which took about 3-3.5 hours there were easily 50 ships per side plus 40-50 stands of fighters. It wasn't about attrition at all. It was about using your fleet in the way it was designed to be able to damage your opponent effectively. The players who understood this did very well. Those who didn't got smacked! Some folks can't seem to grasp that you don't take your cruiser directly in front of a Battleship and expect to win. It needs to face opponents of its size or smaller and or use flanks. That's called maneuvering and is a vital part of winning in Starmada no matter the size of the game.

Thanks,

John

"Full Thrust"/"More Thrust". NOT, repeat, NOT the "Fleet Books"; misguided attempts to improve on a system that was already as close to perfect as I could ask for, the "Fleet Books" were dismal failures, both.
I can even use "Full Thrust"/"More Thrust" for detailed fighter combat if i want to.

Can't agree with that. I have few good memories of the "Alphabet Battery" days, whereas I love the Fleet Book era.

Can anyone who plays Colonial Battlefleet or 5150 who played Full Thrust in the past, explain why they switched? I played FT in the past and have recently downloaded everything again, I am wanting to see if I am missing anything.

I brought CBF because I was intrigued by the mention of tech rules, I'd always wanted to run a FT campaign were available tech could improve over the course of the campaign and I hoped to use them for that. Having played it I decided it was the better game, the larger range of weapons, the better balance between fire and maneuver, fighter rules that weren't broken, tech rules. I was really hesitant about hexes (bad experience with interceptor) but the game uses hexes intelligently to improve the game, and the optional rules include a 12 point movement system.

Robert

@Toaster Have you played Star Fleet Battles? Just curious, as that about burnt me out on hexes, even worse than Interceptor, which I think I preferred.

I'll admit it may have been other parts that tipped the balance, though.

I will say that, and a few other things, have shied me off CBF altogether. And, back to an earlier post, never met an Ad Astra title I really liked, owning some. Fool me twice…

Doug

Edit: By the way, fan boy that I am, I'm not fond of one size fits all. SFB, original B5 Wars, and the like, are interesting getting the feel of flying one or a couple of ships.

My favourite is definitely Squadron Strike these days. I play in either 3d or 2d depending on the group (if you want to use lots of big shiny minis than 2d is the way to go). IMHO Squadron Strike makes the best use of hexes – very few ways to take advantage of them and with the 12pt bearing system you can actually cross someone's T at 90 degrees!

-Tim

I like Starmada Compendium. Full Thrust is also pretty good, although I usually use Full Thrust Light.

Yeah, I like the Compendium too. I find that X is pretty close to it. So, we have used that.

Doug
I played half a game of SFB once and said stuff this we could have finished a game of FT with 4x as many ships by now.

Interceptor was a great game I just got annoyed when I was in range with thrust to spare for rotation but my firing arcs jumped over my opponents ship so I couldn't fire at it.

Robert