"Questions about Colonial Battlefleet" Topic

I've played Star Fleet Battles, Full Thrust, Starmada, GOBS, and Sky Full of Ships.

But I'm always looking for THE space game.

Questions about Colonial Battlefleet –

Played on hexes or not or either way?

How long does a game last if two small (4-5 ships) fleets go at it?

What's the ship speeds like? 1 inch? 12 inches?

Is it a fast playing game? Bunch of modifiers to shooting, etc?

Can ANY space type ships be done? Star Wars? Star Trek? Babylon 5?

Can you cross-up these different types of ships? (Star Wars vs Star Trek, etc…)

Is there a lot of dice involved?

Will it hold the short attention span of my 2 sons (ages 11 & 21) and their father (age 53)?

Thanks in advance,
Warren

If I recall correctly, the current supplement is for BSG.

There was one for Star Wars in the works, but don't know if it's been released yet.

Sorry, can't answer the other questions, since I don't own it, but it received favorable feedback for the BSG universe.

I'm a big fan of the game, it plays a little slower than FT but makes up for it with a lot more detail.

It's designed for hexes but can be played open table, that said it uses the hexes very intelligently to keep the deadliness of missiles and fighters at the right level.
Ship speeds generally top out at 8 hexes/inches while weapon ranges are a practical max of 14 hexes so plenty of maneuver.

Firing is one attack dice per weapon, add fire control and equal or beat range to hit, no modifiers or range bands. As designed weapons have either a D6 or a D10 attack die because Harry (the designer) didn't want things to get cluttered with lots of different dice types, but some people are adding D8's to homebrew designs to give more variety.

The design system (the rules come with an excel builder) allows you to design anything, and it was designed so crossovers such as armor and railguns vs shields and beams will still produce balanced games. The SDG forum already has fan stats for most major shows.

The next source book will be for a propriety universe developed to go with a new range of miniatures and it includes rules for spinal mounts. Both Wars and Trek source books have been mentioned but it's a one man show so things take their time, Harry also almost got burned when Ravenstar got a C&D just before the BSG sourcebook designed to go with the Ravenstar minis came out so he is probably stepping carefully around IP at the moment.

One really good feature of the system is the tech level rules, this means you give each player so many points to spend on various areas of tech and then they design their ships according to the resulting limits, it provides balanced matchups while giving widely differing ships and tactics. One thing I really want to do is run a campaign starting with really low tech levels but with tech increasing as you go so you can start fielding more advanced ships as the campaign progresses.

I've run it with kids as young as 12-13 without problems (and I've taken FT as low as 8-9)

A good browse through the SDG forum will help get a feel for the game link

Definitely well worth the asking price, I picked it up because the idea of the tech levels intrigued me and I was wondering if I could crib them for FT, instead I changed systems.

Robert

The core rules set has its own background and factions but is clearly intended to allow people to do what they want, invent their own factions and story or to emulate pretty much any show or series. The one supplement so far tailors a version of the rules specifically to BSG, producing a much more fighter-orientated game than the core rules.

One thing that I particularly like is that the RAW encourages a balance of ship types and the composition of fleets/flotillas in a way that most other rules I've played don't. I've been on the receiving end of several minimaxing players in FT, whereas such approaches/abuses are generally less effective in CBF.

The design rules also do a pretty good job in reflecting the recurrent dilemma for naval architects in achieving the optimum mix of firepower, protection and speed. It's nigh impossible to build a supership that does absolutely everything, so the result is different types of ship which perform their own dedicated role well, but others not so well. And this in turn encourages fleets with a variety of ships providing various roles to help the fleet perform its overall mission – so you'll have ships specialising as the battleline, others good at area denial, still others excelling at escort functions. And it feels much more organic within CBF than in most other sets I've tried.

The basic rules are pretty easy to learn. The spreadsheet makes the ship design process easy. The possibilities and complexities of using your ships/fleet to best advantage though can keep anyone busy for quite a while! :-)

that said it uses the hexes very intelligently to keep the deadliness of missiles and fighters at the right level.

YMMV, but I found the restriction on fighters and missiles to be a deal-killer for me. Just felt too artificial, never been a fan of "hard" stacking limits in space games. Area of effects weapons that discourage you from bunching up by punishing you for doing so, fine. They're even a Good Idea if you're writing for minis use, since you can't physically stack models so making you spread out a bit actually helps. With a hexgrid game (which is much more likely to use stackable counters) a fixed cap on how many fighters (or missiles, or even ships) just doesn't sit well with me, unless the game's "ground scale" and tech assumptions somehow justify it.

A matter of personal taste naturally, and no rules can please everyone. Would be boring if we all thought the same.

Almost everyone I know of plays CBF or MvM with miniatures though and my impression was that the rules set WAS written for miniatures play. So the stacking and the offsetting rules do support using models.

One effect of fighter stacking limits is that it becomes possible for fighters to block/intercept – so CAP (or whatever the equivalent term might be in space) does have some chance of preventing incoming hostiles getting in amongst the ships. IF you have enough squadrons on CAP, of course. I don't personally play the MvM (Battlestar Galactica) variant, but it seems to work well enough there. Fighters in MvM are quite different from those in the core rules though, and BSG style ships don't use shielding either.

Hmm… there ARE some area effects weapons in CBF that will really punish you for bunching. Spatial Disruption Torpedoes will take out most things smaller than a capital ship in the target hex, and bring a whole load of bad news to destroyers and smaller in every neighbouring hex. It's definitely a good idea to spread out a bit if you happen to be in a game with SDTs being lobbed around.

True – and I'd say any space game, gridmap or not, is better off with some area of effect stuff. Even though chits can be stacked easily, there's something terribly dull about the (for ex) Starfire norm of having your whole fleet in a one-hex superstack.

Some games even achieve it by just making ship explosions phenomenally dangerous. I don't much like Firestorm Armada's crit chart, but it sure as heck encourages you to spread the heck out or risk a 2-or-12 crit on a battleship or even a cruiser wiping out half the fleet.

@ C L Rich, yeah the idea of only 1 ftr sqn per 10,000 km hex bothered me at first so I PSB'ed it that what your looking at is the admirals holographic display and it zooms the hexes to 1-2km where things are happening and compresses others to maintain the big picture and relative positions.

Robert

Warrenss:

Colonial Battlefleet was designed to be taught and played at conventions, so its very easy to pick up the basics and run with it. Similarly most games will run you a couple hours or less, unless you start getting big fleets or lots and lots of fighter squadrons on the table.

Unlike other systems where fighters are a lot like reusable missiles, fighters in CBF are designed to be a tactical game in and of themselves – to make BSG style play interesting – so they do take longer if you have a lot of them in play. But it's "fun time" not "have to do this" time.

Combat just between starships is fast and furious and you and your boys will have a ton of fun with it, as well as possibly designing your own new and interesting starships to kill each other with.

Best of all, Colonial Battlefleet has a lot of tactical depth, and you actually get better at it with play. So its a game that will keep you engaged and interested for a long time.

You can run pretty much any style ship and do crossover battles between them and the game still works.

Let me know if you've gotten all your questions answered or if you have any more.

Harry

Thanks everybody for the input.

I'm not sure on some of the initialized terms being used…

RAW?
CAP?

Harry, that helped answer my questions pretty darn well. Plus I also read this. It helped a lot too.

Going to see if I can get this as a Christmas present.

RAW = Rules as written

CAP = Combat Air Patrol link

Apologies for the jargon. Harry beat me to it with the explanations!

Warrenss – seriously CBF is a great game. Christmas won't be the same without it!