"2nd run of the massive Battle of Khurtis Rock (ACTA:SF)" Topic

Last year I posted a massive battle that had been run at Nashcon by "Scoutdad". He ran it again, with some changes, and here's the after action and pictures:

After action report:
forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=103&t=56111

Pictures:
forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=103&t=56112

Klingon walkover against bad Fed tactics. Not a game I would have enjoyed. The Klink fleet is strong enough without facing weak players as well. Lousy translation of their performance from SFB/FedCom – all comes down to inadequate rules for overloads and photon reloads versus the idiotic Klingon front shield rule.

So, where are all those ACTA Noble Armada con event reports? What? Lovely weather we're having? :)

Is it something specific to the Star Trek version, or do all ACTA battles look like spaceship parking lots? Those are some densely-packed fleets!

The kill zones in ACTA SF encourage stupidly short engagement ranges, which is compounded by the overly large miniatures. It does look dopey, but not really any worse than (say) the Dominion War fights with hundreds of CGI ships parked nacelle-to-nacelle. ACTA Noble Armada (the one no one plays) doesn't tend to be as crowded looking due to generally smaller figs, but the boarding action rules do push some fleet configurations to sprint into base-to-base scrums that also look a little odd – but that's partly the setting's fault. ACTA B5 had longer engagement ranges overall, but (unless you played with Fleet Action scale figs) tended to look a little cluttered due, again, to the size of the models.

You get the same problem with Firestorm Armada a lot. Too many very large starships on too small a table never look good.

Yeah, I've definitely seen that with Firestorm Armada as well. Curse those big models/small tables!

Maybe a change of scale for ACTA:SF would work. For me,that is. I'm sure it's a fun game as-is.

My biggest complaint about SFB back in the day was that all the weapons were weighted to absurdly short ranges.

Once they reduced the explosion strength of ships (to eliminate the kamikaze DN tactic), they basically codified the effectiveness of placing 10+ ships in the same hex and using it as a single super-starship.

I terms of game-scale, it made perfect sense – but it made for rather boring looking battles.

And that was with counters… with miniatures it became basically unplayable.

That's why any starship game (especially minis oriented one) needs something to encourage spreading out a bit, whether it's potent AoE weapons, some kind of spacing requirement imposed by drive systems or shields, or even just improved accuracy against bunched up targets. It may not be realistic in terms of hard physics given the usual table scale, but it saves games from the horrid "traffic jam" aesthetic.

There are good reasons the Phalons are my favorite Full Thrust fleet, and it's not (just) because I like making dirty jokes about their ship designs. Plasma bolts should be legal tech for every fleet in the game.

I have been toying with the idea for some of my convention games, increase the movement rate and weapons ranges by 50% to see if it makes the map less cluttered. Of course I am running games with 10-12 ships/side, not 30.

That's always the option – shift the scales so there's less need to have ships on top of each other.

Never played it, but I understand the Lou Zocci game is based on miniatures being yards apart, and players have to estimate the firing angles for weapons.

:-/

This looks awfully similar to a large game of Warhammer Fantasy. Advance until a big scrum happens in the middle of the table.

I wonder if that is a function of the ACTA rules or the size of the minis.

My guess is it's a function of the short distance ships move and the size of most effective weapons range (overload range or phaser killzone).

I suspect substituting smaller minis like Starline 2400s would not make all that much difference.