"Planetarion Fleets" Topic

Yes I was a Planetarion Head. If you have played the game then you know all about 3 in the morning wake up calls and the life/career/relationship ruination that this game can inflict upon the user. For such a simple game it had the addiction value of rock-cocaine.Ah happy days.

Question has anyone tried to make real Planetarion fleets and battle with them?

Here are the races with a hint at what they are about.

Terran (Ter)
Big heavy ships with lots of conventional firepower.

Cathaar (Cat)
Lighter ships that EMP their prey. Useful allies to the Terrans.

Xandrathii (Xan)
Massed raider with cloaking tech. You rarely know what is coming at you. You only know that they are coming.

Zikonian (Zik)
Pirates. They like to attack and their fleets contain the other races. Bastards.

I generally played Cat or Terran. Somehow "honourable" races.

Others loved the Xan with their cloaking or the Zik who were a bunch of mother-loving pirates.

I often wondered about wargaming this on-line browser based game. What would they look like?

When you have 100,000 Xan ships coming at you and are calling for defence and don't know how many more there are because they are cloaked and it is 6 in the morning you think to yourself what would this look like on a table.

Anyone else a recovering PA player and have any images?

When you have 100,000 Xan ships coming at you … you think to yourself what would this look like on a table.

Expensive. And crowded.

Never heard of it.

Looks a bit like Homeworld, of which I know next to nothing; there've been some discussions on ships and rules for that.

Doug

Have you looked at Fate Amenable to Change ships? Might be something similar in style.

link

Maybe some Studio Bergstrom?

Doug

I'm not sure what Planetarion is but that pic you posted is from Homeworld 2. If you want Homeworld 2 ships then TheBeast's link to FATC is good. I actually just ordered about $300 USD worth of ships from him but those are Hiigarans. He's about to do a kickstarter for the Vaygr fleet.

The ships in your pic are Vaygr and if those are the ships you are looking to find you're in luck.

Zandris has a Vaygr Carrier looking ship and a rather large ship that isn't Vaygr but could be a dreadnought.
Scroll down to the Embassy Class Assault Carrier
link

You can pick an entire Vaygr fleet on shapeways from this guy. The models look rather nice. I'm quite fond of the frigates and destroyers.
link

I thought that was Homeworld art! Cataclysm was followup/replacement/whatever, right? Planetarion?

*facepalm*

Not mentioning Zandris IV could be charitably be characterized an 'oversight'.

I've avoided KS's, but it keeps getting harder. Viz.

Still a Shapeways doubter, though.

Doug

Don't be. After making that post I went and bought a bunch of them and plan on buying a bunch more. Here's the thing. I'm COMPLETELY anal about conformity. The hulls don't have to be the exact same thing in different scales to differentiate between classes but I need them to look extremely similar the way Firestorm Armada does. I was going to cancel the FATC order over fears of a layoff but they were already shipped. I now know my job is secure but I think I'm still going to sell them in favor of the shapeways ships.

Not to hijack this thread but I do a some product reviews on my blog and if you're interested I can shoot you a link when the shapeways stuff gets here.

Also also Cataclysm was like Homeworld 1.5 and if I remember right it focused on the war between the Beast and Taidaan.

Thanks for the input guys. After I posted I thought that no one would know the Planetarion game, which is a text-based browser game without graphics, so I stuck on the Homeworld pic as it kind of gives an idea of what I imagine a big fleet battle should look like and I do like the look of Homeworld ships.

Will look at the links and see if any ring bells. Just like the idea of different races using different weapon systems. Guess it might lead to very different looking ships.

Well you sort of kind of do have that in the warlords version of the FT rules. Both Warlords and the XD/Continuum rules add additional weapons and technology but Warlords assigns a technology value to each of them. As Continuum pulled some of its tech from Warlords, I'm not sure why they did away with the tech values. At any rate what that means is you can't just make a fleet with a mix mash of every different tech. The fleet I'm designing right now has a coherent feel to it where extra tech is limited to advanced drives, advanced FCS, spinal beams, regenerative armor, and twin particle arrays. There aren't advanced screens or gatling weapons or other advanced tech because they don't fit the theme. Someone else's fleet may well have their own theme.