"New convert to genre with a few questions " Topic

Howdy folks,

Starships.. something I've fancied for a while and recently painted up a couple of GZG random fleets (impulse buy!). I would appreciate a little guidance/advice -

1. Manufacturers and how well they mix – I've found GZG, Brigade, and Irregular. Are there any other UK and how well do they mix. My gaming buddy brought some BFG ships along, but they look too large sat alongside my GZG. I've also seen some larger box-set type fleets on Ebay. Do these scale with GZG/Brigade?

2. Cheapo plastic ships. I bought a couple of packs of plastic ships off Ebay (EM4 I think), 12 to a sprue, fighter ships, but I've chopped them up a lot. Are there any other cheap plastics I could also chop up?

3. Scenery. Asteroids, gas-anomolise, derelicts… what's a general layout look like, and any good sources for making features?

4. Battlemats. I've seen local club folks using small battlemats for games like XWing. Being an old school 8x4 table man, any good source for say 6x3 mats?

5. Rules! I am never too fussed with story and fluff. Would prefer something along the lines of the old Battletech – pre-made ships, but with option to creature your own. I like paper hit boxes as well. Any rule sets that would suit? Or any you would recommend.

I appreciate this is a bit of an essay. Any help though, would be welcome and warmly received!

thanks
Chris

Rules with 'pre-built but can also build your own' options are plentiful. Full Thrust (easy and free), Starmada (little more complex), Squadron Strike (more complex but cool) are some well-known examples.

-Will

That's interesting. I never thought of using gas anomalies as terrain for a spaceship game before.

what's a general layout look like

Anything you like. After all, it is science FICTION.

1. and 2. Spaceships:
You can use anything for spaceships. I have made spaceships out of ballpoint pens, G.I. Joe missiles, and other things.

You can buy a big bag of small, cheap, plastic ships for very little if you look around.

Uniformity of livery will usually overcome disparity of design.

3. Terrain:
Space is really very empty. Even if you were playing in the densest part of the asteroid field, you would probably not have more than one asteroid on the table. Look at the table scale specified in the rules and do the math.

The best asteroids I've seen were balls of aluminum foil, spray-painted flat black and flat gray, and stuck on flying stands.

The best planet I've seen was a gas giant made from a kid's rubber ball. It was about 10 inches in diameter, cut in half, and painted in irregular strips, so it looked something like Jupiter.

4. Table cover:
To make a table cover for space games: Get a cheap piece of black cloth. Hang it up. Stand about 3 feet away and lightly dust it with white spray paint. Let it dry.

5. Rules:
I haven't played Starmada, but otherwise concur with wminsing. Full Thrust is playable but detailed, and keeps everyone engaged.

Full Thrust Lite is also fun, and a quick beer and pretzels game.

Don't forget to check out Colonial Battlefleet for rules, 3 ready to play fleets in the basic rules and an excel spreadsheet for building your own. It has tech level rules that allows fleets to feel very different but still be balanced.

For scenery polystyrene balls make good moons and planetoids, for asteroids tear them up a but then cover with PVA and dip in sand, paint black and add a couple of layers of drybrushing. If you are happy with flat scenery look for 'Make your own Space Mobile' type titles in the kids craft books section.

Also link is a great scenario generator, it was written for Full Thrust but works fine for colonial battlefleet as well, other systems may require a tweak to the points.

Robert

I'm a big fan of model plane weapons for various spaceships, and aeronefs, as long as you're trying something 'different.' ;->=

Do you see 'lava rocks' as landscape decorative material? It's light enough to put on a stick, and paints to some really evocative asteroids.

Doug

The new edition of Squadron Strike comes with a funky old-school SF setting in an alternate timeline where Brazil (!) ends up the world superpower fighting aliens. You've got to love a setting where Robert Helen is a significant character.

A really nice feature is the sequence of tutorial scenarios that introduce the rules a little at a time.

Ship construction runs off a speadsheet and is notably more complex than something like Full Thrust. On the other hand, the range of options lets you reproduce all sorts of settings. You can also have everyone agree to limit choices (ablative shields only, no ECM, and so forth). That makes ship design a lot simpler.

I should also suggest Starship Combat News link as the place to get a lot more information on all your options.

Robert

Fastest way to a starship mat is to make your own. About 30 minutes with some spray cans and spatter painting over a 4x6 piece of black felt will work wonders.

Full Thrust is free to download from Ground Zero Games, and there's also a much-expanded version called Project Continuum out there. FT is loose enough that I could turn it into a submarine game, complete with nukes.

Squadron Strike needs a hex-map, but is about the most detailed generic space-combat game you will find. Full 3d vector motion, and it's relatively simple to do.

Thanks folks! Much appreciated. I'll have a wade through this info, very helpful

Posted my first attempts at ships –

link

That's a great start! Always good to see someone new getting stuck in.

Don't forget you can often pick up whole fleets of Firestorm Armada ships going cheap on Ebay. A lot of players of FA come from the WH40K crowd, and they're not adverse to selling off undercoated projects to fund the next shiny thing that's drawn their attention.

(Actually, that's not particular to the 40K gang, is it? No, it certainly is not…)

Squadron Strike is not vector-based, unless you can want it to be. Ships can be "whoosh!" ST/SW movement, speed-limited/UFO/teleports movement, or vector movement.

It also works in both 2D and 3D: all the ships come in both flavors and the ship design speadsheet will spit them out interchangeably.

Forgot to mention that the spreadsheet spits out XML or something that you can feed into a utility that makes pro-quality PDFs of the ship displays that look exactly like the ones that come with the game (the ones in the game are generated in exactly this way).

No writing out by hand or using drawing tools to place icons on ship sheets …

We're going to try out Starmada Admiralty edition with a mix of ships from Starfighter Shipyard's Battlestar Galactica collection, Ravenstar's Tinmen, Halo, Battlefield Gothic (blech) and the Starblazers line (interdasting).

The Battle of Directus is going to be a hell of a thing.

Yea how much customization you want will also effect your choice of rules.

Full Thrust ship design is a snap, literally back of the envelope level, but there's only so many options and there isn't a current well-supported SSD generator that I'm aware of.

Starmada ship design is one category more complex since you can do stuff like design your weapons, you have more choices to make, and there's a good spreadsheet tool to help.

Squadron Strike has the most complete 'roll-your-own' system out there, with more options and the ability to change the 'universe rules' depending on how you want ships to behave. The spreadsheet tool is amazing but requires some help to learn. Once you do though it does the heavy lifting though.

-Will