After fourteen years in the making, Aotrs Shipyards proudly presents Accelerate and Attack! Aeons of War!
Available from Wargame Vault here: link
Accelerate and Attack! Aeons of War is a starship combat wargame design for fleet actions from Aotrs Shipyards.
The game places the emphasis on tactical decision making and manoeuvre, while providing a technology system comprehensive enough to allow a wide variety of fleet playstyles but without compromising speed of play.
Accelerate and Attack is a generic open system that can be used with any miniatures. There is no "official" background here; even the sample fleets included are design so that they can be "plugged in" to existing backgrounds! Players are encouraged to create or adapt their own fleets.
Accelerate and Attack is suited for games of about twenty of more vessels per side for an evening's gaming.
Features:
• Innovative Manoeuvre Factor system and Command and control structure that keeps the record-keeping down to ship damage and the game flowing (no orders to write!)
• Tech level system with up to 20 tech levels
• Over 30 technologies allows enormous variety and versatility in fleet differentiation even between the same tech level
• The "buckets o' D20"-based system* allows for granularity in the tech system while keeping the numbers under control.
• Two sample fleets, the alien Vivrathk Aggression and the mysterious Stone Portals, with ship markers and three starter scenarios to get the ball rolling
• 172 Pages (Main rules 40 pages, Ship design and technology 68 pages, sample fleets and scenarios 32 pages)
*Or "handful-of-D20 plus the average-dice-table" for the less adventurous!
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There is also a free Web Enhancement Pack; this contains the markers and the QR sheet the latter of which is an indicator of the level of the game if you want to have a quick nosey.
It also has a copy of the .xlsx spread sheet I use myself for fleet generation. It's a bit clunky (using it requires lots of copy-pasting and such) – since this was the first and only time I did any Excel programming (as I have taken pains to inform people), but it does the job. It is by no means a professional job (which is why it's with the free pack); it's more like of a sort of an "official" fan mod.
Link: link
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Some history of the game.
I started work on AccAtt way back about this time of year in 2003 (which I know because that's the date on the first scenario we used). I had played Full Thrust for many years, but was never satisfied with the writing of orders, nor with the lack of granularity in technology (I had a lot of fleets even then!) I always said that once I figured out a way to do away with orders, I'd write my own system. That eventually became Accelerate and Attack. I originally intended to have a campaign system fully integrated with it, but that never panned out. However, because I did consider it at the ground level, there are enough mechanical hooks to be able expand on with it having to be tacked on. So there are rules for repair and supply outside of the tabletop game – useful for scenario or linked play – though they do not make a proper campaign in and of themselves. Maybe one day, I'll do a campaign system in full, but it took fourteen years just to do this aspect!
The early prototypes used lots of D6, before it became obvious that the granularity wasn't good enough. So I moved to buckets of D20 (the small 10-12mm I had to import from America). I wasn't even sure it would work, but it did. Then later at a convention, someone suggested having a table for rolling PD – from which gave me the idea of the average dice table. After a bit of number crunching UshCha and I determined that if you use the table for the averages, you could roll the remainders and you'd get more spread than if you rolled all the dice, especially at the high numbers of dice! (So now we're all lazy or have terrible luck and tend to use the table more than we roll the dice!)
I have play-tested the rules across over forty fleets with pretty varied set-ups (we have currently 237 logged scenarios we've played over the years). I've tried my absolute damnedest (with this being basically a one-man plus his playtesters project) to make sure everything is balanced and nothing it without a counter somewhere. An open system is never going to be completely watertight, but I've done the very best I can!
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For those people who follow the scifi Aotrs Shipyards releases (I hope both of you are well…!), finalising Accelerate and Attack is the primary reason the scifi side has been quiet the past few months. There are, however, quite a few new releases in the backlog for both 144th ground forces and for starships. The Wodef Enclave, the second of the Elenthnar races, will be being released soon, now that I will have some time to catch up on the last little bits[1].
(I had intended for AccAtt to be released for Other Partizan last Sunday, but having moved earth and sky to get it done, when I hit "make public" at half-three on Friday, I discovered there was a 1-5 business day submission approval procedure. Which, had I given it even the slightest thought I would have figured was obvious, but I'm so used to Shapeways and being able to click it and have it out there and then!)
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I am quite happy – eager, even! – to answer any questions about the game you might have, either here or via PM at the Aotrs Shipyards webstores at Shapeways (https://www.shapeways.com/shops/aotrs_shipyards). (I'm not sure if you can contact publishers at Wargame Vault.)
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[1]I don't release the scifi models without their fluff, and the fluff for a new fleet requires that I at least play one game with them to make sure that they don't fail horribly!
