"Which games DO use pre-plotting?" Topic

A recent post seeking to avoid plotted movement suggested "It seems that plotted movement is the standard…" mentioning Full Thrust and Starmada.

Do all version of Starmada? Have owned a few, and only played one, but thought some dropped it.

Anyway, I tried to think of others with plotted movement, and came up short. Please jog my memory.

And, please, no 'easy enough to add…' ;->=

Thanks, all!

Doug

Ones I know of…

Starmada X (I don't have the later editions)
Full Thrust
A Sky Full of Ships

Star Fleet Battles

It was a short-lived fad, primarily fostered by SPI's 'SI-MOV' system. While making sense on paper, pre-plotted
movement feels very artificial. It seems to reduce major decision making to educated guesses and is cumbersome to boot. The point is many war games of many genres have flirted with plotted movement and most, if not all, lost.

> Star Fleet Battles

only as power allocation or with a rules variant. Actual movement was done in one hex impulses and was not plotted.

Thanks, Dynaman. I fear my response would have been almost heated, and a followup apology to VSB would have been gushing from me. ;->=

I've never seen a preplotted MOVEMENT (sorry I didn't include that in the title as well as the quote) scheme for SFB. Is there any in TFG/ADB pubs?

Captain, I know a lot of folk that say that, but I don't. Most of the 'I go, You go' whether full sides or in pieces, feels very artificial to me.

I commit, you commit, we see the results, we react. Sounds perfectly, and in game play has felt, normal. Though, more so to me in FT than in Starmada, as it's one maneuver rather than a series of such. *shrug*

Nearest is random activation, and that can be nightmarish, though I play plenty of such games.

Of course, I kept inserting 'to me' and 'in my play' type comments. We'll agree to disagree under YMMV.

Doug

Ahhh, pre-plotting. Back in the 70's (pre-PC's… remember those days?) , Paragon's 3D, one-on-one, WW1 aircraft rules used preplotted movement.

It was cumbersome, but it did put you in the drivers seat.

Early gladiator rules (still in the 70's) did the same concerning movement and strikes towards parts of the body. I also remember somebody doing the same with miniatures boxing rules.

Can't think of anything modern though.

only as power allocation or with a rules variant. Actual movement was done in one hex impulses and was not plotted.

I seem to remember that in the early '80's, playing the original pocket bag version in 1981 and later the Designer's edition, movement was pre-plotted and was expressed like 5r3r3r8. It was this pre-plotting that made it an exciting game for me. I was glad when I saw the same convention crop up in General Quarters.

I stopped playing around 1986, so maybe later versions revised pre-plotting out of the game.

I only own the Commander's edition from 83, basically nothing more than a rewrite of the Designer's edition, and it did not have pre-plotting so that could not be the one you are thinking of. Although I really really think I saw it as an option.

I am looking on Boardgame Geek link

Where it says:

At Origins 1979, we released the Pocket Edition of Star Fleet Battles and it sold out by the fall. We decided to capitalize on success by expanding it into a boxed game released in November 1979. (Back then, pocket games were a new thing and were just not taken as seriously as boxed games.) To save time and work, we just took the rulebook of the pocket game and added pages to the end of it, expanding it from 28 pages to 44 (and effectively just moving the staples from page 14 to page 22)……

….. To this we added 16 pages of Advanced Game material including:

Mass-based Movement: No longer did every ship have a movement cost of 1. The dreadnought slowed down; light cruisers sped up.

Free movement (no more plotting 32 hexes of movement before you saw what the enemy was doing).

So… in the Pocket and Designer's editions, pre-plotted movement was part of the basic rules, and the Designer edition added free movement as an advanced rule. After that I am out of the picture.

Had to dig out my old rules, Plotted and Free movement were a player choice in the Commander's edition. I forgot I bought a more recent version and I don't remember it having plotting at all.

My apologies, gushing, VSB. I played back then, but don't recall plotted movement. Dopey moi.

Hardly the only mis-remembering I'm doing…

Doug