"What are your favorite space fighter combat rules?" Topic

Poll suggestion. Please choose your favorite space fighter combat rules (or suggest one if it is not listed). Choices are:

X-Wing
Silent Death
5150: Fighter Command
Squadron Commander 3600
Tacship
Battlestations
Jovian Chronicles
StarEagles

X-Wing for me. Easy enough for my 11-year-old daughter to play and a bunch of fun too.

Probably x-wing now. Easy enough to get new players involved and not much groaning over record keeping.

X-Wing. Very playable and easy to teach, and a challenge to play well

Mike

X-Wing

Another aspect of x-wing I like is that most people at least know something of the movies so the ships and extras make sense.

Minimal Space Combat

Up until X-Wing came out, Silent Death was my favorite.

I kinda like Jon Tuffley's TacShip – simple, quick and lots of fun! :)

Silent Death. Nighthawk FTW.

Silent Death.

X-Wing. Easy to learn, challenging, lots of variety in play, great minis. Feels like a " real" dogfight (for space fantasy values of "real"). The product line has gotten a bit glutted with ancillary stuff for my taste, but that doesn't affect the actual game; I just stick with classic Rebel vs. Empire and ignore the other "factions."

How many of the comments/votes for X-Wing is because of the Star Wars focus? How much is the Star Wars branding vs the rules themselves?

What I mean by that is, is it popular because it is a focused, specific setting/universe:
E.g. " I like Star Wars space fighters, so I will play the Star Wars X-Wing game"

Or, are the rules really good and people would also use X-Wing rules for other settings or with non-Star Wars miniatures?

SB, the X-Wing system is a great system, and should easily be applied to any sci-fi universe. I do not think it would be difficult to build or extrapolate fighter stats for other fictional ships

Mike

I liked a lot Silent Death, but now I am waiting for the new Star Eagles, since I am a fan of Ganesha Games rules

X-Wing is based on Wings of War/Glory.
What it doesn't do well is 3D. Kahn!!!! Lol

So it plays well but leaves out an extremely important element of flight.

If playing mass fleet games, I get the need to abstract 3D.

Your question should be spaceship combat for fleet, squadron, or single ships.

I have not played enough fleet action. So for now X-Wing is my favorite even with not modeling 3D.

X-Wing is great for replicating any "cinematic" space dogfight setting, not just Star Wars. No, it doesn't do 3D at all, but in truth very few space combat games attempt 3D, and even fewer (if any) do it well.

The real standard here isn't the 3D, but Newtonian movement, as in the questions of delta-v, acceleration, non-banking turns, etc.. If you are looking for actual physics in starfighter movement (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), then no, X-Wing is not the game to choose. In that case, you want a vector-based system in the manner of GDW's Triplanetary.

They had one for Traveller…called Mayday. I played it a fair bit, and found out that missiles at speed are not very useful! Speed is not very useful except to escape or to pursue one trying to escape. And with 360 degree fields of fire, even manuevering in the 2d setting was basically boiled down to the a function of range, therefore battles were pretty much NOT cinematic and booorboringboring as hell. 3D too would really be just one dimensional game unless you have fields of fire and forced them to stay aligned to the movement vector.

Realism in space combat under Newtonian conditions is a not much of a game. No cover,and even fixed weapons with distinct fields of fire such as spine guns would still be able to fire in any direction since facing of the ship would not be dependent on vector of travel, except maybe if not accelerating as the whole ship could rotate. You might as well just line the ships up, distill the target range and roll the dice.

No board necessary (just like Traveller's original rules for ship combat in the basic booklets).

Yeah, gimme space opera fighter combat over simulation every time for fun. I don't even really like historical naval warfare once wind direction as "terrain" disappears and turrets remove the dead spaces in fields of fire…you might as well line the ships up, determine range and roll the dice. The faster fleet might be able to cross a tee so it has a slight improvement on space combat where even that possibility would be a non issue. Maneuver is what makes the game fun.

X-Wing and Silent Death