Would there be any interest in the publication of a sci-fi supplement for Manoeuvre Group?
(I'm posting this to the moderns section as well as the scifi for the simple reason that any existent MG players may be there!)
I have been playing scifi with MG for more or less as long as UshCha had been writing it. Before the Shipyards and 3D printing became a thing, I had my 28mm Aotrs ground force, and we used UshCha and our mate's 25mm moderns (sci-fi'd up) as the opposing sides[1].
We have occasionally toyed with the idea of releasing the scifi rules, but never in anger. With the current Shapeways price-crisis looming, it occurs to me that now might not be a bad time to consider doing that.
The sci-fi rules are more of a tool-box for you to adapt to your own armies. While I would include the stats for the up-scified moderns and everything in the current Shipyards 144th ranges and examples, there is no hard-and-fast design rule (like, with points and such).
The sci-fi rules include shields, sensors, grav, walkers and of course, sci-fi weapon rules etc, to give you some idea. (Everything that exists in the MG sci-fi range at the Shipyards, perhaps obviously.)
(A few concessions have been made for playability; for example, we have very ruthlessly cut the number of targets you can engage at once with missiles to cinematic levels (we even require missile targeting to be line of effect from the targeter (though not necessarily the shooter)) else the game would be nothing but dice-rolling missile-spam. We don't even pretend in-universe this is necessarily the truth[2].)
One other thought that occurs is, as the scifi stats as written are informed by the Accelerate and Attack! technology lists, it might be beneficial to include some of those as well. Possibly even have an AccAtt fleet list supplement, with the MG sci-fi rules as an addendum to that.
I have shied away from doing AccAtt fleet lists up until now, for, among other reasons, I didn't consider there wouldn't be that much to them on their own, just a page or two of fluff and Some Stats for each fleet; with the existent fleets plus the sci-fi MG, there might be enough to make a fair-sized supplement – but then again, that also might put people off who only wanted one or other of the bits, so swings and roundabouts.
What does anyone think? Is anyone even remotely interested in any of the above? If you are interest, what sort of format would you think?
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[1]The convention being that we play what is partly a variant of Ground Zero Games' Full Thrust background, and we could use the excuse of that, probably due to various events that would take WAAAAY too long to explain and would completely irrelevant, that co-incidentally, a lot of ground forces in use by human powers were using hulls that looked very much like the 20th/21st century armour from so long ago.
[2]Though you could make a reasonably bovine excrement argument that interplay of ECM/targeting means that too much processing power is required to be able to lock onto multiple targets and if you fought a "primitive" army, this would not be true; but "one chap fires missiles from his tank and wipes out the opposing army in one phase" doesn't make for an interesting game.
