The Wormhole ships should be compatible with G.O.B.S., save for the Planet Smasher (we don't have anything that big… yet!), but everything through dreadnought, carrier, and perhaps super dreadnought should be covered. I'd personally like to see a shot of a GOBS game with, well, gobs and gobs of our ships on the board. You can easily print and build a fleet in an evening. :)
Here's my developer mega-post-response to the thread:
As to the game itself, it's designed to play quickly, look great, and have a good amount of both tactical and strategic depth. It's not a reinvention of the Full Thrust or Starmada wheels, as those are both fine games for 8-12 built-it-myself ship tactical battles, nor does it venture into Attack Vector Tactical territory (which is as satisfying as helming an individual ship in 3d space can be) or GOBS territory (damn the physics! Give me more ships!).
Wormhole is a 2D miniatures wargame which casts players as the commander of a fleet of starships, making tactical and strategic decisions to ensure victory. The main gameplay centers around 1) securing wormhole disruptions on the game board to both jump in reinforcements from off-board and move ships instantly around the table, and 2) allocation of alternately placed, pre-plotted order tokens (of which there is a limited supply provided by ships in your fleet). After all the orders are placed, players alternate resolving them in an order of their choosing. You, the player, reside in your flagship, and destruction of the enemy player's flagship results in a victory (as that player's fleet then retreats from the engagement). Players also accumulate command point tokens provided by ships in their fleet through the course of the game, and can spend these tokens on powerful one-shot abilities or the more powerful types of reinforcement ships.
The game also does not use point costs for fleet construction, and instead focuses on the costs to deploy reinforcement ships during a game (representing the time and command difficulties of getting ships to your battle). Players do preselect 16 (or other agreed upon number of) ship stat cards to use as their reinforcement pool for a typical battle, each with a different in game reinforcement and command cost, and start with their flagship and escorts on the table at the start of the engagement.
You can build a fleet list to your liking in a few minutes, and a typical 16 card game (usually about 25-30 ships) takes about an hour to complete. A grand battle with twice as many ship cards and either 'control of all wormholes' or 'fleet annihilation' as the objective instead of flagship destruction may take a good two to three hours. A 6'x4' table game would focus more on bringing powerful ships into play and positioning them for battle, while a 3'x3' game would be about quick strikes and floods of reinforcements before the final assault on the flagship. Multi board play is also possible, with players able to send ships between any of their wormhole gates, even those on other boards.
Tactically, ships are divided into capital ships and strike craft: Capital ships (destroyers through flagships) have long range jump drives and special shielding to protect them during faster than light jumps, while strike craft (fighters through frigates) are designed to travel locally or only through special wormhole gates. Capital ship shields are vulnerable only to weapons designed to penetrate them (and are immune to anti strike craft weaponry), but these weapons are too cumbersome to be targeted against strike craft. Weapons are also further optimized against light, medium, or heavily armored enemies, adding a further chance for ships to have clear advantages or disadvantages against each other. Ships have either anti strike, anti capital, both types, or no weaponry (relying on special non weapon abilities). Ships are often very good at their role, and every ship is equally useful, even the basic fighter craft. When ships close to point blank range (bases touching), they can attack enemies with their point blank weaponry along with their ranged weaponry, meaning that ships which can't hurt a type of enemy from range still have a chance in point blank combat. When point blank combat occurs, it's resolved until only one side has ships left in the combat, making it both very deadly and very decisive. The overall combat philosophy is a bit different from games where everything can damage everything and ships can have piles and piles of weaponry, but I find it delivers a richness in relationships between ship types without being overly complex.
Damage can either be tracked via damage boxes on the ship cards or by physically removing sections from the models as they take hull or critical system damage. Hull points are fairly low, with fighter squadrons having one HP, and larger flagships having around 12 (including critical systems). Hull integrity protects a capital ships' vulnerable core sections from damage, and when the hull points are destroyed, the core takes direct damage. The critical systems can also be hit during combat, however, causing key systems to go offline, and even leading to sudden destruction of the ship.
That's a quick and dirty description of the game off the top of my head. It's D6 based, and there can be a healthy amount of dice rolling while playing the game. I will freely admit that vectored movement and inertia have not been modeled into the game, as I have made the assumption that a fleet commander only cares about when his ships can get somewhere, not about directing power to their engines. IE, you'll tell ships to go to a certain location and wait for further orders, and they will take care of the details on their own. You, the fleet commander, are not playing AV:T… the individual ship captains are. ;) I'm a big fan of realistic simulations (both on the computer and off), but in this case, Wormhole is a game, and I didn't want to go half-sies on the realism factor, and preferred to abstract it instead, leaving it up to your imaginations.
We're going to enter closed beta testing before the new year (tentatively), and the game will initially be released as free basic rules to go along with the fleet packs.
~Steve
WorldWorks Designer
tries a stucco repair product to contour his bases.
