"SPACE FIGHT!" Starship combat boardgame

[Morrus]

If you like to designate a ship as "common" for a faction, it might make sense to include it in the core book. The "Federation Frigate" is described as such, for example. If it's such a common sight, why not include it in the core set? (Of course there are pratical answers - you need to commission more artwork, which is expensive!)

Well, there's the rub. The art budget is well and truly blown.

The game might feel "incomplete" if you do not have enough ships per faction, on the other hand the engagements described so far don't really seem to feature all that many ships.

We've been testing very specific things. We'll do a big fleet engagement test at some point.

 

[Iron Sky]

Just wanted to drop in to say the newest ship designs in the .pdf look pretty good. The earlier ones looked pretty garish with all the different solid colors, but the newer ones are pretty sharp. Only tiny thing that stood out on a first look over was the pale-yellowish and salmon colors in the damage regions. I'm not sure what I would replace them with 'twere in my project, but those colors kinda stood out since the rest is fairly clean and appealing.

Art is the real killer, huh? Rules are cheap (and often fun!) to tinker with, but finding quality, affordable artwork - not so much...

 

[Stormonu]

Following yesterday's play test session...

We wanted to try out cloaks, so had the standard two Federation ships facing off against two Spartan destroyers, and three scouts that could cloak. In the first fight the Spartans used their cloaks to get close without being shot, but after that they cost too many APs to be worth using. The fight was a fairly easy win for the Spartans, thanks to their battle tactic of not bothering to switch on their shields and relying on their numbers and high defence numbers to keep them safe. This allowed them to fire all weapons and take down the Lucky and Hood in turn. for the loss of one destroyer.

We talked about the game and agreed on making the cloak cheaper to use and adding in a specific tactic of decloaking and firing a single shot with bonus damage and a crit chance. We also introduced a crit chance when ships took certain amounts of damage. (50% chance). We then ran the game again with one less Spartan Destroyer.

This went even worse for the Feds. Whilst the cloaked Spartan ships sped around getting sensor locks on the Lucky, all the Feds could do was fly along with shields up and a readied intensify shield action. Then the Spartans did sequential uncloaking attacks and in one round vaporised the Lucky's shields and damaged some critical systems. By its next turn they had finished it off with concentrated disruptor fire.

Following this we had more discussion and agreed that there needed to be a counter to cloaked ships. Ideas that we discussed.

Allow sensor locks on cloaked ships as a penalty. Combined with this, cloaked ships moving fast are easier to lock onto. This should then mean that the bonus damage for the uncloaking attack is not received as it is no longer a surprise attack. However, at the end of a cloaked ships turn it automatically shakes off all sensor locks.

I'm probably way late on this, but as has been mentioned before where the capital ships are much treated like battleships/aircraft carriers of WW2 and the fighters as WW2 dogfighters, cloaked ships are the submarine wolf packs of the game. As such, to counter them, there likely should be a class of weapons that can be used like depth charges to smoke out cloaked ships (check out the "Balance of Terror" episode of Star Trek, they actually use phasers in this manner, though it'd probably make more sense with torpedoes). On the cloaked ship's side, it's main attack ought to act like a sneaky torpedoing of the enemy vessel.

 

[Firebeetle]

Has anyone posted about this site?:

Studio Bergstrom Catalog

which has inexpensive knockoffs of virtually all the ships described in Space Flight? It's all very cool and very cheap. I'm eyeballing this as my ticket into spaceship miniature gaming, although I'm interested in Cold Navy eventually.

 

[e4Mafia]

Is there any update on the status of this project? I have to be honest, its the main reason I have subscribed to ENWorld. Not that I don't enjoy the other content, but I hope that at least some work is being on because of my contributions. I'm not about to cancel or anything though.

Russel, have you thought of doing Space Fight! as a patronage project? Like using kickstart or something like that?

-Bob

 

[Morrus]

I've never really looked into patronage stuff (I'm aware that they exist, but hadn't given it any thought and don't know much about it).

I was planning to check to see if there was continued interest in this, so it was a pleasant surprise to see the thread jump back to the top of the page.

 

[e4Mafia]

Aside from personal time to work on the project, what are the current hang ups?
I know you were having some art budget issues, is that still the case?

 

[Morrus]

There weren't art budget issues; the art budget was spent well, in my opinion.

The hardest part is the "props" aspect. The big problem is that a game like this really needs accessories to work - counters, laminated ship sheets, etc. Sure, you can print out and make your own, but that gets really tiresome really quicky (I speak from experience).

The whole props aspect is utterly ouside my spehere of expertise. I did look into a few "on demand" services, but none were adequate for what we needed.

 

[e4Mafia]

Have you looked at "TheGameCrafter.com"?
He had a booth at Gencon this past year, and I was pretty impressed. Might not be what you need in particular though.

 

[Firebeetle]

I would recommend working the guys at Worldworksgames. They already have a spacemap (a really nice one) and a paper miniature set. I think they would be up to the task. That's still in the "print it out yourself" category, though.

A patronage project is a good idea. This really needs to be a boxed set to work.

Another idea: Sell hard copies to guys who already play starship miniatures by creating rules for different miniature lines (there are many of them out there already, check out Star Ranger: Starship Combat News for a long list. I'm going to start working on those Cold Navy ships I talked about earlier myself, I'll post my results.