Oh dear, that's quite a question. In the Old Star Fleet Battles, a single Turn consisted of filling out the Star Fleet Tax Return "Power allocation chart", then playing out one full turn... in thirty two parts or "Impulses" which tried its best to mimic real-time movement. Its the kind of uber detailed break down one would expect out of a PC game now days not a boardgame. However it did manage to convey an incredible sense of control. I always felt like a Starship Captain, but one who had skipped the 4 year Star Fleet graduate program for the mail-order equivalent. To say it was involved as a game would be putting it mildly.
You say that.....mind you, the exact same charge can be labelled at Babylon 5 wars, ACTA's B5 predecessor. Want to shoot at something? Aaaah, you'd better have allocated sufficient electronic warfare effort to lock onto it. Oh, and your main weapon has about a three-turn firing/recharge cycle, depending on which of two or more firing modes you wish to use. Still want to fire? Okay, but you'll need more different types of dice than an average D&D game to resolve shooting from a single capital ship!
There's nothing inherently
wrong with either SFB or B5wars, but they feel more like a simulation than a tabletop wargame.
The rules are good if you want that much detail, and they are very good if you were to use them as the basis for a computer game - which keeps the detail but spares you the number-crunching and the book-keeping.
In fact, for that matter, SFB has been used for exactly that;
the Starfleet Command series is widely considered one of the best Trek game franchises made.
Okay if you can't explain SFB please tell us what ACTA is like.
By comparison, ACTA is a quick-and-dirty game; most weapons, for example have a maximum range within which they work to full effect and outside which they can't be used. Less realistic, perhaps, but it means that when it's my turn to shoot I grab some dice and roll them rather than reaching for a bloody calculator... It's a much simpler ruleset where pretty much any ship is boiled down to about a dozen stats and any weapon to about half that.
The upshot of this is that a small game - say two or three medium sized ships against one another - takes an hour or so for a brand new player, and a 'cheat sheet' can fit pretty much everything you need to know to play in bullet-point fashion on one side of A4. Big games can quite happily accomodate a dozen or so ships a side before the game gets long-winded - and long-winded still only means "an evening's play".
It's also a ruleset that will, on the release of SFB:ACTA or whatever it's published as, be on its sixth edition (B5, Victory at Sea, B5 2nd Ed, Victory at Sea: Age of Dreadnoughts, Noble Armada, SFB).
Each one has been a significant re-working without changing the fundamentals, and there have been several tweaks ('partial editions' like A Sky Full of Stars or Powers and Principalities) and popular unpublished versions (CourtJester's Battlestar Galactica mod, Victory on the Rivers and the Mongoose team's private starwars version) along the way.
As a result, as far as rulesets go it's been pretty much polished until it gleams; Mongoose have had seven years of us whiners, tourney gamers, illiterates and general malcontents pointing out every niggling flaw/typo/inconsistency/etc, and to give them their due have usually listened.
It's a good generic ruleset, with a toolbox of traits and standard rules, and is very good for duplicating the 'feel' of a setting, which is (at least to me) more important than trying for infinitesimal precision on what is a made-up setting to start with. It also leaves you with useful 'generic mechanics' you can pull in in any other setting - for example, the WWII style torpedo mechanics from Victory at Sea that are supposedly being used for SFB photons, or the grapnel guns that make boarding so much easier (and hence more important) in Noble Armada.
Are there standard game types? Is there a campaign structure?
There was a full blown campaign system in the rulebook in every version of ACTA so far, I can't imagine they'd junk it for the new one.
Assuming there aren't too many changes to the core rules, there are a load of standard scenarios to draw on; ACTA second edition (Babylon 5) had about half a dozen generic scenarios - annihalation (first one to die, loses), planetary assaults, raids on supply convoys, ambush, etc, plus about twice that number of 'specific' scenarios based on particular TV episodes (such as the Battle of the Line, Into the Fire, etc).
I suspect the latter are less relevant (since I don't think the SFU license lets you use anything directly from the series) but there are still enough generic scenarios out there; if the relative power of ships in SFB and ACTA are more or less comparable, any scenario published for SFB should be more-or-less adaptable.
Also we need Star Trek emoticons for the boards don't you guys think?
Yes.
