Stu-- said:
We did 3v3 the other day in fleet scale and it took 3 hours. That can't be more than 400 pts.
I forgot how intricate the space accountancy is
Fleet scale is not really much faster than squadron scale. You still have the EA, the move each ship one subpulse at a time, all the decision making etc. And whilst the ships are half as big, the fire power is half as big so the ships don't die any faster.
It probably also helps that we play a lot, anything from 1 FF vs 1 FF to 2000 pt base assaults around terrain etc. There's a lot of variability, a 1000pt game could be over in 3 hours, or be a tense cat and mouse over 8 hours, but 5 hours probably covers most such games.
Also worth pointing out we tend to play campaign games, if 1000pts meets another 1000pts there is no fight to the death except in rare cases. Once someone gets a clear upper hand, or achieves what they set out to do someone is likely to turn and disengage and preserve the rest of their fleet.
Out last 2 big battles were:
2000 pts of Gorn to 1400pts of Andro in asteroids, that took about 8-10 hours, being a tense game where the Gorns just had to survive 10 turns without taking too much damage (campaign wise they were preparing for a Starbase assault) and the Andros needed to do as much damage as possible to the Gorns without regard for loss, So the Gorns were happy to run around asteroids for 10 turns.
A big Gorn fleet (a bit bigger than the one above) against a fed Star base with about 1000pt of defending ships. That took about 4-5 hours as the Gorns just swept in and wiped the starbase.
Anyway in regards to hull points and crippled effects does everyone like how the system is as written? Certainly playing with regular hull boxes and effectively calling crippled ships 'going home' (because they're otherwise getting killed) speeds the game hugely
I like ACTA as is in the rule book except for the special action handling, which feels too random too me. I don't mind some 'luck' element - like the photons through the shield that wipes a ship instantly, those things are pretty rare but quite 'cinematic' (as GW would say). I don't like that many tactics rely on 50/50 rolls. That in turn feeds heavily into drones and plasma being problematic, as you can't reliably defend against them. But Yes, I personaly think the shield/Hull/crit system is pretty decent as is, there may be a few quirks but nothing worth worrying about for what is meant to be a simple fast playing game.