Mongoose August said:
Right now, the game is in the planning stages, so it is hard to tell exactly what it will be like. I would say if you are a fan of either B5 Wars (I am) or the Earthforce Sourcebook (which was also excellent), you should be happy with the end product.
Err, what if you are a big fan of one and, um, somewhat less a fan of the other?
Mongoose August said:
Right now, the game is in the planning stages, so it is hard to tell exactly what it will be like. I would say if you are a fan of either B5 Wars (I am) or the Earthforce Sourcebook (which was also excellent), you should be happy with the end product.
I am taking inspiration from a lot of different sources, so never fear, if there are elements of a given wargame you like, post them here and I'll see what I can do to work them in.
Be careful what you wish for ...
Here's the short list:
1) It should be faithful to the kinetics of the show. (Don't laugh -- that *seems* obvious, but that never stopped previous designers from ignoring it.) By this I mean that you should be able to recreate the action on the show with the same feel.
2) Movement should be simple. That's one of the things I really liked about the _Earthforce Sourcebook_ -- you didn't have a laundry list of possible movement orders to memorize ("let's see, if I am stationary and I want to rotate it costs this much, but if I am coasting and moving it costs how much?" or "I sideslip for ten turns in a row, then take damage and can no longer pay for the sideslip, so I magically spring back to my previous course?!"), you had a very simple set of mechanics backed up by a few meta-principles.
3) Avoid hefty conversions, e.g., W reactor points run multiplied times X conversion factor equals Y thrust points expended through Z engines.
4) At the same time, avoid oversimplifications. The example in #3 is the somewhat inelegant fix to an even worse problem, that of W reactor points equals Y thrust points expended through Z engines. (This equation means that either the absolute value of a reactor point varies from ship-to-ship, or that all ships are the same mass.)
Dag'Nabbit said:
And Jal I gotta agree with you, at least in part, that the Velocity/Vector method that is used in Full Thrust is definitely a good thing. However, it has a few drawback. First, you gotta admit that when people here words usually associated with physics classes they tend to shy away from getting into the action. Not saying they're not smart enough, but that they probably just want to keep it simple.
This is actually why I prefer EFSB -- it's a LOT simpler than some of the alternatives, while giving a more realistic feel.
There's this myth that vector movement is hard, because it's different than what we are used to, and because there have been a lot of games that use vector movement that also have a lot of other rules that ARE hard. (Someone once asked me "You did a vector movement game? How'd you handle 3D movement?" I handled 3D movement by *ignoring* it.) But vector movement is NOT hard.
Look at GDW's _Triplanetary_. The rules for movement take about 1/2 of a single 8.5x11 sheet of paper. Most of that text covers the special case of entering a gravity well. In that 1/2 page of text, you get rules that not only have ZERO holes, they also allow you to orbit planets (or the Sun) by virtue of following the same movement rules as you do in deep space, without any "spend a movement point to go into orbit" shortcuts.
The vast majority of tactical space combat games spend pages and pages of text on movement rules, *especially* if they claim to provide "simple" realistic movement by using movement points.
There are a lot of other claims made against vector movement as well, such as "without a top speed I run off the map" (why don't you run off the road in your car then? because you know not to go faster than you can control!) or "but then I have to think of my moves in advance" (you mean, like, you have to have a *strategy* you have to *think ahead*? heavens forbid!), but most of them are excuses rather than rebuttals.
Dag'Nabbit said:
Second, I have never played Full Thrust with 24 ships and escorting fighter flotillas, but I would imagine that would end up taking a lot more then 2-3 hours to complete.
Depends on the group, but EFSB and some of the other similar efforts (there are a lot of them on the web, including one written by yours truly -- I have a LOT of experience with this) usually play faster than the alternatives. This is because they use pre-plotted movement, which means that (1) everyone is writing orders at the same time, and (2) everyone is executing at the same time, and (3) you get to skip the entire "initiative" thing (which, if determined at the ship level, can be quite time-consuming). There's a lot of parallel processing that takes place, and as a result, the larger the battle, the FASTER it is to play it out in EFSB or the other other similar efforts.
