Battlefront Valkyrie

I've watched the guys at the club play Battlefront Valkyrie a couple of times. This is a cool, printable game which seem to foreshadow the likely direction of gaming: buy your pdfs and stls and away you go. Basically, it is a streamlined, off-brand Star Fleet Battles.

The pros are super-slick energy allocation and combat system, all managed on ship cards. This is very, very well designed.

The cons are the initiative and more mechanics are fiddly and confusing in practice and don't seem to follow Newtonian physics (i.e., don't power your engine and your ship stops?!? what?).

Bruce fixed the by adding some pre-plotting of moves (retention of momentum, accelerate or decelerate, turns) which allows for simultaneous action. The result is a very slick game and a chance to pull out his 1/7000 fleets.

Would definitely play again and probably my favourite ship-level game at this point. You can reasonably play three ships (so a small squadron) and still face incredibly difficult choices.

Would definitely play again!

Star Trek Runabout

A couple of years back, I was putting together some 28mm STTNG-era crews and I ran across this shuttle pod.

It was from the Action Fleet series and was close enough to scale to work. I also got four STTOS shuttles in the same lot.

It included a pilot (maybe Picard?) and you could open it up to play. It looks like there is a warp core in the cargo area that you can eject (it comes out).

I was looking for another of these shuttle pods and, instead, ran across this runabout. It is much larger and was designed for the 4-inch action-figure range.

You can seat a single pilot in the front and there is a matching seat in the rear compartment.

I don't know what purpose it would serve in a game--maybe an objective? Anyhow, it sat on my shelf for a long time waiting for the right moment.

The cockpit aside, the ship scales pretty well for 28mm figures, when you look at the hatch on the side.

A few months back, I ran across some 3-D printed space-station furniture. So I bought it, pulled the ship apart (involving a ridiculous number of tiny screws) and put in a properly-scale cockpit. This was more involved than it shows in these pictures. I had to remove the old chair, create a proper floor, etc.

There were some extra pieces so I did the same thing in the back area (sorry the photos are bad--tough angles and light). I had the whole ship apart and looked at the dead area in the middle (where some electronics were) and, after some handwringing, decided against doing major surgery on the ship to open this area up.

I also gave the hull a wash to make the plating pop a bit more.

Clearly I'm not a skilled plastic modeller, but this was a fun little project. Now I just need to work this into a game.

Up next: Some more 15mm medievals.

Wrath of Khan Klingons

To go with the ST:TMP Federation Crew that I showed last week, I bought a 1982 set of Klingons that FASA released at the same time. 

These were really disappointing figures. Much like last week's set, they are very passively posed. The exceptions include the guy swinging a rifle (below right). His pose is anatomically possible but is extremely difficult to pull off.

The other animated pose (below right) is the fellow who is knocking, or leaning, or maybe dancing? Terrible pose. Like what the hell?

The sculpts have pretty good detail that matches the ST:TMP Klingons from The Search for Spock and they paint up fine enough.

They are, however way under sized for 25mm. Below, I have compared them to the 1970s 25mm Heritage Klingons and modern 28mm (Space Vixens from Mars, I think). Even with the extra height from the slotta base, the FASA figure is shorter and much smaller than the Heritage and looks more 20mm.

Oddly, they are even small compared to the Federation Crew from the same release. They came in a sealed set and included proper markings on the base so I don't think they are recasts (which sometimes shrink). Just a terrible effort by FASA all around.

Up next: Hard to say. Maybe some more Crimean. Maybe some fantasy.

25mm Star Trek Wrath of Khan bridge crew

As a birthday treat, I bought a job lot of 25mm FASA ST:TMP figures from the Wrath of Khan. It looks like I ended up without a Chekov (oh well!). These came with the trousers and tunics blocked in so I just completed the paint job and based them. I decided to go a bit brighter than I usually might.

These are fairly small figures (true 25mm) and have kind of useless poses. Since they were created for the Star Trek RPG, I'm not sure why they are all just standing around the bridge? Kirk even appears to be leaning on his chair. Savik is a nice find though.

I pulled out some of my ST:TOS figures. I'm pretty sure the one on the left is a Heritage figure, so they scale pretty well. Uhura on the right is newer and headed more towards 28mm, but I can't recall from where.

Overall, an interesting look back at the early 1980s. I have the Klingon set as well (although I don't think there were Klingons in the Wrath of Khan?). I will try to finish those in the next few weeks and post them.

Xenos Rampant Tiny Trek

Over the past few months, Bruce and I have been fine-tuning Xenos Rampant to give a good fleet-level spaceship game. The link above gives you the basic rules. A few weeks back, we played a three-player, 50-point ST:DS9 Federation versus Klingon.

The Klingons had to attack and destroy a space station with two separate commands. The Federation had to defend the station and had a relief force in addition to the station itself (which we played as a single command). 

he unit stats and orbat are all at the bottom of this post. The hexes on the mat have no game meaning. The Klingons come on from the right side in the picture above. The Federation relief force comes on from an adjacent edge (as shown above), which creates an interesting tactical situation.

I've played the scenario twice and it is very tight. Bruce and Nathan drew the two Klingon commands and their strategy was to rush the big ships at the station while using the smaller Klingon ships to tie up the relief force. An alternative strategy is to beat the hell out of the relief force and then go after the station. We passed a pewter Sisko back and forth to track who had initiative ("who has the Sisko?").

The battle basically had three components In the middle, the USSs Janet Jackson, Tiffany, and Robin Sparkles tangled with the KSSs Megadeath, Motley Crue, and Queensryche. This was mostly a drawn. The Robin Sparkles got beat up pretty bad but the Motley Crue and Queeenryche were run off.

On the left, the KSS Scorpion focused its attack on Deep Space 3 (oddly, I have no pictures). Eventually, the Scorpion was able to cause enough damage that the Space Station started failing courage checks. Thus led to run-away systems failures, and it eventually bit it just a turn before the Federation was likely to break the Klingons

Meanwhile, on the right, the USSs Debbie Gibbon and Alanis closed with the KSSs Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Korn. The Korn was eventually able to slip past and attack the Federation heavies from behind but the Slayer and Iron Maiden got the crap beat out of them in close combat.

Overall a fun game and the rules adaptation seems to work fine. We experimented with allowing ships to slip up to 45 degrees off centre for free in this game. That worked fine and (or but, depending on your tastes) it made movement very fluid (versus only straight forward flight with a penalty for turning). Meh, either way was fine.

The Klingons had three fighter units and the Federation space stations had five fighters. I had to proxy in some vipers and raiders (hoots of derision) since I haven't based the ST:DS9 fighter tokens.

Fine-tuning Fleet-level Starship Combat using Xenos Rampant

I hauled my tiny starships over to Bruce's place last week and we gave the adaptation of Xenos Rampant to fleet-level action (i.e., the player is an admiral commanding multiple ships) two good playlists. We made a couple of adjustments between tests and the result seems to give a good game. Scenario was convoy escort: Galactica versus Star Fleet. The ships are 1/10,000ish scale from the National Cheese Emporium on Shapeways.

We retained two types of units: capital ships and fighters. Capital ships:

• always have movement as their automatic action
• move straight forward; a turn of up to 90 degrees costs 2" of movement
• act like vehicles, meaning they can try to shoot after moving at a -1 to their activation roll 
• have a forward shooting arc of 180 degrees (we ignore arcs during assault)
• have -1 to armour when shoot at from behind their front edge.

This seems to approximate momentum in movement (and reduces dice rolling around movement) while giving players tough choices about the sequence of actions you decide to take (do you move everyone or do you automatic move one ship and then risk a shooting attempt?).

By contrast, fighters:

• have no facing, can turn freely during a move, and always turn to face an attacker
• can neither shoot nor be shot at 
• fly back towards their carriers when they fail a courage test and, once they touch a carrier, automatically rally during the next rally phase
• that touch a carrier (because of a failed courage test or voluntarily) also regain 1d6 strength points
• can launch as a part of move action simply by moving away from the carrier.  

This seems to approximate carrier operations with fighter being brittle, close-in combat units that can re-arm by returning to base. We also had asteroid fields and planets to block LOS. You can move through an asteroid field at no additional cost but take a 10d6 attack.

Our playtest pitted two battlestars, six transports, and 10 viper squadrons against two battleships, two cruisers, two light cruisers, a destroyer and two frigates. This worked out to 50ish points per side. If you wanted to split this up into two commands for each side (each of which must fail for a player to lose initiative), you could.

Our experience was that the battlestars were very tough ships but one had to be careful with the viper wings and think about whether to re-arm or attack very carefully. The battlestars were also vulnerable to being flanked and were a pain to get turned around and back in the fight if they failed a courage test. Not allowing fighters to shoot seems to mimic the role of fighters in BSG and Star Wars: get in close and try to get lucky while taking significant casualties.

The Federation fleet was also tricky to handle. The destroyer and frigate flotillas were very fast (faster than the fighters) but also brittle, so they were useful to threaten and pin down other ships more so than in combat. The larger federation ships were slow and the cruisers got beat-up quickly. But, with careful maneuvering, even the light cruiser could really put a pasting on an enemy ship.

Overall, this felt like a very fleet-level action (you were commanding multiple ships rather than fiddling with energy allocation on one ship). I have out the ship stats below. But, before turning to that, Bruce also showed off his own 1/6000-sca;e WW2 fleets that we've been using with Nimitz. The counters that the ships sit in are about two inches long. The models can we swapped into other counters as needed.

These are the SSDs we used for the Federation and Colonial Fleets. If you want these as Word files, I can email them to you.

Since the rules basically seem to work, I will point up a Klingon and Cylon fleet. Bruce also had a good idea for handling space stations so maybe we'll try that next.

Xenos Rampant Outerspace

Bruce and I were speculating about whether Xenos Rampant could be adapted to starship combat. We had a nasty bout of wildfire smoke 10 days ago (it was an 11+ on a scale of 1-10 and you could see about five blocks). Since I wasn't up to to roll 3d6 against my constitution, I decided to see if I could work out an adaptation.

I have been itching to use some tiny (1:10,000 scale) models from Shapeways. To give you a sense of how small, the d6 has 1cm sides. The Galactica is supposed to be 1.5ish km long and that makes almost three times also long as the Enterprise D.

Anyhow, I pulled out two 50-point fleets. The stats (which I'll post later when they are refined) were based on infantry units. the Galactica was an elite unit with a bunch of upgrades to make it worth 12 points plus the cost of the fights (5 squadrons at 2 points each). These are enormous ships and let me test out fighter rules as well as min-max ships.

Fleet 1 was the Galactica, a ragtag fugitive fleet, plus the (not-pictured) Pegasus as a separate command. I didn't bother with a spacemat since the dining room table was dark wood. So you'll have the pardon the grainy pictures (that pun was for Terry). 

They were pitted against the ST:DS9 era ships. Yes, I know this makes zero sense, but it let me point out a ST:DS9 fleet (I also have Klingon, Dominion and Cardassian fleets) and test a more traditional space navy with big and small ships.

 

The basic rules adaptations were pretty minimal. There are two classes of ships (capital and fighters).

• Capital ships shoot in the front 180 degrees. Turning up to 90 degrees costs 2 inches of movement. Armour is -1 from the side or rear (if shot is from behind from base edge). The armour reduction encouraged maneuver. Most capital ships move automatically straight forward but have to dice to shoot or assault (the Battlestar's reversed this). Every unit has the firefight skill.
• Fighter have no facing, can turn freely during a move and always turn to face an attacker. They can neither shoot nor be shot at (they are basically melee units). Their armour was 1 but they had extra strength points (basically they were rabble). 
• If fighters fail a courage test (and they will), they fly back towards their carriers. Once they touch the carrier, they automatically rally and regain 1d6 strength points. Launching is just a part of their next move action. They can also voluntarily land and regain strength. This creates a sense of carrier operations without much bookkeeping.

Anyhow, I did two playtests. The first one was a romp for the Colonials, so I rejigged the fighter stats and also developed a better strategy for the Federation. Game 2 playd out like this. 

There were three Federation commands: a heavy group (1 BB and 2 CCs), a cruiser screen (4 CLs), and a flotilla of smaller, fast craft (2 DDs and 2 FGs). The two big units moved to take on the two Battlestars while the flotilla tried to draw off some vipers and then loop around to attack the transports. Below you can see the flotilla at the top streaking past the Galactica and its fighters.

Meanwhile, most of the vipers focusd on attriting the light cruiser screen while Pegasus and Galactica exchanged volleys at range with the larger Federation ships. Below, you can see a less than stellar effort by the Pegasus.

Eventually, the Galactica started to take some serious damaging (having had to turn to protect the fleet). But the continuous cycling of the vipers had run off most of the cruiser screen. 

The flotilla chased the fleet, but the fleet fought them off at short range. The Federation large ships easily brushed aside the viper attacks (although there were some failed courage tests) but the Feds were just no match for the two Battlestars firing.

In the end, a Colonial victory. Some better tactics by the Federation would have likely turned the battle. The Galactica was close to destruction and was a missed opportunity by the Federation. I hope to give this a playtest with Bruce soon. In the meantime, I'll give some thought about how to deal with super large ships and space stations (cube below is to scale).

I'm continually surprised how adaptable these rules are to different genres of sci-fi gaming. I wonder if they would work for superheroes?