Squadron Strike: First Look
Jonas was sick and larygngitis-y today, so no BW - but instead we played Squadron Strike, the new small fleet action 3D space combat game from Ad Astra Games.
I had just picked up the rulebook from the mail yesterday, so the game was mostly a crash course in learning the rules (and ferreting out errata). Luckily, the play aids are great, as usual from Ad Astra, the game itself is relatively simple (for Newtonian 3D movement), and the system builds off of Attack Vector - SS is essentially Attack Vector "light". Another big help was that i had bought the edition with a colour-printed manual, which is gorgeous and filled with helpful diagrams and examples.
The big draw of Squadron Strike is the robust ship design system, which is reminiscent more of Master of Orion than Full Thrust. I haven't really begun to dig into design process yet, so i'll leave that to later.
For the demo game, i matched up two pairs of light cruisers from the demonstration fleets - it was "Rhodesian" Invincibles vs "Russian" Kirovs. This might have been a mistake - i was thinking light cuiser = commerce raider, while the designers were obviously on the WW2 "flak-boat" wavelength!
We walked through the rules as we went, starting with the AVID & positioning, moving on to thrust and facing changes, and then finally to weapons-fire and damage allocation. Even at this glacial pace the game went pretty fast (for me anyway - i'm always slow, even on games i know well). We finished about 5 turns in ~2hrs, including two exchanges of weapons fire, both using the fast "Salvo Allocation" method and the slower shot by shot resolution. Clearly, the game will play much much faster then AV:T, even with a squadron of independant ships and on-the-board missiles.
Speaking of missiles, the "flak-boat" fight went like this: manoeuver, charge, all-out medium-range launches, wall-of-flak shoots everything down. Aside from one torpedo hit, the only damage scored was via laser batteries - the light cruisers just had too many defenses to shoot through, even under optimal conditions. I'm actually not sure whether our ships ended the fight in bad condition or not - all the ships had a lot of systems knocked out of commision, but only a single box of Structure damage was scored the whole fight. Very Russo-Japanese War, without all the nasty fires!
We're planning to play a more comprehensive fight later in the week. Meanwhile, i'm going to start digging into the ship design sheets. The game has real potential - while not as exacting as AV:T, the combination of ship-building and playable 3/D squadron-level actions is a sure win in my book.
I had just picked up the rulebook from the mail yesterday, so the game was mostly a crash course in learning the rules (and ferreting out errata). Luckily, the play aids are great, as usual from Ad Astra, the game itself is relatively simple (for Newtonian 3D movement), and the system builds off of Attack Vector - SS is essentially Attack Vector "light". Another big help was that i had bought the edition with a colour-printed manual, which is gorgeous and filled with helpful diagrams and examples.
The big draw of Squadron Strike is the robust ship design system, which is reminiscent more of Master of Orion than Full Thrust. I haven't really begun to dig into design process yet, so i'll leave that to later.
For the demo game, i matched up two pairs of light cruisers from the demonstration fleets - it was "Rhodesian" Invincibles vs "Russian" Kirovs. This might have been a mistake - i was thinking light cuiser = commerce raider, while the designers were obviously on the WW2 "flak-boat" wavelength!
We walked through the rules as we went, starting with the AVID & positioning, moving on to thrust and facing changes, and then finally to weapons-fire and damage allocation. Even at this glacial pace the game went pretty fast (for me anyway - i'm always slow, even on games i know well). We finished about 5 turns in ~2hrs, including two exchanges of weapons fire, both using the fast "Salvo Allocation" method and the slower shot by shot resolution. Clearly, the game will play much much faster then AV:T, even with a squadron of independant ships and on-the-board missiles.
Speaking of missiles, the "flak-boat" fight went like this: manoeuver, charge, all-out medium-range launches, wall-of-flak shoots everything down. Aside from one torpedo hit, the only damage scored was via laser batteries - the light cruisers just had too many defenses to shoot through, even under optimal conditions. I'm actually not sure whether our ships ended the fight in bad condition or not - all the ships had a lot of systems knocked out of commision, but only a single box of Structure damage was scored the whole fight. Very Russo-Japanese War, without all the nasty fires!
We're planning to play a more comprehensive fight later in the week. Meanwhile, i'm going to start digging into the ship design sheets. The game has real potential - while not as exacting as AV:T, the combination of ship-building and playable 3/D squadron-level actions is a sure win in my book.