I have a slight problem. I and my players love it when we use minis for combat scenes in Edge. Not only does it give me a really cool scene for them to look at, but it also allows me to give them a visual for the ship or vehicle that they're not familiar with (of which there are MANY) without having to either describe the ship or find artwork for it. It also allows me to make a scene without having to rely too heavily on my descriptive, which is lacking when it comes to describing large scenes.

The problem arises when I try to make things cinematic... It gets really clunky and ungainly in large space battles between small fleets, which has happened a couple of times. The main thing is keeping a consistent range scale for everything, which is difficult when range takes place in units of kilometers and the miniatures are starfighter scale.

Do you guys know any tips that can help me streamline miniatures in Edge?

Do you guys know any tips that can help me streamline miniatures in Edge?

Don’t?

Seriously, FFGs SWRPG is a narrative game, and was never designed to use miniatures. You can use miniatures with personal scale combat, but because of the narrative nature of the game, that will not scale up well as you add more participants.

The problem just gets worse by orders of magnitude once you try to start using miniatures with FFGs SWRPG in space combat.

I’ve seen two different solutions to this problem.

One is to scrap FFGs space combat system altogether, and to instead go with something like X-Wing. But even X-Wing doesn’t scale well for larger combats. To the degree that X-Wing works at all, it works best with smaller groups, like 100 points per side, which usually means just three or four ships per side. You can make it go bigger, but the board is not that big relative to the size of the ships, especially the larger ships. And it doesn’t handle large numbers of ships well. That’s why FFG is coming out with Armada, so that you can have those epic-scale battles with ships that are much, much smaller relative to the size of the field they’re playing on.

The new solution in this space is what GM Hooly is doing, and you can see some of that in the thread at <https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/135202-starship-combat-hex-tiles/>. The concept of using the older WotC miniatures plus larger-size hexes is one that I hadn’t seen before, but looks like it might actually work with the more narrative style of FFGs SWRPG. However, while I think this might work reasonably well with small handfuls of ships, I seriously doubt that even this will scale up well to larger numbers of ships.

In order words, the game simply wasn’t designed for use with miniatures, and I don’t know how well you can cram that square peg into any round hole of that nature.

Hooly's done an amazing job of taking digital stuff like I've done and making it physical objects.

For encounter with lots of vehicles, big hexes is probably the best solution.

The hex maps work pretty well to define the different ranges. Although you mentioned small fleets, so are you talking cap ship scale or squadrons of fighters? One of the powers of the systen is that it is narrative so the scales don't have to be exact, just constant.

Salcor

A hex can pretty easily represent a maneuver's worth of "Flying/Driving," and can be useful for matters of positioning. Just make sure to understand that Short range (the farthest edge of a neighboring hex) can be up to several dozen kilometers away, and that Close range (the hex in which you reside) is up to several kilometers in width. So realize that the hexes are good tool if used properly, but should not be constraining the action or used in a ruler-measured-minutiae sort of way. Let the range bands be flexy and open to player & GM interpretation, and use the hexes as a rough guideline.

I use gridless maps and minis for personal scale combat, just to get positioning right. For space combat I draw concentric circles and place ships in range bands, which works great until your party has more than one ship, where it blows up in one's face.

We've found that this allows to use fun minis (of which I have hundreds, it's a shame not to use them) and have a visual aid, but we're not bogged down in counting squares. Seems like the best of both worlds for us, with the aforementioned caveat - we just eyeball it and note it on the battlemat for now.

I'm presently trying to hammer out the finer points of doing this all with my projector, but it still doesn't have that je ne sais quoi.

Yea, i just use a player model, with concentric circles. or lines to denote ranges. My players are rather spatially challenged

So far for space/vehicle combat in EotE we've gone completely narrative. Until last year we were using WEG d6 and miniatures were constantly used. I'd like to find a way to incorporate them into vehicle combat because it can get a bit complex. I've read some good ideas in this thread so far.

I use a map with Circles like a target.

The PC ship is in the middle, and all other ships are moved around it like a radar image. I am able to keep it very narrative as the circles represent range bands.

If i have more than one PC ship i simply hand wave the range band issue as the second ships location in the bands represents is center location and each band away represents a range.

Last night we had a 4-player X-wing flight through a narrow canyon, chased by creatures that could do vehicle-scale damage. We used unused Destiny Points to denote range bands and it worked pretty well. Since we were all heading in the same direction we didn't have to think too much.

I don't use anything to represent ships in ship combat, except for a two-on-one chase scene, and even then it was just a paper with lines on it denoting range bands. That being said, my players are usually just in their ship, with at most one other friendly ship present, so it's been easy to keep track of.

We do, however, use minis for the more involved combats. They're comfortable with the ever-present GM fiat that I decide what the ranges are, even if they look a bit wonky on the paper. It's mostly used to track how many groups there are, where they are, and what's generally going on. That being said, it could be even more fun if I keep that info to myself, have the players keep track of what's around them, so that they have to communicate and share information more.