Speaking as a huge, life-long fan of spaceship games:

- Firestorm is a great, highly enjoyable game that does big fleets better than Armada in all honesty.

- Full Thrust is superb if you want something a bit more granular, and can also be quite "realistic" if you use the newtonian movement.

- Armada is wonderful (obviously) and hits the Star Wars vibe spot on. it is however not great for big fleets and clearly doesn't even try for realism.

Hell, i even played B5 Wars and Star Fleet Battles a lot, as well as Sky Full of Stars and almost every other ship combat game you care to mention. Both Armadas (Firestorm and Star Wars) stack up very favourably against almost all competition. None of them are perfect, but they hit different areas well.

I have every expectation Halo will be very good fun, but since I already have fleets for Firestorm, Star Wars, Full Thrust AND B5 i really don't know if i can do another.

But....i probably will.

In my defence, i really only play spaceship games.

Ah good ol Babylon 5 Wars. Still one of the best navel combat games around.

Very rules heavy but in a good way.

Very, VERY rules heavy, but really one of the best "simulator" type games made. Definitely not for large fleets, but for a few ships a side just fantastic.

So true.

But then I do prefer games with fewer units that take a lot to kill rather than the hollow feeling of "oh you rolled a 6 well I'll take that take unit off the board"

I just love changing your heavy lasers to piercing mode and trying for a hit to his reactor in the hope you do enough damage to cause him to have to choose what weapons to keep powered.

Or getting in close and using your plasma cannons to melt his armour so your fighters can get in and do maximum damage to that critical system....

A real shame there are hardly any games around like that now.

I cut my teeth as a tabletop player on SFB, and rolled into B5W just as that came out.. I do miss playing them both, they weren't 'fast' rule systems by stretch of the imagination, but they certainly were rich with detail.

"If you overload the photons, the Enemy will dance. If you load standards, he will charge. You can't win. He has ESP."

Looks alright if you like the Dystopian/Firestorm game system. Spartan games does a fairly good job at combining multiple theaters in a single discipline. However much like the same problem Star Wars table top games have is the franchise limitations. Take a look at X-wing, there was plenty of ships in the movies as the battles were focused in space but now FFG has to look at EU and other sources for new models. HALO was mostly about ground combat so with space combat in which the Covenant simply destroyed the UNSC with each engagement the UNSC you didn't see too many different types of space ships.

You have 3 UNSC capital ships and 2 Covenant ships in the trilogy, with 2 more covenant ships in Reach and 1 OP UNSC ship in 4. Also the UNSC is supposed to be grossly underpowered when compared to the covenant, with the UNSC biggest cruisers (except the one from 4) supposed to die in a single hit and and the Covenant can never miss and take several MAC shots even survive a nuke.

I don't think anyone here has actually been seriously following the Halo:Fleet Battles coverage, as I am hearing some very odd things. So lets get some simple facts covered and then I'll talk about it VS Star Wars:Armada afterwards.

Halo:Fleet Battles is going to run on a stripped down and heavily re-balanced version of the Firestorm:armada rules. The coreset is going to contain 49 unassembled hard plastic ship models as normal Spartan resin just isn't up to meeting the scale of the project. For the UNSC, there is 1 Epoch-class Heavy Carrier, 4 Marathon-class Heavy Cruisers and 27 Paris-class Frigates. The Covenant get 1 ORS Class Heavy Cruiser, 2 CCS Class Battlecruisers and 14 SDV Heavy Corvettes. Its a lot of models, there will be more. Ships from the first wave were already preview alongside the core set at Salute. Spartan are free to make up new ships, in the sense that they have access to a lot of the concept art and designers so can use ideas that never made it into the games just like many Star Wars EU vessels are based on movie concept sketches. In the UK at least both core sets cost the same before any discount.

Halo:Fleet Battles undoubtedly gives you more ships for your buck than Armada does, and it definitely covers much larger engagements better. However you are going to have to assemble and paint all of those models yourself, and whilst this is Spartans most well polished looking project to date(you only have to look at the card inserts in the bases to see FFG's influence.), they still aren't up to producing all the elegant and tactile systems of Armada such as the movement stick and command dials. There is no reason beyond the budgeting of time and money that says you can't do both, I am certainly planning on trying to and I imagine many other people will to. There is also little to no point in picking it up as a time filler whilst waiting for wave one of Armada to hit. Halo:Fleet battles has no firmer release date than "the summer" and the most optimistic estimates peg that as mid to late July, if we don't have wave one of Armada by then I doubt there will be any Armada players left to chose between the systems.

How do the size of the Firestorm Armada ships compare to SW:Armada? It seems from the pictures that the larger Firestorm Armada ships would be about Medium sized in SW:Armada.

Here's a few of my FSA Hawker ships compared to the SWA core ships.

I don't go in for all of that this game is better than that game bs people seem to like to sling. I like a ton of miniature games. 40k, Warmachine (which I'm terrible at), Robotech RPG tactics, Force on Force, Firestorm Armada, Firestorm Planetfall, Infinity, X-wing, Star Wars Armada and who knows how many more eventually. They've all got a place on my tabletop and I'm happy to have played them all.

I actually quite like the exploding 6s dice mechanic and find it's fun to see some random ship do something extraordinary. Last night I caused an impressive critical hit against a particularly menacing ship that gavee him a shunt drive failure blinking him into an asteroid field. Then when he next activated he collided with an asteroid and shunt drive failed again right off of the board. You see stuff like this happen maybe once every other game and it makes it truly memorable to me.

How do the size of the Firestorm Armada ships compare to SW:Armada? It seems from the pictures that the larger Firestorm Armada ships would be about Medium sized in SW:Armada.

The miniatures are similar lengths when comparing ships of similar classes/abilities. FSA frigates are similar to the Corellian Corvette in size and damage dealing capability. Same for the average FSA cruiser vs Star Wars Neb Frigate. Similar story for the Vic vs many most FSA battleships. FSA ships are normally all bulkier than Star Wars ships.

Here's a few of my FSA Hawker ships compared to the SWA core ships.

I don't go in for all of that this game is better than that game bs people seem to like to sling. I like a ton of miniature games. 40k, Warmachine (which I'm terrible at), Robotech RPG tactics, Force on Force, Firestorm Armada, Firestorm Planetfall, Infinity, X-wing, Star Wars Armada and who knows how many more eventually. They've all got a place on my tabletop and I'm happy to have played them all.

I actually quite like the exploding 6s dice mechanic and find it's fun to see some random ship do something extraordinary. Last night I caused an impressive critical hit against a particularly menacing ship that gavee him a shunt drive failure blinking him into an asteroid field. Then when he next activated he collided with an asteroid and shunt drive failed again right off of the board. You see stuff like this happen maybe once every other game and it makes it truly memorable to me.

You make a good point there. "Better" is really a question for the individual player. The important thing is whether the game is fun to play, and worth the investment to the individual. I've only got to try FSA once, and I thought it was interesting at least, I'd love to give it a go again. What's important to me in a game is whether the system allows good tactics to consistently overcome bad dice, even better if those mechanics make sense in the context of whatever the setting's flavor is.

Stop reminding me of other sexy space ship mini's i can only afford so many i miss the days i had no responsibility and could buy anything that caught my eye