Halo would be neat.

Spartan games have produced a space ship combat of Halo.

+1 Babylon 5. A lot of factions.

+1 Battlestar Galactica (They do have a lot of ships instead of what I have heard, and they have a lot of new invented ships old and new era)

+1 Star Trek. Without fighters.

+1 Buck Rogers. I know, just the draconian and the earth protectorate, models just for two waves of ships...

Yea But I am not sure about with what i have heard of their previous space combat rulesets.

A lot of that is probably not really accurate. The 1st edition of Firestorm had some flaws, but tbh the latest one is very good.

No one said Mass Effect?

It would be perfect.

You have the diversity for fleets: Humans, Asari, Geth, Quarians, Turians, Batarians/Scum/Omega, Cerberus, Reapers and maybe the Rachnii and Protheans.

A very strong line up and a rich lore as a background.

You are not forced to play the All vs Reaper main storyline. The first contact war and so on give good impressions for what is possible.

Has no one mentioned Battlestar Galactica? I am ashamed in all of you, consitering how easy an adaptation it would be!

The topic of reskinning has been discussed before and BSG was mentioned many times. However, many people (myself included) agreed that there just isn't enough diversity of ships to make a decent list-building type game.

*Sigh* not this again... yes it's come up many times, and yes many people agreed there weren't enough ships...

"Is heavier than air flight possible?" or "Does the Sun orbit the Earth?" - turns out that having 'many people agree' is not usually the best indicator of truth.

Let's not forget that if you look at what's 'film canon' or even just 'new canon' to Star Wars, there's not enough ships to make a decent list-building type game. FFG had to not only had to goto the 'expanded universe' to make the game work, they even had to invent a new ship themselves for Wave 3.

So, yeah I think it's demonstrable that there are as many ships in the Battlestar expanded universe, and/or in the first Cylon war setting to equal the diversity of ships sizes, classes and functions that we see in the first three waves of Armada. Does it have a deep a deck as year of the 'expanded universe' give Star Wars? No. Does it need to? No.

Also, I think with any reskin, it needs to be more than just sticking in different models - there needs to be something different in the game that not only sets it apart from Star Wars, but is also thematic to the Universe of the game.

BSG with it's uniquely asymmetrical fleets, and the scenario possibilities created by the narrative of the "rag-tag fleet", is actually in a better position to differentiate itself from Armada gameplay than most of the other alternatives discussed here.

Here's two ideas in development:

1) Missiles, missile interception, and electronics warfare:

https://boardgamegeek.com/article/19155016#19155016

2) Politics and infiltrators:

A dynamic I think would be interesting is one where the Cylon player buys "Infiltrator" upgrades that they then place into the Colonial player's fleet build. This appeals because it's thematic to the story, and also because it allows me to give the Cylon player upgrades that represent the major Cylon characters (fun in of itself), and also so gives them more fleet building and combat choice to make.

You can imagine that a Fleet status board could include linear measures where dropping to zero is a disaster for the Colonials like fuel, or tracks (much like the FFG BSG game). Infiltrators could act not only upon ships' combat status (like flipping or disabling defense tokens) but also upon the fleet tracks. You can also imagine the fleet having other measures, like a "Political" track which is "Militaristic" on one extreme and "Democratic" on the other. Different cards might have different effects depending on the status of that track. For example maybe it's easy to block Infiltrator effects of you're more Militaristic, but harder to maintain morale. Different types of infiltrators are more effective on different kinds of societies, while different political cards (Rosyln, Zarek, Martial Law under Cain) would let the Colonial player shape their fleet's political character. Ideally this would result in two parallel "fleet builds", and that is for the combat that's happening in space, and one that's for the society tracked by the fleet board. Since both would interact it would create a more interesting game with more varied strategies.

The Fleet board provides a game that you play in parallel to the combat game, but which represents both events that happened before and during the battle.

For example, say I have cards for Martial Law, and Investigative Committee. Then the Cylon player puts an Infiltrator in my fleet with an ability called "Bomb the Water Supply", which reduces Morale by 3 and Resources by 3, but only in round 3 and after it's been "charged up" with 2 Command tokens. Martial Law might increase the round which an Infiltrator can trigger on, giving me up to round 4 to decide what to do about it. Investigative Committee might say I can discard one Infiltrator if I also discard a Commander.

In a certain sense the sabotage and committee events all happened before the combat started, but we can play them out and resolve them at the same time as combat. This is primarily for gameplay/fun reasons, but you can rationalize that it's because only when you get to "mid battle" when tensions are high that the consequences of the previous events really have their most dramatic impact. In the above example if you discarded Adama to pay for Investigative committee, his replacement was "good enough" to fill his shoes for half the battle.

Personally if FFG still has the BSG license next year I'd be very surprised if they did not dust it off.

Why? For the very same reason that the original BSG was created back in the 80's - in the gulf between Star Wars movie releases everyone is going to be shoving sci-fi space opera stuff out there as fast as they can, trying to capitalize on the general interest.

Halo would be neat.

Spartan games have produced a space ship combat of Halo.

+1 Babylon 5. A lot of factions.

+1 Battlestar Galactica (They do have a lot of ships instead of what I have heard, and they have a lot of new invented ships old and new era)

+1 Star Trek. Without fighters.

+1 Buck Rogers. I know, just the draconian and the earth protectorate, models just for two waves of ships...

Battlestar Galactica has lots of of ship designs but very few combat ship designs shown on screen. The new setting has two medles of Basestar three models of Battlestar, a handful of different fighter models, a couple of light assault transports/bombers and maybe a couple of smaller warships seen in the scenes from the one miniseries set primarily during the first war, or maybe seen in drydock in Razor. Most of its capital size designs are non-combat vessels and thus little more then targets in Armada. The online game does add an array of smaller warships though.

The old setting only has one Basestar model, one Battlestar model, two fighter models, and an array of non-combat craft onscreen.

Buck Rogers could work but it would work better if instead of restricting themselves to ships from one Buck Rogers timeline they mix ships from all of them, or at least all of the ones that involve space combat.

Not sure how GW would feel about it though.... might drag even more customers away from their outdated rule sets.

Don't try to frighten us with your corporate ways, GW. Your sad devotion to that ancient ruleset has not helped up conjure up a enjoyable games system, nor given you clairvoyance enough to keep the space combat gamers as your customers.

(Yes yes, I'm about to be force choked for that )

But it has produced one of the best and most nuanced universes, far better than Star Wars - That's why I'd still vote for 40K over and above all the others.

No one said Mass Effect?

I never played - despite being a big SF fan, was it really good enough to port over? Is there enough awareness inside and outside the gaming community to make it actually viable to produce?

I've never been much of a fan of taking computer gaming franchises into other mediums - so far I've not seen much thats been any good?

Yea But I am not sure about with what i have heard of their previous space combat rulesets.

A lot of that is probably not really accurate. The 1st edition of Firestorm had some flaws, but tbh the latest one is very good.

I played Dystopian wars, had a full fleet and got a load of other involved..... sadly the rules set was abysmal, so complicated, badly play tested.

Spartan only have one rule set they iterate for all their games, it's telling all their ship designs are the same for each race as well, they pick one shape then make larger and smaller versions of them to cover battleships to frigates. I'll never give them money again!

Armada does everything right where they did everything so badly wrong with that release.

Twilight Universe was a good one mentioned before. Would also boost and give potential to even grow the boardgame variant, and FFG would be free to come up with whatever they like (no canon to "obey").

I can also envision a Starcraft Fleet game :-)

But does the universe have enough appeal to actually sell to a wider audience?

Star Wars, Star Trek & D&D - all have visibility beyond geekdom, which is what has propelled Attack Wing and X-Wing (now Armada) into such stratospheric heights.

Could Twilight Universe cover any of that?

For that matter could any of the suggestions barring BSG, WW2 (Historic or alternate) ?

I think a 40K re-skin offers the best option in terms of depth and breadth of fleets and size of tabletop gaming fan-base.

Upgrade cards would be race specific rather than interchangeable - but that's the same for other FFG 40K games - Forbidden Stars, Conquest.

BFG offers a starting point too.

Not sure how GW would feel about it though.... might drag even more customers away from their outdated rule sets.

GW and FFG are about as close as companies get, GW trust them with their core IPs, and FFG consistently come up with the goods.

If it hadn't been for the asmodee take over I genuinely thought they would have merged.

A space based resin of Armada using the 40K Universe would be a surefire hit.

Better, because of my love of Man'O'War would be a fantasy reskin - but considering they just blew Fantasy up and they released Dreadfleet, there's no appetite for that.

There's not much appetite inside GW to do space combat either - FFG could do it right now, with little effort, and sell me a hundred different spaceships for the next five years.....

But does the universe have enough appeal to actually sell to a wider audience?

Star Wars, Star Trek & D&D - all have visibility beyond geekdom,

Could Twilight Universe cover any of that?

Definitely. The twilight universe isn't as globally popular as SW and ST, but then nothing is. It is a lot better developed than the 40k universe was in its infancy, (and a much better setting, IMO). It has 16 developed races with good, interconnected histories, good art already in place, hundreds of named planets, a thousand year history. If FFG would produce stuff for it it could easily become as big, popular and developed as the 40k universe.

Babylon 5

Babylon 5, but it will only be a dream I bet.

The only acceptable answer here is Gothic.

Everyone else is a heretic who must be purged. It is good we have this thread to identify them and their blasphemy.

Battlestar Galactica has lots of of ship designs but very few combat ship designs shown on screen. The new setting has two medles of Basestar three models of Battlestar, a handful of different fighter models, a couple of light assault transports/bombers and maybe a couple of smaller warships seen in the scenes from the one miniseries set primarily during the first war, or maybe seen in drydock in Razor. Most of its capital size designs are non-combat vessels and thus little more then targets in Armada. The online game does add an array of smaller warships though.

The old setting only has one Basestar model, one Battlestar model, two fighter models, and an array of non-combat craft onscreen.

FWIW according to my count of purely onscreen ships I have:

4 models of Basestars (the same as the number of known Imperial capital ships in Armada), plus cargo ships, Resurrection ship and one class of known space station. If you count the SFX redesign in the middle of the series, and the damaged rebel Basestar as distinct models you get two more.

6 models of Colonial capital warships (one more than the number of known Rebel ships in Armada), plus military transports and the ships of the rag-tag fleet.

3 models of Cylon squadrons (granted 3 less than Imperials in Armada).

9 models of Colonial squadrons (3 more than Rebels in Armada), plus two classes of colonial shuttles.

Not to mention two classes of missiles (nukes and normal), which IMO should be represented as on board elements for interception.

That's before we even get to the BSG expanded universe of games and fannon.

We may not see BSG in Armada officially. It may suck if we see it. But it's silly to keep insisting that it can't happen because of a dearth of ships. It can and (in my garage at least) will!

Battlestar Galactica has lots of of ship designs but very few combat ship designs shown on screen. The new setting has two medles of Basestar three models of Battlestar, a handful of different fighter models, a couple of light assault transports/bombers and maybe a couple of smaller warships seen in the scenes from the one miniseries set primarily during the first war, or maybe seen in drydock in Razor. Most of its capital size designs are non-combat vessels and thus little more then targets in Armada. The online game does add an array of smaller warships though.

The old setting only has one Basestar model, one Battlestar model, two fighter models, and an array of non-combat craft onscreen.

FWIW according to my count of purely onscreen ships I have:

4 models of Basestars (the same as the number of known Imperial capital ships in Armada), plus cargo ships, Resurrection ship and one class of known space station. If you count the SFX redesign in the middle of the series, and the damaged rebel Basestar as distinct models you get two more.

6 models of Colonial capital warships (one more than the number of known Rebel ships in Armada), plus military transports and the ships of the rag-tag fleet.

3 models of Cylon squadrons (granted 3 less than Imperials in Armada).

9 models of Colonial squadrons (3 more than Rebels in Armada), plus two classes of colonial shuttles.

Not to mention two classes of missiles (nukes and normal), which IMO should be represented as on board elements for interception.

That's before we even get to the BSG expanded universe of games and fannon.

We may not see BSG in Armada officially. It may suck if we see it. But it's silly to keep insisting that it can't happen because of a dearth of ships. It can and (in my garage at least) will!

We never see any Cylon Warships other then the Base stars. While you could do a two or three wave colonial war fleet from the series and the miniseries you would need a wider variety of Cylon warships for an Armada game IMO. And I never said they couldn;t do BSG just that they would need to draw ships from sources other then the main series to do so,

No one said Mass Effect?

It would be perfect.

^this, so much. Destiny Ascension pls

B5 would be too good to be true. It also won't happen just because B5 is too old with nothing new around for the younger generations to get into it.

Star trek already uses their captial ships with the x-wing rules. It's also very unlikely.

I absolutely love Mass Effect (to the extent that i am halfway through converting an Infinity force for it, and have started hacking the Infinity rules for ME miniatures!), but i dont see Armada working overly well for it.

ME space combat is based almost entirely around massive, fixed forward spinal railguns. That immediately leads to some game design problems (try playing Firestorm Armada with 2 Dindrenzi fleets facing each other, you'll see how unbearably dull this is). They do have weak broadsides, but these mass accelerators lack the power to drop the barriers of an equivalent sized ship without a great deal of work.

Fighters are of extremely minimal use. Not NO use, but definitely less of an anti-ship threat than Star Wars ones. They also die incredibly fast if they get into GARDIAN (laser based point defence) range. Like....these are real-life style lasers. IE they point, and a fighter auto explodes as a light speed weapon superheats it. They work in wave attacks only, as the point defence degrades over time due to heat and damage. Effectively they are used purely to take down barriers with torpedoes, in almost suicidal attacks.

There's also only 1-2 ships seen per race, so a lot would have to be drawn wholesale from other sources or created from scratch.

Lastly, ship interaction is far more stratified than in Star Wars. By which i mean. Frigates cannot even hurt major capital ships until barriers are down...their main guns simply lack the power. Likewise Cruisers aren't going to hurt Dreadnoughts much, though they will make mincement of Frigates.

TBH, while the rules aren't know yet, i strongly suspect Spartan games Halo system would work better for Mass Effect. it's ALSO based around spinal railguns, with less effective fighters that die in droves, and so on.

I would love to see a ME fleet game, but i dont see Armada being the one to do it better than anything else. ME is a lot less of a "cinematic" space combat setting than Star Wars. Massive ranges (in light-seconds, rather than KM), less variance in ship designs (because most races agreed on the best way to build ships....a massive main gun and then backup weapons), and a very defined "ship hierarchy" leaves very rough game design decisions.

IMO it really deserves its own system to feel "right".

Star Trek.

Armada definitely gives me more of a star trek feeling with the whole defense tokens and shield areas.

Star Trek Attack Wing 2 could easily fold over into Armada/X-wing flight path format.

The only acceptable answer here is Gothic.

Everyone else is a heretic who must be purged. It is good we have this thread to identify them and their blasphemy.

Armada has the same problem I think Gothic has. That there is not much of a boarding mechanic. IMHO BFG should be half boarding, after all that is the whole idea of space marines jumping from their battle barges and orks loading up in a boarding torpedo smashing through the hull and fighting everyone by getting stuck in there. Heck the climatic end the Horus Heresey is the Emperor challenging Horus on the bridge of the battle barge.

Babylon 5 or Battle Fleet Gothic both certainly have potential for a cool Armada re-skin. Though I suspect that both would be subject to various license concerns. I'm not sure who holds the rights to B5 now but we all know who owns BFG - and I don't see 'em sharing (even if they have canned the game). Too bad as I think it was one of GW's better games.

My B-5 Wars models are still on display in my workshop (collecting dust sadly). However, I still keep BFG in rotation on the gaming schedule - was and still is a great fleet scale game. Reminds me I need to finish the Mechanicus cruisers on the workbench.

You know. There seems to be a lot of desire for a B5 reskin of armada. It will probably never happen officially because of assorted already stated reasons, but a few dedicated individuals could probably make a pretty good online fan project out of it.

Just something to think about.

Already negotiating with the 3d print community for B5.I can handle the cards.

Battlestar Galactica has lots of of ship designs but very few combat ship designs shown on screen. The new setting has two medles of Basestar three models of Battlestar, a handful of different fighter models, a couple of light assault transports/bombers and maybe a couple of smaller warships seen in the scenes from the one miniseries set primarily during the first war, or maybe seen in drydock in Razor. Most of its capital size designs are non-combat vessels and thus little more then targets in Armada. The online game does add an array of smaller warships though.

The old setting only has one Basestar model, one Battlestar model, two fighter models, and an array of non-combat craft onscreen.

FWIW according to my count of purely onscreen ships I have:

4 models of Basestars (the same as the number of known Imperial capital ships in Armada), plus cargo ships, Resurrection ship and one class of known space station. If you count the SFX redesign in the middle of the series, and the damaged rebel Basestar as distinct models you get two more.

6 models of Colonial capital warships (one more than the number of known Rebel ships in Armada), plus military transports and the ships of the rag-tag fleet.

3 models of Cylon squadrons (granted 3 less than Imperials in Armada).

9 models of Colonial squadrons (3 more than Rebels in Armada), plus two classes of colonial shuttles.

Not to mention two classes of missiles (nukes and normal), which IMO should be represented as on board elements for interception.

That's before we even get to the BSG expanded universe of games and fannon.

We may not see BSG in Armada officially. It may suck if we see it. But it's silly to keep insisting that it can't happen because of a dearth of ships. It can and (in my garage at least) will!

The best part is that with the realistic physics model of the ship's movement, BSG Armada would feel like a completely different game than SW Armada.

You know. There seems to be a lot of desire for a B5 reskin of armada. It will probably never happen officially because of assorted already stated reasons, but a few dedicated individuals could probably make a pretty good online fan project out of it.

Just something to think about.

There's Star Trek and D&D attack wings that are made by other companies, so maybe someone other than FFG will do something like that? I just wouldn't expect nearly the same quality between the two products (again you can look at the quality difference between the Star Trek/DnD and Star Wars).