Hello everyone. I just picked up the game over the weekend, thankfully before this game is gone for good. I read through the how to play booklet and the rules reference, and didn't see anything in neither booklet that could explain how exactly ships work in combat. So here are the questions I have:

1. Ship to ship combat, meaning there are no ground units at all involved, combat works exactly the same? Or do ships count on doing "Orbital Strikes" on each other?

2. If I give an Advance order and I send ground units to a contested world and I also have a ship in the adjacent void space, does the ship add its attack dice value to the dice pool for the ground attacks? If yes, does this also mean my enemy can assign damage from his his ground units to my ship?

3. If during combat me and my opponent both have a mix of ships and ground units in combat, do all units on both sides count as a single army or do the ships and ground units fight each other in separate combats?

Thanks in advance for clearing things up!

Hi fellow Zogwort, fellow Ork! I'm here to help!

1. Yes exactly the same combat as in ground. Definitely not orbital strike, OS only happens when there is no contested ground and battle occured in an advance order movement, and OS is only 1 single attack without any cards.

2. Ships would not get involved in any land fight and vice versa, so no assigning damage to ships from land.

3. Ship battles and ground battles are seperate! You cannot use your Ork boyz to shoot at the opponents ship (even though its tempting to do so, but not in this game!). In a single advance order, you can only resolve a single contested battle.

That means if you want to occupy a planet/world, BUT the opponent has a single ship on the void blocking the route to the planet/world, you HAVE to initiate 2 advances : 1st to send your ship over and fight his ship on the void (and you have to win of course) and 2nd advance to move your ground guys to the said planet.

Hope that helps! OrderofGamers.com has a nicely written summary of all the rules in FS, you can get it from here and print it out to refer to the subtle rule wordings easier : http://www.orderofgamers.com/downloads/ForbiddenStars_v1.1.pdf

#1: They fight just like ground units. Note how combat cards even have the ship names on them (for the bottom-half special effect requirements in particular).

#2: No, ships fight ships OR Orbital Strike a world where you have no ground units, they don't contribute dice or HP to a ground battle.

#3: A single Advance Order can only create one contested area, so you can either initiate a space battle or a ground battle, can't move units in a manner that would create both with a single Advance Order. If enemy is guarding the void space to a world you want, you have to use minimum of two Advance orders to attack the world, one to initiate a space battle that you need to win against his ships, then a second Advance to more your units to the world itself to fight for it.