Probably would have gotten here sooner at wave 2. X-wing came out first though and Star Trek was clearly a follow up on the success. however I would wish that the models for Star trek at least had a sliding relative scale where Warbird was larger than galaxy which was larger than miranda but that is not the case.

I have not picked up Attack Wing, which is Star Trek X-wing nor have I picked up Armada. But if there was a Star Trek retheme of Armada I would pick that up immediately.

i dont own any startrek attack wing but ive seen several games of it being played. Its littered with mechanics that shut down your list for a turn.

For instance the Q cards i saw one game using had 5-6 cards you randomly picked each round and both players had to deal with it. It ranged from something as silly as limiting an obscure maneuver you dont want anyway, to denying you ALL captain/officer powers. That one in particular just stalled the game since neither player could really do anything without their captain/officer cards, and they got it 3 times in a row so that was ~20mins of basically zilch happening lol.

The scale and model design alone scared me off of that game. I saw them, went "Ooo theres a miniature startrek game?!" saw the Enterprise D with ...painted windows not on the window.... and immediately put it back on the rack and walked away. Didnt even notice the scale issue for awhile lol

I forgot about Q (maybe on purpose.) Q is the worst character in any body of fiction I can think of. Such horrible character design would be difficult/impossible to compensate for in-game design. I remember hating every Q card in the old Star Trek CCG by Decipher. Star Trek (and any game patterned after it) is better without it.

9 hours ago, Vineheart01 said:

i dont own any startrek attack wing but ive seen several games of it being played. Its littered with mechanics that shut down your list for a turn.

For instance the Q cards i saw one game using had 5-6 cards you randomly picked each round and both players had to deal with it. It ranged from something as silly as limiting an obscure maneuver you dont want anyway, to denying you ALL captain/officer powers. That one in particular just stalled the game since neither player could really do anything without their captain/officer cards, and they got it 3 times in a row so that was ~20mins of basically zilch happening lol.

The scale and model design alone scared me off of that game. I saw them, went "Ooo theres a miniature startrek game?!" saw the Enterprise D with ...painted windows not on the window.... and immediately put it back on the rack and walked away. Didnt even notice the scale issue for awhile lol

Yeah, Attack Wing gets a lot of flack for not being to scale, but then again Star Trek cinematography of their models hasn't fit scaling as well. Now some might say that would make Star Wars the better product but when you are comparing a 3 movie production cycle with that of a multiple series that span up to 7 seasons one does allow for more variance to simply get thrown into the mix than the other.

Still when you talk about scaling X-wing has also been sliding their scaling back since Wave 2. Now it is arguably better than Attack Wings scaling that is for sure but still you have to realize that most of their ships are not on the same scale as the other ships, and Wookiepedia doesn't have the most consistent scaling with other sources for this fiction.

On 4/3/2017 at 3:24 PM, jmswood said:

I forgot about Q (maybe on purpose.) Q is the worst character in any body of fiction I can think of. Such horrible character design would be difficult/impossible to compensate for in-game design. I remember hating every Q card in the old Star Trek CCG by Decipher. Star Trek (and any game patterned after it) is better without it.

Always liked the concept of Trelane better than the concept of Q. I could totally see some godlike being picking on the crew because he's a sadistic little brat doing the equivalent of tying firecrackers to a dog's tail until his parents catch him in the act and tell him to quit messing with the wildlife. Q on the other hand, is supposed to be all powerful and omnipotent and yet the major way for the ST characters to beat him is to beat him at his own game until he goes away.

I think Q or another Q said they aren't really omnipotent it's just them bragging and I think over time Q enjoys his games with teh Enterprise and doesn't really want to win. I personally always liekd Q though so I maybe biased.

Q started out as a really lame character, but over time they managed to actually develop the concept of the Q and he took on a whole different meaning in the series. To the extent that even his early episodes need to be re-evaluated.

The last few times we saw Q he was actually an interesting character, particularly Voyager. It was funny as hell when he tried to pick Janeway to be the mother of his kid rather than another Q and he totally wrote her off as a timid little damsel in distress....that completely scared the piss out of him when she bit back lol.

Q as an individual, i like. I hate the Q Continuum though. Q is basically just another demigod-type being that messes with the crew, which startrek has done countless times in TOS, and this time the difference is hes an established, reoccurring character rather than every time they want the crew to deal with such a being another random kid shows up on the ship that soon develops godlike powers after getting rejected by a woman more than twice his age................yeah you probably know what episode im referring to lol.

StarTrek: Ascendancy has Q as exploration effects. Only one i can think of off the top of my head is a forceful exploration again controlled by the person to your left(?) rather than you. Which i like since its mild in nature but can spiral down a really bad path quick (god i want the 2 race expansions so i can play that game again...)

On 3/27/2017 at 9:23 AM, Vineheart01 said:

Actually i remember doing the math because i had an urge to make the ships myself (space limitations prevented that) for ship sizes.

If the Enterprise-D was brought to scale with Armada models, it would be slightly larger than the Gladiator atm (620ish meters vs 500meters)
The D'Deridex class Romulan Warbird would be just shy of twice that, making it ISD size. Against popular opinion the Warbirds arent utterly dwarfing Galaxy class ships, theyre about 1050m in length. Romulans do have a few ships that are larger but theyre incredibly rare.

Borg shouldnt be playable, in ANY game, so the scale of their ships is meaningless.

The big issue of being an Armada format is none of the major 3 factions have a fighter craft. Closest we'd have is the smallest variants, which for the Feds would be the Saber-class starships, which are STILL 190m lol. Unless im missing something obscure they dont have anything smaller than that except maybe a science vessel.

actually..

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Scorpion_class
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Maquis_fighter
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Bajoran_raider
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Bajoran_interceptor
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Hideki_class
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Class_2_shuttle
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Federation_mission_scoutship
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Danube_class
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Federation_attack_fighter

plenty of Fighters in trek. they just tend not to get a lot of screentime because of the focus on bigger ships, and downplay of straight combat in the shows/movies. and most of them get classed as 'shuttles' because they do double duty as auxiliary transport ships.

but every so often you get them taking the forefront.

using an Armada style ruleset, you certainly would see less emphasis on fighters in a Trek game, but they would certainly be present. and most ships could easily deploy at least one stand of "shuttles" for their own defense, if needed. Bigger ships could easily deploy several, and with warp drive being ubiquitous, some of the more potent ones (hideki class, Fed attack fighter and scoutship, etc) could easily show up with no mothership platform.

they tend to be employed more like "PT-boats" instead of fighters (which their sizes and warship level armaments suggest anyway), which makes it harder to perceive of them as equivalent to SW's fighters.

Getting back to the original topic a bit,

If, hypothetically, FFG had gotten the Trek license instead of the Wars license and made a game from it, it most likely wouldn't have been particularly similar to either X-Wing OR Armada. The X-wing rules are designed for fighter dogfights. Yeah, Wizkids hacked them to make a capital ship game, but they did a half-assed job and it doesn't work particularly well and I don' think FFG's designers would have made those mistakes. Armada, on the other hand, would work well for Star Trek, but it was designed after they learned a bunch of lessons from X-Wing, so they couldn't have made it right out of the gate.

So, in the hypothetical world in which FFG had Trek instead of Wars, what we would have gotten would probably have been a game completely different to either SW game. however, FFG seems to know what they are doing as far as game design (have they made a legitimately "bad" game yet?), so if things had played out that way and FFG had made a good Star Trek starship combat game that was somewhere between X-Wing an Armada in terms of complexity and detail, Yes, I would have still bought it eventually.

Thinking about this though makes me hypothesize about ways that Attack Wing could have been done better. Maybe I'll start a new thread to discuss that.

Since everything about Star Trek is about energy usage, I'd think that you'd have the energy balancing of Epic but with models the size of Armada. If FFG took hints from the X-Wing series for the game with the same name, I'd think they'd take a page from Star Trek Bridge Commander or the Starfleet Command series for the hypothetical game.

Weaponry could be separated into different arcs, but firing them would cause the capacitors to drain and damage output to lessen if fired again too soon. At the same time, different areas of the shields would be taking damage from enemy fire. You could possible circle around in order to make use of all your weapon arcs while the spent ones recharged and also keeping your weakest shield facings away from enemy fire. Alternatively you could allocate some of your slowly dwindling energy supply to boost the recharge of both.

Of course, at that point you'd just be remaking SFB with an official Star Trek license. Not sure FFG would want to be labeled as copycats.

There is a lot of room to create an energy allocation mechanic that would accomplish similar things as SFB but wouldn't be anywhere close to copying it, so I don't think that would have been a problem. I love SFB, but FFG makes games that are VEEERRRY different from a design perspective.

On 3/27/2017 at 8:33 AM, Vineheart01 said:

Had FFG done Star Trek Attack Wing, btw thats a thing, it would have been better.

There already is an xwing style startrek game and it sucks. Scale is ludicrously off, models are hideous, and the rules are wonky.

Though i admit i think it would be better in an Armada style format. Not the same exact thing though since Startrek doesnt have anything that would correlate to squadrons but same general idea: perhaps add in the ability to attack specific systems since in Startrek often you have to cripple the ship horribly before you can even attempt to destroy it

I don't think the rules are wonky, they are exactly the same as x-wings the last I checked, I was only picking up ships I liked, like Kirks ships, Bird of Prey that can fire while cloaked, and... well I guess thats it. I have the beginner ships at least.

Scale is a bit off I suppose. I will say this though, anyone that complains about the ships, X-Wing vs Attack Wing, not being in scale, the fighters are shown doing enough damage individually that they would wreck trek cap ships since they also wreck wars cap ships.

SIZE MATTERS NOT!

On 3/27/2017 at 9:23 AM, Vineheart01 said:

Actually i remember doing the math because i had an urge to make the ships myself (space limitations prevented that) for ship sizes.

If the Enterprise-D was brought to scale with Armada models, it would be slightly larger than the Gladiator atm (620ish meters vs 500meters)
The D'Deridex class Romulan Warbird would be just shy of twice that, making it ISD size. Against popular opinion the Warbirds arent utterly dwarfing Galaxy class ships, theyre about 1050m in length. Romulans do have a few ships that are larger but theyre incredibly rare.

Borg shouldnt be playable, in ANY game, so the scale of their ships is meaningless.

The big issue of being an Armada format is none of the major 3 factions have a fighter craft. Closest we'd have is the smallest variants, which for the Feds would be the Saber-class starships, which are STILL 190m lol. Unless im missing something obscure they dont have anything smaller than that except maybe a science vessel.

Well Borg could work if they were a neutral faction like some enemy fleets that can show up in the table top Battle fleet Gothic, both players get to use the borg, though it would imply that borg ships can manuver and attack much faster than the enemies around them... though that might not be non-canoical.

On 3/27/2017 at 11:55 AM, Iceeagle85 said:

Well the Federation probably upgrades their ships look at how many Constitution Class ships (that was Kirk's Enterprise right?) you can spot in TNG's episodes and if I'm not mistaken there were at least two Defiant Class ships (yes the name of the first seems also to be the name of the ship class)if not more.

@Braxton

Starfleet Command was an awesome game.

That was an awesome game.

On 3/27/2017 at 4:58 PM, flyboymb said:

Only Constitution Class you see in TNG is the wreckage of one at the Battle of Wolf 359. Pretty much it was a blunt message of 'Kirk's ship wouldn't be able to handle this but watch the Enterprise D' which was then repeated in DS9 for the Galaxy when the Odyssey was KO'd by a Jem'Hadar fighter. In any case, there's the odd Oberth science vessel, quite a few Mirandas which serve primarily as cannon fodder (seriously they might as well have been made into suicide drones instead of wasting the lives of the crew) and Excelsiors which took maybe 1-2 hits and then became cannon fodder. Other than that, not much in the way of TOS ships.

You can see a model of what the Constitution / Enterprise class looks like in TNG in the episode with Geordie and the orignal creator of the Galaxy class, he talks to her in the holodeck, though i don't remember the plot.

On 4/2/2017 at 2:50 PM, RevJJ said:

And Gorn anchors. Nothing like tractor beaming an enemy ship and pasting it with Plasma torps.

Gorn are best.

On 4/13/2017 at 1:20 AM, Forgottenlore said:

Getting back to the original topic a bit,

If, hypothetically, FFG had gotten the Trek license instead of the Wars license and made a game from it, it most likely wouldn't have been particularly similar to either X-Wing OR Armada. The X-wing rules are designed for fighter dogfights. Yeah, Wizkids hacked them to make a capital ship game, but they did a half-assed job and it doesn't work particularly well and I don' think FFG's designers would have made those mistakes. Armada, on the other hand, would work well for Star Trek, but it was designed after they learned a bunch of lessons from X-Wing, so they couldn't have made it right out of the gate.

So, in the hypothetical world in which FFG had Trek instead of Wars, what we would have gotten would probably have been a game completely different to either SW game. however, FFG seems to know what they are doing as far as game design (have they made a legitimately "bad" game yet?), so if things had played out that way and FFG had made a good Star Trek starship combat game that was somewhere between X-Wing an Armada in terms of complexity and detail, Yes, I would have still bought it eventually.

Thinking about this though makes me hypothesize about ways that Attack Wing could have been done better. Maybe I'll start a new thread to discuss that.

They probably chose that style of game play because most other fleet or fighter mini games I have seen take forever to play.

On 3/27/2017 at 11:05 AM, Vineheart01 said:

Enterprise-A would melt the first time a D'deridex looked at it, let alone actually fired lol.

I disagree, the Enterprise-A was shown to be able to take a real pounding, though purposely trying to have a slug match with the Galaxy wouldn't be wise, I think with the Enterpise As capabilities, it can kill the D, especially with the original crew aboard both ships, picard is not that great of a captain when it comes to combat in my opinion at least in comparison to Kirk.

6 hours ago, Black Knight Leader said:

I disagree, the Enterprise-A was shown to be able to take a real pounding, though purposely trying to have a slug match with the Galaxy wouldn't be wise, I think with the Enterpise As capabilities, it can kill the D, especially with the original crew aboard both ships, picard is not that great of a captain when it comes to combat in my opinion at least in comparison to Kirk.

I'm a keen believer that Kirk>Picard and that TOS and TMP era kicked the bulkheads out of the other series, but I have to disagree that the Constitution could take on a Galaxy and hope to win. There's a 90 year difference between the Constitution Refit and the first of the Galaxies. That's a ton of time even for modern tech progression to render something exceedingly obsolete.

To put things in perspective, if you were to take battleship designs from a similar period, you'd have the pre-Dreadnought battleships coming out at the time of the Constitution class, the Dreadnought herself outgunning and outsailing everything else in the water around the same amount of time that the Excelsior came out, the behemoths such as the Yamatos, Bismarks, and the Montanas (at least on paper) around the time frame of the Ambassadors, and nuclear powered Kirovs with cruise missiles that can fly at Mach 2.5 for 500 km with potential 500 kiloton nuclear warheads at the time that the Galaxies would finally come out (yes Kirov is a battlecruiser but it is the biggest shooting fish in the sea right now).

The Kirov moves much faster than the pre-Dreadnought, has endurance limited only by the crew compared to coal boilers, can level a small city with one shot, and can out-range the pre-Dreadnought by 100X. Anything approaching a realistic engagement handily gives the Kirov the win. Similarly, a Galaxy-class, faster at warp, with stronger shields and weapons, and more powerful reactor, would likely destroy the Constitution even if the difference in command ability surpassed the one between Kirk and Picard.

On 4/17/2017 at 0:51 AM, flyboymb said:

I'm a keen believer that Kirk>Picard and that TOS and TMP era kicked the bulkheads out of the other series, but I have to disagree that the Constitution could take on a Galaxy and hope to win. There's a 90 year difference between the Constitution Refit and the first of the Galaxies. That's a ton of time even for modern tech progression to render something exceedingly obsolete.

To put things in perspective, if you were to take battleship designs from a similar period, you'd have the pre-Dreadnought battleships coming out at the time of the Constitution class, the Dreadnought herself outgunning and outsailing everything else in the water around the same amount of time that the Excelsior came out, the behemoths such as the Yamatos, Bismarks, and the Montanas (at least on paper) around the time frame of the Ambassadors, and nuclear powered Kirovs with cruise missiles that can fly at Mach 2.5 for 500 km with potential 500 kiloton nuclear warheads at the time that the Galaxies would finally come out (yes Kirov is a battlecruiser but it is the biggest shooting fish in the sea right now).

The Kirov moves much faster than the pre-Dreadnought, has endurance limited only by the crew compared to coal boilers, can level a small city with one shot, and can out-range the pre-Dreadnought by 100X. Anything approaching a realistic engagement handily gives the Kirov the win. Similarly, a Galaxy-class, faster at warp, with stronger shields and weapons, and more powerful reactor, would likely destroy the Constitution even if the difference in command ability surpassed the one between Kirk and Picard.

The thing is though, Klingons didn't upgrade there tech as much as the Feds, and even then that is debatable how often as a whole there tech levels for there ships went up, or became state of the art. We saw the Enterprise - A take a wallop from a special Cruiser type Bird of Prey, from what Waff implied they don't modernize ships as offten, and the Bird of Prey Scout type in Star Trek 7 kinda killed it, granted it didn't have to bound the shields to attack the hull. Changs Bird of Prey didn't fire anywhere near as often and it did punch through the As shields, and caused hull breaches in one too two torpedoes on Sulus ship with it's shields up.

Mainly I was thinking of the tech advantages that the A has that no longer exists in the Federation, like transwarp drive, more phaserbanks that are positioned around the hull, rear firing torpedo banks. It jump in in and out with transwarp, using the momentum of the jump with torpedos flying should do some serious damage.

2 hours ago, Black Knight Leader said:

Mainly I was thinking of the tech advantages that the A has that no longer exists in the Federation, like transwarp drive, more phaserbanks that are positioned around the hull, rear firing torpedo banks. It jump in in and out with transwarp, using the momentum of the jump with torpedos flying should do some serious damage.

I vaguely recall the Enterprise-D having a rear-firing torpedo bank - I think it used it in chase scenes (Borg as the chaser?)

13 hours ago, Ironlord said:

I vaguely recall the Enterprise-D having a rear-firing torpedo bank - I think it used it in chase scenes (Borg as the chaser?)

It does, I guess I should have been clearer, I was comparing the A to both the D and Constitution Class ships, Constitutions have only the torps in the front and the phasors in the sauser, maybe in the neck. The Enterprise class or Enterprise A has a lot more weapons all over the hull.