Crossposting this in both the X-Wing and Armada boards to get differing opinions.

The Star Trek instead of Star Wars thread got me thinking about Star Trek Attack Wing and all the ways it doesn't accomplish it's goals (or, at least, what should have been its goals). There have also been several threads lately about the differences between Armada and X-Wing, and the relative merits of the 2 systems. All this got me musing about if and how the Flightpath system of X-Wing could have been adapted to capital ship combat better than it was by Wizkids and I wanted to throw a few ideas out for discussion.

When people are comparing X-Wing and Armada, one of the most common statements is that X-Wing is very reactive, each round you are re-evaluating a new board state; while Armada is much more strategic, it requires more advance planning. That comparison never sits real well with me because X-Wing really does require a lot of advance planning to do well, and a game that was all advance planning with no reacting to the opponent would pretty much suck. Nevertheless, I think I get the meaning that people are trying to convey with those statements. In X-Wing, your planning is immediate, you are planning your next move or two for each of your ships and dynamically altering your plan as you go. In Armada, you react to your opponent, but those reactions can take 3-4 rounds to come into effect (which is why I think the 6 round limit on game length in Armada is a bad idea, but that is a different discussion).

With all that in mind, it seems like one of the big things people think captures the feel of "big ships" is the delay in reaction time. that got me thinking, what if the X-Wing movement system took a page from it's World War predecessor games and used a maneuver dial stack for ships. Bigger ships would plot out a stack of 3-4 maneuver dials in advance and each round the top one would execute, and a new one would be placed on the bottom of the stack. That should give the impression of large ships being very ponderous and deliberate in their movements, while smaller ships would have only 1-2 dials set in advance and could be much more reactive.

In such a hypothetical game, I would envision the larger classes of ships (Battleships, Star Destroyers, Galaxy Class, Battlestars, Omega Destroyers, etc...) being on large ship bases, scaling down to small ship bases for Corvettes (CR-90, Defiant, White Star) with a medium sized base in between. Ships would have 4 (or more?) firing arcs with different weapon stats out each arc, so no real turrets which should help to keep maneuvering important.

What do you guys think? I think such a game would be a big improvement over both Attack Wing and SW Armada. Would it feel suitably like "big ships" rather than fighter dogfights? Would the maneuver templates need to change? How large of fleets could such a game reasonably support (one of the big disappointments in Armada for me was how small the fleets are)? How to handle shields?

Trying to take the best of both worlds is a good start. There's a difficult balance to strike in games with lots of components. Maneuver dials are cumbersome, having more than one would be annoying. Also, the requirement to plan so many maneuvers ahead of time doesn't really match up with the way battles happen in either Star Trek or Star Wars. It makes sense for a ship of any size to follow a plotted course, but there are tons of examples of capitol ships in both franchises suddenly changing direction to adapt to the dynamic space battle. They don't do it as suddenly as a snap-decision turn by a single-pilot fighter, but it is still pretty quick.

Even though I'm not crazy about the idea of multiple dials; I'll run with it for a bit. If you require ships to plan maneuvers multiple rounds in advance, maybe there is a way to still incorporate the sudden changes seen on screen. I would do this by allowing the ship to change one characteristic of it's planned maneuver upon activation. For example, if a ship's dial revealed a 2-bank, it could increase or decrease the speed of the bank, or change the bank to a straight, or a turn in the same direction. These changes would have a cost in the form of energy, stress or some other as-yet-undetermined consequence.

Not sure why you think a stack of maneuver dials would be any more cumbersome than a stack of command dials like Armada has.

As for matching the depictions in various lore, I'm not sure I agree with you. When Needa yells "take evasive action" the Star Destroyers still hit each other, unlike fighters where the ship is moving out of the way basically as fast as it takes for the pilot to think it. In Trek, when a captain says to take evasive action, the ship starts to move, but generally whatever they are trying to avoid either hits them or they manage to dodge it before the ship has moved more than a small distance. Plus, there is a difference between a dramatic depiction in film and the feel of a game during play. Quite often, successful games based on existing properties don't really try to exactly capture the actions that are depicted, but rather the flavor of the source material, and the flavor that people seem to expect of capital ships is cumbersome.

I was more interested in the idea from a generic perspective though, not really tied to any single universe, wondering if such a system would capture the flavor people expect of fleet engagements in a simple enough package that you could command fleets of a dozen or more ships.

Wings of Glory plans maneuvers two turns in advance (they use cards rather than dials, but same concept).

It does lend a very different flavor to the game.

Armada isn't as look-ahead as advertised, though. Yes, you plan commands ahead, but maneuvers are actually spur of the moment, on activation.

A confession: I've never played Armada, I didn't know you stack up dials in that game. It's probably as good a system as any for planning future moves, I just think a little inovation could produce something with fewer game components.

With regard to taking evasive actions:

The entire Rebel fleet at Endor makes a pretty hard unplanned turn to get away from the Death Star's Super Laser.

One of my favorite neocanon references on Star Destroyers is in "Before the Awakening" in Poe Dameron's back story. He's running from the First Order and the book says Star Destroyers can go fast in a straight line, or they can be maneuverable, but never both.

On the Star Trek side, there are plenty of examples of very big ships doing relatively nimble things on short notice. Sometimes they still have collisions, but the fact is they are capable of changing course quickly, even if the magnitude of the change isn't always suffficient to completely avoid a mishap.

I get what you're saying about the difference between capturing a thematic source exactly, as opposed to capturing the flavor.

28 minutes ago, jmswood said:

A confession: I've never played Armada, I didn't know you stack up dials in that game. It's probably as good a system as any for planning future moves, I just think a little inovation could produce something with fewer game components.

In Armada you have a stack of "Command Dials" each of which represents your ships focus during one round. Big ships like Star Destroyers have to plan out their commands 3 turns in advance. This is meant to represent the large chain of command and the delay that can happen in executing orders. As far as movement goes, the commands on your stack are the only way a ship has to change speed. A navigate command can change your speed +/- 1 (ships have a max speed of 2-4 depending on vessel) but for the larger ships you have to be able to predict that you are going to need to change speed a couple turns in advance. Personally, I like the feel of needing to plan that far in advance, it really makes ships of different sizes play differently, but the default game is only 6 rounds long, so a SD has to plan the first half of the game before the game even starts, and the last few rounds there is no point in planning anything because the game will end before the dial comes up. I guess what I'm looking for is a system that captures that same feeling, but is simpler and fast enough in execution that you don't have to limit the game to so few rounds.

The rebel fleet at endor makes a pretty hard, unplanned turn at endor to no run into the shield, but look at how long it actually takes for them to execute that turn. Akbar gives the order and all the fighters clear out of there, then there is a scene of all the capital ships and they all look to be in the same relative position as before, just rotated 90 degrees. As if, in order to make the turn, they have to rotate to point in a new direction and will then have to apply thrust to get themselves moving in that direction. I, at least, get the impression that the Imperial fleet was able to close with them and could have opened fire on the formation and done serious damage before the rebel fleet had truly scattered and began to come around to the new threat.

As for Star Trek, it's all relative. When Picard says " Mr. Crusher, come about to heading 327 mark 189, evasive pattern delta. Mr. Worf, lock phasers on their weapon systems and prepare to fire." Do you envision the enterprise has come around to the new heading by the time Picard finishes saying "Mr. Worf", or are they just getting to the new heading by the time those phasers are ready to fire? It's only a difference of 4-5 seconds, but those 4-5 seconds make a perceptible (by the audience) delay in the execution of commands. That 4-5 second delay on screen creates an expectation in game players that bigger ships are slower to react. That is expectation I am trying to get at with this exercise.

I am assuming that ships would potentially have abilities that allowed them to change their stack of dials. If FFG produced such a game, that would no doubt be via upgrade cards (legendary helmsman, or something).

1 hour ago, Hawkstrike said:

Wings of Glory plans maneuvers two turns in advance (they use cards rather than dials, but same concept).

The WW-1 version plans them out 3 turns at a time, but instead of a continuously rolling reveal, you plan 3 moves, spend 3 rounds executing them, then plan 3 more.

There should be a sense of inertia that is more apparent in larger ships. If we were to go the command dial route, it would be a neat thing to see if you could only move so many moves in either direction before you have to roll for some kind of structural damage. A large ship in a hard turn could stay in that hard turn, ease it to a bank, or go straight. But any attempts to move in the other direction would warrant a roll. Medium ships could go for a change of 3, and small ships could probably just do whatever (let's face it the Defiant is pretty dodgy). Speed could play a factor as well. Fast maneuvers could make you more evasive vs. unguided warheads (which photons seem to be off and on variants of), but you'd lose one degree of movement as now you're fighting a more powerful turn instead of a gentle one.

Reversing would be nice (wish it were in Armada) but the ship would move more sluggishly since it wasn't primarily designed to go backwards. Still useful to keep your torpedo launchers pointing toward the enemy.

I've never really agreed on Armada's use of a command dial in order to change speed. A Captain has his helmsman within earshot at all times and changing speed shouldn't really interfere with damage control or fighter tactics. Actually, Armada ought to have the equivalent of action points or time points. Instead of pulling off just one action per round, have each command cost a certain number of points out of a total that is replenished every turn. Different ships have different totals and different costs for each action.

A large ship might have difficulty locking down damage or recharging heavy shields compared to a small ship and changing speeds would likely be difficult as well. But that large ship may have better Command and Control abilities to boost fighter squadron effectiveness and certainly has an easier time firing a brutal broadside.

This could play into damage as well as cards could take away from your total pool or make actions cost more until repaired. Conversely, upgrade cards could do the exact opposite. In any case, there has to be a better way of doing things than what is tantamount to sending runners to different parts of the ship so that your squadrons can be boosted two turns after they've all been destroyed.

As I alluded to in the opening post, x-wing is quite obviously heavily inspired by wings of glory. The guy who designed WoG has also designed an age of sail game, Sails of Glory. It has a nifty mechanic for the turn radius issue your talking about. If I remember correctly, maneuvers have a value assigned to them based on the sharpness of the turn. Straight maneuvers are a "7", port turns are lower numbers, starboard higher. The harder the turn, the further away from 7 it is. A ship may only plot a maneuver whose value is within so many points of its previous maneuver. How many is based on the ship.

On 4/13/2017 at 9:07 PM, Forgottenlore said:

As I alluded to in the opening post, x-wing is quite obviously heavily inspired by wings of glory. The guy who designed WoG has also designed an age of sail game, Sails of Glory. It has a nifty mechanic for the turn radius issue your talking about. If I remember correctly, maneuvers have a value assigned to them based on the sharpness of the turn. Straight maneuvers are a "7", port turns are lower numbers, starboard higher. The harder the turn, the further away from 7 it is. A ship may only plot a maneuver whose value is within so many points of its previous maneuver. How many is based on the ship.

As I said before I would consider Armada a better Star Trek game than a Star Wars game. The defense tokens are just asking for a LCARs set up.

So some ideas,

• Start at ToS, Federation Constitution Class, Klingon K'Tinga and Romulan Bird of Prey, add in Enterprise/Discovery ships in the first wave along with some from the Movie (Miranda, B'rel, Romulan K'Tinga). Around Wave 6 bring in TNG ships. Excelsior, K-vort, Ambassador Constalation, Nebula, Galaxy, D-Drex. Towards Wave 10 break out the DS9 ships, Negvar, Defiant and Akira, Sovrign, Also the Romulan ship from Nemesis.
• Alerts as Mission. Blue is your overall mission and it is public. That is the mission like 5 year mission (complete 5 other missions), or Glory and Honor (Destroy 5 ships or win take your opponent's star base), Green are Cruise missions, more like Euro Worker placement than tactical but may require some space maneuvers. Yellow will be Critical missions. More of a Face off (anyone who watched the enterprise incident would know). Both sides are not necessarily fighting but have to maneuver and there is aggression triggers which carry heavy penalties losing points and what not. Red missions (RED ALERT) are Tactical missions, that is your standard tactical battle.
• Alert and Commands, Depending on the Alert of the mission the commands will do a different thing. (You don't want to be firing phasers at a very sensitive peace negotiations) . Also dual dials system like Rune Wars. One for movement (or yay values or speed adjustment) other for command actions.
• Dice with no blank sides, but that doesn't mean every roll is good. So 4 dice, Green, Blue, Yellow, and Red. Each dice could be use for either a weapon or to attempt a mission. You can also guess what each dice comes from (Green, Diplomacy and Plasma; Yellow; Command and Disruptor; Blue, Science and Phaser; Red, Tactical and Photon) as one might guess Red has a lot of hit and crit icons but on some Green Alert and Yellow Alert mission hits will trigger aggression and cause to fail and lose points. Blue will have most of the scan icons for research and accuracy but will not have any critical hits.
• Maneuver tool and speed dial. Speed dial is no longer speed 0,1-4 instead it is impulse values, 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, Full, Stop, and Reverse. Depending on the ship some might be able to reach speed 4 at Full Impulse, some might only reach speed 3 but would rather be at 1/2 impulse for more maneuverability.
• The Away Team game, Sure there are models but Waves come out maybe once per year, most of the other expansions will be cards like a LCG with Crew (full size) cards and equipment (mini sized) cards. Not only do they make the bridge crew to staff your ship they also go on away team for some missions. However another player could send a hostile away team to innate an Away team battle. It won't be like the models but there will be positioning. You got Close, Stand Off and Covered. Close is the most exposed but can make the most use of their combat dice, Stand Off is the standard. Covered is protected but not as able to participate in battles, however it could also end up exposed by equipment and tactics.
• As for equipment (aka upgrades) they could represent weapons or retrofits on a ship or equipment on crew members. Hence why there will be crew and equipment packs separate from Ship packs.
• As for damage system and movement in ships (decks/ stations etc) You might have a critical hit that is face up but it hits a certain deck that could hurt or kill crew, also force crew to leave their station to fix said damage removing their abilities from mission/battle.

Well those are a few, hope you like them.