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

A thread over on the X-wing boards 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 X-Wing 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 only 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 (one of the reasons why I think the 6 round limit on game length in Armada is a poor decision, 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 Wings of War and used a maneuver dial stack for ships. Bigger ships would plot out a stack of 3-4 maneuver dials instead of command dials. That should give the impression of large ships being very ponderous and deliberate in their movements, accomplishing the same thing Armada does, but with less complexity and less fiddling with maneuver tools.

In such a hypothetical game, I would envision the larger classes of ships (Battleships, Star Destroyers, Galaxy Class, Battlestars, Omega Destroyers, etc...) being on 80mm bases, scaling down to 40mm bases for Corvettes (CR-90, Defiant, White Star) with a 60mm medium sized base in between. Ships would have 4 (or more?) firing arcs with different weapon stats out each arc much like Armada does.

What do you guys think? 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 without big, bulky bases?

I like STAW and prefer it to X-Wing. But the movement system of both games seems a little artificial. Like a dogfight where you have a blindfold on for 10 out of every 15 seconds and react to each time you can see what the enemy has just done. They are nice fun games but to compound the movement quirks by delaying them by another turn or two wouldn't be my choice.

I prefer Armada to both other games and like the movement system much more.

Attack wing accomplished what it set out to do very well: take a rising star game mechanic, marry it to their crappy miniatures they are stockpiling because nobody buys them, then push it out as much of said crap as possible for people to buy and make a quick buck on the pretense of being a real, balanced game. Attack wing was never about producing a balanced game that actually has viability, it's about being a cash grab to rake in as many sales from their clix afterstock as possible.

X-Wing, for the longest time, paid merticulous attention to power and upgrade balance over the course of many waves. That pretense was dropped pretty quickly in Attack Wing, allowing enormous attack pools to be rolled against ridiculously low numbers, creating scenarios where something like a decloaking Klingon battlecruiser can one-shot the Enterprise-D . It's hardly thematic, or fun. Introducing the Borg didn't help anything.

As for the movement and initiative system, Flight Path is very much dogfighting. My image of capital ship duels invovle more deliberation per entity than the FP system gives. FP is good for programmed moves and the interplay of guessing where your opponent went, so you can attack him. In the universe of capital ships what's important is not where your pointed, but where your turrets are facing.

5 hours ago, Norsehound said:

Attack wing was never about producing a balanced game that actually has viability, it's about being a cash grab to rake in as many sales from their clix afterstock as possible.

Hence my qualifier

On 4/13/2017 at 4:00 AM, Forgottenlore said:

Star Trek Attack Wing and all the ways it doesn't accomplish it's goals (or, at least, what should have been its goals).

5 hours ago, Norsehound said:

My image of capital ship duels invovle more deliberation per entity than the FP system gives.

Which is why I was looking for ways to add a more deliberative element to the FP system By needing to plot moves multiple rounds in advance you have to really think about where you are going to want to be. You need to try and anticipate your opponent's over all strategy and not just their next move. At least, that's the idea.

The Attack Wing flight path could be like dogfighting because in Star Trek even kilometer long capital ships can turn on a dime at top speed. There is virtually no such thing that inertia there so obviously the ships can do reckless turns. And that's a good thing, I don't say it's not working well for Star Trek. Their space battles look great and they can actually make an MMO where you can fly capital ships like fighter planes and it still feels like Trek.

In Star Wars however inertia was present form the very beginning (remember Han's daring maneuver from ESB that made two ISDs collide?) so it toally makes sense that you have to plan forward with your flight paths. And it's one of Armada's merits that you have to do so.

There was plenty of inertia in Wrath of Khan, which IMO was the best space battle in all of Star Trek.

While space-racing car battles are true in the case of DS9, I always felt that was being used as justification for licensing the popular Flight path system. Then they proceeded to throw in their crappy minis, then create a collector's environment with power creep so that you need to buy the latest and greatest upgrades to stay competitive... even moreso than X-Wing (and certainly here, a merit to Rhymer, Yavaris, and Demolisher persisting far after hey were debuted in the game).

Since Armada came out after Attack Wing, I like to believe that FFG decided to upstage WizKids by making their idea of a capital ship battle game. Armada is superior in every way. Even the criticism of X-Wing being nothing but a six asteroid arena battle, something Attack Wing Players loved to harp on, was addressed with objectives and nobody does Armada objective-less play.

Attack Wing was all right, but I introduced Armada to a friend as "everything attack wing should have been". He was a big Trekkie, not generally a Star Wars fan, and an ideologue to top it all off, but he eventually conceded after playing Armada.

Although I do have to say one of my shining moments in gaming was pulling what became known as "the Howard Maneuver" (my last name is Howard) among my circle of friends during a game of Attack Wing. Anticipating that I would move my Excelsior in a hard left bank, this Trekkie friend moved his Klingon Battlecruiser ahead at full speed only to find that I actually pulled a simple reverse. He was directly in front of me and in my best Picard impression, I said "Quantum torpedoes, fire!" Bye-bye, Klingons.

I would not copy wings of war's maneuver system. Though I get the rationale behind it, it made reacting to enemy moves difficult when I had to plan three moves in advance. I just didn't enjoy it. Though the WWII version was better with only two moves in advance. X-wing might seem twitchy by comparison, but honestly Star Wars was never super big on physics to begin with.

All in all, each system has its strengths and weaknesses, and I think I would rather enjoy each game for what it is rather than try to compromise on several issues in search of the illusory perfect game. But, by the same token, Armada does a bang up job and is one of my favorites right now.