When you guys have ship combat, what do you use for ships? I know that GW used to have a game called Battlefleet Gothic, but since they don't make the game anymore and pieces are hard to find, I was wondering if there were any cheap alternatives.
I guess I could use the pieces from games such as Battleship Galaxies that my school's Sci Fi and Fantasy club has, but that's only if I'm there at the club.
I think the BFG models are still being sold - you just need to dig a bit on GW's website to find the Specialist Games section that they've been stuck into.
I've got a set of 'blip' tokens that are used until the players have scanned a ship, and a heap of BFG miniatures I've gotten from eBay. Firestorm Armada may be good to look into to get a whole lot of ships at once, it's a hell of a lot cheaper than buying from GW at least.
I used Microsoft Word to make some tokens with the name of the player's ship (or a number for NPC Ships) and an arrow to point the direction the ship is facing. Simple, but works great.
I'm pretty cheap/poor too when it comes to ship models. I happily utilize openoffice.org, with centimeters as the standard page wideth/length layout and paste the pictures to a scale. Each kilometer is a centimeter. Once that is done, copy the image and flip it vertically. Cut out the images u need a paste them on a cardboard sheet the same size (front and back, hence the mirror image) or just glue them togethor (which I find very flimsy). Hope this helps. If you need images just google them. You would be surprised what you find.
I've got a reasonably large BfG fleet that I can use to represent ships (although I haven't done what I keep meaning to, which is repaint the ships to look like holographic ghosts/projections from a ship's strategium holotank), but most of the time I either don't have the ships to accurately represent what's out there (my fleet has a heavy cruiser/carrier bias), or the players don't "know" the ship out there, so what I've done is a modification of what I used to do with close formations in BfG- the player's ship is a properly converted (and "holo" painted) model, and all the other ships are the flight stands, painted with a contact blip around the stem and a small transponder code. Tucked underneath the flight stands/impaled on the stems are slips of paper with what the players "know" about the ship, which gets added to the more they scan or are in reasonably close proximity to the ship.
I'm pretty new to this as well and this thread has probably just changed my game up a bit, but what I usually do for ship combat is just use spare dice as markers on the map, then any information of the ships are written down separately on note cards.
This guy created Paper Minatures, they require a little work to print up and put together but I like them.
http://corpsegod.blogspot.com/
It saved my group from using Minstrels as tokens, though it was nice being able to eat the casualties...
I bought BFG miniatures off ebay for this. If you keep your eye out you can get some really good bargains here and there.
I use some resin naval miniatures for some pre-WWI fantasy game setting. They have ships from historical nations as well as fantasy nations like dwarves, elves and orcs. They look pretty steam punkish, which works well, and you can get a set of 6-7 in one pack for about 10$. Can't think of the name of the producers/game, something thing like Cryptic Waters (but i could be way off).
They fit perfectly on the vinyl grid map, and they also have larger and heavier ships too for a bit more, but would work easily for the larger ships represented in RT.
Anyone that has considered creating a modular system of Paper Miniatures?
A simple program with images of hulls and classes of various ships, where you can then attach images of all available upgrades (if expected to have external representation), which you can then print and use as miniatures?
Just a thought. I lack the skillsets needed to do it myself.
I use the models from the twilight imperium board game, its another FFG product.
It a great game when you have 4-8 hours to play and willing friends and it has enough different ships models to represent all the forces I'm willing to deal with in a space combat.
Battlefleet Gothic miniatures. They are still easily available online.
Using anything less than the real stuff is heresy.