My brother and I have been quite honestly gotten a bit tired of the same old 100 point games. While we experiment with random builds and stupid ones, it still can get a bit dry.

We've created a new game type of a campaign which we have both enjoyed immensely, and i wanted to share it with all of you so you could try it out for yourselves

The basic premise is this - There are between 13-18 planets on a map. We each have a capital planet, and start with 3 others, then the rest are neutral planets separating our space. Each planet is assigned a point value around 15, while the capital counts for 75.

We start with about 300 points at the beginning of the game and seperate those into different "fleets". We do not allow Any named pilots, you must start with the lowest Pilot Skill for each particular ship. The way you rank up your ships is by killing enemy ships, and for each kill you get, you can increase your point cost by 2, so a Rookie Pilot kills a tie fighter, he becomes a Red squadron pilot. If he gets 3 more kills without dying, he can become Wedge. A fun thing about this is that when an Academy Pilot gets a kill, he becomes Black Squadron, not Obsidian, because it's based on cost points, not pilot skill. (We also tried 1 point per kill, but no one could survive long enough to keep ranking up)

There are 3 movement phases (for the fleets) each year. At the end of each year you get your reinforcements, which is the sum total of the point values of your planets, by which you can add upgrades, ordinance, etc. to your ships, and create new fleets.

A few of the kinks we've worked out are - let's say a Rebel fleet is going from Bothawui to Commenor, and an Imp fleet from Commenor to Bothawui...We've chosen to have the fleets stop in the middle and fight, or else you can't move a fleet from a planet you try to protect.

Retreat rules: A fleet may retreat from the fight After round 3 IF it's point value is lower than the enemy's fleet. The fleet with the most points cannot retreat. Any time a ship retreats, if it has kills, you roll a die, and if you get a Crit, he's considered a Coward and loses his kills. You may also retreat if the attacking fleet is 50% more that yours, but that is an automatic retreat, the battle never takes place. You may retreat before round 1, but you roll a die for every ship that goes off, and on a "hit", he's considered a coward, and on a Crit, the ship is destroyed.

A ship can upgrade to a higher PS non-unique at any time, but can only upgrade to a unique at the end of the year (to give the opposition a chance to hunt him down). Also, we consider any unique you get to never "die" per se (he ejects safely), and they may return at the beginning of the next year.

Fleets Cannot change their composition (the ships in it), to make it more realistic. Also, you cannot add new ships to a fleet unless they are within 1 jump of your Capital (So you can't fly a fleet deep into enemy territory and reinforce it with 150 points out of no where.

Each of your starting planets also gets a small bonus, one can call an allied fleet from a system 1 jump away to help in the fight, another gets a defense force of 50 points, and the other has a minefield which damages any fleet that comes into the system. The Capital has a Defense force of 75 points, and you can take up to 2 uniques while defending.

We have enjoyed this type Extremely. We rarely play a normal game anymore, and get to play about twice a week, which allows for around 2 "years" of gametime and alot of both small battles and big battles that force you to do the best with whatever you got.

I will try to get pictures up soon of the map, scoreboard and such.

Sounds interesting, keep letting us know how it goes.

I love these sort of things, one off games are fun and everything but the pinnacle of minnature gaming for me at least is linked campaigns. For one thing you end up having to use things you might not ever consider and be playing for a result other than win at all cost. What is victory if you have nothing left to fight the next round with?

Inr issue that often comes up in these systems is one gigantic force rampaging ariund the map, gave you been able to deal with this?

Looks like a solid set of rules.

This sounds fantastic. I'll be following this thread and looking forward to more details on the map and rules.

Very cool. I'm preparing something along similar lines, but less literal – we won't use a map, but we will use persistent squadrons to set up a series of scenarios. I will post these rules once I've got them all written down. I think there's some ideas from your I can use, and hopefully some ideas from mine for you too!

Awesome! Can't wait to hear more about it.

For one thing you end up having to use things you might not ever consider and be playing for a result other than win at all cost. What is victory if you have nothing left to fight the next round with?

Inr issue that often comes up in these systems is one gigantic force rampaging ariund the map, gave you been able to deal with this?

Looks like a solid set of rules.

Exactly!

You know, that hasn't been a problem at all...The thing with that is - If you put a ton of forces into 1 fleet, then you can only take 1 planet at a time while your opponent can take 2 or 3 (depending on the size of your map). Also, with our Auto-retreat rules (50% over the defenders fleet) a gigantic force will rarely engage anything until the capital, where they will likely face a force just as big. The big problem is that if the majority of your forces are in 1 fleet you can't defend your own planets.

Thanks everyone And i'd love to see what you do with it Kestrel...i'll be getting pics up soon

Have you toyed with the notion of using deceptive ships as well......some ships have the capability to appear on the radar as another ship and until you are in firing range it is too late.....same thing would go for cloaked ships too....this would definitely lengthen the game but would add a twist to the strategy ......Never give up,Never surrender

This sounds truly awesome and because we are having trouble getting all the ships we want at my FLGS this would stretch those lull points waiting for the next shipment more bearable. I would love to get a more cleaned up version of your rules with examples seeing as I have very little time for gaming on a regular basis, and would love to play this with my buddies at the store plus probably pull some new meat into the game.

I'll give you the basics of my system, just to get them written down somewhere. So, here

The Kestrel Campaign: First Draft

Both players agree on a "hangar size" – basically a total pool of ships they'll have for the campaign. Say, 300 points each. They then separately buy 300 points worth of SHIPS (at the lowest per-ship cost) and upgrades. No pilots. These ships will (mostly) be what you have to last the campaign, so you'd need to balance a good number of hulls with upgrades.

Both players now also buy a much smaller allocation (maybe 20-30 points) of what I'll call "leaders," for now. Named pilots or upgrade pilots at their cost above base value. Wedge, for instance, would cost 8 points. Normal rules for "uniques" still apply. Unique droids also fall in this category.

Battles can now begin. Flip for Strategic Initiative, whoever has it sets the terms of the first battle. For now I'm just going to say these are normal tournament-style dogfights, but I want to eventually figure out a list of scenarios that can also be played. I'm alsogoing to define some basic types of engagements, but for now we can just do it by point value. So I say "100 point battle." Now the defender gets to modify that by up to 25%. So they say, no, 125 point battle.

And now we make our lists. And fight. Everything normal EXCEPT:

1) ships and upgrades you lose are lost forever!
2) pilots and droids you lose are possibly lost forever! (A small amount of bookkeeping is required here, see Recovery, below.)

3) to avoid that terrible fate, you have three options:
--3a: don't get shot down! Awesome!
--3b: Flee the battlefield. A ship fleeing anywhere BUT the opponent's edge escapes freely. A ship fleeing the opponent's edge is destroyed on a hit result on one die.
--3c: Every ship gains Action: Eject
4) regardless of the above, any ship that flees is considered lost for the purposes of determining the winner of the battle.
5) determine the winner of the battle. For now, we'll say Last Man Standing, but later I will also define this as part of the basic engagement types.
6) apply The Stakes (which also don't exist yet but will be added to the engagement lists)

The player that wins takes Strategic Initiative for the next round. They also stand a better chance of recovering their ejected pilots. Possible Reward Points for the winner and loser are also allocated, but I haven't figured out what I want to do with that.

Recovering Lost Pilots:
Every time a ship is destroyed, keep a record of how many hits it took in the final attack that destroyed it. After the battle is over, roll this many attack dice again. ANY critical hit result kills the pilot/droid instantly; they are gone forever. Normal hits are "wounds," and are how many future battles the pilot must sit out before they may be used again.

For every Ejected Pilot, roll two attack dice. The rules are the same as above, except (A) ignore crits, (B) if you were the winner, you get to roll one green die to modify the results.

Replacing Lost Ships/Pilots/Resources:
Before the next battle is declared, both players can now replace any lost ships/upgrades/non-unique assets. However, you pay a slight tax for this flexibility: 10% higher than the original cost, all fractions rounded up. So a simple Academy TIE Fighter would cost 14 points rather than 12.

(I haven't entirely figured out how to do this for upgrades yet. Maybe just in bulk.)

The "campaign" continues until one side is "all in": all of their final points are on the table. Probably here is where it would be fun to introduce Capital Ships rules for each side, for a big climactic battle.


Anyway, this is a rough draft, but pretty much everything I have in mind. It'd be fun to also add in a per-pilot experience system to allow "leveling up," like in Pete Parker's campaign rules, but that might be too much all at once.

Comments welcome, of course. And let me know if you want me to move this all to its own thread, Syleh!

ahhhhh....the independent air force and good old Douhet! You boast the dilemma of how to use your limited air power against an equal strength aggressor...love it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Douhet

Fantastic! Great work, cant wait for the updates mate. This sounds like the perfect excuse to build and create even more of the 'big' ships!

Hey sly, give us a map example.

I can't figure out how to post an image. I've posted others and they worked, and tried to post directly from my desktop and that didn't work, and tried to post from photobucket and it says "You are not allowed to use that image extension on this community, so here's a link to my photos.

http://s1301.photobucket.com/user/Syleh27/library/?sort=3&page=1

The white one was our first map - but it proved a bit too easy to destroy the enemy in a couple lucky battles, so we created the second map below

The brown map is the one we're currently using. It has a few additions, more planets, a large point value planet, and a sector (Outer Rim) that gives you bonus points if you control all 3 planets. We've also been experimenting with Uprisings in Corellia (Roll a die at the beginning of the year, on a {changing} _____ Result a fleet of 75 points shows up from the planet) and Pirate fleets that jump into the Outer Rim on a Crit.

And the other is our scoreboard - it keeps track of our Uniques, our fleet points, unit's kills, and amount of points lost per year. This pic is after a particularly brutal year of fighting.

To TheKestrel - That looks like a ton of fun! It's like a tournament of starships. Feel free to continue to post here, but I think others would like to see your idea too, and it may get more exposure in it's own thread.

Have you toyed with the notion of using deceptive ships as well......some ships have the capability to appear on the radar as another ship and until you are in firing range it is too late.....same thing would go for cloaked ships too....this would definitely lengthen the game but would add a twist to the strategy ......Never give up,Never surrender

We haven't thought of this, but it's a pretty intriguing idea, i think we'll try it, thanks.

This sounds truly awesome and because we are having trouble getting all the ships we want at my FLGS this would stretch those lull points waiting for the next shipment more bearable. I would love to get a more cleaned up version of your rules with examples seeing as I have very little time for gaming on a regular basis, and would love to play this with my buddies at the store plus probably pull some new meat into the game.

I'll try to write it out in a bullet-type format with examples for everything by tomorrow. (Wednesday)

Looks awesome. You kinda need a regular following to get it to work. Something I have yet gained the luxury of.