Thursday, August 2, 2012

Adding "terrain" in Star Navy

The playtesting of 5150: Star Navy continues apace.  In the latest battle, Ed the THW Guy and I threw roughly equal (points-wise) forces at each other.  Yes, there's a points system, and it seems to work pretty well. 
I played Hishen, using my Galactic Knights Avarians.  Ed played Star Navy with his Galactic Knights Terrans, while his GaLakTik TakTik Dominion ships and my GK Terrans proxied the Planetary Defense Forces.  This time, however, instead of an empty table, we placed some scenery on the board to represent asteroids (even though some of them look like planets or moons, for the scale of this game, just consider them large, spherical space rocks).
Asteroids block line-of-sight, which means players can now employ more tactics than just line-'em-up-and-shoot.  We also put a range limit on starships' beam weapons, which means vessels must get a little closer for optimal fighting effectiveness.  In exchange, we increased the amount of hits on a partial success.
We also used a LOT of fighters in this game, and I'm happy to say the fighter rules no longer slow the game down the way they did in early playtests. 
So how'd the game go?  I blew up or drove off a lot of Ed's Class 3 ships--he had 10 or so, and pounded the hull of his Class 5 flagship but was unable to damage any other capital ships.  He took out three of my cruisers (Class 4) that were escorting the battlecruisers and carriers (Class 5), so in the end I decided to skiddadle instead of fighting to the last ship, ceding control of the system to the Star Navy.

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