Subtopic	Posts		Updated
	Fighter dogfight game	57		10/18 03:09pm

Having seen a local group play X-wing I admit I am tempted. That game plays fast 75min< and is perfect for players who is busy with work and family. It is very popular and it helps it is Star Wars too&#128512;.

It's similar to Zocchis old game, so I was thinking it possible to do a fast variant for duels.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, October 20, 2016 - 07:55 pm: Edit

I know nothing about the X-wing system and have no idea how it works or if it could handle SFU. (Just the title and subject make me think it won't work for Trek.) Anybody else got a viewpoint?

By Nick Blank (Nickgb) on Thursday, October 20, 2016 - 08:20 pm: Edit

There is Star Wars: X-Wing for dog fights, and a separate game Star Wars: Armada for capital ship battles. Different scales and such.

By Will McCammon (Djdood) on Thursday, October 20, 2016 - 08:38 pm: Edit

[cross-posted with Nick]

Fantasy Flight already took that system and did capital ships with it; Star Wars Armada.

I haven't played Armada (I need another capital ship space game addiction like I need a hole in my head), but I've played many a game of X-Wing.

Armada doesn't seem to be the runaway hit that X-Wing was/still is, but I've seen people playing it.

Both are miniatures-only, 2 and 1/2 D, and use a template controlled movement system (hexless), with an initiative sequenced gameplay mechanic. Most games are choose-your-squadron points-value fights. The game added variety to the limited craft selections via modification cards (pilots, droids, special weapons, etc).

For fighters, it works beautifully. It ought to, as it was cribbed from a fighter airplane game. Fantastic quick-play game right out of the box, that developed a lot of meta-game strategy as expansions added more cards and units.

I'd assume the mechanic can scale for big ships, with appropriate adjustment to the turn gauges.

The production values for both are exceptional. Very nice cards, templates, etc., and the pre-painted miniatures are just about the finest I've ever seen.

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Thursday, October 20, 2016 - 09:02 pm: Edit

It should work, it would be to ACTA as ACTA is to Fed Commander.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Thursday, October 20, 2016 - 11:53 pm: Edit

There is a Trek game that uses similar rules by a different company (under license, I do believe) called STAR TREK: ATTACK WING. I have not played it, or even seen it played, but I hear it's pretty popular. X-Wing has a bigger following, at least locally here. I thought about trying ST:AW but I just can't bring myself to buy it due to the minis. X-Wing has fantastic minis, but ST:AW minis are low grade in my opinion, and laughably out-of-scale to each other.


Garth L. Getgen

By Scott Iles (Gullwind) on Friday, October 21, 2016 - 12:10 am: Edit

I've played both X-Wing and Star Trek Attack Wing. They use the same system but they have a different feel, and I've spent a lot of time trying to put my finger on why.

In X-Wing, you choose a maneuver for the turn and then perform that maneuver in ascending order of pilot skill. After you execute your maneuver, you perform an action, which may reposition your ship slightly or allow you to gain a token that you can spend to modify your attack or defense dice later on. After all the ships have moved, they attack in descending pilot skill order, rolling attack and defense dice based on the ship type. All named pilots have a special ability, and there are hundreds of upgrade cards that can be added to customize your ship. Most of these essentially allow you to break the rules in one way or another. Darth Vader, for example, gets to take two actions after he moves rather than just one. Luke Skywalker can change one focus result on a defense die to an evade result for free. Most ships have either two or three attack dice, a couple have four. No ship has more than three defense dice, and a couple get zero but have a lot of hull and shields.

Attack Wing is similar, but the pilot skill and abilities are on the captain, which is separate from the ship itself which allows for more customization. It also, unfortunately (IMO), allows you to equip Captain Picard to a ship from a non-Federation empire. OCD kicks in at that point. The biggest difference is in the actions. You get the essentially the same types of actions, but you need to spend your actions on other things, like preparing your photon torpedoes and you don't get the tokens to modify your dice nearly as often. Plus, the ships tend to have more attack dice (4-5 commonly) and fewer defense dice (1-2) which means your attacks are more random with less control over them without those tokens. It just plays differently than X-Wing. There are some aspects of Attack Wing that I like better, but overall I prefer X-Wing.

As for adapting SFB, it could certainly be done. The epic ships (like the Corellian Corvette) use tokens to represent energy gained each turn that can be spent to fire weapons or carry out various actions. That could easily fit SFB. If I'm not mistaken, FC does that already, right? So SFB-Wing would probably be Federation Commander with a different movement system.

By Scott Iles (Gullwind) on Friday, October 21, 2016 - 12:13 am: Edit

Garth, I agree completely about the minis. I have a decent collection of the first couple releases and I replaced most of them with my old Star Trek Micro Machines. They look a lot better.

There are some exceptions, though. The bioship for Species 8472 is quite nice.

By Will McCammon (Djdood) on Friday, October 21, 2016 - 12:22 am: Edit

ST:Attack Wing was forced to use the existing minis from the Wiz Kidz Clix game, due to IP restrictions (they were already approved). Thus the "fit the base" scale, rather than in-scale with each other the way the X-Wing minis are.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Hardcore) on Friday, October 21, 2016 - 07:48 pm: Edit

Heh, I should have figured out something like Attack Wing already existed! Would prefer A SFB variant though.

By Will McCammon (Djdood) on Friday, October 21, 2016 - 11:13 pm: Edit

LucasFilm played fast and loose with the tech of their setting in the films. One thing Fantasy Flight did well with X-Wing was establishing their own internal-universe setting "rules" (which seemed heavily influenced by the old West End Games Star Wars game data) and stick to them.

They've also been good about not making retroactive changes that devalue units already in the game or make them do "stupid" things. An X-Wing or TIE Fighter from the original box set is still a totally usable unit and none of the add-ons they are eligible for break the setting feel. None of the units added since have badly disrupted the game's-balance - their points values have been tested well for the most part. I like that you can add them and enjoy them, but don't *need* to to be competitive. Very un-like Games Workshop and very appreciated.

I hope they stuck to that with SW:Armada. That would be a tougher row to hoe though, as Lucasfilm really messed around with scales, etc. for the big ships in the movies. The Corvette/Blockade Runner was at least three times larger in the fleet scenes in RotJ than it was at the beginning of SW. Or course, Star Trek did a lot of the same stuff (the size of the Defiant in DS9 seemed to change from one shot to the next).

They're not at ADB-levels of internal consistency, but they did far better than things like ST:Attack Wing (with the above-mentioned silly things like Picard on a Romulan ship, with a Klingon super weapon and a Breen tea maid).

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, October 22, 2016 - 12:51 am: Edit

Well, here's an idea. Take ACTA:SF and keep everything the same, but add in Captains cards or Named Ships cards that give a special ability to the ship with said cards attached.


Garth L. Getgen

By Robert Kroyer (A88mph) on Saturday, October 22, 2016 - 01:07 am: Edit

I too am a former Star Trek Attack Wing player. In fact, I found and started playing SFB after all of the Organized Play events for Attack Wing in my area dried up almost overnight last Winter.

By John Williams (Johndw) on Saturday, October 22, 2016 - 01:44 pm: Edit

Recently there was a board game, star trek ascendancy, that came out. It kind of simulates a hundred or more years of federation, klingon, and romulans starting to expand out from homeworlds, eventually coming into contact, establishing boarders, building up, and then final conflict. Gives me the general impression of early TOS up to and beyond the general war, just with limited factions for now. Not that SBF should make a board game that copies this, but there does seem to be enough solid background to support a game similar to this.

But keeping it similar to attack wing or whatnot might be better, i dunno. There's lots of possibilities.

By Tony L. Thomas (Scoutdad) on Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - 03:21 pm: Edit

Garth: Don't think something like that hasn't been bandied about by play testers...
But it's well down the line.
Book 2, 3, and 4 need to come out first.

By Xander Fulton (Dderidex) on Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 11:24 pm: Edit

Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but...for a simple "I have no idea what this game is about, but it seems incredibly popular, what is it about?"

FFG has done a *fantastic* video explaining the game on YouTube

Brief 'pitch' bit in the front, and a brief 'commercial' bit at the end advertising the product line, with the rules in the middle. Whole thing only 12 minutes, and that really is the entire core game.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 09:19 am: Edit

Xander, someone at the store "explained" the game to me. I walked out thinking "SFB is easier". A couple weeks later, I saw that video. It changed my mind. I now have 100+ X-wing fighters.


Garth L. Getgen

By Xander Fulton (Dderidex) on Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 01:03 pm: Edit

Yeah, the core mechanics are definitely very straightforward. Just a handful of maneuver templates, and a dial all players use to secretly set their maneuver*. Then reveal/execute maneuvers one after another, and attack. Only 5 stats, total, in the game - your pilot skill (determines order of maneuver and attack), attack dice and defense dice (attacker rolls # of attack dice they have vs defender's # of defense dice they have) - uncancelled hits then deduct from the shield stat until it's gone and then do hull damage.

And...that's it. Super simple, at a high level, but surprising depth in play allowed for, given that.

As to 'adopting to the SFU'...well that asterisk, above, is a big deal. BACKROOM GOSSIP is...WizKids threatened to sue FFG over that whole 'miniatures game with a rotating dial that has a viewport window to change unit stat' thing as a result of a patent they have on Heroclix (FWIW, it expires in 2021, IIRC). At the time, X-Wing wasn't the hobby-redefining juggernaut it is, now, and FFG seemed to not want to tempt fate (they probably would have won in court, but who wants to fight battles over a product you don't even know will be successful, yet?). So they made a deal to give the 'Flight Path' system license to WizKids for free in exchange for WizKids dropping their threatened lawsuit. Thus is born 'Star Trek: Attack Wing'.

By Jeffery Smith (Jsmith) on Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 09:48 pm: Edit

the flight path engine would be great for fighter combat. if you want to do starship combat though you need to use SW Armada.

By Robert Kroyer (A88mph) on Wednesday, November 02, 2016 - 04:15 pm: Edit

SW Armada is another good game as well. Though I only play it though Tabletop Simulator as I cannot afford to spend the $100+ on another game like it.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, November 02, 2016 - 04:17 pm: Edit

If SW Armada doesn't use the same game system as X-wing then that post needs to move to a more general topic (and either way, this one needs to disappear).

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Wednesday, November 02, 2016 - 05:55 pm: Edit

SVC: Star Wars Armada system is kind-of-the-same yet kind-of-not-the-same as X-wing / Trek Attack Wing.

Three minute video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE16ZKHm_-U


Garth L. Getgen

By Jeffery Smith (Jsmith) on Wednesday, November 02, 2016 - 08:40 pm: Edit

Svc: Armada is a modified version of the flight path engine. it is tailored to better fit the Starship side of things.

X wing is the basic system. it would be great for dogfighting and could provide a way to sell fighter and gunboat mini's.

By Jeffery Smith (Jsmith) on Wednesday, November 02, 2016 - 08:45 pm: Edit

Jean: could you please create a topic Star fleet Armada. with Svc's permission I would like to discus converting SFB/FC to SW:A

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, November 03, 2016 - 01:08 am: Edit

Done

By Mike Ptak (Norsehound) on Wednesday, May 09, 2018 - 06:00 am: Edit

X-Wing (and attack wing) are created with the mindset of simulating high-speed dogfights. I do not feel it adequitely justifies multi-weapon ship combat Star Trek displays... and WizKid's model drops game balance pretty hard.

The system is sound however. If an SFB version was made, I would recommend tweaks to allow multiple arcs of fire with different shield faces. Perhaps examine how Armada resolves their combat abilities to help distinguish starships.

(Armada introduces a critical hit result on their die facing which is used to trigger special effects. For the heavy weapons of SFB, this can be a decent way to represent those heavy weapons hitting their target).