Hexes

[Monty]

With a little bit of reverse engineering, would ACTA work on a hex map?

[Scoutdad]

Yes... and no.
you could reverese engineer it to work, but with all the changes required...
New movement rules taking into account 60 degree hex faces.

• Revised ship stats (since all weapons have 90 or 180 degree fire arcs.
  Edited rules text replacing inches with hexes...
  Edited rules text converting movement in inches to movement in hexes...
  Converted rules for movement rates of slow / fast / crippled units...
  Revised rules for Turn Score...
  Etc.

After all of that, the game you'd end up with could almost be called Federation Commander 2.0

[Nerroth]

That seems like the kind of niche which Starmada Nova Edition may be trying to fill. (I know the Admiralty Edition was primarily hex-based; it seems that Nova follows the same development path, according to this preview pdf.)

[Mike]

I'll bet squares would work much better with ACTA:SF than hexes if you allow diagonal movement. Now some will say a diagonal distance of 3 squares is farther than a straight-on distance of 3 squares and they would be correct...mathematically. But we're not talking mathematics here. This is a square grid and a square is a square is a square.

[Steve Cole]

Diagonal is 1.5 squares.

[Scoutdad]

We've used octagons and square mats for this before. Moving into an octagon caost 1 movement point... movinging into a suqare costs 0.5 movement points. So... moving from an octagon to another octagon by moveing throug ha square takes 1.5 movement points.
Sounds complicated, but it's not really.

Here's an image of the map I'm talking about.

[lincolnlog]

Yes... and no.
you could reverese engineer it to work, but with all the changes required...
New movement rules taking into account 60 degree hex faces.

• Revised ship stats (since all weapons have 90 or 180 degree fire arcs.
  Edited rules text replacing inches with hexes...
  Edited rules text converting movement in inches to movement in hexes...
  Converted rules for movement rates of slow / fast / crippled units...
  Revised rules for Turn Score...
  Etc.

After all of that, the game you'd end up with could almost be called Federation Commander 2.0

We've and are experimenting with this. Not necessarily hex movement, but making home rules that line SFB and ACTA up a little closer. And they will work using hex grid.

So experimented with adding the 6 shield facings back (most of us hate the Klingon front shield rule). On an open board the only time you have to determine hex facing is to determine which sield was hit. The weapons firing arcs can be left alone.

We also boosted the weapons back to full power, and gave weapons variable (most weapons, photons and drones are not variable), and threw out the crippled roll for each system, and when you roll on the hit table now, you can eliminate weapons, labs, transporters, tractors, probes, and shuttles.

We also tried split movement, and it didn't work to well. Surprisingly, the increased number of shields and slightly increased damage rolls didn't really lengthen the game that much.

With drones, we went back to 1 drone takes 1 weapon to kill it, and ADD can kill 2. In a 6 or 7 turn game, we are not concerned about ADD ammo. Amazingly, drone became real weapons again and not a game distration. It was fun, and we plan to try it again with some additional improvements we added.

As Jean always says, we're waiting for Steve or Matt to beam into my basement and say "Hey, you can't play that, that way!".