Federation Commander

A bit late to the party, having been in London this past week, but anyone interested in a primer on what Starmada is all about can download the basic rules for free from the Majestic Twelve Games web site:

www.mj12games.com/starmada/

sounds good, worth checking out.

If it speeds up large fleet battles its definitely worth taking a look.

I have played also starfleet battles,federation commander,BFG has well call to arms ,full thurst, and trek wars whats star trek ship wars, plus other board games. so i will also get starmada is it true you can use the federation commander fleet ship cards.

Mark, the ship diagrams in Klingon Armada are not the same as either scale of Ship Cards in FC - or like SSDs from SFB either.

Take these examples from the website, to help give an idea of what to expect.

(Usually, each printed page gives you two of the same ship. The ones here are from CL40, which were packed in 2 to a page.)


What Klingon Armada will do, however, is let you use the same counters from Klingon Border and Klingon Attack - as well as the same minis.

And fight out a fleet type engagement (10 to 12 ships per side) in two hours or less.

I've just bought Starmada, and am impressed by its flexibility. I'm going to adapt it to GDW's 2300 background - very short-range direct-fire weapons (due to the enormous distances involved) and very long-range missiles.

2300's own starship combat game, Star Cruiser, was very innovative, but unfortunately badly designed and almost unplayable.

I've also got hold of Squadron Strike and it's laugh-out-loud (well, I did but there again, I'm odd) background briefing. Now I just need a month or so off work to write up a B5 adaptation...

Glad you like Starmada -- I'm not aware of any current 2300 adaptations. I'd love to see what you come up with, either here or over at the MJ12 forums.

Answering your questions.

A) What is Starmada? Starmada is a rules system for the construction and combat of starships.

Starmada isn't the only system out there by far. However, it has the most flexible and robust ship generation system I have seen. The rules provide a framework for costing out weapon features, defensive systems, movement capability and other special functions. The key is that the system is generic which gives you latitude to approximate any fictional universe you want.

Other than ship construction, you have a couple different mechanical models for movement. Exectution of simple simultaneous movement orders gives some tactical layering to a simple and quick fire and effect system. This promotes large scale battles being completed in short periods of time.

What Starmada lacks is a tactically meaningful duel capability. The type of tension you have in a 1 to 1 ship duel in SFB or FC just can't be replicated in Starmada.

B) Play other systems? As far as miniatures, I 've played Galactic Knights, Full Thrust, BFG, Space Wars, and Interceptor. I've also played Starfire, Twilight Imperium (1,2 and 3) , Nebula 19, Throneworld, Imperium, May Day, Shooting Stars, Warp War and others.

SFB/FC remain my favorite space games period. Starmada is my favorite set of miniatures rules.

I played a game at the weekend where frist we used klingon armada has it was about 30 ships onto about 20 plus i was klingon my mate was federation and after we got down to i think it was 16 to 12 the other ships lagging behind we went onto fed commander and the game both of us enjoyed it.