Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Future Wars => Topic started by: rokarege on May 17, 2019, 01:16:42 PM
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Mike Hutchinson (Gaslands) is writing a new game about interstellar operations which will be release by Osprey in 2020.
Design Blog, playtesting (http://abillionsuns.space/)
Each player commands a fleet of mighty cruisers, sleek destroyers and agile fighters as they attempt to hunt down pirates, defend their mining vessels and disrupt each other’s activities. The rulebook provides everything you need to play exciting and tense games of interstellar exploration, exploitation and combat.
From an interview on BigComicPage (https://bigcomicpage.com/2019/05/16/interview-gaslands-refuelled-and-ready-to-race)
the game is striving to be very much a “science-fiction” game, not a reskinned naval game.
The result of this is that, for one, there are no army lists up front. You simply jump in the ships that you need, turn by turn, as the tactical situation evolves. While this theoretically gives you infinite reinforcements, the resources you pay to jump ships in are the same resources that determine victory. Overspend, and you go into debt. Underdeliver on the mission and you might not make that money back! It’s an exciting and very unique dynamic on the tabletop.
Speaking of unique dynamics, the other bonkers thing about A Billion Suns is that games can take place over multiple tables! You can play with one system on the kitchen table and another on the kitchen counter, and a third on that bench! Using the jump points, fleets can both deploy across the multiple tables as well as hop between them, creating an utterly new wargaming experience.
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You had me at mighty cruisers, sleek destroyers and agile fighters.
This sounds really, really enticing already... 8)
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There is a facebook group with an active playtest community. I still havn't read up on all of it, but there are a lot of interesting ideas. Mostly you can field (during a fight! ) as many ships as you want, but its all about getting the most profit from your contract in the end.
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Tried the first several iterations of the playtest, didn't care for it at all. Too abstracted and "gamey" for my tastes, I prefer my starship combat with a little more detail and ship/wepaon customization. Still, it was looking playable, just not my thing.
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Tried the first several iterations of the playtest, didn't care for it at all. Too abstracted and "gamey" for my tastes, I prefer my starship combat with a little more detail and ship/wepaon customization. Still, it was looking playable, just not my thing.
I can definitely agree on that sentiment, it would be a game I might like to play that uses space ships, not THE game I would want to play about space ships, if you catch my drift.
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I can definitely agree on that sentiment, it would be a game I might like to play that uses space ships, not THE game I would want to play about space ships, if you catch my drift.
Yeah, I guess I was hoping for something more like A Sky Full of Ships or Battleshift. They're both pretty abstract and handle bigger fleets than rules like Full Thrust or Starmada comfortably manage, but still closer to a traditional fleet battles game than Billion Suns.
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I can definitely agree on that sentiment, it would be a game I might like to play that uses space ships, not THE game I would want to play about space ships, if you catch my drift.
I am looking at “Billion Suns” and the club I go to have been testing it ( I haven’t been able to make it though). Looks like it would at least be worth a punt for the price, but I totally get the sentiment. I am playing a bit of PSC’s “Red Alert” with my children having tried it at Salute. We didn’t buy the box having plenty of models already, but just cards, mat and dice. Rules downloaded. I quite like that for a quick game (45 - 60 mins). It won’t replace FT or Starmada (I prefer FT on balance), but it has good qualities. Typical case of horses for courses?
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Tried the first several iterations of the playtest, didn't care for it at all. Too abstracted and "gamey" for my tastes, I prefer my starship combat with a little more detail and ship/wepaon customization. Still, it was looking playable, just not my thing.
Tried it and had similar thoughts. Combat/weapon systems seemed a bit off.
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That sounds too bad.
I really liked the idea of a generic space combat ruleset, and the concept of theoretically unlimited reinforcements at the cost of victory points does seem interesting. Plus the possibility of playing on several tables/systems simultaneously and jumping between them also sounds pretty cool.
But then again; I already have several quite deep space comabt rules/games, so a lighter,more gamey one could still fill a niche.
I'll reserve my judgement until after I've played it. Here's to hoping somebody at Poldercon will be demoing it next year... ;)
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I'll reserve my judgement until after I've played it. Here's to hoping somebody at Poldercon will be demoing it next year... ;)
We could well do a playtest round before that at BOD if you want!
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We could well do a playtest round before that at BOD if you want!
Sounds good :)
But pardon my ignorance: BOD?
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Sounds good :)
But pardon my ignorance: BOD?
wargaming Club that meets at the same place as Poldercon is hosted.
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Ah!. Well that would be doable I guess... :)
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Ah!. Well that would be doable I guess... :)
I'm on my phone atm, but shoot me a PM and we'll see about a date.
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Reading trough the rules, something I havn't seen mentioned yet is the fact the game can be played across multiple tables at the same time! Warp jumping between them. Its strange but definetly a creative fun different aspect to set the game apart!
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That's one of the things that piqued my interest actually.
Sort of reminds me of the later missions in Star wars Alliance, or those in Freelancer where you could jump between systems (and battles) at will.
And to a lesser degree (because it's different systems, and not simultaneously) of games influencing each other such as the BFG/Epic/40K/Killteam cascade campaign that was featured in a White Dwarf decades ago. Or of a Dropfleet game determining the forces in a subsequent Dropzone game (I'm still hoping for an even more zoomed in game in the same line I've pre-emptively called Dropsquad, to zoom in even further ;) ).
I'm very curious as to how it plays; more news after tomorrow night's game I guess... :D
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Reading trough the rules, something I havn't seen mentioned yet is the fact the game can be played across multiple tables at the same time! Warp jumping between them. Its strange but definetly a creative fun different aspect to set the game apart!
Brings to mind the climax of Thor 2: Dark World.
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Hmmm...I’m interested...might this be a good system to use Star Wars Armada models?
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Daeothar and I played a game yesterday, and my first impression was very positive.
First of the basic mechanics are quite simple, but definitely not too simple. Between the multiple types of actions, you can take and command points you can spend on special effects there is a lot to keep track of already. We definitely forgot to apply some rules on occasion. In particular, we forgot the rule that after you move a battlegroup, all enemies in range can fire their auxiliary weapons at that unit! This is definitely one of those space fights where there are lasers flying everywhere all the time. I do think this is a good inclusion in the rules though. While you might spend most of your activations pursuing objectives, where you place your ships will have a big influence of enemy movement due to this passive fire effect. We also played thinking auxiliary weapons have 360 arcs of fire, but it's only 180 I just noticed (oops)
(https://i.imgur.com/rPVonGR.jpg)
As for the ships, I really liked the difference between classes, each one felt interesting and worthwhile to deploy in the right circumstances. You will need a lot of ship models for this game. You pick the scale of your conflict from 1 to 10, with 4 being recommended for a beginners game. (we did so) Besides the regular military ships, you might also need quite a few "Utility ships" as these are necessary for the completion of many objectives. We ended up with all sorts of models on the table, full trust, star trek, star wars silent death and some scratch build all together! I must say for me at least this did not distract from the looks. However for the future I might be tempted to use tokens for the ships, or 3d print "microfleet" scale ships myself, somewhere in the 1-3 cm range. (something like these: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/javelin98?section=MicroFleets&s=0)
Now the scenarios. There is a pretty involved set up you need to do before the game. You sort a deck by suites, take out the face cards and then take the number cards from 1 to the scale of your conflict. (so 1-4 for us) one suit goes high to low, one low to high and 2 random. You then draw face cards to generate what missions you will be playing (3 in total, but never more than one from the same suite) all mission use these sorted stacks of cards for scoring purposes, but in variety of ways. I thought this unnecessarily complex upon first reading, but in play, it definitely fulfilled a purpose. Knowing that some decks start high and low means you want to get in on those contracts early since there are diminishing returns, but if somebody is already set up to complete that contract you might instead try and get a head start on another contract that goes low to high for example, with the random ones presenting more of a gamble.
This might sound very "gamey" on paper but definitely felt like a complex puzzle during play. Many objectives are multi-step, so you can try to sabotage an enemy who is halfway a scoring process by blowing up his ship or target!
For our specific game, we ended up with these 3 missions:
-Quarantine contract. There were 4 bases that you needed to send medical teams to and retrieve later on to cure an infection. This could only be done by utility ships. In retrospect, the smartest move here would be to send a larger battlegroup of medium utility ships to send the teams first, and a single light utility ship to retrieve them to score this in a single turn.
-Industrial espionage: There were 4 cargo vessels on the tables that you could control if you had the most ships within 3 inches of them. At the end of the turn you would draw cards equal to the round number from one of the random decks, if it was anything but an ace you discarded the card, if it was an ace you scored it and all cards in the discard pile. Those cards got removed and the ace goes back into the deck. The person who controls the most ships decides the order of drawing. (with only 4 cards in the deck, that matters!) You also gain control over these ships, so you can do some pretty fun shenanigans with them hopping trough jump points to another table (more on that later)
-Whaling contract: We set up 4 "space krakens" Which you could scan to draw a card and keep in your hand (hidden) if killed they would drop a "heart of the kraken" token which a utility ship could pick up. If you jumped such a ship out, or it scanned a jump point you could discard the hearts to play the scanned cards on a one for one basis. The Kraken also have an automated system where they go after nearby ships. We stayed away from these guys for the first 2 rounds of the game. During the third, it turned out that killing them wasn't as hard as we both expected, but neither of us had the ships present to actually score any points off them. The fact you can steal another person trophy heart is good fun, especially with alternating activations!
(https://i.imgur.com/0pO1l9g.jpg)
Now tables! Each of these 3 scenarios had the "add a table" effect so we played on 4 tables at once! We actually never moved towards the last one which only held krakens, but I did manage a fun trick by jumping cargo ships away through a wormhole to a location where I had a stronger force. The game specifically mentions that playing on particularly small or strangely shaped boards is wholly encouraged and I think this is definitely worth a try. After the game we noticed that some of the larger ships actually had minimum ranges on their heavy weapons that were longer than some of our "tables" were long!
The missions are definitely complex, and I strongly encourage reading them through together with your opponents before play and making sure everybody understands their implications as they are central to actually winning and can be a bit involved on first reading. I'm definitely looking forward to playing another game with different missions and seeing how that changes things up!
A couple of things we didn't touch on but I'll still mention.
This game can be played with multiple players, and I think it might well do so nicely. The scenarios all use the number of players as an element in calculations. I think the strong focus on objectives would also make this a fun group game, though a chaotic one!
The ships have a set profile, with no customization. You do have a choice of which ones you jump in, but that should be a tactical choice, not a themed force one. However, there is a whole system called "competitive advantages" that allow you to customize your force in interesting ways.
Slotting neatly into that, there is a campaign system as well. I have only skimmed it but it seems very interesting. Since there is no measure of how many forces you have in a region (as much as you are willing to pay for, always) it becomes more about pursuing commercial interests which might alleviate the snowballing effect of many campaigns. There are also rules for researching new competitive advantages as mentioned above.
All in all, this first game showed that aBS is very playable and quite quick, but also very deep and complex when it comes to scenarios! We both clearly had no idea what we were doing turn one, and spend the other 2 turns paying for it. Definitely not in a bad way, as this game left me thinking of more strategic plays for the future hours afterwards.
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First off; thank you YPU for graciously inviting me to test the game and get a taste of how it plays! 8)
Aside from the fact that I had a great time, I can only say that the game is a very enjoyable affair already.
When people call it gamey, I can only assume this label refers tot he actual combat, which admittedly is a rather simple and abstracted affair. But this verdict totally foregoes the actual core of the game, and that is strategy much more than tactics.
It's all about getting the maximum yield out of the assets you pour into the missions. Of course there is some smart maneuvering involved, in fact it's one of the more important bits of the game, but in the end, it's all about achieving objectives, and that can be done through stealth and guile, superb tactics, brute force, or any other method you can think of.
That's why the ships are limited in their types and capabilities, but the mix is such that you absolutely need to pick the right tool for the right job.
Certain behemoth battleships can dominate a large table, but when it comes to tight maneuvering on the much smaller table next to it, that ship is going to be just a sitting duck, unable to fire its devastating main weapons when it decides to jump there.
So the mission mechanics is where the real weight of the game is. I found it somewhat convoluted at first, but after a couple of rounds, it began to get clearer. Basically, some missions are better taken care off immediately, while others can wait or maybe even ignored. Again, it's all about the choices you make in regards to what assets will get you the optimum profit.
Too small a fleet (or ship) and you may get annihilated by a competitor, but too heavy handed a play, and you may win the objective, but still lose because you threw in too many assets.
It reminds me a great deal of the Clans' bidding process in Battletech; try to use as few units as possible, while still remaining confident you can claim the objective.
I really liked the experience, and based on this one game, I would definitely play it again! :)
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Thank you YPU and Daeothar for trying the game and sharing your thoughts. I have found surprisingly little discussion around the web, even on the dedicated FB group, when it comes to hands on experience.
So it’s been a few months since your test drive. Have either of you gotten any further games in? Any additional thoughts upon further reflection? Any development of opinion in hindsight?
On the FB group, the couple of folks who have playtested have raised concerns about low player interaction and early game decisions being over determinative/hard to correct. Any resonance with your experience?
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Reading trough the rules, something I havn't seen mentioned yet is the fact the game can be played across multiple tables at the same time! Warp jumping between them. Its strange but definetly a creative fun different aspect to set the game apart!
It's a novel concept for sure, although not one that is uniquely tied to this ruleset.
I use Full Thrust for my spaceship battles, and this thread has given me some great ideas about scenario design. Some slight changes to the rules to force ships to have to 'spin-up' their FTL drives and then implementing a measure of random variation to where they emerge at the next point should make for some interesting play.
That's enough to get the creative juices flowing!
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It’s less a matter of can be played across several play spaces and more like you are meant to do so. Half of the twelve contracts instruct the players to add a play space, that is, in addition to the first one, and you draw three contracts per game. So that’s 1-4 play spaces with pretty good odds of at least 2.
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Sounds like this is more geared to strategic, game play, across multiple star sectors, so might be a decent option for campaign games.
I've always wanted to do something like that. Think WWII naval gaming in the Pacific, with large fleets moving about, and smaller forces present in many areas.
You need to find, fix, and destroy the enemy, while protecting your own territory and assets from destruction too.
Seems to me you could bolt on your preferred tactical rules, if desired, to conduct the battles in each sector, if you really don't like the simplified rules.
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There will be a campaign system, although the rules for it are not included in the playtest materials. You will be able to create a corporation by selecting certain advantages on tech trees and you can improve it over the course of the campaign.
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It should be noted that one of the unique features of the rules is the fact you can bring as many units into the battle as you want at any time during the game. It just costs your corperation a lot to do so. Every decision to field something is based on "does it brign me more profit than it will cost?" this system however does mean that a classic campaign system with a tactics layer where you track units in an area is less appropriate, as the game is meant to be played with theoretically infinite fleets.
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Sure the progress of individual ships will probably not be tracked over the course of successive games but it’s easy to imagine that as a corporation advances on a tech tree it may be able to use certain classes of ships more cost efficiently or otherwise more effectively.
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...So it’s been a few months since your test drive...
I think you're missing an entire year there; it has actually been over 14 months since our game! ;)
The last 6 months have been wild and strange though, and Billion Suns has been pretty much off my mind for the duration of it, but I am still very interested in the game itself. Based on the one game YPU and I got in, I would probably dish out for the book once it's released; it was that much fun.
So I'm just curious about the state of the game right now, and its release schedule...
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Right, I didn’t see that the year on those posts was 2019 rather than 2020 until after responding!
As to the release of ABS, Osprey have had to commission new artwork for the book. Starting from scratch here has pushed the publication date back to February 2021. Mike has released quite a bit of the latest draft as a “gamma playtest,” meaning hardly anything can really be changed but there are rules out there for people to try the game.
Any thoughts on trying solo games?
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Good info Manchu. I was hoping it would hit later this year. :(