Desired current sci fi wargaming trends

[Dentatus]

Allowing for personal taste, degrees of detail and varying emphasis on command or morale and such, when it comes to transitioning from 5 to 6 man skirmishes to 50 or 60 in an all out brawl, the only real difference I see is a 'unit' shifts from an individual model  - with particular stats and abilities - to a group of models with the same, just more fire power and wounds. The trick for mass combat games seems to be how to handle large quantities of miniatures smoothly and efficiently.

I'm not sure you can scale rules for individuals up to squads/platoon level without serious abstraction and simplification. I mean, you're not gaming with hundreds of individuals, each with their own unique stats. You have simply grouped 50 or 60 miniatures into 5 or 6 or 7 units. In the end, aren't you just back at the skirmish level - but with loads more dice and models?       

[Pattus Magnus]

My understanding is that Wiley Games is developing a version of Fist Full of Lead to play games of 20 or more figs per side. I’m not sure about the timeline to release, but it could be a good option. If it is also mg the lines of the other FFoL titles, it should be pretty straight forward to adapt the ‘big skirmish’ version to sci fi, even if official rules for that aren’t in the initial release.

[Pattus Magnus]

Those are good points Dentalus. Another challenge for abstraction is that modern (and presumably future) squads don’t tend to consist of identically armed troops - SAWs and other specialists provide a large proportion of the firepower in a manoeuvre element.

I liked how Stargrunt2 handled that, with riflemen contributing some firepower points, which combined to form firepower dice, while each specialist contributed entire dice. A buddy decided to minimax and take all specialists, then discovered that his squads collapsed very quickly when taking any casualties- there are some nuances  there in putting  effective units together.

A more current set of rules should be able to accomplish something similar and account for a non-uniform distribution of firepower within tactical units.

[nozza_uk]

She wants to play a space exploration tabletop with combat but also non-combat sci-fi elements. Star Trek away team type themes.

This would be my ideal game too. Closest I've come to it is using Pulp Alley plot points to provide non combat problems that need solving. Galactic Heroes does it to a certain extent with different levels of tasks and that's what I am currently using. I did think about adding character traits eg Charisma gives a +1 to the Captain attempting to charm someone, but it adds another level of bookkeeping, and then the question then becomes how much does a skirmish game become a RPG-lite game?

[Dentatus]

Right. At what point do you simply shift to a straight up RPG with decent, streamlined combat mechanics?

I'm going to build a long-term campaign around the RPG 'Band of Blades' fluff, but am currently considering a modified 'Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes' for combat. Or maybe I'll modify the dice mechanics I used in Hardwired. Dunno. Point is I'm trying to get both RPG and war game to mesh in a way I like. That's where my gaming tastes are right now.
If I can occasionally portray the party in the middle of a larger war, involved on a large field of battle, so much the better.