Blacksails wrote:
Actually, I just had a look through their fleet book. Too much Fore (Fixed) for my taste, way too much. I've never much liked the whole idea of Fore (Fixed) in the game as it just feels finicky watching your opponent line up his models just so to draw that line he needs. Its also frustrating for squadrons trying to line up shots at a shot close to them as they have to angle a lot more.

Meh, I'll wait for the Zenian Fleet book and probably go woth Works Raptor or Rense. Both have great models, I just hope the rules fit my style and taste a little more.

 Ronin_eX wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
Actually, I just had a look through their fleet book. Too much Fore (Fixed) for my taste, way too much. I've never much liked the whole idea of Fore (Fixed) in the game as it just feels finicky watching your opponent line up his models just so to draw that line he needs. Its also frustrating for squadrons trying to line up shots at a shot close to them as they have to angle a lot more.

Meh, I'll wait for the Zenian Fleet book and probably go woth Works Raptor or Rense. Both have great models, I just hope the rules fit my style and taste a little more.

If the fixed-fore on Dindrenzi gave you pause, then Rense may not be for you either since Rense is actually a faction within the Dindrenzi fleet. Thus they have certain tactical similarities.

Works Raptor will be more in line with Directorate-style tactics, so they may be more your speed.

 Malika2 wrote:
Will the new book also include additional background material? The impression I get from their site and forum is that there isn't so much background material available besides the tiny bits of texts on the website itself. Am I correct?

 Boblogik wrote:
I know your pain. You could just maintain 2 fleets so that, like a self-contained boardgame, you can just invite another player, who owns nothing, to play a game or 2 and if they like it you can tell them how to get ahold of the stuff. That's what I'm doing with my starter and I'm also going to run demos and such to drum up support in my community.

Also if your LGS doesn't stock it physically, they may be able to order it and if not, there's always the option of thewarstore.com who are great.

 Ronin_eX wrote:
The more I've read and seen, the better I've felt. Spartan of the last year or two has actually taken real strides in design and testing and I think it is finally starting to show.

For once, one of their games has core fleets which don't feel like simplistic tweaks on the base design. Each of the six major fleets do actually appear to function almost completely differently. And what's more, the balance doesn't seem to be off either. The Terrans and Directorate look to be just as viable as the Dindrenzi or Sorylians. They all have their own way of going about it of course, but no one seems to be too weak or too strong (at least from a first look at the fleets). This is a pretty good sign. Normally Spartan imbalance was easy to spot in every previous rulebook. So at the very least, if there are balance issues, they are buried deep. A definite improvment over being able to find glaring issues on a mere flip through as you could with Dystopian Wars.

The awesome work they've been doing with the Dystopian Wars upgrade boxes and fleet reworkings is definitely paying dividends in FSA's new rules. This actually feels like they went the extra mile and released a set of rules that wasn't just going to get replaced in a couple of years (for once).

So far, though, what impresses me the most is twofold. First, they fixed mediums. We were starting to see inklings of this in Dystopian Wars (the newest stuff and non-core factions). But they really hit it out of the park here. Almost every cruiser has seen some kind of boost in firepower, survivability or some other facet. They now offer a similar amount of firepower to a battleship, but often for a lower price. And this is because large vessels saw a price increase across the board (as well as some stat tweaks to make them less all-round perfect). Dreads especially have seen a nerf in terms of pricing.

The feared Dindrenzi Retribution had a few stats dumped, a downside added (Ablative Plating, once you're at 50% HP you get a -2 to your CR; this is the new Dindrenzi factional MAR) and some neat improvments (massive range boost and some firepower improvement) but costs 20 more points and handles like a drunk bear (though you can pay a further 35 points to get rid of some downsides; but now it costs 325 points instead of its old 270).

So now mediums actually are the workhorses of the fleet. Larges still pack good firepower in a durable package. But mediums are more mobile and able to bring battleship-level firepower in to range faster. If nothing else, balancing mediums and larges is a huge (HUGE) leap in the right direction. It solves tons of endemic internal balance issues that have plagued Spartan-system games since Uncharted Seas.

But beyond that info is still a little scarce on the more core system changes. Boarding sounds like it has changed completely (which is cool, boarding has never really felt right in any of the Spartan-system games). Small craft have also changed and now have a more limited range mixed with no longer being a way to spam activations. Both of those should be nice general system tweaks.

As for the new starters, they are basically an excuse to re-sculpt the old ships without writing the hulls out of canon. With the new way you buy ships (pick a basic hull class and put add-ons on it to create a variant) this makes a lot of sense. From the sounds of it, they will still be in resin but will come with bits to convert a heavy cruiser in to the mix (making them a nice buy for even established players). And apparently the game will be going to an upgrade box model like Dystopian Wars which should be fun if they can keep a bit of variation and extra bits in there.

All in all, this new version of Firestorm finally feels like Spartan aren't just phoning in a minor reprint with some half-arsed tweaks. They didn't have a lot of good will banked with me for the last little while, but things are actually looking up for the second edition of FSA. I hope Spartan can keep this up. The last major hurdle will be whether or not they have finally managed to pick a layout for the rules that doesn't require the reading of goat entrails to properly divine meaning from (though, again, we've seen snippets from the book and it seems fairly solid so far).

 Blacksails wrote:
Yup, FSA is in a good spot right now. V2.0 has breathed some new life into what was largely a bland and overly simple game. There's always room for improvement, but Spartan is prepared to constantly tweak and build on their lessons learnt.

That and the new models are sooooooo much nicer than they were before.

 Grugknuckle wrote:
When I saw the Warstore's price for the 2 player battlebox I thought it was too good to be true. Something had to be wrong with it. I mean, I got...

A Terran starter fleet
A Dindrenzi starter fleet
A bunch of SRS tokens
A Space Station
A hardback copy of the new rules.
Dice.
More Dice.
All of the TAC cards.
A Scenario book.
A bunch of markers (asteroids and game markers)

For $114 with shipping. That was an AMAZING deal. I'm still in shock that all of the resin models were actually really good.
For that much $, I think I could just barely get a Land Raider and enough paint & glue to build it.

ALSO : I need to say this again. The resin models in the battle box were REALLY high quality. I was expecting either the equivalent of Forgeworld quality, or Finecast, but the Spartan models had really crisp edges, very little flash, no warping and were not brittle at all. I even dropped my Dindrenzi battleship on the floor and cringed thinking that it was certainly shattered. But except for a very minor scratch on one corner it was in perfect shape.

I'm really pleased with this purchase. Now if I can just get someone to play the game with me...

Lysenis wrote:I started Aquan in V1 and due to some real workd issues I lost my fleet. Now I plan on restarting. I just want my Ryushi and Hawkers and my Rense (the 3 BEST looking fleets imho) As long as I can run them without any "Must take main fleet" requirements I am happy!