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A month ago I happened to find these forums, and I saw that sometimes people post games that they're developing. I asked you guys what you wanted to see from someone presenting their game here.

You guys said this: You wanted Rules. The common downfall of hopeful game designers is to generate wonderful fluff and no game system to go with it.

I have brought my rules.

My brother and I have been developing a space combat game, and we have worked on little else besides the game rules. If anything we're too light on fluff - but that can come later.

Many (not all) space games can be slow, complex, or uninteresting, and we felt we could do better, so we've done our utmost to make the game that we wanted to play. We've worked to make a space combat game unlike anything we were able to play before, that featured things that I wanted to see that nobody else was doing (things like inertial movement and boarding actions that you can fight out right on the ship), and to do it all with a particular attention to game speed, player engagement, and most of all, fun.

We've named it Silent Fury. And even though we've worked on it for over two years, we're still improving it.

We've been running it at HMGS conventions and have gotten some great feedback from players there, but I'm always searching for more. I'm hoping that I can pique the interest of some of you folks out there, as new eyes look it over (or even take up arms and give it a shot with your gaming group) I would absolutely welcome all sorts of feedback that you're inclined to give, good or bad.

http://www.silent-fury.com/

So here it is, in all it's prototyped glory. Rules, ships, scenarios - everything you'd need to play, ponder, and critique.

Feel free to ask any questions, and let me know what you think.

Looks interesting, at least from the quick pass I just made.Will have to read over it in more detail later.

Wow... looks quite detailed! Is there a cliff notes version / summary?

Blind Fury was an awesome movie, If your game is even half as good it will be an epic.

 RiTides wrote:
Wow... looks quite detailed! Is there a cliff notes version / summary?

I can take a stab at cliff notes, sure.

Ships are interconnected series of components (Engines, weapons, shields, etc). These components dictate what a ship can do, and also serve as discrete locations for tracking damage (and damage control).

At the start of every turn, you play a series of orders cards on each ship that serve as basic actions for each ship (thrust, attack, defenses). This also simulates energy allocation without having explicit energy allocation rules - if you want 'all power to weapons', you'd play the 'attack' card three times and shoot lots of weapons that turn. This also lets you outwit your opponents - the right series of cards can give your opponent a nasty surprise, and is a big part of the tactical game. The worst mistake you can make is to be predictable.

During the turn, cards resolve in initiative order of the card, so there's no 'your whole side moves and shoots, my whole side moves and shoots' - instead what happens is that individual ships end up doing lots of little things during the turn, like one ship on one side will move, then a ship on the other side will fire, then another ship will take a crew action. This results in higher player engagement because nobody has to ever wait a time to do the next thing with their ship.

Space combat is a mixture of luck and skill - many shots that you take have a wide range of possible results, from doing nothing to destroying the target completely, but through superior positioning and tactics you can improve your odds (hit a ship on a weak side, catch it at the right range, etc.) The unpredictable nature of the game means that a scenario seldom plays out the same way twice.

You have individual crew figures who exist on the ship and operate individual components. When enemy crew boards your ship, the ship sheet also serves as a game board for the resulting combat aboard the ship. Boarding combat is handled seamlessly with the rest of the game - once people get on board your ship, they play orders cards just like you do, so while a ship is contested your enemy could get into one of your laser cannons and use it to shoot one of your own ships.

This results in a rich variety of possibilities - even a small boarding party that has little chance of actually taking the ship can cause a lot of havoc. Just getting into an engine can mean that they spin your ship to expose it's weak sides and move your own weaponry out of arc.

Finally, I'd like to mention drift - between turns, your ships will have built up velocity from their maneuvering. Since you're in space, you retain whatever velocity you've built up, and your ship in motion will remain in motion. Your ship's facing is completely independent of it's direction of movement - and this is all very elegantly handled by a little disc for each ship called the Vector Token, which does all the work for you in terms of keeping track of your ship's velocity, as well as automatically performing vector math for you. I've written about the vector token mechanic here if you'd like to learn more. The nature of this type of movement means that you will need to engage in some forward thinking, as closing in on the enemy too quickly may mean that you have a very short time where you are in engagement range before you blow by your target completely.

Throughout the game system I've endeavored to use consistent and simple mechanics - for example, there are only three types of rolls in the system, ship attacks are each resolved with a single roll of the dice, and inter-ship combat between crew uses the same mechanics and damage rules as ship-to-ship weapons fire.

The system is simple enough that the only charts that players will need to refer to are already incorporated into the ship sheets - we don't have any handouts or reference charts to give out at games we run, and despite that people generally pick up the majority of the entire game system in their first game. I made a lot of hard choices as to what I wanted to keep and what not to - for instance, I would have loved to get 3-D movement and positioning into the system, but ultimately I couldn't sacrifice the speed and simplicity of the game, so it's 2-D for the sake of gameplay.

Even more important than being simple, the system is also very fast. I've worked hard to make the mechanics as efficient as possible (when attacks were finally boiled down to a single roll per weapon, it was a great day). Design-wise I tended to start complicated and then gradually refine, so the game has become much more streamlined as we've worked on it. More complex phases like drift and orders are handled simultaneously (all ships drift at the same time, independent of their turn movement), so during longer phases every player is busy actively doing something. The game is ambitious and doing a ton of things at once - detailed damage tracking on individual ship components, individual crew figures and boarding actions that they can fight, inertial movement, strike craft and missiles flying at each other... there's a price to pay if any one of these things slows the game down at all, and I am quite pleased that we can generally complete a game in about two hours.

That said, I also recognize the limitations of the game. This is not a massive fleet vs. fleet game (I'm contemplating making 'Silent Fleets' at some point after this though..). This is a game where you're probably never going to see more than six ships per side, for reasons of both time and tablespace. Silent Fury revels in tactical play, details and storytelling (my favorite part is that how scenarios play out is often a story worth telling - like so.), but it is not a game of grand scales with dozens or hundreds of ships per side. It is also not a game for everyone - space combat games aren't everyone's cup of tea, to be sure, and I'm sure there's plenty of things that someone who likes other space games may not like about mine.

That said, I feel like it's very solid at this point - we've actually started developing a small following at the conventions we run at, where several of the players show up for at least one game every convention, and there's one kid who tries to get in every game I run (even if he's played the same scenario before), so I feel like I must have done something right.

Props for designing and sticking with what looks like a fantastic game. I'm working at the moment but I'll take a look later this afternoon.

Do you have a quick start sheet? A brief outline of 2 pages might draw more people in.

Just gave it a quick look, but it looks quite good. Well laid out. Simple, but very crisp graphics for your ship cards, and looks to be well developed and playtested. I personally don't like spaceship games, but I'll be referring this to some of my friends that do.

I also really respect the amount of work you've put into this. You're process of writing, refining, playtesting and playtesting at convetions should be an example to the many folks who make "I've got an idea for a game" posts at dakka without doing their homework and groundwork.

Looks great! I'm excited about space warfare. I'd like to try it soon.

I downloaded the PDF will check it later

I'm reading through it now. It looks pretty good so far. The writing is good, which is important, though I have had to re-read a few sections to get a clean handle on the rules. It seems like a system that will snap into sharper focus once you start throwing some dice.

I'll try to get together some folks to give it a whirl some time in September. I am not big on space combat games, but a few of my friends are, and I have to say that I'd rather play something like Silent Fury than the systems that they have been trying to get me to play. Some space combat wargames are just waaaaay more complicated than I want to mess with on a Saturday night.

weeble1000 wrote:
I'm reading through it now. It looks pretty good so far. The writing is good, which is important, though I have had to re-read a few sections to get a clean handle on the rules. It seems like a system that will snap into sharper focus once you start throwing some dice.

I'll try to get together some folks to give it a whirl some time in September. I am not big on space combat games, but a few of my friends are, and I have to say that I'd rather play something like Silent Fury than the systems that they have been trying to get me to play. Some space combat wargames are just waaaaay more complicated than I want to mess with on a Saturday night.

Thanks for the compliments - if you do get to play, I'd love to hear how it went. Do let me know if there are rules that you find unclear or confusing - I can clarify what's intended, and it also lets me know what areas of the rulebook may need improvement.

A friend of mine has been buying Firestorm Armada miniatures because he likes them, but we've been finding those rules leave us unsatisfied after we play a game, so this is fortuitous timing.

Comassion wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:
I'm reading through it now. It looks pretty good so far. The writing is good, which is important, though I have had to re-read a few sections to get a clean handle on the rules. It seems like a system that will snap into sharper focus once you start throwing some dice.

I'll try to get together some folks to give it a whirl some time in September. I am not big on space combat games, but a few of my friends are, and I have to say that I'd rather play something like Silent Fury than the systems that they have been trying to get me to play. Some space combat wargames are just waaaaay more complicated than I want to mess with on a Saturday night.

Thanks for the compliments - if you do get to play, I'd love to hear how it went. Do let me know if there are rules that you find unclear or confusing - I can clarify what's intended, and it also lets me know what areas of the rulebook may need improvement.

This might be answered somewhere in the rules I haven't gotten to yet, but I find the Action Hand to be a bit confusing.

It seems that during setup, each ship gets one of each of the types of Action Cards. Is each type of card the same then? Like, is an Attack action card always the same, and every ship has access to the same pool of orders (Defenses, Jump, Attack, Thrust, Crew)? It seems that his must be the case, as I do not see how the game works otherwise, but in the rules as written it is a bit vague, probably because cards suggest some form of randomization, and of course the crit and jump decks are randomized decks if I read the rules correctly.

So if I am reading it right, every ship can take any combination of three of the 5 available actions in every game turn, as the Repeat cards allow you to repeat actions, and are essentially the same card. So you can:

Attack, Attack, Attack
Defenses, Attack, Jump
Thrust, Defenses, Jump
Crew, Crew, Attack

And so forth.

If this is how the game works, tightening up the language in the rulebook may be a good idea. Something like:

"All ships in Silent Fury can perform 5 different types of actions (Attack, Defenses, Thrust, Crew, and Jump). [brief description of each]. In a game turn, a ship can be ordered to perform up to three actions, and ships are allowed to repeat any type of action if desired. For example, a ship could be ordered to Attack three times, or be ordered to Thrust, then Attack, and then engage Defenses. During the Orders phase, players decide which three actions a ship will perform during the game turn, and use the Action Cards to identify which orders a ship has been given. Action cards are placed face down in the three slots in the ship sheet for every ship in play. This way, players must commit to a sequence of actions without knowing which actions the ships of an opposing player will take."

Something like that may help to clarify things.

I'll have to take a look at the rules a bit closer but it looks like you put alot of work into it. The vector token idea is actually something that I encountered in an old Mekton Z/pre-Jovian Chronicles playtest game at gencon in the mid 90's and liked alot. They didn't use a hex board but rather just a regular star map (and pennies for the token) but the underlying principle/idea is the same. I've always wondered why more games haven't used it over the years.

weeble1000 wrote:


This might be answered somewhere in the rules I haven't gotten to yet, but I find the Action Hand to be a bit confusing.

It seems that during setup, each ship gets one of each of the types of Action Cards. Is each type of card the same then? Like, is an Attack action card always the same, and every ship has access to the same pool of orders (Defenses, Jump, Attack, Thrust, Crew)? It seems that his must be the case, as I do not see how the game works otherwise, but in the rules as written it is a bit vague, probably because cards suggest some form of randomization, and of course the crit and jump decks are randomized decks if I read the rules correctly.

So if I am reading it right, every ship can take any combination of three of the 5 available actions in every game turn, as the Repeat cards allow you to repeat actions, and are essentially the same card. So you can:

Attack, Attack, Attack
Defenses, Attack, Jump
Thrust, Defenses, Jump
Crew, Crew, Attack

And so forth.

If this is how the game works, tightening up the language in the rulebook may be a good idea. Something like:

"All ships in Silent Fury can perform 5 different types of actions (Attack, Defenses, Thrust, Crew, and Jump). [brief description of each]. In a game turn, a ship can be ordered to perform up to three actions, and ships are allowed to repeat any type of action if desired. For example, a ship could be ordered to Attack three times, or be ordered to Thrust, then Attack, and then engage Defenses. During the Orders phase, players decide which three actions a ship will perform during the game turn, and use the Action Cards to identify which orders a ship has been given. Action cards are placed face down in the three slots in the ship sheet for every ship in play. This way, players must commit to a sequence of actions without knowing which actions the ships of an opposing player will take."

Something like that may help to clarify things.

You are exactly correct in your assessment of how the cards work - all of the action cards are exact copies of each other (Similar to games like Race for the Galaxy where every player has the same action hand), the action hand is there to assign orders to ships - you have the same options every turn and select from the full set of options, and the repeat cards exist to let you repeat actions without having a 15-card hand.

Thanks for the rulebook suggestion - I'll likely incorporate it in some form in the next iteration of the rules. Recalling what I wrote, I put down the exact mechanics for what you do, but not the overall reason and context for what you're doing, which your paragraph describes nicely.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 frozenwastes wrote:
A friend of mine has been buying Firestorm Armada miniatures because he likes them, but we've been finding those rules leave us unsatisfied after we play a game, so this is fortuitous timing.

We love the Firestorm Armada models, and several have found their way into our own collection - we use a mismash of miniatures we've picked up from several universes, anything that looks good and fits in a hex is fair game to us.


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 warboss wrote:
I'll have to take a look at the rules a bit closer but it looks like you put alot of work into it. The vector token idea is actually something that I encountered in an old Mekton Z/pre-Jovian Chronicles playtest game at gencon in the mid 90's and liked alot. They didn't use a hex board but rather just a regular star map (and pennies for the token) but the underlying principle/idea is the same. I've always wondered why more games haven't used it over the years.

Vector tokens certainly weren't our original idea - we were first using 'vector hexes', where you'd use tokens on various sides of a hex to indicate the ship's current velocity (Attack Vector Tactical pretty much does this too, I found later), and our movement rules revolved around ways of changing your vector hex.

After showing a friend the game, he mentioned the vector tokens from a different game he'd played (I believe he called it 'drifter', but I never found exactly what it was). We tried it out and went through a couple different variations on the idea, and quickly dropped Vector hexes. It's a very elegant way to record inertial movement, and I think that any system that wants to try for inertial movement would do well to give it a look. It works great on a hexless starmap as well - I went with hexes for Silent Fury mainly to remove the 'fiddliness' that you otherwise get with things like determining weapon arcs and ranges, but like most games it will likely be possible to make some conversions to play the game on a hexless map if people are so inclined.

I'm pretty much through reading the rules and I'm liking what I'm seeing.

Probably my favorite idea is being able to use my 15mm sci-fi stuff on the ship sheets. But I don't quite have enough miniatures, so crew might have to be markers or beads of some sort.

A local store sells baggies of board game cubes like these. There also seems to be lots on eBay.

As for damage markers, i play a lot of Battletech and have no problem tracking individual spots of damage with a dry erase marker once the sheat is inside a plastic sleeve. Is there something about the markers that makes such an approach inappropriate?

Eventually I could see doing a little terrain project for each sheep where you make the different rooms, make flame markers and rubble bases and whatnot to depict what's going on inside the ship, but I think for testing it out I'll want to keep things simple until I know whether I really like the approach of these rules or not.

if you need someone to write fluff, I would really like to throw my hat into that and, I guess submit a story for you're criticizing? This game seems pretty good and you two having idea's of your own and not wanting to blindly copy GW as I have seen so often in the past.
OH! have like an expansion or something down the line and call it Silent Running

 frozenwastes wrote:
I'm pretty much through reading the rules and I'm liking what I'm seeing.

Probably my favorite idea is being able to use my 15mm sci-fi stuff on the ship sheets. But I don't quite have enough miniatures, so crew might have to be markers or beads of some sort.

No problem with that at all - I'd certainly advise people to give the game a shot with stuff you already have on hand or can obtain cheaply rather than go miniature hunting before you've even tried it. It doesn't need to look pretty for someone to see if they like the rules and how it plays.

As for damage markers, i play a lot of Battletech and have no problem tracking individual spots of damage with a dry erase marker once the sheat is inside a plastic sleeve. Is there something about the markers that makes such an approach inappropriate?

I've never tried doing it that way before, but I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work. If you have different colored markers that will probably help differentiate the damage types.

Eventually I could see doing a little terrain project for each sheep where you make the different rooms, make flame markers and rubble bases and whatnot to depict what's going on inside the ship, but I think for testing it out I'll want to keep things simple until I know whether I really like the approach of these rules or not.

That's pretty much my end-game for when I have a ton of free time and want to make the ultimate Silent Fury convention game, but even I haven't gone that far - yet.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Rainbow Dash wrote:
if you need someone to write fluff, I would really like to throw my hat into that and, I guess submit a story for you're criticizing? This game seems pretty good and you two having idea's of your own and not wanting to blindly copy GW as I have seen so often in the past.
OH! have like an expansion or something down the line and call it Silent Running

I appreciate the offer, but I actually do have my own universe in mind that I plan on fleshing out once the rules are done.

That said, if you have stories in mind, I can only encourage you to write them regardless of whether they're attached to a game system or not. Something worth reading on it's own is worth writing.

Well, our gaming group has green lighted trying this out. I told people about it and got lots of "this is the type of thing I've been waiting for in a starship game" so we're going to compile a list via email of who has what ships and 15mm sci-fi. One guy has lots of game board meeple cubes from Eclipse to use as crew. I'll be printing ship sheets and we'll keep the rules on a tablet for reference while we try the game out.

 frozenwastes wrote:
Well, our gaming group has green lighted trying this out. I told people about it and got lots of "this is the type of thing I've been waiting for in a starship game" so we're going to compile a list via email of who has what ships and 15mm sci-fi. One guy has lots of game board meeple cubes from Eclipse to use as crew. I'll be printing ship sheets and we'll keep the rules on a tablet for reference while we try the game out.

Awesome, I'm thrilled to hear it. Looking forward to what you guys think,.

We're almost done revising the 'free print' cards, which are the last piece of this rules release that you'll need to play. I expect to have them up tonight.

That will be great. Before I noticed they were the old version of the cards I was somewhat confuzzled.

I'll give the rules a spin this weekend with counters and tokens, and see how it rolls.

weeble1000 wrote:
That will be great. Before I noticed they were the old version of the cards I was somewhat confuzzled.

I'll give the rules a spin this weekend with counters and tokens, and see how it rolls.

Yeah, the reason they're outdated is mainly because this is a 2-man project that we work on in our spare time. When we update the rules and post them online, we have to revise the rulebook, revise every posted ship sheet, revise every posted scenario, revise our gamecrafter cards (consisting of four decks - the action cards, critical hit cards, forged in battle cards, and jump cards), then make those same revisions to the free cards that you can print out. It's a lot of work, and we've actually reduced the number of ships and scenarios that we have posted online in order to save time - if people end up playing through all the posted scenarios, we actually have several more that we can revise and put up as well if people want to try them. I'll trade scenarios for feedback.

Since we playtest with the gamecrafter cards in our own games they're usually our first priority, and the free cards tend to get done last since we generally don't use them ourselves (we have playtested with them to make sure they're functional, the GameCrafter ones are just plain better though). We do get to all of it eventually, and we'll be lighting a fire under it now that we have people who need them done.

Comassion wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:
That will be great. Before I noticed they were the old version of the cards I was somewhat confuzzled.

I'll give the rules a spin this weekend with counters and tokens, and see how it rolls.

Yeah, the reason they're outdated is mainly because this is a 2-man project that we work on in our spare time. When we update the rules and post them online, we have to revise the rulebook, revise every posted ship sheet, revise every posted scenario, revise our gamecrafter cards (consisting of four decks - the action cards, critical hit cards, forged in battle cards, and jump cards), then make those same revisions to the free cards that you can print out. It's a lot of work, and we've actually reduced the number of ships and scenarios that we have posted online in order to save time - if people end up playing through all the posted scenarios, we actually have several more that we can revise and put up as well if people want to try them. I'll trade scenarios for feedback.

Since we playtest with the gamecrafter cards in our own games they're usually our first priority, and the free cards tend to get done last since we generally don't use them ourselves (we have playtested with them to make sure they're functional, the GameCrafter ones are just plain better though). We do get to all of it eventually, and we'll be lighting a fire under it now that we have people who need them done.

I understand completely. Keeping an in-development rule set up to date is a chore, and it gets progressively harder once there are documents that reference the core rules. I appreciate you and your brother making Silent Fury available. You guys have put a ton of work into it and it looks like a fun system. I will certainly give you some feedback after we play a few games.

What might be nice would be some pointers on balanced ship construction/scenario design, if people are interested in doing their own scenarios. It is the kind of thing you can figure out playing the game a bunch, but what I like about the system is the wide open nature of ship design. It would be interesting to see some designers' notes, rules of thumb, etc. regarding designing ships from scratch.

The game also seems like it would be very 'scalable' in the sense that the ship rules are very abstract and interpretative. The compartments could be giant or small, for example, and the crew tokens could represent any number of crewmen.

weeble1000 wrote:


I understand completely. Keeping an in-development rule set up to date is a chore, and it gets progressively harder once there are documents that reference the core rules. I appreciate you and your brother making Silent Fury available. You guys have put a ton of work into it and it looks like a fun system. I will certainly give you some feedback after we play a few games.

What might be nice would be some pointers on balanced ship construction/scenario design, if people are interested in doing their own scenarios. It is the kind of thing you can figure out playing the game a bunch, but what I like about the system is the wide open nature of ship design. It would be interesting to see some designers' notes, rules of thumb, etc. regarding designing ships from scratch.

I'll keep that in mind for a future blog post, or even a design guidelines section of the website. I'm definitely planning on leaving ship (and even weapon) design wide open - there will be ship construction guidelines rather than ship construction rules, so players can make anything they want. The reason for this is that I think players tend to munchkinize when you try to constrain them (heck, I certainly do), and put forth the utmost effort to create the toughest, nastiest, most deadliest thing ever under the constraints they're given. If you remove any sort of restriction, that activity rapidly becomes pointless - you can design a ship with a million armor, but it doesn't make much sense to actually play with it, and someone else could build a 2-million armor ship just as quickly. I want the emphasis to be on designing interesting ships that work well within a scenario.

The game also seems like it would be very 'scalable' in the sense that the ship rules are very abstract and interpretative. The compartments could be giant or small, for example, and the crew tokens could represent any number of crewmen.

You have an eye for observation. Wherever possible I've tried to avoid assigning real values to anything the game treats as abstract.

Scalability is just one advantage of doing this. A Silent Fury game could be between massive capital ships with hundreds of crew per ship, or you could shift things down and play a game involving nothing but smaller strike craft with a handful of occupants.

The other advantage is that I don't have to deal with any more 'realism' than necessary. If I were to specify things like the volume of space a hex represents, and the length of time a turn represents, it would be easy to calculate just how many Gs a ship is under during its acceleration. Too few, and people will wonder why engines are so weak. Too many and people will wonder how the crew is able to survive those conditions. I'd feel inclined to take those factors into account when designing future ships and scenarios - but why worry about it when none of these things affect actual gameplay?

So is there a process for making ship sheets?

 frozenwastes wrote:
So is there a process for making ship sheets?

My brother creates them using Adobe Illustrator. I'll see if I can get him to hop on and describe the process.

Also, print n' play cards have been updated! Everything you need to play is ready. Go forth and enjoy.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

weeble1000 wrote:

What might be nice would be some pointers on balanced ship construction/scenario design, if people are interested in doing their own scenarios. It is the kind of thing you can figure out playing the game a bunch, but what I like about the system is the wide open nature of ship design. It would be interesting to see some designers' notes, rules of thumb, etc. regarding designing ships from scratch.

It's not quite what you asked for, but in response to this I'm going to document building the scenario we're working on now on our design blog. It should provide some of the information you're looking for - here's the first in the series: http://silent-fury.com/?p=746

I meant the rules side of things. Figuring out everything that needs to go on the ship sheet.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I meant the rules side of things. Figuring out everything that needs to go on the ship sheet.

Do you mean the weapon stats and diagrams, that sort of thing? We basically developed our own in-house design guidelines for how much armor and firepower a ship of a given size would generally have. I can probably dig those up if you're interested. We definitely play outside our own 'standards' every so often to give a ship some character.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I meant the rules side of things. Figuring out everything that needs to go on the ship sheet.

Do you mean the weapon stats and diagrams, that sort of thing? We basically developed our own in-house design guidelines for how much armor and firepower a ship of a given size would generally have. I can probably dig those up if you're interested. We definitely go outside our own 'standards' every so often to give a ship some character.

I get that it's primarily a scenario based game and that you design ships appropriate for a scenario, but there are lots of people who have expectations about what makes sense for a given miniature.

It looks like the space issue generally makes things work. If you start putting all the various systems in your limited locations, you're going to make a ship that makes sense and by concentrating on some systems and not others you'll be able to get some variety very easily.

But yeah, a ship design process is definitely something people will want.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I get that it's primarily a scenario based game and that you design ships appropriate for a scenario, but there are lots of people who have expectations about what makes sense for a given miniature.

It looks like the space issue generally makes things work. If you start putting all the various systems in your limited locations, you're going to make a ship that makes sense and by concentrating on some systems and not others you'll be able to get some variety very easily.

But yeah, a ship design process is definitely something people will want.

Hey there, the other half of the silent fury design team here.

Right now ship design is fairly touch-and-go. The main focus has been getting the core mechanics solid before creating any hard and fast ship creation rules.

Now, as my brother mentioned, we do have some guidelines we use for ship creation that I can outline here.

Ships are broken out into size categories of small, medium, large, and huge. The size is based on the number of components, 1-5 is small, 6-9 is medium, 10-15 is large, and 16-20 is huge.

The size categories determine a couple of things. First, more powerful weapons can only be mounted on larger ships (we've got an internal weapons chart that determines what weapons can go on what ships). Second, it determines what kind of thrust chart I'm going to use. Right now I keep three basic thrust charts per size category on standby, one for fast ships, one for maneuverable ships, and one for slow ships. I'll further tweak the thrust chart depending on the ship. Finally, the size plays a role in determining how much armor armor the ship will have. Small ships generally have armor values of 0-2, medium 2-3, large 3-5, and huge from 4-6. Armor is probably where there's the most current flexibility, though, as a general guideline, I try to have the total armor values on all sides be less than or equal to double the size of the ship, plus 1 (Mathematically think of it as armor <= (ship size x 2)+1) . If armor values exceed the formula, I'll give the ship a more restrictive thrust chart.

The only real hard and fast rule we have regarding component composition is that no more than half the components can be engines. Other than that, ships can mount any mixture of weapons, reactors, shields, cargo, even bridges.

A couple of further notes, only bridges can be armored, and you can not have any more than a single armored bridge on a ship. Armored bridges are buried deep within the hull of a ship, and cannot be targeted directly. To represent this, armored bridges have no number, and do not contribute to the size of a ship. A ship must be at least medium sized to mount an armored bridge.

We've also been experimenting with over sized components, mostly using them on defensive platforms. Basically, instead of being represented by a single number, they're represented by a range of numbers, thus making them more likely to be hit when the ship is hit.

Finally, we come to weapon arcs. We play pretty fast and loose when determining the arcs of weapons, but generally, the more powerful the weapon for the ship class, the more restrictive the arc. Arcs are also a great way to add flavor to a ship.

Finally, when it comes to connections, there's no real limit, but more connections will make a ship more susceptible to fire, and can make it harder to repel boarders. Fewer connections can make it difficult to actually move crew to a damaged component to get it repaired. The only rules when it comes to connections are that every component must be connected to at least one numbered component, and connections cannot intersect.


As I mentioned earlier, once things are good and solid with the main rules set, we'll look into making a more concrete set of rules. Though, to be honest, I'm not sure how much deeper they'll go beyond the above guidelines.