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One thing I've noted is that, fun as they are, most space combat games tend to be very 'zoomed in' on a couple of capital ships (Starfleet Battles, Attack Wing, Armada), or at most a light task force of half a dozen to a dozen ships (Battlefleet Gothic, A Call To Arms, implied Dropfleet Commander).

I don't recall ever seeing a game which would allow you to do battles like those shown in At All Costs, Into The Fire, or Sacrifice of Angels (or at least meaningful chunks of them). A 40k-equivalent game often has upwards of 60 odd models of varying sizes on the table - albeit grouped into units - without difficulty.

Would it work trying to do a space combat game on a similar scale? Are you aware of one? What elements would be needed to get the right 'feel' of a space combat game?

Halo Fleet Battles has about 50 ships in the box so it is intended for fairly big fleets.

Here are some possible other ideas.

http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=170576

In design terms what the rules need to do is combine the movement of several ships into one flotilla, and abstract firing and damage into more general factors rather than individual weapons and system.

Historical naval games like General Quarters or Wooden Ships and Iron Men give some ideas about how to do this.

All-Escort Eldar / all-escort Orks are viable in BFG, and likely more effective than Capitol-based fleets.

The real issue is time and space. If you need to physically wrangle something like an EVE Online megabattle, you have a problem.


Although, in this case, it's dozens of super-capitol ships firing doomsday weapons, supported by hundreds of capitol ships, themselves supported by thousands of sub-capitol ships...

Without aggregation, it's not possible to manage on the tabletop in a reasonable timeframe. Even time dilation becomes an issue...

I suppose you could "zoom out" a bit. Just like how Warhammer or Kings of War make the basic unit of gameplay the regiment of dozens of figures rather than a single warrior, you could have a game where you control multiple squadrons of ships, rather than multiple individual ships.

The focus of the game would be different, though - more about command and control, making sure you issue the right orders, and not about which ships have which particular weapons, whether they've got a firing solution on the enemy, etc (that's for the ships' captains to worry about). With sufficiently large fleets, even the precise formations of those squadrons needn't be explicitly represented (that's for squadron commanders and lower-ranked admirals to worry about).

One such game is Space Dreadnought 3000 from Kallistra. IIRC, one hex represents an entire star system, so a fleet battle is simply having some of my ships in the same hex as yours. There's no tactical manoeuvre - that's all abstracted way down in the rules. That might be too high a level of abstraction, though - you have these massive fleet battles represented by two or three miniatures, which is probably the exact opposite of what you want.

One game I remember being good at fleet level stuff was Starfire (and Imperial Starfire, the campaign expansion) by Task Force Games. Been a while since I broke open the boxes to read it, so I’m shooting quite a bit from memory.

The main thing that stands out was the ship stats and damage tracks. IIRC each ship was defined by 2-3 stats and a line of letters. So a light ship might look something like this:

SSALEE

Which would translate into Shield(x2), Armor, Laser, Engine (x2). This is a bit of a simplification, as there were a lot more options. But damage would basically start on the left and check off letters. The nice thing about this system was you could have whole fleets all on one piece of paper. Rather then something like SFB where every ship was it’s own page, plus another page of energy allocation.

I think it was a good compromise between granular damage and bookkeeping. You could have whole fleets operating, and actually damage things more then just a full strength/flip counter for damaged system.

That's how it worked.

You can play quite big games with Star Fire though you are tracking the movement, shooting and damage o individual ships so if you use a lot of ships it inevitably starts to take a long time.

The original edition rules are a lot snappier than the most recent 3rd edition.

Silent Death is another good space game I played a lot of. It’s fighters, with only low-end capital ships. I think the largest game we did was a score or so units on either side.

The one thing that was an issue was torpedoes. They were launched and tracked and moved individually, so once they hit the table things bogged down. Before you moved a ship you would have to see what torps were locked on it, and how many would reach you depending where you moved.

I really liked the to hit/damage mechanics in SD though.