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A BILLION SUNS by Mike Hutchinson (Gaslands)

It’s what I’ll call a starship skirmish game. You don’t pick a faction. You don’t write a list. You don’t really play as an admiral. Rather, you take on the role of a corporate executive. Venturing out into the black of space means facing the risk of taking your enterprise into the red, financially. Your main decision point is figuring out how much you need to invest to get jobs done profitably.

Using the trumps from a normal pack of playing cards, the players construct a deck for generating a scenario. Each card represents a Contract: mining asteroids, hunting dangerous space kraken, hacking comms satellites, etc. The players draw three Contracts per scenario. Some of these (fully half of them) entail adding additional play spaces and you could end up playing across 1-4 play spaces at once, with ships possibly jumping back and forth between them. There isn’t a set play space size. Looking over the weapons ranges and ship speeds, I think the smallest area would be 1’ x 1’ but this is just my personal opinion.

Once the scenario is set up, the game can begin. But wait, what about building your force? This isn’t a matter of writing a list before the game, as in most miniatures games; rather, it’s a central aspect of playing during a game of A Billion Suns. Throughout the course of the game, each player has access to a theoretically infinite number of units called Battlegroups that is practically limited by (a) how many minis you actually have available in your collection and, more importantly in strategic terms, (b) the fact that deploying Battlegroups costs Credits and Credits are what you’re trying to earn by completing Contracts. So you have to go into VP debt before you even have a chance of earning VPs and (hopefully) eventually moving into positive VPs (i.e., profit). This is one factor in game balance.

The other balancing factor is that all players have access to the same 13 classes of starships. The cheapest option is a wing of recon starfighters, which costs 1 Credit to deploy. On the other end of the spectrum are 40-Credit battleships. As mentioned above, you deploy units of starships called Battlegroups that consist of 1-5 starships of the same class. All the starships in a Battlegroup activate together, are targeted together, and take damage together. So you can see there is a pretty huge range of costs for Battlegroups, from 1 Credit to 200 Credits. The game handles this scope because it is played at scales numbered 1-10. The scale number is a variable that allows the same 12 Contracts to be playable in quick games involving a handful of Credits worth of starships as well as ones involving hundreds of Credits of investment that might take hours to finish. Suggested starting scale is 3.

One of the variables scale controls is how many Credits are available to earn during the game. This is also scalable by number of players. For example, a 2-player game at scale 3 has a maximum possible revenue of 36 Credits. Note this could not even cover the cost of deploying a single battleship; doing so means climbing out of debt during the game would be impossible. Making the (impossibly) generous assumption that you will earn half of the maximum revenue, you only have 18 Credits to spend deploying starships to break even. The most powerful ship you could deploy in this scenario would be a cruiser, the third most costly class at 15 Credits. Of course what could you even accomplish with only one ship with a 3 Credit margin to break even?

That analysis doesn’t consider action economy. It’s too complicated to analyze generally because of the variety of Contracts. But in a 2-player game at scale 3, it’s possible for a 2-starship Battlegroup or two 1-starship Battlegroups to score a total of 10 Credits by Round 1 in one of the Contracts. The most profitable way to do this is obviously using starships that cost 1 Credit each to deploy. Meanwhile a single starship, like our powerful cruiser, could score a maximum of 6 Credits in the same circumstances, leaving us at a 9 Credit deficit instead of an 8 Credit profit. But these 1-Credit ships are obviously far more vulnerable to attack by competitors. Whether that will be profitable for them, however, is yet another level of analysis. So far s I can tell, you never directly earn Credits by attacking/destroying your opponents starships. Rather the purpose for doing so is to hobble their ability to work on Contracts and, in the most efficient cases, increase your own probability of completing them instead.

A Billion Suns is thus not primarily about starship combat as such. Nonetheless, the Contracts provide for plenty of opportunity for hostilities. The question is, can you afford them?

@EasyE

That’s a completely reasonable reaction to my post. I only talked about two aspects which to me seem the most novel developments for miniatures wargaming, probably because they are more at home in board games. But rest assured, the bulk of the rules consists in how you move starships around and how they fight each other — i.e., stuff that if it appeared in a board game, one might say, huh well this should be a miniatures game.

@chaos0xomega

I’ve seen the concerns from a few people about low player interaction but in other AARs I read about all kinds of PvP. I don’t have a good picture of whether this is a game issue or a player issue. And I tend to see it as a little of both. As to the game having little room for adjustment/correction; I think that may be more of a player issue than a game issue. There are a lot of moving parts in ABS and that makes it hard to believe that there are unbeatable optimal approaches that can be discovered after, say, three plays.

I certainly agree. I was big supporter of this back when AoS first debuted to much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Ramming speed in ABS is ... FTL “speed.” Jumping ships of mass > n into ships of mass = n causes “jump shock” damage!

 Easy E wrote:
I hope you put some of this content on your blog....

I ordered some starship models from Brigade and some other bits and bobs from here and there. I plan on writing up a blog post depicting the scale 1 solo game Mike uses as the introduction to the game, where a wing of starfighters attacks a space station. Stay tuned!

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Please tell me more of this “jump shock”.

Even huge starships are as nothing against the vast emptiness of space. So physical collisions are not merely statistically unlikely (an understatement!) but would actually take quite a bit of effort to achieve. Think about IRL attempts to land probes on asteroids. The only two examples of physical collision in ABS that I can think of are (a) star fighters and light utility ships (e.g., freighters) deploying from/back onto carriers and (b) torpedoes. In the former case, both parties are cooperating to achieve the “collision” and the vehicles are engineered around making success possible/probable. Likewise, in the latter case, a torpedo is purpose-built to achieve (hostile) collision. It’s worth noting that the only vehicles capable of delivering torpedoes in ABS are bomber wings, suggesting that, even considering the torpedoes own onboard guidance systems, a relatively nimble craft is required to properly line up a shot.

What about missiles? They aren’t explicitly mentioned but the really big starships (cruisers and battleships) have defense grids. These are auxiliary weapons, meaning they can fire passively, e.g., when hostile starships move into their range and arc, in addition to actively. The primary weapons systems of these big ships are high-powered and have considerable minimum ranges (12”!) so defensive grids help protect the capital starships up close. The fact that only the largest ships have defense grids implies that they are sophisticated systems that probably require dedicated crews. So if defense grids do implicate missiles, we can see again how it would be another demonstration of how difficult it is to achieve collisions, particularly hostile collisions, in space.

So that’s a long winded way of explaining why one starship physically ramming another one is probably too difficult to be a useful tactic. The other consideration is, such a tactic is utterly anathema to the military-industrial paradigm. Starships are costly resources and intentionally destroying one’s own assets is at least irrational. But of course the larger issue, quite literally, is simply the nearly unimaginable scales of distance relative to speed and therefore time to evade.

In contrast to the relatively infinitesimal physical size of even huge starships, jumping from μ-space back into real space gravitationally impacts a huge volume of space. Obviously, this correlates to the mass of the object causing the gravitational ripple. So the volume of space impacted has radius M, where M = mass of the starship jumping in, and causes Md6 attacks with damage 1 against starships of mass < M caught in that volume. To be sure, attacks made on d6s with damage 1 are hardly cataclysmic (equivalent to some of the lower end weapons systems in the game). Still, it shows how a kind of “ramming” tactic is possible even in a game that (IMO realistically) does not allow for physically driving your starship into another one.

Davout wrote:
I missed out on Battle fleet Gothic and am hoping this scratches that same itch.

I don’t think it will. BFG is basically WW1-era naval combat transported to space. What I mean is, the fundamental conceit of games like BFG is that rival nation-states have assembled fleets of ships for the purpose of destroying one another. By contrast, ABS is about corporations risking valuable assets for the chance to reap a profit. In the Core Systems Contract deck (included in the rulebook), the actual object is never to directly engage with rival corporation starships. Doing so may be a means to an end but it isn’t the end itself. Now, this may change with later Contract decks. One planned deck is called the Warzone deck.

In an interview from some time back, Mike said ABS “is striving to be very much a ‘science-fiction’ game, not a reskinned naval game.” I think this is the big draw for me. As much as I hope GW eventually resurrects BFG, the notion of Jutland IN SPAAACE with generic miniatures has limited appeal to me in addition to being done, done, done, and done. Oh, and done some more. On the FB group, one poster has been describing ABS as a “puzzle game” — which admittedly isn’t really a genre of miniatures games, so far as I know. Obviously, any given situation in a game can be described as a “puzzle” to some extent but most miniatures games are more about players challenging each other rather than trying to solve a complex set of problems not directly related to eliminating the other guy’s forces. To me, this lends a kind of rationalist flavor to ABS that feels more like classical sci fi than, say, Star Wars or BSG (much as I have loved those franchises over the years).

One of the implications of this, which is really a matter of ABS’s core structure, that I have not seen discussed is the potential here for solo gaming. None of the Core Systems contracts assume another player as necessary to the way the scenario works. Even more interesting, because maximum revenue is scaled to number of players there is a pretty strong implication that solo games can fit into multiplayer campaigns. If a group only meets every so often, and this would of course be particularly relevant given current events, or if some members cannot make every session, players need not fll behind. Just play a solo game and post an AAR.

This is also one of those cases where rules imply setting. Maximum revenue in a multiplayer game is much higher, by a factor of the number of players participating, than in a solo game. Systems without many resources simply don’t attract the same attention from the spacefaring megacorps as the wealthy, busy ones. A corporation unlike a state does not generally claim territory in the sense of sovereign control. That would entail some level of governance, which is cost inefficient. Nevertheless, in the vast stretches between the billions suns, there must be certain “backfield” sectors even in the core region where the margins are thin but worthwhile, especially considering the lack of competition.

I guess that depends on what you consider the defining feature of such computer games.

This game has finally been released in the US!