I own Galactic Starfire, and I have made spreadsheets to handle it, but my solo game collapsed when I ran into my first NPR and I realised I would have to make a set of 3 EXCEL spreadsheets for it and every other race in the game.  I don't think spreadsheets work, and I have played Starfire Play By Mail where I had a binder full of system data sheets and so on, I have also played PBEM with spreadsheets but only for a single race.  What I would never want to do is run a game like that.  Marvin likes short games with small numbers of stars...for that the overhead may be sufficiently small you can do it as a spacemaster.  That this sort of game tends to keep fleet sizes small and the changes to starfire's mechanics push the exponential growth till later likely means the game is over before the paperwork crushes it.

SFA makes the sort of games that Kurt, myself and starslayer, or for that matter Steve played possible.  Frankly I have never seen a game aid with the features of SFA, when I have tried to interest Starslayer in Galactic Starfire or other systems (Squadron Strike, or VBAM) it is "does it have a SFA-like program?" ... as the answer is always no, we stick to starfire 3rdE or play Stellaris.

kurt, do you actively like 6th, or was that possibility just a brief impulse?  kiero, do you have a strong opinion?


i disliked 5th so strongly i just passed on 6th.  now im kind of looking for an excuse to buy it, even though the odds of any non-solitaire 6e campaign ever existing seem remote.

Starfire Assistant is for 3rd edition revised. The later editions are so different they are incompatible with SA.

FOUND IT!!! cunningly nestled betwixt the nethers in SM#2. . .  and right next to it the Machine Race and J'rill rules I was after!

so, to go back to my earlier question, to use Hive/machine/J'rill, is it as simple as setting the Government type in SA and that's it, SA takes care of the rest?

or is there somewhere else I need to click?

cheers again

I believe it's as simple as selecting hive/machine/J'Rill race type in SA.  Hive races, in particular, are seamless in that SA takes care of everything below your notice, but with machine and J'Rill you have to actually understand how the rules work to play the races. 

Kurt

The J'Rill rules are in Alkelda Dawn. They are also in the unpublished unified rules for 3rd edition, but I don't want to quote large sections of that or I will probably end up with copyright issues