3rd Edition Rules

[Hawkeye]

I just got Imperial Starfire from Noble Knight Games and Alkelda Dawn, Crusade, Sky Marshal 1 and First Contact from Troll and Toad. Still waiting for Starfire 3rd (which should be here any day now)
Not cheap, I have to admit (80 bucks for Imperial and 3rd each) but I have spend more money on less worthy things.

Unfortunately, according to their web pages, those were the last ones they had, but it shows that if you keep looking, you might come up lucky.


PS: I am going through Imperial right now.
Holy cow! Will take some while to get my head around all those rules

[MWadwell]

PS: I am going through Imperial right now.
Holy cow! Will take some while to get my head around all those rules

Could be worse - it could be GSF/Ultra! 

[Steve Walmsley]

I just got Imperial Starfire from Noble Knight Games and Alkelda Dawn, Crusade, Sky Marshal 1 and First Contact from Troll and Toad. Still waiting for Starfire 3rd (which should be here any day now)
Not cheap, I have to admit (80 bucks for Imperial and 3rd each) but I have spend more money on less worthy things.

Unfortunately, according to their web pages, those were the last ones they had, but it shows that if you keep looking, you might come up lucky.


PS: I am going through Imperial right now.
Holy cow! Will take some while to get my head around all those rules

Interesting that you are paying so much for older versions of the rules when the latest versions are so much cheaper . That was my favourite version though by some distance. I still occasionally read through the background material, particularly for Stars at War, Crusade and ISW4.

Steve

[Paul M]

Weber wrote very entertaining rules, and the back ground material if you divorce it from the game mechanics is very good.  For the most part the interludes in the Stars at War bear no relationship to what would happen if you play the scenario.  I found this to particularily jarring with the start of ISW3, where even role playing I could not achieve anything similar to what the interlude suggested happened.  Based on my experience the interludes are written to generate overall an interesting story as you read through the book.

I got my start with Avalon Hill Board games, I don't find the rules in starfire either complex or well written, although again they are entertaining to read something that Squad leader is not.  I do find them confusing and unclear because of statements like "a presser beam is for all intents and purposes a reverse polarity tractor beam." Worse by the end of the muddle over IS+3rdR+SM2+other publications finding a rule is a pain dans la derriere.

Still it works, and that is the key point.  It works better when you have SFA to do a lot of the fiddle faddle for you.  Also the newer rules have the advantage that they tend to be more organized, and well I find aspects of them too "balanced" or "bland" that is really a matter of personal taste and there are a number of things I like in Galactic Starfire, I just could never get the locals interested in a campaign because there was no GSFA program.

[Erik L]

I got my start with Avalon Hill Board games, I don't find the rules in starfire either complex or well written,

My first wargame was Star Fleet Battles. The second was Fed & Empire... Starfire was very simple after those

[miketr]

My first wargame was Star Fleet Battles. The second was Fed & Empire... Starfire was very simple after those

Fed and Emp was complex compared to Starfire?  SFB I can understand.

Michael

[welchbloke]

Fed and Emp was complex compared to Starfire?  SFB I can understand.

Michael

I'm playing my first F&E campaign in over 5 years and with all of the available expansions, I wouldn't call F&E complex but it does require a significant amount of brain power compared to a lot of other games.  SFB is still the most complex game I've played without the safety net of computer assistance

[Paul M]

SFB pales besides Renegade Legion: Interceptor.  The only time I played it was on a computer and after that when I first saw the rules I just shuddered.  Determining an internal hit was a complex path depending on which armour block was penetrated.

SFB I recall playing a huge amount of as teenager, it only was complex due to the fact it grew and morphed and so much like in SF you had this whole hunt for rule x in book y...oh it isn't book y it is book w.  After Squad Leader, and its 3 expansions I think my brain was affected for life.  What was interesting was if you went back and played an earlier scenario in Squad Leader with a lot of the later rules it really tended to change dramatically.  But my view is that Steel Panthers is pretty much squad leader on a computer.

I was a huge fan of the SFB system but where I hated it was when you attempted to do squadron battles.  Those...didn't work so well.  I was a big fan of the Kzinti and the Hydrans I have to admit.  Still for star trek battles what I perfered was the rules from the role playing game.  The starfleet command computer games were also a good conversion of the SFB battle system as was in many ways what they did in STO.

I'm still trying to find someone to play Assault Vector Tactical and Squadron Strike with.  Nice rules but fully 3D newtonian movement makes it a bit tougher than move 5 spaces on a hex grid with a turn mode of 2.

The worst combat system rules I have ever encountered though has to be what is written for D&D.  I'm all but certain it is intentionally written to be convoluted and imposible to understand because D&D combat is trival and is nothing more than slightly modified minature rules yet it takes them 80 pages to describe in full glory a system based on rolling a d20 and then rolling a yd(x). 

[Erik L]

The only thing I recall being complex about RL:I was the damage. The rest seems to be to my memory, fairly easy. But then I was also a good 8 or 9 years older when I got it.

I never played ASL or the like. The closest would be either Richthofen's War or Blue Max, but those were fairly simple also.

The sheer volume of rules in SFB is what made them so complex I think. And the fact that later books superseded various things. I know I cut the binding off my books and put them in a 3 ring binder.

[Paul M]

I was thinking about the damage allocation specifically in RL:I.  The movement and such was straight forward.

What made SFB complex was the sheer number of tiny details they had.  Each new system had to have all sorts of bells and whistles and six different operating modes and 4 excpeptions to 3 different other weapons and so forth.  Add in then that every race had their specific special abilities.  And well exciting optional interactions such as boarding parties with a further set of rules.

How many different shuttles could you make by the end it must have been almost 10?  Then ECM and ECCM rules...sensor rules...nebula rules...special rules covering things like speed changes...and exceptions to the speed change rules under circumstance 12.  The task was to hold enough of it in your head so you could filter out the shlock stuff and "min-max" your way forward.  Best was to pick a race or a couple or races and get good at playing them was my feeling.  The nice thing about the game was the different races had ships that although essentially the same were quite unique.  A Gorn ship was not a Romulan ship even if both used plasma weapons.  A Kzinti ship was unique to itself.  Klingon tactics differred significantly to Federation ones even for similar ships.  It is what I think was lost in GSF...all weapons are essentially the same thing generic damage delivery device 1 versus GDDD2 rather than the difference between distrupters and photon torpedoes.

I have to say that fighters and pseudo-fighters were the start of my hatred of the whole concept of space fighters.  I view them ultimately as large slow missiles, and so long as a missile is a credible threat that requires a response then a fighter is a death trap.  Why I like Aurora's way of dealing with them much better.  I'm still more a Leviathan fan.  Yes...fire crowbar...thunderstrike!  You can just imagine the whole ship torguing about under the impact of a half ton of highspeed steel.  Fighters are just a device that makes the fight more immediate and meaningful to the reader/viewer as it is personal as opposed to the rather impersonal combat between captial ships.  I consider them a crutch for the director or writer at the end of the day.

[MWadwell]

I was thinking about the damage allocation specifically in RL:I.  The movement and such was straight forward.

To be honest, RL:I is a favourite of mine, and every so often I fire up dosbox and play it again.....

What made SFB complex was the sheer number of tiny details they had.  Each new system had to have all sorts of bells and whistles and six different operating modes and 4 excpeptions to 3 different other weapons and so forth.  Add in then that every race had their specific special abilities.  And well exciting optional interactions such as boarding parties with a further set of rules.

Sounds like Ultra (cough cough) (I've never read the rules, but some of the critism I've seen about Ultra is it's size.)

[Erik L]

Sounds like Ultra (cough cough) (I've never read the rules, but some of the critism I've seen about Ultra is it's size.)

I think the last copy of SFB I got weighed in around 1000 pages. Not counting the 10 or 12 books of SSDs.

[Paul M]

1000 pages?  Holy cow on a broomstick.

Clearly they kept going after I stopped playing.  It was already a pretty seriuos 3 ring binder if I recall correctly.  What I liked was we used the cards to do damage...a precurser of card based gaming I guess but it was much more fun then rolling dice.  Especially when you got to blow up the 3D chess set!

[welchbloke]

1000 pages?  Holy cow on a broomstick.

Clearly they kept going after I stopped playing.  It was already a pretty seriuos 3 ring binder if I recall correctly.  What I liked was we used the cards to do damage...a precurser of card based gaming I guess but it was much more fun then rolling dice.  Especially when you got to blow up the 3D chess set!

They are up to R12 for the Alpha Octant with expansions for the Omega Octant, the Magellanic Cloud (pre-Andro and during Andro Invasion) and another galaxy whose name escapes me right now.

[Paul M]

Lets just say I clearly am behind the times...wow...that is impressive.  I only vaguely remember the andromedian monitors with their energy absorbing panels or whatever and some kind of death ray dodad.

ah so...a light just dawned...as the next abomination, and retconprise came out they kept updating the game...  Borg cubes in SFB...

Sorry I'm still stuck back in the 1980s of the game!  Like discussing AD&D with people who play the 4th Edition.