New player with a few questions

[BJ Walker]

Hi fellow Minifigs! I just found this set of rules, and I've got to say, it looks great. I hail from years fo gaming in general, and a 40K background for wargaming. Unless you count Risk and Monopoly, then I've been playing longer. Anywho, I've run into some problems with the rules and I've yet to even play a game! Sorry if I just missed the info, I've tried searching via ctrl+f to find the answers to no avail. I'll try to keep this short.

1. What does Volume stand for? It's not defined, near as I can tell, anywhere in the rules. I assumed it was along the lines of number of pieces used in the ship.

2. How do you attack? I see for how to roll damage, but I didn't see a roll to hit. Are attacks an automatic hit if they are in range?

3. Power is used to [upgrade] a ship in a sense. Do these numbers regenerate, or static at creation only?

4. Is there an easy explanation of movement? Seems a bit...daunting. At least to me. I'm used to "Unit A moves X inches". It's simpler, but I think i can see what you were going for here. I don't understand how ti works, per se, but I think I can see that it's mean't to be more realistic or tactical?

I think that's it for the moment. I'll come back if I find any more issues in learning the rules as they are posted now. I do see that it's a WIP. Thanks for any assistance you can render.

[James Shepherd]

Hey, glad you found us!  I've never played 40K myself, but I hope you can offer insights that those of us who are less familiar might miss.  Glad to have a fresh set of eyes on this stuff, in any case, so taking your questions in order:

1) Volume is determined as if the ship were a rectangular solid, and I need to highlight this on top of the Ship Creation page.  The gist is, measure the ship's longest, widest, and tallest dimensions then multiply those three numbers.

2) There's no to-hit roll, no - I think I'm going to add that back in as an optional rule, but since we usually deal with a great many ships and we want to keep things moving along, we just assume all attacks hit.

3) They don't upgrade, it's pretty much your static resource-pool you use to pay for a ship's abilities/upgrades at creation.  The idea is roughly "a ship this size has a reactor that puts out X power. If you use Y to power the engines, you only have X-Y left for everything else."

4) I've just this week been starting to look back over these pages and simplify/update the language.  Movement isn't too hard in actual practice, but does seem hard to explain.  The main thing to keep in mind is that the system is going for conservation of momentum - if a ship is moving 5 units per turn west and it doesn't speed up, slow down, or turn, it will keep moving 5 units west each turn until some force changes that movement.  Turning your ship on the table keeps track of direction and position, we usually track speed either with dry erase markers on a whiteboard battlefield or with dice/counters nearby.  Engines govern your ability to change speed, thrusters let you turn.  This is a simplification, but larger ships need to spend more power to get the same effect out of their engines.  That's the quick-and-dirty version, so hopefully that clears up at least the basics - if not, we'll work on more concrete examples.

Having someone new trying to get a handle on things gives me an incentive to go through and clarify, so hopefully, things should become more clear soon.  Please, keep the feedback coming, and welcome to the group!

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[BJ Walker]

Thanks! That sort of helped with movement. I guess I'll have to try and play it to see if I get it. Let's see if I can come up with a fw more things I noticed. 

1. You cleared up volume, and that, more or less, helps allot. I don't have models so I can't really do much with it yet. I will build some quick mocs and test it out.

2. AA to-hit roll cna be simple. Something like roll a d6, and if you roll a 4+ (4, 5, or 6) you hit. You can add a simple modifier for squadrons, like a +1 for x number of ships. Ex: for every 5 ships in the squadron of fighters, it's a +1. This could represent the sheer volume of incoming firepower, in that there si so much that some bullets will hit. Damage I don't think needs an adjustment (at first glance without playtesting).

3, I think I got it. It's basically, "here's a pool of points. Fix that hull up with them and go blast the crap out of that guys (or gals) ships!"

4. Hmm. I think I might understand. As I said, I'm used to other games. Ex: 40K trooper can move 6 inches. You don't worry about facing or turning, really, and if the enemy is in range you blast them. Warhammer Fantasy, I understand, has a facing rule, where to turn you have to use up part of your movement inches. I've never played fantasy, so I have avery rudimentary idea of how it works. If I say inches instead of units, I'm not trying to be a pain, it's just what I'm used to. Almost every game uses inches. Anyway, I can't think of an alternative to suggest. If I do, I'll shoot it over. 

New stuff!

A. Would it be possible to create a very simple template that can be printed out and would have firing arcs and/or other vital info? This way, you could place it at the ship and see the arc if it's in question? I'll create one myself and share if it helps brainstorming. I'm a big fan of simplified gaming, huge tactics, fun and entertainment. 

B. I think besides clarification/simplification, perhaps a quick-start guide might be a nice idea down the line?

C. Any good micro space sites? I need to get building some units and playtesting. :)

[Justin Hayes]

I've been following these guys for a while but this is my first post in the group. I also come from a 40K background with a bit of battlefleet gothic thrown in, flickr has several groups dedicated to microspace mocs and these guys have a group just for pictures of their games as well.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/1748264@N22/   Microflleet Wars group.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/microspace/pool    The Lego Microspacetopia Pool

[James Shepherd]

1. Glad to hear it, but honestly, I think we've just measured objects close to hand which are the rough size we want in scale and played with those.  It might actually be interesting to see this game played with 40K...thingies.  (I honestly don't know what the generic term for units is there.)

2. Roll to hit can be easy, I agree - my issue is more from a game design standpoint - is it necessary?  Let's just say that right now, hypothetically, we considered the damage spread too wide on a d6 and switched to d4 for damage.  And let's say that we wanted to give the attacker a roll-to-hit and the defender a roll-to-dodge/block/miss/whatever.  We could adjust the probabilities on how often an attacker successfully attacks, but...in the end, haven't we approximated a bell curve, to some degree?  Sure, if we failed to-hit rolls or got critical hits sometimes, that would be moments of "aww, fail!" and "hah!  triumph!"  but depending on the size of your fleet, that can turn into more rolls to keep track of quickly.  So in a small, tactical encounter - some bombers and their escorts find a lone picket patrol and its fighter wing, for example - roll-to-hit works for me, but I don't think I want to mandate that as "The Rules."

3. I think you got it - would it help if we called it "energy" and not "power?"  Since "power" can often mean "attack strength" or "awesomeness" or whatever else?  Or perhaps "starting power" or "energy pool?"  The gist is "this is how many jiggawatts your reactor can pump out, max," so it's a matter of labels at that point.

4. I think I gotta kill one of my sacred cows.  Sure, Newtonian spaceflight might make sense to me and may work for our universe, but I don't need to mandate that for everyone - what if I changed the rules to simplify it down to "Engines -> inches you can move in distance, Thrusters -> 45 degree arcs you can turn?"  We'd have to test and balance that a bit - since large ships can't just get up to speed and coast - but I think we have enough power in our proposed ship-building changes to accommodate it easily.  If momentum and speed are something you eventually get comfortable enough with to add back in, you may then find yourself pleasantly surprised with the power you didn't have to put into movement.  I should also note that Unit is generic distance for a reason - if you want to use 40K armies and inches for playtesting, be my guest, because there's nothing inherent to Lego or Lego spacecraft that is needed for play.  Just happens to be our point of entry into swooshing around and shooting pewpews at each other.

What do you guys think about all that?

[Rich Schoonover]

1.  The volume measurement works well since it defines enough space to a lot for many different shapes sizes of ships.  We rarely question a ships class using this measurement type.  I think scale has a lot to do with measurement and interpretation of what size some ships should be.  Instead of using a 2x4 brick that we use most of the time you can use a 1x2 brick for one unit.  It is have the length of the 2x4, but fighters are much more difficult to build in that scale since they really can’t be much bigger that 2x8 brick.  We have started using individual fighters to represent squadrons of fighters at our 2x4 scale, and that seems to a better way to do that.  The measurement is not entirely necessary if you want ships to mostly represent a ship and not necessarily its size in comparison to other ships.  Using a single fighter represent a squadron of fighters may not really represent the space 6 fighters take up in space, but they do better represent a squadron of fighters that may be at half that scale.  I think as long as everyone agrees what models should represent the different class of ships and how that compares to the scale measurement may not be entirely necessary.

2.  An early version of this game had to-hit rules, and I suggested its addition.  After playing the game with to-hit rules  we found that it was bit cumbersome for game play.  The rounds took much longer to resolve, and some of it began to not make a lot of sense.  I fighter rolling to see if there missile hits a ship that moving a fifth of its speed and is have a kilometer long doesn’t make sense.  If you can’t make a dumb fire missile hit in those conditions let alone a fire and forget missile then you shouldn’t be flying space ships.  I played battle tech for years and the to-hit rule made more sense among units that are nearly the same size and  that you were firing a weapon form an undulating vehicle at another vehicle that was undulating as well.  What made less sense is rolling to hit on missiles that should be somewhat guided to there target.  This is also suppose to be the future with better technology I would hope.  We have shouldered fired missiles these days that should be able to easily hit the equivalent of a good year blimp in the sky.  On the other side battle ships targeting fighters using point defense weapons could use radar tracking to acquire targets and fire or work autonomously.

3.  I think “power” and “energy”  are easily transposable.  Power could be interpreted as exerted energy, not everything we a lot with this points use electricity or energy to work.  Armor is a more passive component, that uses no energy from the ship.  Engines, weapons, and electronics packages all use energy.  Power points are also spent on missiles and crew that use power in a different ways and have less cost.  You can call it whatever you want it is strange attribute in our game that represents not only the offensive and defensive capability of the ship, but also represents the capacity the ship has to carry out different roles such as bing a battle ship or being a carrier.  The number of points limits the number of different roles the ship can play and its effective ability.

4. I know we use some of the newtonian physics in this game, and that may not be simple to follow.  The method of allotting a set amount of movement distance to the amount of energy is expended to move a ship of a certain size.  Assigning a set movement range to a class 6 wouldn’t work because since ships can be configured so differently.  I f acceleration was not used in the case of bigger ships under our current energy configuration would mean that large ships would be set with a very limited movement which may not always be the case.  I think we could drop the newtonian physics as long as we could still effectively capture the range some ships can cover in a round and taking the acceleration that they can accumulate over the number of rounds.  In order to keep to allow individual ships to have their customized movement rate, we would need a formula that would account for power invested and the mass of the ship.  Battle tech used a similar method that used a ratio of engine power versus tonnage to assign a set number of walking movement points, and a set number of running points.  We could have standard cruising speed and a afterburner speed.

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