I have an assortment of spacecraft miniatures I've gathered over the years, from Star Trek (Star Fleet Battles, FASA's Spaceship Tactical Simulator) and I use the Klingon ships the most, Babylon 5 (hmm, maybe it's time for the Shadows to make an appearance today...), Battlestar Galactica, Traveller (although only civilian ships so only use those when making a "ragtag" fleet  :roll: ), Silent Death, Full Thrust, to Star Wars plastics which need to be rebased to use on a hex grid. I have used my Italian WW2 naval vessels at times (only time I get to use them, no one is playing naval games around here).

I realize that the fleet composition is mostly a fluff thing, but I've seen fluff make it into the rules in other games. I don't want that with this subject, or even mentioned in the rules as an option.  Listing the ships and some doctrines of a "sovereign power" as part of some universe is one thing, but perhaps make some alien race have some other doctrines so people don't get it in their heads that one way is how it has to be. 

I didn't say that only the ships of the line mattered. By all means, have various sizes of ships in your sovereign powers' arsenal (whether that's Earth Alliance, The Republic, Klingons, or the Glenians Space Fleet   8-) ).  Do not require me to have to put together a near fixed formation or task force composition for ship battles that just so happens to follow one century's naval doctrine out of the many centuries of naval warfare of one small planet.

I think the whole idea of having to have certain ship elements in a space fleet is an archaic notion.  If you want to play a naval game, then play a naval game.

Air forces do not do this to such a degree. About the most they have is bombers and fighters to protect them, and even then the fighters are not with the bombers in one armada from start to finish. No medium bombers escort the large bombers and even smaller bombers escort those.

Space is another medium entirely. Space fleets may compose of other options and concepts. Perhaps it'll have both elements of naval and air forces, or perhaps not be related at all. Hopefully we'll never have to find out.

Well, learn something new every day.

Never even used that rule as I didn't even know about it.

But I doubt it would make much of a difference, perhaps maybe cripple the D5; the combat was pretty one-sided.

Re: ship/planet/troop combat

Borrowing from an old computer game (PLATO empire, it's on the wikipedia): a player controlled ship could bombard a planet while in orbit, killing some of the ground forces but taking damage. After several bombings and damage taking the ship would break orbit, spend time repairing, then go back to the planet and resume bombing.  It was time consuming, but you could whittle the planet's troops down to a minimal value ("remaining troops are too well dug in to be destroyed"); and hope you weren't attacked by another player's ship in the meantime (or have friendly ships guarding you). Then you can drop your own troops (there were limitations on how many you can carry) with an exchange rate of 1:1 and take over the planet.

I've written up some rules to do the same for a campaign, as yet untested, with changes to adapt to Starmada.  In short, a ship can bombard a planet at range 1 for one round of combat per strategic movement/combat phase if no enemy ships present, firing every weapon (arcs don't matter in this case). Each damage point destroys 1 troop.  The planet's defensive systems fire back like an Anti-fighter battery, the number of AFBs depend on the number of troops on the planet at the start of the bombardment ( for now 1 per 500 troops, may be too few AFBs, but...); at EVERY ship that bombards the planet that strategic phase (cuts down on deciding who they should fire at.. trying to keep this simple and quick).  The AFBs probably won't really hurt ships much, but repair is not that easy to do, and ships may be damaged from recent ship combat.  Testing would be the only way to adjust the defensive fire so it's hurtful but not extremely so.  I have a limit on how many troops can be on a planet (2500 max for good production planets, 1000 max for not-so good prodution planets).

Next phase would be transferring troops to the planet to do ground combat, exchange range a simple 1:1.

I did try an experiment. I had designed some ships with various defenses but the firepower seemed weak. So I went the other extreme and designed a couple of ships with similar weapons and no defenses, they had a lot more weapons.  The largest one died in one round.  So much for all that firepower.

Glen Tzu saying derived from this experiment:
The longer you survive the more you can harass the enemy.

In game terms:
The longer you survive the longer you get to play.

8-)

I design all sorts of ships, usually trying to match the style or feel of the miniatures I have.  They just rarely stand up to the "hammer" of the others.

We don't play all that often.  3-4 times a year, although each of those times might have 2-5 games.

Well, I have issues with some point values (if Richard uses a system or trait, it's suspect ), but it is a decent game.

And by tech zero, that means all techs are zero, not the sum total of +'s and -'s;  so no -2 to Fighter tech and +2 to Weapon tech cheesiness.

I've worked on maps and rules for something like this for decades.  The rules usually get overly complicated trying to cover a lot of things, for example: logistics, ground forces, technology, peace time, exploration, colonization.  Finally I went with a simplistic approach borrowing from an old multi-player computer game.  Game was won and reset when one race took every one of the 25 planets. What added to the fun and player/race loyalty was that each race had a win count so there were bragging rights if your race had the most wins.

Adjusting for face-to-face multi-playing, I figure if ONE race/government (no allied wins) controls over half the planets (13) for one full turn then declare him the winner, reset and start over.  As to... naw, I won't bore you with more details.

As yet I haven't had a chance to try it out.  Every strategic level part of a tactical game around here for the last several years never gets off the ground.

pfft, I fight them every time Beowulf's nephew comes to play.   

You could cut down on the die roll by having every other shield hit having to apply to the facing shield.

I think this might be too much damage to the facing shield, though.  Weapons do a lot more damage versus shield strengths in Starmada compared to SFB.  Perhaps every third hit, starting with the first, should apply to the facing shield.  So it would be on shield hits 1,4,7,10.  But I guess only playtesting will really see what the differences might be like.