Starmada seems to have a philosophy of elegant combination of many orthogonal options -- witness the way weapons are now defined, compared with the Compendium way.

Given that, it feels odd that spinal weapons have to be defined separately from regular weapons.  Among other things, they can't have any of the other weapon options.  The differences between spinal weapons and normal weapons are:

- Spinal mounts have a special narrow forward arc.  I'm not sure if this is important.

- Spinal mounts are really big.  We could just raise the ceiling on PEN.

- Spinal mounts take damage as the ship is damaged.  This used to be a way to prevent a single hit from crippling a ship based around a spinal mount, but that can happen now with a Q hit.  Maybe some kind of "several hits to destroy" option is in order.

- Anime spinal mounts have area effect.  Two different area effects are conceivable:  one hex and along-the-beam.

- Anime spinal mounts effectively have ROF 1/2.  Fractional ROFs should be allowed in general, although it might reduce bookkeeping to limit these to 1/n, where n is a positive integer.

I'd like to see all of these things moved into the regular weapon options, so we don't need special rules for spinal mounts.

Through a gift error, I have "VBAM: Starmada Edition" but not the campaign book.  Still, it's apparent that the VBAM rules are extremely detailed.  Simple campaign rules would only take up a few pages in a Starmada rulebook.

I've put down some thoughts on killer strategies and their counters.  Any others?

Also, are there other ship design graphs you'd like to see?

Ooh, but what about area affect weapons.  What if I suspect there's an adjacent cloaked ship, so I set off my shockwave?  I'd say that should affect the cloaked ship.

Okay, I'd like to put that in the FAQ, but I can't seem to find the "create a new page" page.  Can anyone tell me how to get there?

Or, more elgantly still, "A cloaked ship (or a ship that attempts to cloak) may perform no actions other than movement.  Movement includes regular movement, stutterdrives, hyperdrives, overthrusters, evasive action, and emergency thrust.  Any action involving interacting with another unit, such as launching or recovering fighters, ramming, towing, or being towed, is specifically prohibited."

As a layout, I had something like this in mind:

Eyrie-class Carrier (237)
Hull: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Engines: 4 3 2 1
Shields: 5 4 3 2 1
A. Anti-Fighter Laser
AC AC AC AC AC BD BD BD BD BD EF EF EF EF EF
Hyperdrive O
Fighter Bay OOOOOO OOOOOO
1:HQ 2:EQ 3:Ha 4:Sa 5:Ha 6:Q

1. Are you using the Shipyard spreadsheet?  It produces record sheets like the ones in the Starmada rules.

2. I've been using the ones from Ground Zero Games.  Yes, they are in the UK, but they offer very good prices, excellent models, and fast shipping.

Hmmm, I'm not sure.

I know I've had some versions where VPs and production currency were the same.  Making the VPs permanent ensures a steady march to the end of the game.  There may be something to be said for not making the game too balanced.

Does anyone else have opinions on this?

I do hope others will try the system out!

I don't do anything special -- a station is just a ship with no engines or hyperdrive.  I allow them to be larger than regular ships;  no need for a special multiplier.

We had one of our best Starmada battles to date last night.  There were 5 players (two of them new).  48 ships came into play;  12 more were waiting in hyperspace, but we called the game on account of time before they arrived.  There was lots of maneuvering, a proper wall of battle, and plenty of exploding.

The scenario:  the intruder fleet enters through one wormhole (6 ships at a time) and tries to exit through the other.  To exit, you must end your turn on the exit wormhole AND have a functioning hyperdrive.  Each side had two dreadnoughts, four battlecruisers, eight destroyers, and sixteen corvettes.  At the time we stopped, two corvettes had run the gauntlet, a dozen or so ships had been destroyed, and about four had flown off the map into the Oort Cloud.

What made this scenario work so well?

- The two wormhole hexes provided terrain.  Having to exit at a particular point finally makes it reasonable to do piracy and several other scenarios that normally devolve into ridiculous map-floating.  Furthermore, it is no longer necessary for the running ships to be really slow, so we could use faster ships, making maneuvering more important.

- We VASTLY restricted the weapons available to lasers (18), ion cannons (15, ignores shields, no hull damage), and fusion torpedoes (9, PEN 3, expendable).

- Weapon arcs were restricted to AB, AC, and BD.  This means everyone has a blind spot in the back!

- All of the aforementioned restrictions allowed for greatly simplified ship sheets.  The 13 engines on a corvette were represented by 13 1/8" blue boxes to be filled in as the engines were destroyed.  A laser is a red circle with a line indicating its direction of fire.

- We used special maneuvers:  emergency thrust, overloading and directing shields, and evasive action.

If I had it to do over again, the only change would be to cut the sizes of the fleets in half.