My friend (which never played space wargame) and I played a basic scenario, 800 points.
BTW, SAE scenarios prevented you to buy ships which costed more than half the budget. Here, you can deployed one ship as long as it's not more expensive than the budget. Not only it's not really realistic compared to current fleet (you never see an aircraft carrier cruising alone in enemy seas) but you can end up with cheesy tactics.
My friend deployed 5 imperial ships (one Belligerent, one Swiftsure and three Furious). I deployed one Kyouwa (for its fighters), one Izanagi and one Hayabusa).
Our game lasted three or four turns (I don't exactly remember) and ended up with almost all of my fighters shot down, the Kyouwa badly damaged (lmost crippled) as well as some other ships damaged.
Some notes:
- I like the initiative phase. Same as SFO but much much better due to alternation activation.
- Move phase OK, a bit difficult to make my opponent understand the overall concept but OK.
- Fire phase, well still takes time to compute dice but once done, really fast to resolve.
- Fighters... I would be too kind if I said they were crappy. They lost all of what made them so powerful (not bad when I remember how they wreaked havoc on enemy ships in SAE). But they are still as expensive, so, unless I'm mistaken, I don't think I will take them again. Contrary to SAE, they (as a whole) can't cripple or destroy ships before they fire, and in they achieve almost nothing. By turn 2, all of them jumped on the swiftsure and one furious. After some trading shots, I lost some fighters (maybe 3 to four hits) and manage to inflict less hits than that. Next turn, I was down to one or two squadrons and still the enemy ships were left almost untouched. I could have nothing instead of fighters, it would have been the same.
BTW, I should think about something to allow more fighters on the same space. As we used minis, fighters take a lot of space and it's not easy to pack them on the same quaxdrant.
Other that, very pleasing!

Some questions:
- What are attack dice modifiers that are not cancelled by fire control (aside battery mods)?
- Are fighter fires affected by enemy ECM?

Marc