Hello and Welcome to Starmada

One of the reasons I enjoy this game is because it gets my creativeness going also.
Your fleet is very interesting.   :idea: To deal with ships closing on your Long-range ships, install a secondary battery that has Range based ROF, range based damage, etc.  Give it a long range with caronade.  This way, those ships or fighters closing can be fired at by these secondaries while the long-ranged battery continues to pound away at more distant targets. 
My main BBs have mains that fire out to 30, and secondary weapons that fire out to 20 with caronade and also have range based ROF.  These ships can pulverise up to a dozen fighters a turn at short range (out to 10 hx).
Last week, they were very effective in the games I played down in Davie in S. Florida @ Gaming Glen's awesome gaming store.

All's fair in love and wargames....

Be sure to give yourself time to develop tactics for the various races. Each race would give a great deal of thought on how to use each type of ship. Changes to the ships would be slow in coming, so the local commanders would have to live with what they have for a while. I thought of doing something similar with a VBAM campaign, so I'm looking forward to hearing how this goes.

I love the concepts so far....

Be interesting to see how those races play out.

Also remember that soldiers tend to develop loyalty to certain equipment....and the people who make final decisions towards change (and also develop the force's tactics) tend to be the older officers... who are used to, and plan their tactics based on equipment that they are most familiar with.....

Entrenched loyalty to older tactics plays a huge part in what equipment is in general usage, and how it is used....

You can draw a lot of parallels based on how tanks were used by various militaries during the second world war..... part of what made German army advances so dangerous was the fact that they used their tanks as mobile heavy hitters, rather than short ranged fixed artillery mounted in a hard position (unless they were moving the battle line).... which is how France and England initially used their tanks. The German model became the standard once it was proven effective, but the Allied Officers needed to see it as effective before they began to adopt the tactic for use.

John

Ok, so I finally PLAYED the game last night.  I did a solitaire run with two Takulyo class Kalaedinese Destroyers and a Cekalyo class Kalaedinese Cruiser against a Raikou Class Arcturan Battleship from the ISS.

This was a blast.  I guess, coming from a Star Fleet Battles background, that I worried that the loss of detail would lead to a pretty luck dependent, generic feeling game.  Using just the Basic Rules + Sideslips (plus the individual ship and weapon traits used by the classes listed above), I think this game is simply fun while keeping the important tactical options.  The game is really all about maneuvering for the best shot.  I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the simultaneous movement of multiple hexes followed by firing (specifically the concept of not being able to fire at the enemy as it moves from one point to another) but it works beautifully. 

The battle itself came right down to the wire with the toothless (weaponless) Raikou accelerating away from the crippled Kalaedinese fleet (two ships with 1 hull left, one destroyer with 1 weapon left) with 19 fighters still harrassing them.  The most likely outcome was that the relatively undamaged Destroyer would have escaped with the other two Kalaedinese ships being destroyed.  The Raikou also would have been able to escape but would have a long time in a repair dock before it would be able to come back to the front.

One issue I had was with the size of the map.  It didn't come into play much, but for a ship I've designed it could.  I'm curious whether anyone plays with 'floating maps' (ie, when a ship is about to leave the map, move all ships a certain number of hexes away from the map edge about to be exited.. if there's no way to resolve the situation so all ships remain on the map, then the moving ship still leaves... of course, this is somewhat problematic when it comes to simultaneous movement)?

Yup, as a Star Fleet Battles player, I know all about the problems of floating maps.  My impression is that as long as one side doesn't have to 'defend' something, there's not likely to be a decisive engagement.  I tend to look at these things from a real war perspective.  A stronger side going up against a  weaker side probably will just watch the weaker side disengage.  If the two sides are equal, unless for some reason both wish a decisive engagement, they probably won't become too heavily entangled.

It's when a fixed position, or route, needs to be defended that decisive battles would occur, and in those I tend to use a variant of a floating map such that the position being defended must always remain on the map.

Funny you should mention that...

Heh heh heh...