• Registered: 2009-12-29
  • Posts: 12

Topic: Utter newbie... some questions I need to ask

Hi folks.  I've been looking for a good space combat game (I used to play Star Frontiers Knight Hawks 20 years ago, but that was then and this is now).

A couple of newbie questions I'd like answered if that's okay.

What is the difference between the Imperial Starmada Sourcebook and the Starmada Rules Annex?  Obviously I'd need to buy the Core Rulebook first, and both look like they cover the same ground, yet the "shorter" of the two (the SRA) purports to cover multiple supplements (including the ISS).

Needless to say this has me a little confused.  Can anyone elaborate on what sort of overlap exists between the two?  Does the purchase or one negate the need to purchase the other?

Thanks in advance for your help.

  • Registered: 2009-08-03
  • Posts: 245

Re: Utter newbie... some questions I need to ask

Greetings!

ISS is a setting book; it contains some background on each of five factions, as well as ship stats for four to seven ships from each faction, plus some extra options.  SRA basically takes the extra rules options from each of the setting books (except Klingon Armada) published so far (so it contains material from ISS, Hammer and Claw, Starmada: Dreadnoughts, and Starmada: Iron Stars), and aggregates them into one source.  It does not contain any pre-built ship designs, factions, faction backgrounds, etc (except for a few ships used as examples for things like Dual-Mode Fighters and the Flotilla rules).

So by buying SRA instead of ISS, you get more raw rules material, but don't get pre-built ship designs.  That's the main trade-off, really.  If you buy both, there is some overlap, but it's not too much; pages 6 through 16 of ISS are duplicated (albeit reformatted and merged with other stuff) in SRA, so you lose about 12% of the 82-page ISS by buying SRA (or about 25% of the SRA by buying ISS).

Personally, if I were going to re-buy the Starmada sourcebooks again, I'd buy SRA and H&C; I liked the fleets in H&C slightly better than those in ISS (particularly Dai-ken and Grumm), but that's just me.  My brother preferred the ISS Imperials.  IMO, the SRA is good if you like to build and tweak your own fleets and want more options, whereas the setting books are good if you don't have the time or spreadsheet-monkey inclination.

  • Registered: 2009-12-29
  • Posts: 12

Re: Utter newbie... some questions I need to ask

Cheers, thanks for that.  It seems quite logical.

I'm a "roll your own" sort of guy when it comes to vehicle design (back in the late '80s I probably had 150 pages of Car Wars designs in various notebooks), so it sounds like the SRA is the way to go.