Uh oh...

Oh no... you opened the "List of Games Played" box...

If you focus ONLY on starship/starfighter tactical games: FASA's Star Trek Starship Tactical Combat Simulator was my first exposure, via the Star Trek RPG. From there, I was hooked. Moved on to Silent Death, Star Strike, Star Warriors, Full Thrust, A Sky Full Of Stars, Star Fleet Battles/Federation Commander, Star Frontiers, Noble Armada, Bab5 (ACTA), never actually played B5W but I do have AoG's Turning Point Fleet Action game, Battlestar Galactica and The Last Starfighter (FASA, both essentially the same game), Star Blazers, Battlefleet Gothic, Hard Vacuum, Arclight, Squadron Strike, even the Spelljammer War Captain's Companion, not to mention a host of online-only rulesets like Minimal Space Combat, Generic Space Combat II, and Slag!. I'm probably missing some.

Regeneration will probably be back sooner rather than later. Honestly, I was running out of room.

AE Screens -- you mean "X number of shield points which you assign to the various defensive arcs"?

Expanded Tech Levels -- I have no objection to these in principle. You mean having more than 2 levels up/down, and not more than a max of 200% and minimum of 50%, right?

Starship/Fighter Exclusive -- will be back.

Traits that affect Screens -- need playtesting.

Cinematic Movement -- I figured it was encompassed by the rules for Etheric Drag and Graded Turns, but I'm happy to put together something "official".

4 defensive arcs -- you can thank/blame Ken Burnside for that one. Frankly, if I hadn't settled on 4 arcs, there wouldn't be any at all. Six was just too much. I like 4, and it's not fiddly at all in practice... I was convinced after playtesting Grand Fleets on a hexgrid (which only has four arcs for both weapons and defense).

Anti-fighter batteries are simply a re-implementation of the rule prior to Admiralty. I decided there was no need to have "active" AFBs, since you could just design a range-3 weapon with Dfn/Pnp to achieve the same result.

I like the tactical use of probes -- suggested by someone on this forum whose name escapes me. But yeah, shuttlecraft are there for simulation purposes, and not much else.

Thanks for your comments!

I absolutely LOVED FASA's Star Trek RPG and STCS. I miss them both... *sniff*

About the only traits I can think might be useful are:

1) Weapons that do 2x (or 3x) damage to screens, but normal damage once screens are gone.

2) Weapons that bypass screens altogether.

Stealth is more correctly equated with Shields than with Countermeasures, IMHO. And in that respect, while high levels of Stealth might be annoying to the attacker, Stealth becomes less efficient the more you use.

Stealth 1 is equivalent to Shields 1, and takes 30% less space.
Stealth 2 is equivalent to Shields 1.8, and takes 24% less space.
Stealth 3 is equivalent to Shields 2.5, and takes 17% less space.
Stealth 4 is equivalent to Shields 3.1, and takes 10% less space.
Stealth 5 is equivalent to Shields 3.6, and takes 2% less space.
Stealth 6 is equivalent to Shields 4, and takes 5% MORE space.

(just throwing an idea that was spawned by this part of your post)

Well, if Stealth is more along the lines of Shields, maybe a weapon ability that reduces levels of Stealth (and maybe ECM, though I'm not too sure about that) akin to how Piercing gets a bonus to Impact rolls? Call it Tracking--each level of Tracking ignores one level of Stealth. Costing abilities similar to Piercing.

Of course - stealth is already countered by Mines, shockwaves and the proximity trait on weapons.  So probably not a big priority to find another way around it.

Would be cool if there was a ship system that was able to target a ship and somehow mitigate its: countermeasures, cloak or stealth - like some sort of electronic warfare specialist type thing (kind of like what scouts could do in SFB).

-Tim

[catching up from the original post]

Your universe can have any tech level range you want, and it's easy to change.  Dan has the cost formula in the AE rules, page 42.  It only took  10 minutes to re-calculate the costs and alter the Unity Dry Dock to change from -2/+2 to -3/+3 tech level range.

Cinematic movement: I also like this type of movement in my space fleet games, since it's simple enough to allow the player to think more about tactics than movement mechanics.  In my case, this means the Full Thrust cinematic movement rules.  I need to walk through the Unity movement rules again to see if there is anything I want to borrow.  Note that I also play campaigns with sub-light engine technology (Basic/Advanced/Gravimetric).  The more advanced engine techs allow for less forward movement before turning.

Look in the appendix for the different movement options - I think "free form turns" might fit what you are looking for.

I actually really like the default movement system combined with plotting movement.  If we were playing sequential, I'd probably go with free form.

And you're looking at the wrong scale for slaloming. Fighters, I think, can slalom. Which is the scale the Falcon would be at. What does a starship do? Shoot the darn asteroids that are too big to not cause catastrophic damage, and not worry about the ones that will cause minor damage.