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.
