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mj12games.com/forum → Spitting Fire → OK - It's too quiet ...
... what's everybody been up to? Anyone have an AAR to share? Or is everyone busy collecting and painting up 1/300 planes like me?
Doug
I took the rules along to the club and we played our first games last weekend. I had eight players to handle (!) so the first game was a quick one to get used to the rules. We each had just a single plane to get used to the movement and firing rules - four Spitfire Is against 4 ME-109Es. The RAF handed the Luftwaffe their hats, all four 109s going down for the loss of a single Spit.
For the second game we each took a flight of three or four planes - the Germans had one flight of three ME-110C, the other three each had 4 ME-109E. Opposing them were the combined might of the Low Countries; two Dutch players had 4 Fokker-XXI and three Fokker G-IA, the two Belgians had 4 Gladiator and 4 Hurricane. The ME-110s were embarrasingly wiped out early on - poor coordination saw them bounced by three Allied flights. The Fokker XXIs, which were the only planes capable of altitude 7, stooged around above everyone else and occasionally popped down to level 6 to see how the fight was going. My flight of 109s then blazed a trail across the table, putting paid to the Hurricanes with some fancy manoeuvering, finishing off the remaining Gladiators and hitting the G-IAs hard as well. Unfortunately we ran out of time with the game finely balanced.
Conclusions - well, certainly I think everyone enjoyed it - at least one guy was making plans to buy some Pacific theatre aircraft (we were using Tumbling Dice's excellent 1/600th models).
Obviously we were using mostly home-brewed stats for the aircraft - not many of the models I own have stats in the book. They felt about right however. It would still be nice to be able to confirm that I was using the correct formulae to work the planes out (and of course, I wasn't able to generate any points values). Not being able to generate your own aircraft seems to run counter to the other MJ12 rules we use (Starmada and Iron Stars).
When I get a chance to take some photos I'm going to put them on the club's website and I'll post a link here.
Well, the plan is to release a book with some more optional rules and more fighters in the next month or so -- and I think after careful deliberation I'm going to put in some conversion rules. Maybe not the "official" computations (since some of them are a bit intensive), but certainly the point-costing formulae, so that whatever you decide regarding game values will be balanced with the official designs.
That might work... a friend of mine has all of the figurines they made for the original Crimson Skies game.... I'd love to convert a couple of those planes over, and see how they fair against the historical designs.
John
Well, the plan is to release a book with some more optional rules and more fighters in the next month or so -- and I think after careful deliberation I'm going to put in some conversion rules. Maybe not the "official" computations (since some of them are a bit intensive), but certainly the point-costing formulae, so that whatever you decide regarding game values will be balanced with the official designs.
Well, that's certainly better than nothing, and it would let people fiddle with things - but as you know, I'd far rather see the whole shebang made available.
From my perspective (as if it were my game), I'd rather do it that way and let people stat up their own planes from their own sources than deal with an endless stream of request for OFFICIAL stats for this or that obscure plane. This is one of the beauties of Starmada - as long as one does the formulae right (and the spreadsheet takes care of that) ANY ship that a player comes up with is, by definition, official. Also, since one of the given design criteria of the game was to NOT base ratings on "this plane is supposed to maneuver better than that plane," I would not want to leave players with no choice but to do just that when rolling their own.
Again, if it were me, I'd want to sell the RULES - the mechanisms of play - not the stats. In order to protect the IP, I'd either take down the free demo or take a good bit out of it so that it was not the complete game mechanics. There's a precedent for this with the demo version of Grand Fleets. It would be more difficult, though, to put up a stripped down Spitting Fire demo that gives a good feel for the game than it was for Grand Fleets. The rules are so slim (relatively speaking) that if you take enough out, there may not be enough left.
Just my own personal druthers.
Doug
That might work... a friend of mine has all of the figurines they made for the original Crimson Skies game.... I'd love to convert a couple of those planes over, and see how they fair against the historical designs.
I believe that someone did some stats for that game, but don't remember who. I see a couple of problems.....
- without a license from the Crimson Skies folks (and I'd think it unlikely even if MJ12 had the funds), you can't publish 'officially'. 'Unofficial fan supplements' could be posted on a fan site.
- I suspect that many of the Crimson Skies designs would be about as airworthy as a brick in real life, and wouldn't be real balanced against actual aircraft - might be fun, though. If the 'conversion rules' account for that, it might be balanced enough.
Hard Vacuum might be kinda fun as a conversion - somewhere between Iron Stars, Crimson Skies, and Spitting Fire.
mj12games.com/forum → Spitting Fire → OK - It's too quiet ...
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