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New member with a few questions

Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2018 8:13 pm
by MajorTheRed
Hello everyone,

I recently bought VBAM 2e Ed and thought it would be nice to look at the forum.
I'm a big fan of 4x and RTS video games (MoO 1 and 2, Homeworld, Endless Space, Starsector, Haegemonia...) as well as a wargamer for most part of my life. I'm a solo wargamer, and I really love to look to tell stories by playing campaigns. So you can quickly figure I was really pleased to discover VBAM.

Once I bought the game, I was a little bit surprised by some of the mechanics which have not been kept from the first edition. Now, after reading the rules these last few days I figured that it was mostly ok for most of them (random exploration, solo-friendly, resistance from government, morale and rebellion). The two thing I'm still looking for in the rules is something about research fields, and differences between empire/species (like in MoO and Endless Space). I'm planning to play VBAM by coupling it with Starmada Nova using Firestorm Armada miniatures from Spartan Games. So I want to introduce a way to discover new technology (weapons traits, abilities, level of armor or stealth, etc...).

I have more or less understood that development of new supplement has been slow down by diminution of peoples working on the game. So, is this kind of mechanics (Race traits and field-oriented research) can be found in older book from the 1st Edition to be used in the 2nd one?

One last thing, I'm French, which doesn't help to write english fine...

Re: New member with a few questions

Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2018 6:04 pm
by BroAdso
Thanks for the questions! I can't answer them definitively, but it does seem a lot of the race mechanics would be tough to port directly to the new edition. However, you could certainly find ways to do it yourself.

If you wanted to find a way to introduce more differences and story texture without tons of additional mechanics, some of the basic stuff introduced in With a Purpose, which is native to 2nd edition, is ideal!

Re: New member with a few questions

Posted: Sun Mar 03, 2019 5:55 pm
by Tyrel Lohr
Much delayed response as seems to be the norm anymore, but I think most of the VBAM 1E custom empire rules from the Menagerie should port over to 2E without much hassle. 2E was mainly an attempt to clean up some of the more wayward elements of the rules.

Starmada Edition should still be fairly applicable to the new Starmada editions I think, too, although I haven't played anything beyond Admiralty edition of Starmada myself so I'm not sure if MJ12 changed up how they handle tech in those future versions.

I have actually been playing around with VBAM/Starmada again in the last few months and one thing I was experimenting with was the idea of handling weapon designs in Starmada as micro tech rather than unlocking specific weapon abilities. Then it becomes more of an issue of figuring out what specific weapons you think you need on your ships versus creating new weapons on the fly as you design the ships.