VBAM Games Forums

Not sure if this belongs here or in Off-Topic. Please move if it should be there.

Just wondering what different Tactical systems people have used with VBAM, what they had to do to interface them together and which ones they thought worked the best.

Starmada (by Majestic12 games) is a popular choice. So popular that they published book for interfacing between Starmada and VBAM.

There is a newer version of Starmada out now (http://www.mj12games.com/starmada/mjg0130.html), so you would have to rewrite the changes, but it is a good start.

Here is the link to the VBAM: Starmada Edition (http://www.vbamgames.com/products/mjg0113/)

I still play Starmada X, with modified rules for weapon delays, Full Thrust, Federation Commander, and Babylon 5 Wars. It REALLY depends on the audience though.

Jovian Chronicles Lightening Strike
Heavy Gear Blitz
Renegade Legion (Whole series)
Babylon 5 ACTA

Just got VBAM 2nd edition and thinking of Using Colonial BattleFleet with it.
Anyone else try that yet?

@sunwolf: You might be interested in a news announcement on Monday. Just saying.

Well now you have me intrigued. Will definitely look at any news postings on Monday

I see there are some pretty cool announcement up on the main page now:
http://www.vbamgames.com/

Pretty cool. A pity I don't have a current group to playtest with. I'd do solo or create a PBEM group.

sunwolf wrote:Pretty cool. A pity I don't have a current group to playtest with. I'd do solo or create a PBEM group.

There will be some PBEM opportunities for sure!

-Jay

Working on Colonial Battlefleet and Task Force Zeta conversions at the moment.

Played with Starmada, used the conversion tools, but it did slow things down some.

The latest version of VBAM looks somewhat faster, I am just finishing my Ship Generator / Calculator for the new rules before I start making my own ships to try out combat.

My local group is using the Nova edition of Starmada for tactical combat for our current VBAM campaign though we used the Starmada Admiralty Edition for a number of previous campaigns.

We are of course still using the 1st ed of VBAM and so have had to create a pretty extensive set of house rules to adjust the old VBAM Starmada edition rules to take into account all of the changes that have happened between Starmada X and Nova.

Prior to our group switching to Starmada, (ironically owing to it's ease of integration with VBAM) our group almost exclusively played Full Thrust for starship combat.
Needless to say a number of us are quite excited about Tyrel's latest announcement.

Jay is the one that is leading up the development on the Full Thrust and Colonial Battlefleet expansions, while I spend my time updating the 1e rules to work with 2e and make corrections based on the playtest experience since they were first released. Jay has done preliminary development on both, and will start getting things ready for playtest once With a Purpose is ready for layout.

I still need to pick up a copy of Starmada Nova and see what all changed with the rules. My last real experience with Starmada was right at the beginning when Admiralty edition was released. It was after that I got too busy with the various 2e prototypes that I just didn't have the time to keep current on the state of their rules. Which is a shame, because I really enjoyed Starmada X.


2e should have eliminated some of the busy work and bookkeeping from 1e. You can also vastly speed up turn resolution if you use 4.9 Simplified Piracy, because then you only have to make a single raiding chance roll each turn to see if you have any piracy to deal with. Raiding chances are generally half that of 1e, too, which means that you have fewer pirate attacks to deal with.

Tyrel Lohr wrote:Jay is the one that is leading up the development on the Full Thrust and Colonial Battlefleet expansions, while I spend my time updating the 1e rules to work with 2e and make corrections based on the playtest experience since they were first released. Jay has done preliminary development on both, and will start getting things ready for playtest once With a Purpose is ready for layout.

WAP is on the final edit now before I do the open playtesting. I had to clean up formatting so it is easier to do the layout work on Tyrel's end. There were also a number of small things that I had to clean up to be compatible with the final revision of second edition. Even after I took some extra sections out the book is still much larger than I expected.

Tyrel Lohr wrote: 2e should have eliminated some of the busy work and bookkeeping from 1e. You can also vastly speed up turn resolution if you use 4.9 Simplified Piracy, because then you only have to make a single raiding chance roll each turn to see if you have any piracy to deal with. Raiding chances are generally half that of 1e, too, which means that you have fewer pirate attacks to deal with.

That was certainly one of the major goals with 2e. We wanted the core product to just be easier to manage. I suppose this is most obvious to me just because of the last 6 months of playtesting and just how much easier to was to run large games with multiple players.

-Jay

Our group's experience is that Nova has done a lot to streamline and simplify things without losing any of the tactical depth of the game.
It has also in my opinion addressed one of the biggest balance problems in Admiralty and now handles fighters and seekers much better.

The only real issue we have had to deal with is the correlation between the different VBAM unit traits and what specific equipment is required for the Nova design.
Our ultimate solution I feel is less than optimal and has us importing a bunch of equipment items from Starmada X as auxiliary equipment (to allow players to create Scouts and Jammers etc).

Personally I would love to get in on the Full Thrust playtest though I am not sure how much of my group would be up for that given that we are in the middle of an existing 1st ed. campaign that is finally heating up.