Previewing the Squadron Strike Spreadsheet Release

Normally, the Squadron Strike spreadsheet updates on the 16th of March, June, September and December.  This December, I was still elbows-deep in the rewrite of the spreadsheet for the new point defense model, shown on my Patreon.  I've been toiling away at it ever since, along with getting things ready for Squadron Strike: Traveller.

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New analytic tools for designing ships in Squadron Strike.

One of the new features I put into the spreadsheet is an analytic display, shown in the graphic above.  There are eight of them, each one representing all 50 windows of the AVID.  The top row are offensive - the leftmost image is "how much missile spam can I put out" - the numbers are the typical amount of point defense resources needed to have a ~60% chance of stopping each missile.  Next to it is a similar display for torpedo launches, which weights torpedoes as being more valuable when launched from the front of the ship, and less valuable if launched from astern.

The two displays to the right of that are average damage per AVID window, and the user can enter the range, and an ECM/Profile modifier and see what the averages will be.  They're all conditionally formatted to make it easier to spot gaps in firepower coverage.

The bottom row shows how many new-style zone defense points a ship generates out of each AVID window, and then shows the strengths of the Deflector Shield, Ablative Shield and Armor on this ship, grouped by facing.

It's my hope that this will make it even easier for players to design the ships of their dreams.

Birds of Prey Story Packs

There are SIX new Birds of Prey items on the site today. They are the eBooks in what we call Story Pack format. A story pack combines all the background, scenarios, ADCs, MDCs and SOAR aircraft for a given product in a given era. Each product (Air Combat in the Jet Age, Airborne Alert and Fighter Sweep) has two Era-based story packs, one for the "Early Era" (1950s - 1970s) and one for the "Modern Era" (1970s-2000s or similar).

The Story Packs are intended for customers new to Birds of Prey, who have a historical interest in an era, or a particular family of jets.  It gives a lower price of entry to get in and explore. Maybe this customer might just read... or maybe they'll buy a rulebook and push around some box-minis to get a feel for how the game works, or how different jets perform under different circumstances. 

If you've already purchased the PDFs matching the print products, there's nothing new in them for you, and they're the same price as buying those PDFs. They're just organized a bit differently.  

If you have a friend who's interested in the history of fighting jets, this may be a great recommendation!

http://www.adastragames.com/products/air-combat-in-the-jet-age-early-era-story-pack-format-pdf
http://www.adastragames.com/products/birds-of-prey-air-combat-in-the-jet-age-modern-era-story-pack-format-pdf
http://www.adastragames.com/products/birds-of-prey-airborne-alert-early-era-story-pack-format-pdf
http://www.adastragames.com/products/birds-of-prey-airborne-alert-modern-era-story-pack-format-pdf
http://www.adastragames.com/products/birds-of-prey-fighter-sweep-early-era-story-pack-format-pdf
http://www.adastragames.com/products/birds-of-prey-fighter-sweep-modern-era-story-pack-format-pdf

Comparing Squadron Strike Traveller to Power Projection: Fleet

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The cover for Squadron Strike: Traveller

I get asked "Why are you doing Squadron Strike: Traveller when Power Projection: Fleet already exists?"  I publish both games, and while you never really want to get into these kinds of discussions on the Internet, because they quickly devolve into "System A is better than System B, well, I like System B, and must defend it!", discussing what the games do differently is important.

So, with the caveat that I publish both rules sets, and am trying not to say Power Projection or Full Thrust is worse, here goes:

Squadron Strike is hex based, and ships have faced defenses - the armor on the Nose may (and often does) differ from the armor on the Aft of the ship; Left, Right, Top and Bottom are distinct facings.  Power Projection doesn't have faced defenses.  Armor in Squadron Strike is reductive - if you fire at a ship with armor 7 with a 6 damage weapon, you're not going to get any effect whatsoever.  Armor in Power Projection is, like Full Thrust, ablative.  It's extra hit points, basically.

In Power Projection, Andy Lilly and Dom Mooney pretty much renamed the Full Thrust weapons. This is great for simplicity, which is one of the strengths of Full Thrust...but a lot of Travellerisms kind of vanished in the conversion. For example, I'm not terribly fond of their Meson Gun rule - it just doesn't have the same pucker-factor that it should from Traveller.

In Squadron Strike, weapons are player-designable. I'm not trying to make something work out of a half-dozen pre-built weapons, I'm able to specify range, accuracy, damage, variable damage and special weapon abilities on a per-weapon basis. The same weapon in High Guard may have slight regional differences in SS Traveller, for example. 

Coming back around to the Meson Gun, the Meson Gun has a high base damage, a high variable damage component, and two special weapon traits.

One is "High Impact," which adds a point of damage to the base damage for every pip you beat the Accuracy number by - if it's got an Accuracy of 4+ on a d10, and you roll a 7, High Impact would add 3 additional damage.

The other is "Ignores Armor," typically at 8+, though earlier models have it at higher target numbers. If your Accuracy die roll is an 8 or higher, ignore the target's armor when the damage is allocated. 

Both these traits benefit from high die rolls. While it doesn't happen all the time, I've had a a ship I've been flying take an appropriately "Traveller-esque Meson Gun" hit and go from "Unhurt, unhurt, un..." to "Ooh, pretty explosion..."

The other big difference is 3D movement, and an easier to use vector movement system than Full Thrust uses. Maneuver is important in SS Traveller, and it's a lot of fun.

Riding the Red Horse

Riding the Red Horse

By Christopher G. Nuttall, Chris Kennedy, Jerry Pournelle, Thomas Mays, Rolf Nelson, James F. Dunnigan, William S. Lind, Brad Torgersen

Buy on Amazon

So, one of my other gigs - beyond making Cool Space Combat Games, is being a science checker for SF writers for Baen.  I got asked by Vox Day to write a science article for their new anthology series "Riding the Red Horse" - which released yesterday.

In its first day of release, it's done impressively - it's climbing up the paid Kindle listings and is a category leader in Military SF and SF in general.

Here's where you can buy it - my piece is called The Hot Equations.

Preliminary Playtest Results: New Point Defense Model

If you've been following us before the website move on Google+ and Facebook, you've known that I've been considering a significant revision of the Squadron Strike rules.  If this is new to you, the basic gist is we're porting the Attack Vector survival roll versus points allocated over to Squadron Strike.

Last night's playtest found a few minor issues, which I'm fixing.  The very basic ships we're testing with, and a very brief summary of the changes, will be up on the Patreon for members to look over in a bit.

Some initial thoughts:
1) This is MUCH faster for dealing with large salvos of missiles
2) The number of points per Interceptor weapon seems "about right" for missiles.
3) Torpedoes need more testing.

What's the Difference Between Attack Vector and Squadron Strike?

Attack Vector: Tactical (AV:T) and Squadron Strike (SS) are both 3D space combat games. They have some common design elements because of that 3D nature.

AV:T was published first, and is space combat with real physics. By real physics, I don't mean "Oh, it has vector movement." I mean "Oh, it has vector movement with segmented continuous acceleration over time, fuel tracking that uses the rocket equation, and thrust that increases as your ship's mass decreases from spending fuel, as well as pilot-perspective orbital mechanics."

In a manual wargame, that's actually playable by human beings without a pocket calculator. Your brain may have to stretch, but the math has been carefully done for you by the play aids.

It also has power generation, heat dissipation, and damage modeling based off of physical constants as we know them, kinetic weapon launches where the damage goes up at the square of the impact velocity, and laser ranges defined by Rayleigh scattering, focal array sizes and beam wavelengths.

You can argue with the underlying technological assumptions in AV:T - it's got a double-talk handwavy FTL drive so we can go to strange star systems and have fun with imaginary biology.

It makes some assumptions about fusion drive torches that, while not physically *impossible* are engineering we don't know how to do yet....but for the most part, if you thought Traveller, Niven or Heinlein were hard science, this will be an eye opener.

It uses segmented movement, like Federation Commander or Star Fleet Battles. When you do something in the game, you're usually setting a timer for when you can do it again, like a lot of video games do behind the scene, or expending a resource, or imparting a vector you need to correct for later.

It is very much a "flight simulator with rocketships."

Squadron Strike (SS) was published second, and is a simpler game engine with whole turn movement. It is also designed around the availability of a ship design spreadsheet, and later on, utilities for printing your own ships in pretty formats. Its sweet spot is about 3-6 ships per player. It has optional 2D SSD displays; when used, those 2D SSD displays allow you to handle about a dozen ships, which makes it a good fleet game at that scale.

Its ship design engine is the most thorough one that's commercially available. If you want Babylon 5 Minbari fighting Cylon Basestars while the Star Trek Federation is coming in to play spoiler...it not only can do it, but I run that game at conventions.

SS is all about flexibility in play and flexibility in ship designs. It has three different sets of movement rules, named after the number of Newton's Laws being obeyed.

Mode 0 means your ship moves like an ox-cart. When you turn off your engines, the ship will slow down to a stop. Lots of Anime universes use this type of movement.

Mode 1 means your ship moves like an airplane. It has momentum through its front. Your ship accumulates thrust from turn to turn, has no top speed, and slows down by turning. If you turn off your engines, you keep moving according to your momentum. It's a good match for how the Minbari and Vorlons and Shadows moved in Babylon 5.

Mode 2 means your ship moves like a spaceship. It has vectors that are independent of its facing. If you accumulate a velocity of 8 in direction A, to slow down, you've got to pivot 180 degrees (to direction D) and apply thrust in the opposite direction. It's a good match for how Earth Alliance ships moved in Babylon 5 and how fighters moved in nuBSG.

In SS, you can have fleets with different movement modes fighting on the table at the same time. You can also design weapons and choose the type and quantity of the defenses on your ship, and have more control over ship design than any other game on the market. SS ships are comparable in detail to Federation Commander ships, but can be clean-sheet created from scratch.

We sell both of them directly - Deluxe editions print the rulebook in full color, and it's worth every penny of the extra $10 to see the play aids (which are all color coded, anyway) in color as part of the process.

Welcome to our new web site!

We've been spending last week or so getting the new Ad Astra Games web site up and running.

The forums are up here, and the services.adastragames.com subdomain is still getting poked - we've had people say they can't register products.

We're getting information into the new shopping cart as quickly as we can, and we look forward to your continued patronage.

Ad Astra Games on Social Media:

With the new web site, we've got better integration with social media.

You can follow us on Google + as +AdAstraGames

or on Facebook as Ad Astra Games

or on Twitter with @AdAstraGames

We've also got a Patreon going to help Ken have more time to devote to producing games rather than business wriiting, at Patreon.com/StarShipsRUs