Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

Sounds like a great idea.

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

Some replies:
I've never hear of the Thrones game you're talking about, but I based the mechanics on the Axis and Allies board game.

The map is arbitrary, really. Anybody can make a giant picture, throw on some SE4 planet portraits and then draw some lines between them.
The one provided can be considered an example, with harder/easier starts for handicap purposes.
In the game I played, the number of colonies didn't really enter into it anyways. We both got one colony built, and then fought and glassed before any more could be started.

Once we got into the flow of things, there was very little downtime.
While the other guy is pondering his movement, you take a look at your mitt full of components and decide what ships you're going to build.
The administration is mostly "Ok, 10 bucks for my homeworld, 2 for the little colony, and toss back 5 for maintenance. Grab 3 more component cards."
Repairs are rare, and a lot of the rest is special case items. Buying mineral miners on the colonies is a quick given as well.
The hidden orders would take a long time to write down and then unveil properly, I think.

Victory conditions were mostly unspecified.
If you lose all your stuff, you're obviously out, but house rules for victory are easily added.

Research might stand to use more items, but too many tech modifiers to the components could get hairy. Its based on AnA; most of the time you don't have the funds to devote to research instead of bolstering your defenses.
A simple modification might be to collect one coin for each research facility, and put it in a special research pool to spend on a roll when you get enough collected.

The damage is fairly simple.
Components are either flipped over (damaged), or removed permanently (destroyed).
We arranged the ships around the planet/sector they were in, and it fits 4 ships fairly easily (components were partly piled to avoid spillage)
More than four ships starts generating combat penalties, so the fleets shouldn't get much bigger.

We also only used one page of ships, since we were tired of cutting, so we were limited to three of any one type of hull and that helped keep the numbers down too http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

As for construction, we simplified it a tad, by just laying down the components with the hull, since the surprise is minimal, and events during the turn never conspired to require a different design.

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

Hmmmm looks fun!

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

Hey! I didn't know you played SEIV too?

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

Looks like it works great then for two-player... How long did it take you guys to do a turn? Maybe downtime wouldn't show up until you did 3-4 players?
Also, if you guys weren't really expanding, you might want to consider either 1) trying it to see if it is more effective - and then see if that has an impact on turn length or 2) making it more tempting to expand (easier to do, better rewards, etc), or 3) Excluding the option to expand and simplifying the game down to what you like: good ol' fashioned ship-to-ship combat.

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

You wouldn't write them down. You would make Order Tiles (or cards, or whatever you want to call them) and place them face down over your fleets. After everyone has placed them, flip them all over and start executing them one by one, alternating players.

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

Wouldn't the order tiles have to be specific rather than generic?

Such as "move to system X" and "Attack ship Y"?

As for the expansion rate, I was going full out on it, although I was admittedly hampered by a run of bad luck in the cargo bay department http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
I did manage to smash the opposing transport before it could finish the colony, and built 3 transport hulls to drag coins to the colony to help build it up faster.

Our warships simply did the monkey smash faster than the transports built colonies http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif


I'm not sure how long the turns actually took, since it felt like only a minute, but when we looked up, it was 1 AM.

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

No, they would be very generic, such as "Move". You decide where they actually move on your turn. If you had three fleets with a move order, you would decide which fleet to move first (and where to move it. The ships in the fleet could move all toghter, or you could split them up and move each ship to a different system). Then one of the other players would execute one of their Move orders. Combat would occur when enemy ships were in the same sector.

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

Why not just mark them as moved or not, then...

BTW, this game deals in individual ships, not fleets as such.
We only had one front line, and the biggest battles were 3 on 4, including my standard-armor-and-ecm decoy transport.

Re: Space Empires IV - Board Game!
 

This game looks interesting if only I could get my wife to play it. Hmm...

Anyway, can we get a Version without the black backgrounds - my lowly printer is afraid of it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif