Space Empires IV - Board Game!

[spoon]

Suicide Junkie said:
Why not just mark them as moved or not, then...

There's a difference, because you have to decide which ships are going to move, defend, etc BEFORE you see what the enemy is up to. Like I said, though, this works best if there are more things to do besides simply move... and again, better with 3+ players than with two.

[Suicide Junkie]

I've got some printer-friendlier, white-background Versions up on imagmeodserver.
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/MM/SE4/BoardGame/

It looks better with black, but that does take a chunk of ink to do.

[spoon]

Suicide Junkie said:
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.

That's a sign of a good game! When did you start, and how many turns (roughly) did it take?

[Suicide Junkie]

We started cutting things out after cleaning up dinner, so it must have been 9 or so with an interruption for an hour or so.

The first few turns were full of confused paper-shuffling, but by about 5 turns in, I managed to get my colony started despite the lack of cargo bays. There was another 5 turns or so of sending reinforcements to the slaughterhouse while I built up the colony before we finished.

[Captain Kwok]

You should standardize the playing cards so that they fit on a typical avery-type "business" card label or some other form of heavier paper so they can be more robust.

[Suicide Junkie]

Captain Kwok said:You should standardize the playing cards so that they fit on a typical avery-type "business" card label or some other form of heavier paper so they can be more robust.

They are all made from the common SE4 portraits...
128x128 for the components, 192x192 for the ships and 256x256 for the colony cards.

[spoon]

Here's a link to a review of a new space-based boardgame called Battlestations. Looks like a neat cross between board game and RPG.

BoardGameGeek

[geoschmo]

So, I was looking this over in detail some. Question about ship design. Am I correct that general spots can hold any component? So you can put weapons armor or even cargo bays on you escort hull if you want?

Have you thought about adding fighters?

Events?

[Suicide Junkie]

Yes. General slots can hold anything you want.

I'm open to adding fighters, but I'm not sure how they'd fit in with the game mechanics.

[geoschmo]

Well you could have fighter bay components, and add a carrier hull.

Fighters could be a simple unit that you construct at any planet and can be moved around in cargo bays or launced from fighter bays or from a planet. Since they don't warp and there's no system movement they wouldn't be able to move on their own and couldn't retreat from combat.

You could add weapon platform and sattelite units as well for planetary defense.

I'm thinking each fighter bay could hold a certain number, and launch them at the start of combat. Anyway, fighters in combat would move around like ships. From that point they would be treated like another ship. Unlike ships they could be targetted by PDC as well as regular weapons. Make them harder to hit by regular weapons. Normal hit chance by PDC. But when hit they are destroyed a lot easier then ships. Any hit scored takes them out. And no crippling. Just destroyed.

Since they are fast and manuverable give them more rounds of combat then other ships. But they are small so they do less damage. Not sure how you'd handle that. They have to beat the defense roll by 2 or 3 to score a hit. That would save you from having to track partial damage.