Solo Spaceship Wargame Playtest: Turn 7 AAR

... Alternate Title: This is Why We Playtest

I finished turns 6 and 7 of the playtest of my simple spaceship game Greater Space Battles.  The playtest paid some big dividends as it highlighted some design flaws.  I'll get to my fixes in a little bit; first I'll set up the scene.

As I mentioned last post, I had concerns regarding the weapons fire rules, but then I rolled a number of hits on four separate ships, including a critical hit on the SS Fifthia (see the first AAR post for the lineup of combatant ships).  I was starting to feel better about the rules mechanic but then, during the damage control phase, nearly all the ships repaired all their hits, including the Fifthia.  My doubts returned.  Basically the flaw in the rule is that since both the attack and defense rolls use a "take the highest die rolled" mechanic, as soon as a 6 is rolled by the defender, the attacker's shot becomes impossible.  Not a terrible rule, but something I could fix.  The following pictures of the turn 7 energy allocation phase highlight the bigger problem with my ruleset:

At the edge of the mysterious "gridded space" sector

Pennies show energy allocation

 As the pictures show, it's turn 7 and the ships are still on their respective sides of the boards!  Everyone is moving like molasses.  As I mentioned previously, I thought perhaps this was due to my own tactical reluctance.  After six turns of failed movement rolls however, I realized the rules hamstring the ships.  Again, the "roll many dice, take the highest" rule caused the problem.  I use this rule mechanic because I need it for energy allocation as it generates a maximum of 6, regardless of ship size.  I wanted the die rolls to be consistent so I decided to use this mechanic for shooting and moving.  After turn 6 I resolved to try a new method and saw immediate improvements.

For weapons fire the defender now uses the sum of all the dice rolled to get the defense score.  Likewise, the shooting vessel sums the dice scores rolled for attack.  Damage is as before: the amount the attack roll exceeds defense.  Easy.  In turn 7 this little change resulted in the poor little SS Raimo taking 7 hits, which resulted in all five energy allocation channels knocked out as well as a critical hit.  As brutal as that sounds, the damage control phase restored two energy schemes, and besides at close range space combat should be devastating.

Movement now uses a similar mechanic.  The moving ship rolls one die per energy token allocated, and sums the dice scores, then subtracts the ship size.  This is a huge change to the rules, as it allows ships to displace quite a bit.  As a result a target ship can jump from one firing arc to another quite easily, so it makes initiative even more important.

I've made the changes on the rules download; please feel free to download the newest version.  Thanks for looking.