Mailbag 1: Starmada and BFG

As I was checking my search terms, I realized that some of them were fairly entertaining, and others were questions and might entail answers or responses.  So, here are some of my favorites, biased towards the ones that appear most often:

"starmada fire arcs": Yeah, these are tricky for beginners.  In AE, you have six primary arcs - A, B, C, D, E, and F.  There's also a second set, but they're for munchkins and rules wankers (the G arc is too damn good).  Each arc covers 60 degrees of...  well, arc.  If you take a ship's heading to be 0, directly right to be 90, directly behind to be 180, and directly left to be 270, the arcs cover angles as follow:

• A: 300 through 360; forward-left
• B: 0 through 60; forward-right
• C: 240 through 300; left broadside
• D: 60 through 120; right broadside
• E: 180 through 240; rear-left
• F: 120 through 180; rear-right

 I know that that may not be terribly helpful, and that I should include an image, but my image editing capabilities are rather limited (no mouse), and pulling one out of the manual would be poor form.  One trick we did find helpful in learning the arcs was copying the arc diagram from the book into the map so that we could refer to it rapidly without having to consult the book.

"battlefleet gothic firing arc templates": These I don't have readily memorized (though I thought they were just forward, aft, port, starboard...), but Games Workshops' BFG resources has something which might work.

 "starmada admiralty edition review": Huh, maybe I should write one of those.  A bit late in the game's lifecycle, though, since Starmada Nova should launch in the next month or so.  Speaking of which, most recent news on that front is that the rules are complete, but they're deciding what should go in the core book, and doing layout / formatting.  Also, they have cover art, and it has better texture than in previous versions.

"battlefleet gothic conversion": Let me tell you, when Starmada Nova launches, it's the first thing on my to-do list (possibly after constructing a spreadsheet for accelerated shipbuilding, depending on how fast OldnGrey and the other spreadsheet guys on the forums are about it).  I did do a lot of conversion work on the Battlefleet Gothic ships to Admiralty Edition, too (about 5 revisions of Imperials, Chaos, and Eldar, as well as one version each of Tau and Orks)...  but the files were lost in the great Laptop Catastrophe of Fall '11.  They may be on a backup drive somewhere, but I honestly don't know anymore.  There are three relevant threads on the Starmada forums, here, here, and here.  The first of those has most of my version 1 work, as well as parts of v3 and my v3.5 Imperials. 

"simplest campaign system": It's a simple campaign system for Starmada: Admiralty, originally published in the Imperial Starmada Sourcebook, and republished in the Options Annex.  As the name would suggest, it is in fact very simple.  You have a fleet registry (where hull damage persists across combats), and a pool of resource points which you can use to repair or buy new ships.  After each combat, the winner gets a victory point towards campaign victory, but no resource points, while the loser gets resource points, but no victory points.  First one to n victory points wins, for pre-determined n.  It's known for creating really torn-up fleets by the end of the campaign.  For a series of after-action reports from a game run using a slightly tweaked version, I recommend Blacklancer's posts here.  It starts getting good on page 3, particularly this post.  Note to self: try running Simplest with >2 players and watch the chaos.

"starmada d12 roll": Huh.  Well, there was a forum thread a while back on d10 Starmada.  Never tried d10 or d12, myself; I certainly don't have enough d12s for it, and while I have enough d10s, you'd need to do some serious work on the probabilities and the point costings.  If somebody writes a conversion to make that happen, let me know.