After my recent dabbling with Sky Galleons of Mars, I've been down a bit of an Aeronef rabbit hole. I'm pretty sure I had some Aeronef ships years ago and sold them on, so of course it must be time to rebuild! Luckily Brigade Models are very reasonably priced, especially their Flotilla packs.
Osprey produced Castles in the Sky in their 'Blue book' set of rules in 2022. They're more Diesel-punk than VSF but the rules seem pretty adaptable and easy together to grips with. Mechanics are fairly straightforward and not too different to many naval rules... ships have speed and turn ratings, gun batteries marked Bow, Port, Starboard etc and armour ratings to offer a bit of protection. Where they offer a bit more flavour (apart from the altitude ratings of course!) are in the initiative and command ratings, and in how damage is applied.
Each ship has its own Command score and the lead ship rolls this number of dice to.determine initiative. Extra dice are added for Escort ships like Destroyers, frigates etc to reflect their.scouting role.
The highest number of successes (on a 4+) wins initiative but the number of successes also gives a number of Command dice which can be used to give a bonus to movement, turning, firing, damage control etc.
Hits from firing have to check to see if they penetrate armour but even an unsuccessful hit will cause 'Friction' which affects the ships ability to move and fire. If a hit gets through the armour then the results can be pretty bad, from losing some of your precious armour, losing a weapon or steering/engine damage, to exploding! Obviously that's very unlikely and probably won't happen... erm... will it...???
I played it twice in the last couple of weeks, with quite different results. Both games were a simple encounter with a couple of Cruisers and a couple of Escorts per side. In game #1 Anthony took the British. We kept a reasonable distance apart and quickly found that the fast moving Destroyers were very hard to hit, although they wouldn't have lasted long if a shot actually found it's mark. Although we slugged it out for some time there was little major damage (some armour lost on kne of my German Cruisers) and the friction points were generally removed at the end of each turn, so thr game was heading for a draw.
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| The British fleet |
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| The dial made keeping scores easier |
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| Too many dice! |
In game #2 I took on the British and Andrew played the Germans. This time we both got in close pretty quickly and damage (and friction) mounted quickly. The Duke of Edinburgh cruiser lost a lot of armour to torpedo hits from the German destroyers and was at the point of having to test each turn or it would strike it's colours, but then the first of those unfortunate damage rolls resulted in the Scharnhorst exploding! This was followed soon after by a 'Crippled' result on the Magdeburg and the loss of a German Destroyer, handing the British a convincing win. The short ranges definitely made a difference and we also found that the increased Friction points were proving harder to remove which affected movement and firing significantly.
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| The Germans close in on the British Cruiser |
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| The Scharnhorst explodes! |
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| Friction everywhere |
All in all I thought the rules worked well. The biggest problem we had in game #1 was the amount of markers that each ship needed. You need to record speed, altitude, friction points and any specific damage. We'd used dice, which inevitably got knocked over or moved. Anthony had some nifty dials which we used which were better but there was a lot of clutter on the table.
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| The revised fleet sheet |
In game #2 I revamped the ship data sheets and marked a space by each ship to place the dice. This kept them off the table which really helped... only had friction markers to worry about and these could also have gone on the sheet if need be. We also found that 4 was a pretty optimum number of ships to handle... maybe with more familiarity with the rules we could handle bigger fleets but I think we would have been bogged down in the detail. Good fun, and of course I'm now perusing the Brigade Models site... hmm... those aircraft carriers and dirigibles look fun...