Revising Pax Stellarum

Lately, I've been working on some changes I'd like to implement on my spaceship combat system, Pax Stellarum.

Mostly minor changes, that aim at making the game play faster and smoother. Last saturday we played a game and I had the chance to playtest my ideas, and they seem to work pretty nicely, I think.

We played a 1460 point game, and used the Aquarian and Carnivoran fleets, from Monday Knights Productions. Here you guys can see some pics of the game, that ended with a Carnivoran victory by a tigh margin.

The bulk of the changes I'm implementing on the game involve the following:

- Streamlining fighter rules, so their phases play faster

- Speeding up dice rolling resolution on firing weapons

- Partially rewriting ramming rules

- Adding a Technology (TEK) chart, that limits what ships can have, according to the race's level of development

- Rearranging the sequence of items on the Critical Damage table

- Adding a couple new Special Systems & Abilities

- Cutting down costs by half for all items on the design tool. This way, a 1500-point game will have sufficient ships to play in the same amount of time of popular games like 40k. It helps give players a sense of the amount of time they need to play any specific number of points.

This is all work-in-progress, and I expect to have all this figured out by next week or so.

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Transolar Fleet

Here is my finished Transolar Fleet, from Starfleet Wars/Galactic Knights:

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Avarians Out, Terrans In...

 I finished painting my Avarian fleet on Thurday evening, so I thought I'd share some pics of it:

 My 3 previous fleets from Starfleet Wars have each a unique color pattern: blue for the Aquarians, Yellow for the Carnivorans and Green for the Entomolians. Therefore, my avarians needed a different color to stand apart from these.

The problem was that I wanted this fleet to be colorful, as to represent a birdy species. The solution was to make them colorful but with red being the predominant color.

With the friday night free, I had some time to work on my Terrans, which arrived this week (one week after my Avarians!). I already cleaned the flash, washed them and based the big boys with corsec omni-stands, and now I only need to base the smal ships and fighters and then we're ready for primer!

I'll be painting this fleet after Kurfurst's scheme, from the Starfleet Wars 2 blog. Here are some examples of his paint job on them:

As I'm going out on a work travel next week, I probably won't even get to prime them before returning home at September, 5, also because I plan on using some of my free time this weekend to come up with more ship stats for Pax Stellarum.

Speaking of my homebrew, it is already listed on Star-Ranger's Web Games page. Yay!!

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Avarians arrived!

My Avarian fleet arrived today, after 2 months... Usually, international packages sent to me as priority shipping arrive in a month, but USPS messed it up this time and sent my birdies to Germany, instead, so it took 2x the regular schedule for them to arrive at my door.

The good side is that my paint desk was kind of empty for the last couple months, which allowed me to work on Pax Stellarum with ease of mind.

The bad side is that my Terrans, purchased a month after the avarians, are almost arriving as well, which means I either work hard to get the Avarians ready in record time or my paint desk is soon going to look like downtown during the rush hour!

I'm very please with most of the designs, but a couple ship classes looked too antiquated. Ok, they are old designs, and part of their charm is their antiquated look, but 2 classes in particular were over the top. They were the Hawk Class Destroyer and the Falcon Class Cruiser.

To work this out, I decided to try applying some (minor) changes to these 2 classes, and turns out I'm very pleased with the results:

Hawk Class destroyer, converted (left) and original 

Falcon Class Cruiser, converted (right) and original

The Avarians are the most advanced race in Starfleet Wars, but not so advanced as to be portrayed as Extemely Advanced Ships (EAS) in Pax Stellarum. These are ships that are allowed to ignore some of the restrictions on the design rules.

I'll be working on their stats on the near future.

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The Aquarians!

My 3º Fleet of Starfleet Wars is done! Check the pics:

The paint scheme for them was:

 - Black spray primer

- 2 layers of medium drybrush with Tamyia Acrylic Metallic Blue X-13

- 1 layer of light drybrush with Vallejo Game Color Magic Blue

- 1 layer of light drybrush with Revell Enamel Light Blue 50

- 1 layer of light drybrush with Vallejo Game Color Jade Green

- Engines on Vallejo Model Color Orange Fluo

- Semi-glow varnish, to give a somewhat moist look

Now there are only 2 fleets to go: the Avarians and the Terrans. While I wait for the birdies to arrive, I'll focus on getting as many ship stats created for Pax Stellarum as I can, so people can play my homebrew right away, without having to go over the design tool.

I already designed and entire Centauri fleet, and now I'm going to work on the Narn to oppose them. 

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