• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

Battlefleet Mars and Vector 3

kilemall

SOC-14 5K
Has anyone spent any time with the SPI Battlefleet Mars and Vector 3 games? These were SPI games coming out at the same time as Traveller.

I'm not terribly interested in the games themselves (although that solar system map in BM looks great and V3 modular ships are a nice design ethos) or their combat models, but rather the 3-D vector movement.

Is it adaptable and/or superior to Mayday type movement?
 
I played Battlefleet Mars fairly heavily back in the day and again a few years ago. The 3D movement system never seemed worth the effort to me. The split boards didn't really help visualizing the combat and the (admittedly small) amount of extra work didn't provide a sufficient payoff.

As you noticed, the strategic map was very well done and really is the star of that game.

I remember playing Vector 3 a few times but I wasn't terribly impressed by it.

The main issue I've had with simulated 3D space games is that, unless you're using detailed facing rules (weapon arc limits and facing-oriented damage) they rarely seem to provide sufficient justification to make the extra work worth the effort.

If Mayday-style movement interests you, you might want to take a look at Triplanetary. Steve Jackson has the rights to it now and they have an improved Solar system map here:

http://www.sjgames.com/triplan/


Ad Astra makes the Attack Vector series which uses an innovative combined 3D and Newtonian movement system. They used to offer a free starter download but I no longer see it on their site.
 
Ad Astra is supposed to be coming out with an ACS version so I'm looking to see what comes up there.

I don't believe the weapon arc thing is what is missing in MD or CT maneuver, but that's another topic.

Thanks for the feedback.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top