A Billion Suns - Interstellar Fleet Combat

[Justjokin]

I was checking this out for the first time today. Anyone play this yet? 

Rules let you use most any ship models you already have. There's also a Virtual Tabletop Simulator mod too.

With the addition of a single player ruleset this is 1-4 players.

 

A Billion Suns – Interstellar Fleet Battles

abillionsuns.space

 

 

 

A Billion Suns is a tabletop science-fiction miniatures wargame of interstellar combat for 2-4 players, featuring a number of awesome and uniquely science-fictiony ...

[Ish]

I haven’t played, but I’ve been following the development blog with eager anticipation.

[Ish]

Just got my copy of the rulebook delivered today (free two-day delivery and a special sale price now on Amazon!) and have given it a quick skim... I really, really, really like what I’m seeing.

I think this game will be a lot of fun for “one offs,” but much like Gaslands or Frostgrave it will really shine when played as a campaign...

I gotta buy some spaceships soon. 

[Ish]

Well, I pulled the trigger and bought a little north of $150 worth of tiny pewter spaceships... 

...

...

I am such an easy mark.

[Ish]

(So... A user by the name of Manchu over on DakkaDakka provided the most concise write-up of A Billion Suns that I’ve yet seen. Rather than write up my own thoughts, I’ll just copy-paste his. –Ish)

 

It’s what I’ll call a starship skirmish game.

You don’t pick a faction. You don’t write a list. You don’t really play as an admiral. Rather, you take on the role of a corporate executive. Venturing out into the black of space means facing the risk of taking your enterprise into the red, financially. Your main decision point is figuring out how much you need to invest to get jobs done profitably. 

Using the trumps from a normal pack of playing cards, the players construct a deck for generating a scenario. Each card represents a Contract: mining asteroids, hunting dangerous space kraken, hacking comms satellites, etc. The players draw three Contracts per scenario. Some of these (fully half of them) entail adding additional play spaces and you could end up playing across 1-4 play spaces at once, with ships possibly jumping back and forth between them. There isn’t a set play space size. Looking over the weapons ranges and ship speeds, I think the smallest area would be 1’ x 1’ but this is just my personal opinion. 

Once the scenario is set up, the game can begin. But wait, what about building your force? This isn’t a matter of writing a list before the game, as in most miniatures games; rather, it’s a central aspect of playing during a game of A Billion Suns. Throughout the course of the game, each player has access to a theoretically infinite number of units called Battlegroups that is practically limited by (a) how many minis you actually have available in your collection and, more importantly in strategic terms, (b) the fact that deploying Battlegroups costs Credits and Credits are what you’re trying to earn by completing Contracts. So you have to go into VP debt before you even have a chance of earning VPs and (hopefully) eventually moving into positive VPs (i.e., profit). This is one factor in game balance. 

The other balancing factor is that all players have access to the same 13 classes of starships. The cheapest option is a wing of recon starfighters, which costs 1 Credit to deploy. On the other end of the spectrum are 40-Credit battleships. As mentioned above, you deploy units of starships called Battlegroups that consist of 1-5 starships of the same class. All the starships in a Battlegroup activate together, are targeted together, and take damage together. So you can see there is a pretty huge range of costs for Battlegroups, from 1 Credit to 200 Credits. The game handles this scope because it is played at scales numbered 1-10. The scale number is a variable that allows the same 12 Contracts to be playable in quick games involving a handful of Credits worth of starships as well as ones involving hundreds of Credits of investment that might take hours to finish. Suggested starting scale is 3. 

One of the variables scale controls is how many Credits are available to earn during the game. This is also scalable by number of players. For example, a 2-player game at scale 3 has a maximum possible revenue of 36 Credits. Note this could not even cover the cost of deploying a single battleship; doing so means climbing out of debt during the game would be impossible. Making the (impossibly) generous assumption that you will earn half of the maximum revenue, you only have 18 Credits to spend deploying starships to break even. The most powerful ship you could deploy in this scenario would be a cruiser, the third most costly class at 15 Credits. Of course what could you even accomplish with only one ship with a 3 Credit margin to break even? 

That analysis doesn’t consider action economy. It’s too complicated to analyze generally because of the variety of Contracts. But in a 2-player game at scale 3, it’s possible for a 2-starship Battlegroup or two 1-starship Battlegroups to score a total of 10 Credits by Round 1 in one of the Contracts. The most profitable way to do this is obviously using starships that cost 1 Credit each to deploy. Meanwhile a single starship, like our powerful cruiser, could score a maximum of 6 Credits in the same circumstances, leaving us at a 9 Credit deficit instead of an 8 Credit profit. But these 1-Credit ships are obviously far more vulnerable to attack by competitors. Whether that will be profitable for them, however, is yet another level of analysis. So far s I can tell, you never directly earn Credits by attacking/destroying your opponents starships. Rather the purpose for doing so is to hobble their ability to work on Contracts and, in the most efficient cases, increase your own probability of completing them instead. 

A Billion Suns is thus not primarily about starship combat as such. Nonetheless, the Contracts provide for plenty of opportunity for hostilities. The question is, can you afford them?