Accelerate Attack! Fleet lists Vertical Slice: Feedback requested

[Aotrs Commander]

Accelerate Attack! Fleet lists Vertical Slice: Feedback requested

As this week is a short working week (on top of packing and holiday preparations, none of which I had time do to before Partizan), I have nevertheless made a vertical slice of what I intend the fleet lists for Accelerate and Attack! Aeons of War to be.

The current plan is to release the lore book (Bleakbane Galaxy Guide) as a PDF/kindle for a rulebook/splat book sort of price and for the fleet lists to come out with maybe 4-5 different fleets (on a theme, if I can swing it!) for a lower price (something in the region of $5/£4 or so).

But before I commit to any final formats, what I really need are some fresh eyes. The ship design format, tech lists record sheets and the presentation thereof have been fixed more or less AccAtt was starting to be written, so have twenty year’s worth of inertia behind them.

So I would ask, not just of the (few, if any!) AccAtt players, but the general starship folks if I could borrow some of your time. I appreciate that the majority of it won’t mean a lot to those of you who haven’t read AccAtt, but hopefully things are reasonably well-explained enough to be comprehensible for this purpose.

Here is PDF of a vertical slice of the fleet lists, which essentially is the bare-bones of what I intend to do.

 

I would be particularly interested on some of the following points.

1) Would the explanation of the construction stats and record sheet be better at the front (as now) or at the back? (Given that “sheet” is grossly exaggerating size, can anyone thing of a better phrse?)

2) Is is worth having the colour damage track below each starship, or collated at the end (as the greyscales ones are here)? Are the colours sufficient or are there any obviously better suggestions that might fit? (As I say, the colours we used are somewhat AccAtt’s historical inertia.) Would the damage track be better if the greyed-out boxes at the end of the track were omitted entirely?

(Sidenote Damage tracks: In addition to them being in the PDF / kindle files (?), I intend to try and provide the damage tracks in a format suitable for word processors (probably .docx, which is the native format), and the point about them is you are intended to easily copy/paste them for the individual scenarios, for the minimum amount of paperwork sheets at the table and minimum effort on the part of the players.)

3) Fluff/lore. I have deliberately kept this to a minimum.

If you’re being paying attention, my lore-writes ups are… Extensive. My estimation is that they are best placed in the lore book (Bleakbane’s Galaxy Guide) which ideally will be supplied with a kindle as well as PDF format. The Galaxy Guide will be very much a read-book, not a look-at-the-pretty-pictures book. (I, frankly, do not ever see me be rich enough to afford to pay Proper Artists to do Spacecraft 2000-2100AD-like Proper Art, so the black and white line art is the best I can provide. So it would be daft of me to try and market it otherwise.)

Further to that, people have said noted reading PDFs isn’t terrible easy on phones and kindles and whatnot (and I know from my own kindle experience that’s true). So I feel like stuffing the fleet list books with the lore essentially copy-pasted from the Galaxy Guide would not only crowd out the important bits – that is, the game stats – but it make them harder to read.

But on the one hand, if I don’t put the lore in the fleet books and only have that seperate in the lore book, I could be accused of locking the lore behind a larger paywall (nevermind that the lore is all freely available already in at least beta form!) And if I do, then I could be likewise accused of trying to make people pay twice for the same thing.

As the lore articles cover a lot more just the powers that have fleet stats and are at least centrailise (in a single place that can be readily updated and supported), I am more inclinded to go for the first option.

But it would be daft of me, I feel, not to at least try to ask the target audience what they might want.

 

 

[Author]

Posts