Space Opera General

Its pretty broad, but melodrama in space. The characters are important, special, big fish and all interact as willful individuals with wide ranging consequences.

Science fiction that is light on the science.

So, do you like your humanoid aliens or your guys prefer the more exotic ones?

For example the Puppeteers from Ringworld or the Moties.

The only fuckable alien chicks are human with different skin color. Prove me wrong.

T-that would open a rabbit hole than could attract all kinds of deviants user.

>I'm boring, prove me wrong!
Nah, you got it.

There are a lot of people than disagree with that.

People fuck horses, dogs, sheep etc all the time, none of those are humans with different skin colors. Based on that alone it's very clear that if there were aliens around people would want to fuck them pretty much regardless of any likeness to humans so long as they have an appropriate orifice.

Clunky is okay, as long as it can go fast

So, what are the best 6mm wargames?

Say no more.

Source?

Krueger's Krieger, they are a modeller/miniature kits made be some Jap in the 80's than wanted a more real robot feel, he started from kitbashes and ended with they own lines, some magazines were involved. There are no manga or animes based on them but it has some backstory. There are a few pages than don't use moonrunes where you can learn a bit more but they are pretty rare.
maschinenkrueger.com/joomla/
This guy for example.
I love them, old school sci fi power armors? Yes pls.

Shit, SF3D/Maschinen Krieger, not Kruger Krieger, the later it's the name of that page.

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user pls no, xenomorphs ar not for Lewds.

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Haven't you seen the shower scene in the new movie?

Everything after Aliens it's haram to me.

ion age is pretty cool
horizon wars is pretty simple but still fun to play

>creations of H.R. Giger are not for lewds
how naive/deluded are you?

>horizon wars
For what I seen in a review, sounds good, I love to use mechs and being generic and make your own units it's ever nice. It seems to lack cover tough.

Glorious jeroba "Fast" master race

I only read the fluff about Hevy gear (and until the Paxton got blow up with nuclears), how it's like the jerboa in the wargame? I'm getting interested in it.

You're kidding? No other company will pick up a license that killed the previous holder.

Anyway, I hope someone picks up the FSA models, but I'd love if they could tool it down by half in size, so I could play 2k without feeling like highway traffic on monday morning.

I tought Spartan games died because too much games. Probabluy the halo license didn't help but pointing finger to those two games doesn't seem fair.

I've no doubt they lost a lot of fans, but I also have no doubt that buying an expensive license that proved to be past it's prime was the straw that broke the camel's ADHD back. Especially since Halo directly competed with their own fucking franchise.

>Create multiple interesting games
> Kill them all through lack of support and focus
> Take up the niche that might have made a Leviathans revival worthwhile, then shit on it

I'm still sad that I never got my hands on any of the Studio Spartan models they had had originally for Firestorm: Planetfall. Many of those were way better looking models than what they actually put out for the game.

They were okay. I was primarily an aquan player, and the Planetfall aquan models were awful garbage, and it made me sad that they carried that style over to FSA.

I like a range, personally. I don't care much for just weirdly colored humans though. I am generally partial to bug people

I may need to keep an eye on Aquan stuff. It was kind of "close enough" that it would have made for some fun Minbari proxies.

They died because they were run by literal retards. FSA went years without any competition in the space ship wargame field, and they did absolutely nothing with it. I knew this was coming the moment the Dropfleet kickstarter took off.

I took part in the 2.0 beta, and while the game had some flaws (including apparently Neil's unwillingness to re-do any of the main fleet stats, meaning aquans were easymode and sorylians nigh-unplayable), but it was so fucking painful to see the game driven into ground when there was no competition to speak of. Literally all it would take is not going full retard.

What do you think are good bug aliens (than aren't swarm mind).

So I just ended the mote in god eyes after going for classical sci fi (Starship trooper, Dune, Ringworld, Asimov foundation and other tales, Ender Games and a few more) and I want some fun space opera, what do you guys recomend? Liked all the mentioned but probably Dune and starship trooper were my my prefered.

Like Ground Zero Games's Full Thrust?

Sure, but I dunno how minor are GZG or Brigade, they have been making minis since lots of years ago. Heck, they have pretty cool and cheap spaceships, I dunno why they aren't that popular.

Marketing. The only reason I know about either of those companies are Starship Combat News, which no longer updates, and TGN.

Yeah, sadly they're not well known due to a lack of marketing. Full Thrust is a nice and simple system, and you can make stats for ships from other settings, but nobody knows about it. And their own ships aren't bad.

>Dune and SST
You might like the Dorsai! series by Gorden R. Dickson. Its got some social/political stuff, some military, genetic mercenaries.

I don't mind basic humanoid bodyplan, because it's a pretty reasonable design you could expect to develop through convergent evolution, plus it makes sense for narrative reasons as its easier for human audience to emphatise with aliens that have a basically human-like shape. Plus for gaming purposes it lets gear to be more or less interchangeable (if the aliens have hands with opposable thumbs, humans can probably use their tools and weapons, and vise versa). Not fond of "literally just a human painted green" aliens, though. I prefer more alien-looking aliens, though. Having mix of more humanoid and more exotic aliens are good.

Arthropoid aliens are good, I think, because the way arthropods work lets you easily make creatures that are both biologically plausible-looking and reasonably alien-looking. You can change the number and specialisation of limbs and tagmosing of segments and get something that isn't directly like any Earth creature yet still looks recogniseable enough.
I designed these guys as a species in a space-opera setting, and I think they illustrate what I meant well enough. Although on the hindsight I could've gone a bit weirder, like not making all the limbs uniramous.

>Administrators instead of warrior.
How horrifying, they pound into submission other species with lawyering and bureaucracy?

Dropfleet Commander! Great game, as both 'Space Jutland / Guadalcanal' instead of Space Age of Sail, and in the Starship Troopers esque focus on mass landing soldiers to invade cities.

Sounds like they would get along cordially with the Vogons, assuming they both had filed the proper paperwork.

They're called the admistrative caste since their main role is to direct the workers around because the average worker is pretty dumb (they're mentally on par with preteen children) and can't really into complex long term plannings, or indeed bureucracy.
In combat they'd function as officers, directing batallions of worker-soldiers.

Always relevant

The protagonists are exceptional individuals filling archetypal roles. The story has a very grand scale with enormous stakes (fate of the galaxy, etc.) Storytelling is light on nuance and philosophical tones and emphasizes a black and white morality, where solving problems via violence is acceptable and even encouraged.

For example, Star Trek TNG would most likely not be a space opera because the characters are nuanced, the stakes are just as often personal as they are epic, and there is a distinct effort to solve problems without violence. Similarly, Firefly would not be a space opera because the stakes are almost always personal and the characters have depth.

Eh kid.. wanna do somethin fun?and potentially time consuming?

>realistic design
>still has clear artificial gravity based design instead of "engines down" skyscraper config
reeeeeeeeeeeee

It really should be "semi realistic" or "near future".

Is Stellaris anygood?

Pic unrelated

Is there a worse things for an adventurer party? To find themselves swamped be bureaucrats?
So what level of tech do they have? And they governament?

I like Stellaris, although I haven't played it for a while as I'm waiting for the next big update that should fix/change a lot of things.
It has its flaws (every 4X does, really, even Masters of Orion 2), but I like that you can create multiple civilizations of your own and do a game with entirely randomly generated civs, only the pregenned ones, or only ones you've made (and any combination thereof). It's also a bit more complex than average, althoug nothing on the level of Paradox's historical games like Crusader Kings 2. And they're clearly willing to update and rebalance things that don't work.

They're supposed to be one the the major powers in the local area of space (along with humans, a militaristic imperialistic empire, and another civilisation that's had a long-standing alliance with humanity). Technology-vise, they're roughly on par with humans, but have advantage in production capability due to controlling more planets and having a gigantic population that places good of society above personal gain. FTL-travel, space habitats, cybernetics (their military vehicles are actually full-body cyborgs, with a worker's brain placed inside a tank or fighter). Practically no automation or true AI, though, as they've never had to develop any due to abundance of cheap manual labour.

Their goverment is actually composed of hundreds of independent hive-cities, each with their own queen (huge mega-coloniest may have multiple queens, but generally it's one queen per city). Each city is officially ruled by the queen, but in practice most of the day-to-day business is handled by the highest ranking members of the admistrative caste.
Historically the cities used to fight each other all the time, but eventually joined together for the greater good (really because it became clear than any further wars would result in a massive global clusterfuck and nuclear annihilation). There's still lots of political intrique between cities, though.

Are any tabletop space games ACTUALLY popular in the slightest?

I don't think so. For example, thicc bug in look kind of sexy to me for some reason.

x-wing of course.
Apart of that Dropfleet seems to gain traction, but it's not anywhere the scale of X-wing.

X-Wing and Armada. If GW brings back BFG, I'm betting it will become decently popular as well.
Problem is that aside from X-Wing and Armada not that many stores around here at least actually carry any space games, which makes it hard for new players to get into them (BFG wouldn't ahve that issue since it would be sold in GW stores and advertised in White Dwarf).

Traditionalist design is best, then comes realistic and then armored, a long time nothing and at the end are "sleek" plebs.

It's a fun game, but it's got one scenario only- land shit, fight over landing zones. Yes, it's exactly what's on the tin, but it's boring. Much like DropZone, which pretty much forces you to play on a city map.

>but it's got one scenario only- land shit, fight over landing zones.
Half-true; there's something like 8 sufficiently different scenarios based around landing shit (whether that shit actually be land, or space stations.)

That said, it's not all that hard to redo it for annihilation or assassination games with minimal tinkering.

Firestorm was overburdend like DW, and Planetfall was mediocore in eveything. Bad rules, bad minis and bad force organization. Nobody will miss it.

The Halo License didn't kill Spartan. It was their own fault. They jumped from one IP to the next. Going forth one step and 2 back. It's okay if you are a small company, like they were with Dreadfleet, but after DW and FSA keept on having high price, mediocre models and bad and clunky rules for 2 editions, you gotta go. And then they had Dystopian Legions, Halo GB and FB.

This is the maximum clunk level for Power Armor for me personally

Anything larger gets into mechsuit/minimech levels

still better then the saurian mega dinos. DAmm that was fugly model.
agreed, old models were much better.

Studio Bergstorm does some cool and cheap, but sometimes a bit low quality stuff aswell. They have ST, SW even Star Game and some Starship Trooper Ships.
Also Ravenstorm Cold Navy ships look awesome. Pic related.

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Those are quite sexy, I remember the cold navy ships, I tought it was disbanded or something.

Is that armor the official one? If I Remember correctly the power armor from the mobile infantry looked like an ape.

It's not hard, but it invalidates two unit types completely- the strike carriers and troopships, and any bombardment ships. Point is, I wish Dave made his games a bit more open-ended regarding reasons to fight.

I can agree with most of this, but how the fuck were their prices high? They were higher than some of the low-end shit like GZG, sure, but GZG, as important as it is to the genre, has incredibly low quality control metal models that go together like garbage.

I'm not actually sure if it is official or not, I found it on /m/ like a year ago posted with little to no context

The guys who were doing Cold Navy had to get out of the business, and Ravenstar Studios, who do a lot of other shit like !Not classic BSG and !Not nuBSG wound up buying the rights. They also make sundry other spaceships, and some dead sexy looking stations.

ravenstarstudio.com/store/c1/Featured_Products.html

ravenstarstudio.com/store/c46/Ship_Yards.html

Speaking of Space Operas, the Galactic Federation threads on /qst/ is worth checking out if you want to make up your own empire and join in the roleplay

I dunno I'm more of a space rap battle myself.

It's from the Starship Troopers anime, so technically it's an official design. That is to say it's a design used in an official, licensed product.

sounds fun

Dang, there are some cool stuff in there, those Mauridian look sexy, the Terrans look solid terran too, I could see as proxies for FS terrans, if it wasn't because FS is ded.

Firestom minis are fuckhug too, I don't see them to be that badly priced.

I recommend Dorsai books as well, if for no other reason than they are pretty iconic and one of the origins for a lot of military science fiction tropes. Also very popular among filk singers for some reason. Although they do have some questionable choises, like proliferation of hypercompetent military genius protagonists, and some weird psychic power stuff from one of the books that comes out of nowhere and isn't even all that relevant to the plot.

These are neat. You have more drawings of them?

Jerboa is from Nucoal
it's an incredibly fast recon mech with a 9" move when it uses its wheels.

Nucoal in general is about being FAST

Tell me about Nucoal, how did some ex CEF ended as leaders of they own coalition?

Those are a lot bigger than I've assumed them to be. Never seen em life, but from the pictures of just the models I've always assumed they'd be the same size or smaller than BFG cruisers.

>These are neat. You have more drawings of them?
I did a few pages of sketches that have all the major species in my setting, but nothing else. They should all be somewhere on my DA page (elder-thing.deviantart.com/) where I uploaded all random shitscribles I've made.

When the CEF landed, they set up a base of operations in what became Port Arthur, lead by said Col. Arthur. He and his army was left behind by earth after the first invasion, so in exchange for not dying they joined the rising New Coalition (Nucoal) as the Port Arthur Korps.

During earth's second invasion a shit ton of traitors in PAK turncoated and gave the city to earth, Arthur lead a counter-coup and regained his army back from the turncoats and proceeded to murder every sympathizer of earth in Port Arthur.

He basically the central icon of NuCoal, but not exactly the only leader. Each of the 7 main city states has a representative however, Arthur's city, has PAK which is easily the strongest in regards to military power. So much so that the NuCoal logo represents PAK as the central and largest sword.

Nice sounds like a good faction, apart of the jerboa what other cool stuff do they have?

Well there's the chasseur which is the mech in the middle. literally a copy of the southern Jager. It's a lost faster than the jager but due to HG's mechanics it becomes crippled easily. It's MK2 variant (right) gains a jetpack.

The Arbalestier is a new unit that will be revealed in the kickstarter but its stats are already public. It's another very fast mech with hover jets but doesn't sacrifice on armour, being specifically designed to counter the King Cobra from the South

It uses a shit ton of direct-fire explosive weapons, has excellent accuracy and, due to being a veteran model, gets a free reroll every turn.

They have some more standard units like the Cuirasser (left) which is a slower unit than the Chasseur but far better armed.

If you're willing to include the PAK list, you get to use some of earth's equipment too like the hovertanks and GREL infantry.

practically every NuCoal army type has some form of 'allies' rule, meaning you can have other factions models present in your army, in one way or another.

Cool, I don't know if I will get enough money for the kickstarter but definetly looking for some of those guys when they get released.

lol exactly

Question for the thread: how do you run one of these games in a way that feels distinct from "Dungeons and Dragons but in spaaaaaace"? Is there any reason you couldn't just refluff Pathfinder with sci fi wallpaper?