Like Derek Guder, who also reviewed this game, I desperately wanted to like Noble Armada. I'm a huge fan of the Fading Suns line and I even got to play a game at a convention GMed by none other than FS co-creator Bill Bridges himself. All that being said, I gotta say "stay away from this bad boy."
This game seems to suffer from, much as I hate to say it, out and out and hubris. The boys and girls at Holistic are fairly noted successes in the RPG arena. They apparently thought they could pull off the same level of achievement with this game without putting much effort into the attempt. It fails.
The around 50 pages of rules are disorganized as all get out. Flavor text is thrown in where it doesn't belong in a game that relies on way too complex a series of steps in a single turn. Rules are either overly complex or nearly impossible to find and like a couple of other reviewers here on rpg.net, I eventually just gave up.
Holistic swears that players love the game once they've played it at conventions, but I'm a firm believer that if I have to have the designer's home phone on speed dial, then there's a problem.
Turn sequence is broken down into phases reminscent of Star Fleet Battles and over-complicate the entire game, in my opinion. This is especially true if you have more than one ship per player AND even worse if you're trying to incorporate the RPG aspect of Fading Suns. There is an option for actually playing 3-D space, but I shudder to think what calculus and excel spreadsheets are involved to pull that off.
The ships have deck plan maps that allow you to man weapon stations, helm, etc. These nicely detailed, black and whie maps of the interiors are nice for RPGing, but only add more stuff to keep track of in actual gameplay. Again, the more ships or the more elements of RPGing you throw into this mish-mash, the more complicated and--to me at least--less fun the whole thing becomes.
The sole redeeming feature of NA and its follow-on line of miniatures for the various Fading Suns political factions is the miniature line. The boxed set includes several sprues of frigates, freighters and galliot-classed ships that are beautifully designed The follow on pewter ships go on to represent (again beautifully) larger capital ships from all the major houses. They are wonderfully done, but can be a bit pricey.
Still, at $55.00 for a boxed set, I expect more than thirty-two tiny plastic play pieces, no matter how nicely they're rendered. Holistic should have done one of two things (to my way of thinking): a) relied on more RPGish/less complicated rules for playing the game OR b) taken the time to organize the hard science, tactical strategic stuff they wanted to pull off into something that could be readily used and digested.
Overall, I'm disappointed. Holistic promises a new release of this product as two separate entities: the ships and the rules, each retailing for around $25.00. The rules are supposed to have been updated and/or revamped and hopefully some of the problems have been addressed. Until someone can show me proof that they've fixed the game, save your money for the next couple or three Fading Suns RPG supplements (you'll have enough to buy a couple at $55.00 for Noble Armada's price).
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(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)