The game itself is a 136-page PDF, and it comes with a starship designer in Excel format. While the math involved in ship design isn't especially onerous, it's still a nice thing to have, and something that all publishers should include with these kinds of games. The art is serviceable, featuring painted up minis with photoshopped in space backgrounds provided by pictures taken from the Hubble telescope- nothing to extraordinary, but nothing that actually detracts from the book.
Chapter 1
The game goes into the historical background for the fleets presented later in the book, but this really only applies for games that take place in the default universe. The game does, however, break down each of the ship classes, in the game, of which there are five- Battleship, Battlecruiser, Heavy cruiser, Light cruiser, and destroyer. then come the roles that each ship can fall into- Battleline, Flagship, Screen, Rapid Deployment Force, Carrier, Scout, and defender, allo of which add different mechanical quirks and bonuses which are discussed later in the book.
The game requires hexmats, the appropriate Ship record sheets, and a number of d10s and d6s, and whatever all else you write and erase things with. The back of the page has printable counters for the various terrain, missiles, and other things possibly or certainly needed in play.
The next part is how forces are actually put together in game. There are restrictions on how many light ships (Destroyers, light cruisers) one can bring to a fight based on how many medium ships (Heavy Cruisers) or Capital ships (Battlecruisers and Battleships) one has assigned to their force, which makes it nearly impossible to build 'swarm' fleets, and is one of the ways the game ensures the players will bring a variety of ships to the table.
Chapter 2: Moving
Initiative is determined by rolling 2d10, plus the Flagship bonus if there's a ship with that role in the fleet. The winner of that roll can choose the "Aggressive" or "Tactical" strategy, with the loser taking the other. The player using aggressive moves, shoots, and resolves damage first, while the Tactical player goes second- however, because positioning is everything in this game, the player who moves second may actually be able to seize a greater advantage by maneuvering after their opponent has done so.
Each ship starts with a default Velocity, and each ship has a Delta rating, which affects how much they can adjust their velocity at the start of each turn, as well as how many facing changes they can make in a round. Missiles move first, and missiles that end up in a ship's hex automatically resolve their attack and damage during the movement phase, potentially causing critical damage before the regular shooting even begins. Fighters move last.
Note: Ships cannot ram each other. Space is big, and if you're out of guns, you're out of luck.
Chapter 3: Weapons and Equipment
Now, I can't see why this chapter was shoved in between the Movement Phase and Shooting Phase chapters, but I do invite the writer to comment, if he catches wind of this review. I probably would've kept the Turn Phase rules in one unbroken continuity, myself.
Anyway, this chapter described the various weapon and equipment systems involved in Colonial Battlefleet. Like Full Thrust, this game draws from a list of pre-defined weapon systems. These do have a bit more flavor than the sometimes excessively generic Full Thrust weapons, with each having their own properties of how well they work on shields and hulls, how well they shoot, and how well they penetrate armor.
I find the rules for mines here notable- not only can be placed as deterrents, to force your opponent to maneuver around them, but a player with mines can choose to deploy some or all of them by stealth- at the end of an opponent's movement, a player with mines can declare that his opponent has blundered into a minefield, choose the hex where he wants to deploy the mines, and roll for scatter. If it all works out, the ship that ends up in the minefield takes a mine attack, and those things are potentially devastating to even the largest vessels, as I found out in my play.
Chapter 4: Shooting Phase
Colonial Battlefleet continues the long tradition of weapons having defined firing arcs, so nothing new is here. Weapons fire is handled as follows: Each ship has a Fire Control rating, which determines how many weapon batteries it can fire each turn, and the rating also acts as a bonus to attack rolls- put simply put, a higher fire control lets you fire more guns at once, and more accurately.
The thing that really speeds up play in the shooting phase is the fact that the game doesn't use range bands. Weapons have an attack die (d10 or D6), and the roll to hit is Attack die + Fire control vs. Range. Hits automatically apply the appropriate damage to shields, and roll vs. the ship's armor. Non-penetrating hits do half the listed hull damage (so high armor doesn't make one invulnerable to weapons), while penetrations do full damage, and automatically generate a critical hit roll. Capital Ships resolve their gunfire first.
(Ex: The Acheron PDF Battlecruiser Persephone attacks an unshielded side of the Perseus Trading Co. Battlecruiser Competitive Advantage, hitting with three disruptors and two railguns. One of the disruptors fails to penetrate, but the rest of the weapons do do, allowing the Acheron PDF player to roll four critical hits, disabling the ship's Point-defense system, damaging its Fire Control system, disabling one of its Gatling Laser batteries, and also destroying its bridge- meaning that the Competitive Advantage can now no longer shoot, maneuver, defend itself against missiles, or fire one of its Gatling Laser batteries while those systems are down. to add insult to injury, the Acheron PDF Light Cruiser Styx comes along- while its turbolasers can't penetrate the Competitive Advantage's shields at all, its torpedo causes another critical hit, destroying its forward shield generator. Repairing all of those will take a minimum of five turns. Ouch!)
As in the above example, critical hits can render a ship non-battleworthy, at least temporarily, well before the ship is destroyed. Missiles roll their attack vs. the enemy's point defense dice, and missile attacks that make it through point defense automatically hit, and bypass shields.
Shields regenerate each turn by an amount equal to the ship's strongest shield facings, so in order to really weaken a ship's shields you have to attack from multiple sides. Each hex facing has its own independent generator.
5: Damage Control Phase
The damage control phase is where critical systems are repaired and shields regenerate. Each ship that has suffered critical damage have a 50% chance on a 1d10 to restore a single damaged system chosen by the player. Nothing much here but the basics.
6: Fighters
Fighter squadrons are extremely agile in a game where maneuverability is king, instead of velocity, they have a speed, and they can move as many or as few hexes as they want in that speed. They also have no facing, so they don't aren't limited by the need to make specific turns. Squadrons are composed of six individual craft, but they all move and act together, but are destroyed separately.
However, fighters are very much there to support ships rather than the other way around. Fighters cannot win a battle on their own- they have trouble defeating all but the lightest shields because you can't stack more than one squadron against one facing, and their critical table is limited- they can only damage weapons, while it requires warship-scale weapons to cut into the really juicy bits like Life support or the reactor. They're useful to have, but they don't dominate the table- they just make things easier for the rest of your guys.
Chapter 7: Scenarios.
There are six scenarios included in the rulebook, so as to add some flavor and challenge to your games, as always. Each one has its own conditions and point limits, but I won't bore with the numerical details.
In Ambush, the player being pursued must escape, but through a Warp Point rather than off the map edge, which requires more prep and maneuver than simply boosting to full speed and off the edge of the map.
Convoy Raid is an escort mission for the B side, however, most notably, the designers recognized how hard it is to protect something in a game with free and open shooting, so the a raiding vessel may not attack a civilian ship if there's a defending cruiser that's closer and within line of sight.
Meeting Engagement is a meeting engagement- each player gets a Warp Point, deploys their fleet around it, and go to town on each other.
Warp Point Assault is an assault on an entrenched system- The attacker has more points, but has to funnel his ships through the warp point while the defender gets to place their whole fleet on the board, if at a distance from the warp point, as well as some free mines.
Unprepared Defense is a variation on the above, where the defender may actually have more points than the attacker, but the defender has no free mines, and their ships are facing towards the long edges of the table, meaning they won't be able to immediately attack the ships as they come through the warp point.
Armageddon is a planetary attack mission where the attacker uses strategic bombardment from railguns and the like to try to turn an enemy planet into a worthless wasteland. The attacker needs to complete this mission before reinforcements come in and stop them. Defending ships can actually block the strategic attacks, but they need to move their ships in the way, and take the damage instead- and Rail guns are strong weapons.
8: Optional Rules.
This is where you find things like boarding actions, the rules for Warp Points, and others. Of most note are the rules for tech levels, which allow you, for purposes of fleet construction, determine what technologies your ships do and don't have access to, effectively allowing players to make customized factions for a campaign context (The full campaign rules will be in a separate book to come.)
It also allows for the usual terrain, such as asteroids, but, due to the velocity-changing rules applied to planets and black holes, it's possible to actually slingshot around them for a speed boost, if the ship is maneuverable enough.
Chapter 9: Starship construction
This is where the rules are for shipbuilding. There are eighty different hulls spread across all five classes. A point to note is that the largest hull is only five times more innately durable than the smallest, but the larger ship has 25 times more space with which to mount its offensive and defensive systems. Plus, certain heavier weapons are restricted to the higher classes of vessels.
However, the aforementioned roles are also restricted by class. Only Destroyers can take the scout role, which allows them to be deployed by stealth to make surprise attacks, confer a hit bonus to other vessels, and vessels firing on scouts don't get their fire control to-hit bonus. Only Light Cruisers can take the Screen role, which confers a point defense bonus to nearby ships against missile and fighter attacks, and it also prevents stealth ships and mines from deploying nearby, and so on. Each role confers a significant mechanical advantage towards that role, meaning the concept you envision for your ships is translated by the game rules directly to the tabletop- in an Unprepared Defender scenario, more than half of my fleet was composed of Rapid Deployment ships, whose ability to maneuver and thus react quickly was one of the keys to my victory. Another ship in that battle had the Battleline role, and despite taking tremendous critical damage from mines, was able to repair all of its systems swiftly and rejoin the fight immediately.
Appendices:
This contains the game counters, as well as a set of three ready-to-play fleets. complete with filled-out data cards. It also contains blank data cards, for all of your own ship-recording needs.
The sample fleets are based on some of the fleets in the Brigade Models spaceship line, and the author has said on the forum that he plans to to a fleet book based on the ship lines put out by Ravenstar Miniatures and Ironwind Metals.
End:
Colonial Battlefleet, while perhaps not as flexible as some other generic space combat games, offers some unique and interesting options that provide a decent and satisfying space combat experience.
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