Void Admiral has jumped into the spotlight recently with its release on Wargames Vault. It purports to be a modern rewrite of Battlefleet Gothic-style space combat, taking the sailing-ship style movement and arcs but substituting tables and reference cards with straight dice rolling.

Have fun and make sure your opponent is also having fun. Winning isn’t as important as being nice. This is also pretty good advice for life in general.
– Void Admiral Rulebook

After my recent Man O War experiment, I figured I would try and ride that wave of naval combat, be it on water or in space.

Guerilla Miniature Games did a nice overview here, if you prefer video content:

Damage like Lion/Dragon Rampant

Once you have hit and penetrated a target’s shields you have a damage number (let’s say, 7) and that is divided by the target’s Armour. In the case that the armour is 2, then our 7 damaging hits would yield 3 actual damage. If the Armour was 4, it would be 1 actual damage.

The system extends the Dragon Rampant-style rolling:

• Damage:
  • Cannons and missile weapons do double-hits on 6’s
  • Lasers treat a target’s shield as 1.
• Range:
  • Cannons are best at short range
  • Missiles fire best at medium range
  • Lasers can fire at any range without penalty.

This seems an effective way to give flavour to ranged weapons, distinct from the units they are mounted on:

Orders like Saga

The Void Admiral fleets each have four ship types: large, medium, small and a trio of tiny ships. They are differentiated with slightly different statistics, and different loadouts of the three weapon types. The main difference between factions comes from their command board – at the start of the game a player rolls 6D6 and places the dice in the relevant areas of the command board, and can spend those dice for the related ability during the game:

The Hex Problem

One of the main problems I have found with a number of naval games, particularly those with lots of variable speed and weapon range characteristics, is that there’s an awful lot of measuring and arc-checking. Starmada recommends the use of a hex map to simplify matters, and I am willing to bet this would significantly speed up play.

Translating Void Admiral to Hex

Arcs and Directions

Void Admiral uses front/rear/side arcs for weapons, and these essentially remain the same on a hex mat:

Board Size

Hex mats are generally more space hungry than freeform tables if the system isn’t designed for them – for example, Starmada suggests a 24×21 hex map for any game size, while the equivalent large battle in Void Admiral would be 48×72″!

For now since I’m using a Paizo Starfinder Flip Mat and/or a printed Starmada Play mat as my hex grid as a cheap option to determine if hex-based wargaming is something I want to entertain long-term, and so at 24×39″ equivalent I’m restricted to the lower end (albeit not the bottom) of the game size in Void Admiral of 21pts.

Ranges

The longest ranges in this game are 18″, so playing down the long edge of the table (as per Grand Fleets) seems like a reasonable approach to maximise the elements of manouvre and range before getting into a slugging match.

Conclusion: Time to get Space Fleets out?

This wouldn’t be my first space combat game, infact this came about because I had seen an updated Starmada rulebook on Wargames Vault – a game which I’ve played a couple of times but not really been able to sink my teeth into and deserves a revisit.

Though in recent years I mostly have played my games on a small 3×3′ table and in small scale, I’d also tried to skirt the bottom of the recommended points value for a given game. The inevitable result was that one or two bad dice rolls would determine the game, unless one side had more bodies on the table (in which case they almost always won).

My recent experience with MoW has shown me that forces sized appropriately to the system can provide a more interesting game, particularly evident in games with low model-count, high-density rules – and so I’m going to make sure I try that.