The Saganami Island Tactical Simulator (SITS hereon in for obvious reasons) is a game of starship combat in the Honor Harrington universe (the “Honorverse”), a series of SF novels by David Weber. If you’re unfamiliar with Mr Weber’s work you can download the first book in the series for free, legitimately, from the Baen Free Library ( http://www.baen.com/library). If you’re reading the review of a space combat game, you’ll probably like it.
This review
Cards on the table, I am a physics teacher and I like crunchy games, although my tastes are pretty cosmopolitan. I very much enjoy Attack Vector: Tactical, also by Ad Astra Games and I play ASL (badly), but I also enjoy Eurogames like Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne and Trans America and I have a slightly odd obsession with the old Metagaming Microgames, especially OGRE and GEV. This review is based on a couple of solo games and a deep familiarity with the movement system (because that is shared with an up-coming sister product Squadron Strike, which I am currently helping to play test). That said, I am not an employee of Ad Astra Games (I had to pay them to get on the play test team, and rightly so), nor am I a personal friend of any of their central team, nor was I on the play test team for SITS 2.0. but I do hold a high opinion of Ken Burnside as a game designer and I frequent the Ad Astra forums. When term starts in September I will be rounding up bright teenagers at the school games club to teach them SITS and don’t imagine they will have any problem picking it up. Also, I fully plan to use it as part of my teaching of Newton’s Laws of Motion to my 3rd Form physics class (14 year-olds).
How does it play?
Movement
At the beginning of a turn, you will have a Movement Card (or one per ship if you are running multiple ships) that shows the orientation of your ship in 3D and the velocity vectors it has, due to thrusting on previous turns.
The first step is to place two markers on the map; one to show where the ship will be in the middle of the turn and one to show its position at the end of the turn (assuming you just drift without thrusting).
Then simultaneously with your opponent, you take the movement card and draw two arrows on the top half to show how you want to pivot and roll your ship this turn (if at all). You mark the middle of the pivot arrow to show the direction in which your ship will thrust (on average) this turn.
Based on this middle position, on the bottom half of the Movement Card, you draw another two arrows to show the thrust in the vertical and then the horizontal directions.
Finally you note the numbers from the final two arrows next to your current vectors (and move the End of Turn marker by half these vectors if you weren’t pivoting this turn - all the physicists cheer for 1/2at^2!).
And that really is it. A system that describes full 3D Newtonian motion comes down to “Draw 4 arrows” - it’s an amazing and beautiful piece of design.
Combat
Most of the combat in the Honorverse is missile based (bomb-pumped x-ray laser warheads or contact nukes), with beams (Lasers, Grasers, Grav Lances and Energy Torps) only being used at very close quarters, but to devastating effect.
For the missiles, based on the range between your final positions, you read off a table how many salvos you can fire (you can fire up to three salvos a turn: early middle and late).
You then find the ranges for each salvo - ship to ship for early, ship to midpoint for middle and midpoint to end point for late - which neatly buries a lot of maths involved in “leading the target”.
Then based on your ship’s orientation at the launch point (the beginning of turn position for early and middle, the midpoint position for late), you look at where the targets are in the sky and subsequently which weapons bear on which targets.
Finally, you fill out a salvo card and hand it to your opponent. This involves filling in just 4 boxes – the number of missiles in the salvo, the range, the bearing window of the target and the Missile Quality Level (MQL). MQL is a number based on the range and also factors in the missile’s build quality, ability to manoeuvre, resistance ECM, etc. Lower is better for the attacker.
This clever system allows players to fire and track literally hundreds of missiles per turn without cluttering the map.
Beams can be fired twice (middle and late) but, in accordance with the physics, only at very short range. However, they pack a huge punch and they never miss.
Damage
Early salvos are resolved before the ships are moved, middle salvos from the mid-point and late salvos at the end. Each salvo runs the gauntlet of the target ship’s defences.
Firstly the ECM layer. To begin you roll two ten sided and take the smaller from the higher. This is a central game mechanic and it gives an interesting distribution of numbers from 0 to 9 (1 is most common). Because I’ll have to describe this a lot I’ll use the game abbreviation “2d10-“ subsequently. To this number you add the MQL and the ECM value of the target. An interposed “drive wedge” and decoys add further modifiers. This total is cross-referenced on a table with the number of missiles in the salvo to find the number of missiles that get through.
Second come the active defences. For each of the counter missiles and the point defence, roll 2d10-, add the MQL and cross-reference the total with their strength, giving the number of missiles killed by each. What is left hits the target.
Finally you roll two 10 sided dice and add them to find where the missile hits on the damage silhouette. This is referred to as a table, but it actually a diagram of the ship showing where on the ship it is hit, and what systems are destroyed. The amount of damage depends on the missile and is then modified by the target’s “side walls” and cunningly, the size of the ship, producing a fully scalable damage model that works as well for destroyers as dreadnoughts. This damage silhouette also allows different weapons to have different damage profiles. For instance, nukes only penetrate half as deep as the standard pumped x-ray laser warheads, but they span five columns.
This may sound quite complex, but is actually less so than typical d20 combat, and it accurately describes what you read in the books in essentially just four rolls of a pair of 10 sided dice with some applied modifiers and four table lookups. Another design triumph.
At the end of a turn there is a final phase of “house-keeping” when new thrust vectors are added to the existing ones and players can attempt damage control. Therein lies my least favourite rule and the only real stinker in the game; that all repairs fail after 10 turns, which due to the record-keeping overhead, I choose to ignore.
What’s in the box?
I think that for a small company that does not enjoy the economies of scale available to the humblest eurogame, Ad Astra have chosen carefully and fitfully where to spend your money, whilst still keeping the game reasonably cheap. However, there will be certain aspects that will disappoint.
The Highs –
There are several types of laminated play-aid: Movement Cards, Reference Cards and Salvo Cards. These are beautifully produced in a chunky SF style and font and cleverly designed to streamline play.
The Movement Cards (of which there are nine) allow people to sit around the map on different sides of the table and still have their movement card orientated correctly – for maximum flexibility the reverse of the card has a different orientation printed on it. It’s a little thing, but it’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of the thought and care that has gone into this.
There’s a handy Reference Card that includes aid-memoires of how to consolidate hex vectors and the turn sequence and a look-up table of 3D ranges on the vertical-horizontal slant. This allows you to find things like the range for 27 hexes out at an altitude of 17 without needing Pythagoras (it’s 31) and it show you where it’ll be in the sky. This also has the missile combat resolution engine on the reverse should you need to write it down.
Finally there are the playing-card sized “Salvo Cards” which fly rather well, if flicked like a beer mat between fore and middle finger, so you can literally launch them at your opponent!
You also get 8 pairs of tilt blocks in two colours (red and green). These are cubes of plastic with a skewed 90-degree slice cut out of them. They can be used in conjunction with a box miniature to represent a ship in any of nearly 600 3D orientations. Genius. There are also sets of different coloured tiles that clip in to the bottom of the blocks to represent different altitudes.
The ships themselves are represented by self-assembly, pre-punched cardboard boxes, with an appropriate view of each ship on each side. The pictures are rendered from the same computer models (by Charles Oines) as are used for the metal miniatures. You can actually identify and count the individual weapons should you be so inclined. Beautiful metal miniatures exist, and there are even funky magnetic stands for reproducing the richness of the tilt-blocks and box miniatures, but it’s never going to be as elegant or simple as the original design.
The Setting Book - The beginning of this is a collected summary of all the technical bits from the books. This is followed by the history, economics, and politics of Manticore, the low down on the Manticoran and Havenite Navies, and a description of key battles in Manticoran Havenite war, with set up instructions should you wish to play the battles as scenarios. I loved the technical stuff, but skimmed ever faster through the histories. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there like me, and plenty who will do the opposite, but there’s something here for any Honorverse fan.
Ship Book 1 – This contains the SSDs of the ships, but also a page of historical data on each, including the battles each ship was involved in, and the ever breath-taking renders of the ships themselves by upcoming SF 3D artist Charles Oines (apparently uncredited in the books, so do forgive me if I keep dropping his name to give him the exposure I think he deserves).
The CD-ROM. This contains all the Honor Harrington books up to “At All Costs” (book 11 in the series) in HTML and various e-book formats. To buy those books would cost as much as the game, and it renders the series searchable. I am enjoying reading these on my PDA, but proving the Baen Business Model™ works, I’ve also found myself buying the actual books in parallel.
The Core Rulebook. This is intelligently organised with a “sidebar and main text” layout and numbered rules. The sidebars are used extensively for examples, helpful illustrations, notes on the design, and best of all, direct quotes from the books that echo and embellish the rules being presented. For an extra $10 you can get the deluxe version in full glorious colour. I did and I felt that it was money well spent.
The Lows –
Firstly there are the two large paper hex maps, one blue and one white printed with 34mm hexes on one side and 20mm hexes on the other. These are nice and big, but white and blue just don’t cut it for me for space combat. However felt maps are available for purchase separately from Ad Astra Games and indeed elsewhere (Mr Hotz does famously good work).
The tutorial “walk-through” that was such a strength in the first version has been abandoned. There are plenty of examples, but the spiral structure, by which things are returned to in increasing detail several times leads to a weakened sense of how playing the game actually looks. As one poster on the Ad Astra forums said “The rule-book looks pretty sweet, but I'm having trouble following the rules. I'm trying to find where to start learning but am getting lost in the descriptions of the play-aids. As I'm effectively coming in to SITS with 2.0, anyone have advice as to where to start learning? I'd do the whole, 'play the game, not read the book to learn the rules', but I need a place to start.”
Only 3 ten sided dice (d10s) are included. You won’t need buckets of dice for this game, but ten d10s in 5 coloured pairs will greatly streamline play.
The box itself is a bit like one of those those flat-pack parcel boxes you can buy at the post office that’s been sprayed black. It’s made from corrugated cardboard and the black ink comes off on your fingers. Also the box cover is a rectangular tube that slides over the box, making access fiddly. I went out and bought a large black box-file, cut up and mounted the box cover on it and then binned the original box.
Things you will need that aren’t included
In a market where San Juan comes complete with its own little pencil, gamers are often irritated that everything needed to play the game is not included in the box, so up front, here’s the list of what else you might need.
Paper glue for the box miniatures. You may also want some small ball bearings to put in the box miniatures for stability.
China markers or erasable markers for writing on the Movement Cards, which are essential.
Those extra d10s in coloured pairs, for ease of play,
Unless you wish to scribble on the originals, you will need to scan and print or photocopy the Ship Systems Displays (SSDs). You can also purchase a set of printable PDFs of the SSDs from Ship Book 1 for $5, and when you register the game online, you get access to two additional ship SSDs (not included with the game) in PDF format for free.
A pack of playing cards for “miracle blackjack” and advanced scenario generation.
Internet access to register your copy and claim your free SSDs, search for local opponents and for accessing the lively and friendly forum. Ken Burnside (one of the designers of the game) answered that forum post about “anyone have advice as to where to start learning?” with a full-page post of advice.
If you’re an Honor Harrington fan
The guiding light of the game design has been to recreate the “feel” of the books. Where the game is in direct conflict with the books, there are designer’s notes in the sidebars to explain why certain “non-canonical” decisions have been made – usually to preserve the “feel” of the books even if the numbers are not quite right. The missile defence and damage resolution engines literally produce the characteristic missile cull reports and damage reports from the books. There’s even a mechanism for including the kind of “miracles” that appear in the books, should you wish to re-create the legendary wins of Honor herself against impossible odds. The Ship Book and the Setting Book are packed full of canonical data and gorgeous rendered graphics of the ships by the talented 3D SF artist Charles Oines (did I mention him?
).What if I’m not a Honor Harrington Fan?
This is a great game for any starship combat fan. The idea of capital ships blowing each other into scrap is why we play games like this in the first place. The full 3D-movement engine adds a lot of tactical richness in a way that is essentially painless.
All that said, this is really a game of the books. If you’d like to face off an Imperial Star Destroyer against Yamamoto then this system is too closely wedded to the Honorverse for adaptation. The good news is that Ad Astra Games has a sister product called “Squadron Strike” in the pipeline that uses the same streamlined 3D movement, but also includes an online ship design program to produce the Ship System Displays, with enough flexibility to model almost any SF capital ship.
I’ve got SITS 1.0. How’s it different? Should I upgrade?
SITS 1.0 was based on the Attack Vector: Tactical game engine. SITS 2.0 has a completely revised movement system and combat resolution. The 8 segmented turn has been reduced to just 3 (beginning, middle and end), thus losing the complex if accurate system of thrust charts and vector/segment split tables. This means that experienced players can actually play it in real time at 6 minutes per turn (which is 6 minutes in game time). Each missile salvo can now be sent through the defences in just 4 pairs of d10 rolls. All the changes have been tuned to better reflect the feel of the space combat described in the books. If you liked the idea of space combat in the Honorverse enough to buy the original, you are unlikely to be disappointed by the upgrade – a snip at $25.
“3D doesn’t matter”
There is little doubt that one of this game’s unique selling points it it’s successful handling of 3D movement. The fundamental 2D nature of lots of other similar products is often vehemently (and often quite incorrectly) defended by their adherents with the phrase “3D doesn’t make any difference”. While it is true that the vectors of any two ships can be resolved into a plane, this becomes harder once the ships are allowed to orientate themselves out of this plane and thrust, as a reference-frame shift is now required every turn. Once the vector of a third ship is added the situation has become almost irreducibly 3D (or you can go ahead and resolve the thrust vectors into the plane defined by the position of the three ships. Then ask yourself if tracking the ships’ vectors in 3D is not actually simpler). 4 or more ships makes 3D essential. There’s a lot of tactical richness to be had in 2D as long as there is terrain (consider briefly Halo or Quake with no terrain). However, for the true flavour of full Newtonian space combat you really require 3D. Moreover, in a hard SF setting like the Honorverse, you just wouldn’t be able to re-create the feel of the books without it.
Who will probably hate it?
Anyone who considers addition and subtraction “hard maths” and cross-referencing tables “hard work”. The central resolution mechanic requires rolling pairs of d10s and subtracting the smaller from the larger, adding modifiers and using the result as a lookup parameter on a table. The inner active defence layer subtracts a certain number of missiles from the total that evaded ECM. Damage involves subtracting a shield value and a size modifier from the base damage. It’s not like you’re being asked to take square roots or solve parallel differential equations. It really isn’t that hard at all, but here’s your warning: it’s not a roll and count pips system, but honestly it’s much better for that.
Eurogamers who like their games tactically rich, somewhat abstract, light on rules and with game-times of about an hour. There’s quite a lot of new stuff here to get used to. You won’t learn the rules in 10 minutes, but with a competent demonstrator you could probably get the basics down in about half an hour, and once you’re comfortable, you can play it in real time (each turn being 6 minutes). But even then, games will probably last a couple of hours or so.
Conclusion
Capital ship engagements in Science Fiction universes are for many people one of the highlights of the space-opera genre and one that science fiction wargamers are eager to re-create. However, most of the miniatures games available are fundamentally 2D, and often reflect cinematic rather than Newtonian mechanics. SITS clearly reflects the hard SF of its pedigree, but through great design does so with limited added complexity. Computer games fare little better in comparison - despite the myriad space-fighter-combat computer simulations available, Capital ship combat has never seems to progress from “highlight the target and watch the computer do the attacking for you”. This is simply because the complexity of capital ships requires a team of people on the bridge. Until someone comes up with that kind of online game (and the MMORPGs are getting that way – a Honorverse MMORPG? Yeah!) this is the closest you’ll get to the experience of commanding a Military Capital Space Ship in combat. And you’ll love it.
Simon*
Posted Sun Aug 19, 2007 6:14 pm
