Talon: Fleet Combat in Defense of Earth

Excellent! Paging Engineer Al, let's play this ASAP!

darning with faint praise?

At any rate it is definitely cheaper than Armada.

Barnes wrote: In other space battle news, GMT sent me Talon, and...drum roll...Jim Krohn has managed to make a playable, highly accessible Star Fleet Battles. I mean, it feels A LOT like SFB (or Federation Commander) what with its impulse activation/movement, power management, unloading fully charged disruptors at range 1 and so forth. But gone are the tax forms and the book keeping. You write all the important stuff directly on the big ship counters. It surprised me opening the box how relatively little it needs in terms of components. A board, a couple of ships and a handful of counters. That's it. Very lean, very manageable and really pretty quick. The scenarios are kind of bleh, but the combat is mostly fun. But it does feel like SFB/FedCom, so that means it actually kind of feels more like some kind of tank combat than spaceship combat. There's a cool campaign game you can play and you can also use it to resolve battles in Space Empires 4x.

As for the Armada comparison you are forming in your mind...I definitely prefer Armada over Talon. It is more detailed, more cinematic and more complicated. But Talon is almost a beer and pretzels sort of game...it just happens to have some of that crusty old nerd stuff going on, albeit updated and made palatable by today's standards.

Not faint praise, it's really good. I think there is more to appreciate though if you have played SFB or FedCom and wish that either were more approachable. Those games are really kind of specific types of space combat...and this game is that, but with less detail and lots of fat cut away. But the aspects of managing power, recharging weapons, maneuver and most importantly the same staged, impulse-based activation are all there.

But it is stripped down to those most important things so there is no boarding, no specific hit locations (other than hull quadrants), greatly simplified missile rules, only a couple of ship types per side, no crew detail, no point defense, no countermeasures...

Armada is actually significantly more complex, although still quite distant from SFB/FedCom. But virtually everything there is based more on Flight Path, which imparts a very different feeling.

But Talon is really good and I think a lot of you guys will really like it. I just wouldn't call it an Armada surrogate. In fact, one of Talon's weaknesses is that the setting is really, really generic. Which of course Armada is by comparison best in class (if you like SW)

Oh, you get to fire a wave motion gun in it.

If this would have come out a handful of years ago I would have been all over it. Now? I dunno...

Still have not received mine, still hasn't even shipped yet if the "Your Account" section on GMT's site is to be believed, and given that I was charged on January 9th, I'm kinda pissed about it.

Michael, did you get a review copy? If so, nice to know they got those out before getting it to playing fucking customers.

GMT tracking system is USELESS. So it's probably on the way. They ship according to alphabet started at a random place, so if you get unlucky it can take a really long time for them to ship.

I just hit GMT's chat line and got my UPS tracking number for it. It's out on the truck to my house today. Hit UPS January 28th.

Michael Barnes wrote: In fact, one of Talon's weaknesses is that the setting is really, really generic.

Talon's setting it Star Trek by the way, moved just far enough away to not violate intellectual property issues. This first set is Federation and Klingons, you fire Phasers and Disruptors at each other. GMT kept it cheap not using the IP explicitly, but (especially to those of us with prior experience) it's Star Trek through and through.

I love the impulse movement mechanic. There's a trireme game in the works with it as well that I'm looking forward to. This game has slimmed it down, but it's created some interesting new issues with the slimming. Very much looking forward to this one.

I'm going straight to game night tonight so I won't get to have it in my hands until I get home at 11. A yesterday delivery would have been much better.

GMT actually seems to be getting worse about shipping notifications. I seem to remember getting them in the past, but now it's just pretty much "whenever it shows up."

Now I really want to play this and SE:4x, though not necessarily in the same session.

BUT YOU CAN.

It notes that games will be "significantly longer". Hah.

I never played SE4x, I'd love to get a hold of it but it's out of print and sort of struggling in P500.

There is also an "empire" game you can play where you have like a campaign map and some extra strategic-level stuff going on.

Sag, yes, it is VERY much Trek and it's not hard to sort out who's who and what's what. But it still comes across as generic on a surface level. You just don't get the same level of investment when the ships have names that aren't things like Enterprise or Defiant, Gr'oth or Kronos 1. But you know, ADB never actually had the Trek license, there was some weird loophole where they could "sort of" use it without directly referencing the films or TV shows. I have to admit that I kind of wish that GMT would have pulled some kind of similar stunt.

Given the new movies' focus on action, it would have been a hell of a good fit. Curious what a Trek license goes for. Something tells me GMT had no interest in even calling.

We could probably all pitch in $20 to buy it and then give it to GMT.

Michael Barnes wrote: We could probably all pitch in $20 to buy it and then give it to GMT.

If we're pitching in for an IP it better be Mad Max.

Mad Dog wrote:

Michael Barnes wrote: We could probably all pitch in $20 to buy it and then give it to GMT.

If we're pitching in for an IP it better be Mad Max.

If we're buying Mad Max, that's going to Gale Force 9.

The other day I thought about just sending them a check to help with the development of the Doctor Who game.