Full Thrust (1992)

Ground Zero Games

Date Reviewed: 1-10-03  Revised 10-15-11

Critical Kobold Rating:  (5 out of 5 Dice)

 

I Dinna Think Me Wee Bairns Cin Take It, Cap'n!

     Star Date: Sept, 2011. This review was originally written in 2003 based on the material in the original two Second Edition rule books for this game, entitled Full Thrust and More Thrust. Soon after writing that review, this kobold got his gnarled claws on the pair of supplemental Fleet Books: Volume One and Volume Two, which were published a few years after the More Thrust book.

     The Fleet Book: Volume One sourcebook updated, streamlined and expanded the 2^nd Ed. core rules while offering several new goodies; it is, in essence, actually a third edition of Full Thrust. However, the Fleet Book refers to material published in More Thrust without reprinting it, so it’s helpful to have More Thrust on hand to make full use of the Fleet Book. (Fleet Book Vol. 2  is mostly a compendium of alien races and their specific technology and fleets, and is not in any way required for play.)

     While I have the printed softcover books, which are hard to come by these days, Ground Zero Games has made the entire Full Thrust rulebooks line available as free PDF downloads on their website! Go there now and get them! Do it!

     My thanks for some very helpful input from Mr. Oerjan Ohlson, one of the play-testers for the Full Thrust Fleet Books, who was polite enough to contact this kobold and offer his insight on the game after reading the original review.  (I'm not sure how he made it past the undead rats, but his efforts are appreciated.)

Overview

     This is a game of “fleet actions in deep space”, as the cover says.  I say…This game ROCKS!

     For quite some time, I have been looking for a set of spaceship rules to incorporate into my sci-fi role-playing. I wanted rules that were useful and complete, yet flexible and simple. The combination is hard to find, my friends. As I read the rulebook to Full Thrust, I smiled, I laughed, I wept. This is what I’d been searching for!

     It’s important that readers understand that this is not a role-playing game. It’s designed for “tabletop miniatures war gaming”, where metal miniatures or other tokens representing starships are moved across game board hex sheets, or across a large table or floor area using rulers.

     To sum up the game succinctly, players control starships in rapid-fire deep space combat. The spaceships may be anything from one-man fighters to super dreadnoughts (think “Star Destroyers”). Any number of craft may be involved in the battle, and it’s possible to represent slightly different levels of technology in the spacecraft as well, perhaps to represent advanced alien races.  

Mechanics

     Ships are rated by Mass. A small fighter or personal craft might have a mass rating of two or three, while gargantuan passenger liners or battle cruisers may have masses of 80 or 100. Behemoth interstellar bulk freighters and super dreadnaughts could have a mass of 200 or more. Theoretically, there is no maximum mass, as long as you have enough engine power to move the thing. Anything over 100 Mass is referred to as a 'superstructure' starship. Space stations are created using the same rules, and often have several hundred Mass points. The mass dictates the Damage Points a ship may sustain in combat, and the available space for weapons and defenses or other systems.

     The mass also dictates how much thrust a ship has. Thrust is the rating a ship uses for speed and maneuverability. A small, light ship may have 8 thrust (the maximum), while huge lumbering ships might have only 2 or 3 thrust points. Thrust is used to accelerate or decelerate each game turn, and up to half a ship’s thrust may be used to change its course each turn.

     The simple space craft movement mechanic in the original rules represents what the authors call cinematic movement. This is the type of space flight seen in space opera movies, and has little to do with actual physics. Basically, your ship flies in whatever direction it's facing at the moment, rather like an airplane. An optional, more realistic vector movement system is introduced in Fleet Book Volume One, for those who would like more scientific movement in your space combat. Vectoring allows you to move in one direction while spinning on your ship’s axis to face another. This would allow you to zip past your opponent going sideways, thus allowing you to use your forward-mounted heavy cannons, which would be unavailable to someone using cinematic movement. You should choose which movement system you’ll use in your games, and stick with it once you’ve chosen.

     Most ships are also capable of FTL travel (Faster Than Light). This may seem to have little bearing on a tabletop game (unless you’re going to run like a scared little goblinbaby when the enemy battleship gets the drop on your two-man courier) except for one important strategic consideration: weapons cannot fire out of the rear arc of the starship due to the energy waves given off by the ship’s FTL drives. (The drive waves screw with fire control targeting systems or something gnarly like that.) That means that even the most poorly-armored spaceship can stay out of the way of an enemy frigate’s weapons batteries if it’s maneuverable enough to stay behind the opponent. (Ships without FTL drives are stuck in one star system, but they can also fire through their rear arc.)

     Once you pick your ship size based on its Mass Factor, you load ‘er up with weapons, naturally. The game uses a generic “beam weapon” classification for guns. These can be any classification you’d like them to be, so you can call them lasers, or phasers, or plasma guns, or microwave projectors, or ion cannons, or HiVoHoFuSpus  (High-Velocity Hot Fudge Spurters), or whatever you’d like!

    Beam guns come in various sizes, plus a “needle beam” variety for sniping at specific parts of a ship. Obviously, larger mass ships can carry bigger, more bad-ass guns, but they also have the option of piling on loads and loads of smaller guns instead. You can therefore decide if you want fewer chances to hit with some serious punch, or lots more chances to pepper your target, but for lesser damage with each hit.  There’re also mines, a few missile types, planetary bombardment ordnance, and my personal favorite, the pulse torpedoes!

     Cryptic reference: “Phooootooonnnn toorrpeeedoooo aaaWAAAAAAY…"

     Your ship uses Fire Control units to lock onto enemies. Each fire-con allows you to target a single enemy craft, but you can focus all your weapons on them, if you want. More fire-cons allow you to track and fire upon more opponents each turn.  Lose these systems due to damage, however, and you can’t find your targets in all that deep space...

     When a juicy target gets in your crosshairs (within range of your weapons), combat is resolved using six-siders. Different weapons have different numbers of d6s to dole out damage with; just roll however many d6’s your weapon entitles you to, and any roll high enough to hit will score damage against your opponent (higher rolls do more damage)

     Your craft is protected with armor, or if you’re big enough, with energy screens. (“Shields up!”) Screens can reduce damage suffered by attacks, but once your defenses go down, you’re in trouble. Weapons do various amounts of damage against your hull, and once your ship loses enough Damage Points, you start rolling for systems failures. With a poor set of rolls, your ship could possibly lose every freakin’ active system on the ship! Yeah, that’s weapons, defenses, engines, life support, crew, etc.

     So how do you repair your leaky plasma containment system and depowered scanner arrays in the midst of combat? Damage Control rules! Larger ships usually have Damage Control staff, but these crews count as systems, and therefore can be lost (killed) just like any other system if you get damaged badly enough. Some systems are more critical than others in combat, such as fire-cons and scanners, so you’ll want to patch them up quick-like. ("Lt. Borf, is that a weather satellite, or an enemy super- heavy- killer- battle- dreadnaught? This could be important...")

     There are also rules included for boarding actions, squadron operations, and terrain effects. (OK, in space, "terrain" includes dust clouds, nebulae, gravity wells, black holes, etc.) This can make just flying around the battlefield dangerous work.

     While most Full Thrust battles are slugged out between larger capitol ships, simply because they can dish out and take the damage, smaller fighter craft can play a role. Fighters have scary-few Damage Points, and so destroying them is often like swatting gnats for the larger capitol ships, generally. Fighters are too fast to hit with missiles, but they are very susceptible to Area Defense Systems, which spew flak in a deadly cross-fire cloud around big ships when fighters try to close. If your pilots stay in close combat with larger ships, they'll have a shorter career than a Tribble at a Klingon BBQ.

     On the plus side, fighters are fast as hell due to their low mass, and when launched in a standard squad of six, they can get close to larger ships and do damage en masse and try to get away again before taking return fire. Putting some fighter squads in your game will allow you to work with hit and run tactics unavailable to the larger ships, but be prepared to lose a sizeable chunk of your pilots in any extended confrontation.

     Example ships are supplied in abundance, so all your freighter, frigate, or fighter needs are provided for, allowing you to get right to the task of blowin’ the everlovin’ crap out of your opponent. But one of the things I love the mostest about Full Thrust is the ship design system. Oooooh, it’s niiiice. Just in case you want to create your own vehicle of destruction, there is a wonderfully simple chapter that walks you through statting out your own spaceships from start to finish. You choose Mass, defenses, armaments, systems, and everything else about the boat, then turn ‘er loose in a matter of ten minutes. For people like me who just enjoy tinkering, it’s hours of fun. 

     (Left) This is a standard ship status display diagram for Thrust, showing all your ship info at a glance. The symbols represent systems like weapons, drives, sensors and armor, and the rows of squares track the damage points the ship can take before becoming space scrap.   

The GOOD

     So, this is a fast-paced, simple, well-designed game! While many games make the claim that you can start playing them 15 minutes after you open them, Full Thrust is seriously that easy. You could be throwing fleets of 20 ships against each other within 15 minutes of reading the basic rules, thanks to the photocopyable ship rosters in the book.

     The two Fleet Books provide major awesomeness by statting out entire fleets of warships of every size and purpose for you to use, and providing a ready-made campaign background outline. Not too much detail, just enough to give you a viable setting in which to throw your armadas against each other. They introduce some alien opponents as well, along with optional variant game mechanics to imitate the alien tech that comprises their ships.

     GZG has produced some nice minis to complement the game (and any game involving miniatures has this kobold’s attention, baby!), but you could take any of your favorite starship minis from other game lines and adapt them to Thrust.

 The NEUTRAL

     I’ll use this space to discuss incorporating FT into an rpg.

     While the game is a tabletop design, I think it could easily be used narratively in an rpg, without needing to break out the rulers and miniatures. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’d like the opportunity. When I found Full Thrust, I had really been looking for a simple system of starship rules to use in conjunction with a role playing game.

     While any space rpg worth its dice will already have rules for ship-to-ship engagements, those rules are often terribly clunky when dealing with, say, a dozen ships, or certainly trying to handle massive war fleets. With some very simple tinkering, your sci-fi rpg of choice can use these rules for some quick but exciting resolutions to their fleet combat. (In fact, one of the Babylon 5 role playing games produced by another company used a modified version of GZG’s Full Thrust for their space combat mechanics in the Earth Force Sourcebook.)

The EVIL

     Oct '11 Update: I had at first said in both the original 2003 review and the recent 2011 version of this review that there was not a single thing I didn't like about this game. However, then I remembered that the one thing that struck me as silly is something I've just always completely ignored for the last decade, so I'd forgotten all about it. 

     The way the rules are written, before every turn, players are supposed to write down their movement orders for every ship they control. There are abbreviations and notations in shorthand to make this go as quickly and simply as possible, but you still have to note how every single one of your craft are planning to turn, where they're moving to, if they're changing their speed, raising or lowering shields, rotating on their vector axis, etc. So every move your armada makes for the next turn is plotted out and unalterable before you know what your opponents are doing.

     The problem with this is that while I suppose it represents the 'realistic' situation of not knowing what your wily space adversary is going to do in battle, it just seems like it would make it a pain in the ass to engage your foes if you have to chase them all over the board and just hope you eventually luck out and plot a course that takes you close enough to launch some torpedoes at them. It also seems like a crapload of wasted time to be writing a bunch of shit down before every turn of the game when you could instead be merrily delivering a type III laser battery broadside against your opponent's frigate. Which seems more fun to you?

     So bear in mind that my estimation of the Full Thrust rules is predicated on the fact that I ignore a core element to the tabletop wargame rules as written in favor of expediency. (We humanoid game reviewers aren't too big on taking notes when we could get right to the ass-kicking. I'm a kobold, dammit! )

     Now, ensign, engage the cloaking device! We're gonna sneak up on the McDonald's drive-thru...

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