“Talon Tuesdays” is an article series appearing on InsideGMT periodically on Tuesdays.  It features articles from the Talon development team regarding the game’s design, development and upcoming release.

Issue #14: Space Empires Crossover

Jim Krohn and GMT Games have another game called Space Empires: 4x. It’s a 4x (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) board war game in the vein of old PC games like Masters of Orion and its namesake – Space Empires. It’s a strategic level game, where you are mostly concerned with the development of your empire, research and area control on the board.  Combat is handled through a very slick system that still gives players interesting tactical choices – however, it is abstracted.  The ships are not on a map, moving around, they instead take turns firing.

From the outset, Talon was always meant to be its own thing. Talon was never meant to be an expansion for Space Empires. It exists in its own flavorful universe while Space Empires has only mild seasoning for flavor.  We realized shortly after Talon was announced that there was a big demand from our Space Empires fan base for there to be a Talon tie-in for Space Empires.  Fans wanted a way to play out their Space Empires tactical battles in the Talon system – letting them zoom in and control the nitty gritty details of the ships they’ve built.  We wanted to satisfy our fans, but at the same time, Space Empires needed to bend to the rules of Talon, not the other way around.

Once Talon was entering the last leg of development, we decided it was time to lock down the crossover rules.  The Talon engine was where it needed to be so we could safely play with how the two games would interact.  Fortunately, many of the ship types in Space Empires are present in Talon and things like bases and transports are already core parts of the Talon engine. We also had Oliver Upshaw, Space Empire’s developer, weigh in and he was a big help in polishing these rules. Surprisingly, the crossover rules worked out smoothly and take up less than 3 pages of the Play Book.

The crossover doesn’t require ownership of the Space Empires: Close Encounters expansion, but we included some rules for things like Ground Troops in case you do have the expansion. There are several caveats and some Space Empires rules are not used at all, such as Mines, Fleet Size Bonus and Boarding to name a few. The biggest caveat is to use common sense.  The crossover rules are pretty solid but, when merging two game engines together that were not designed to work in unison, there are likely to be unforeseen consequences.

One player in Space Empires will represent the Talon, the other the Terran. The Talon player starts with 3 FFs instead of SCs (and of course must use the Red tokens). Talon players cannot build Fighters. Beyond that, things like Cloaking only effect the strategic map and not tactical combat.  Combat in terrain defers to a roll on the Astrometrics Lab chart (so multiple combats in one Space Empires hex will have different “locations”). Only terrain patterns that are predominantly the location’s type (say Asteroids) will be used, so if you roll a terrain pattern that is 3 asteroids and 2 nebula you can use that in your asteroid battle.  Black hole battles obviously use the black hole counter in Talon which makes things way more interesting than in a regular Space Empires battle in a Black Hole.

The biggest and maybe least intuitive change is in the Attack and Defense technologies.  Just upgrading damage in Talon doesn’t really work since the characteristics of the individual weapon types on Talon ships are so different. Instead at Attack tech 0 (your starting tech level in Space Empires) your Missile damage and die roll results are actually WORSE than in a normal Talon battle.  Likewise at Defense level 0 the Missile damage a ship receives is WORSE than in a normal Talon game (this actually balances out if both sides are at attack/defense 0). As you improve Attack tech, Missiles deal more damage and weapon die rolls are increased, which means more damage or accuracy depending on the weapon type. As your Defense tech goes up, damage from Missiles goes down and your opponent attack rolls against you are decreased.  So if I have Defense 0 on a ship and you have Attack 1, that ship’s Missiles would do 3 damage and you would add +1 to all your other attack rolls. If you had Attack 0, Missiles would do 2 damage and your other attack rolls would have a net 0 roll modifier.

Tactics tech is also a little different.  The side with the highest tactics rating may, once per battle, change the initiative at the start of an Impulse. If Tactics rating are tied, the defender gets this benefit.  Very powerful, as always.  Also, at the end of combat, all damage is repaired, unlike in Empire War mode (but like Space Empires).  Retreats follow the Talon retreat rules (which can be more challenging to pull off in a heated battled).

If you have the Close Encounters expansion, troop ships will have to land on the enemy planet (and survive the flight to orbit).  Additionally, crews can gain experience.  This gives slightly different effects than in Space Empires. At +1 level difference, the damage caused by your Missiles is increased and your rolls are +1, as with Attack tech.  With +2 level difference, your opponents Missile damage and rolls against this ship will be decreased (notice this mirrors the effects in Space Empires). At level 3 damage from all sources (like explosions) is decreased on this ship and at Legendary experience, your ship gains a bonus AP once per round as if they had an additional battery (even if they were Talon).

In Space Empires, it is not uncommon to have really large fleet battles with >10 individual ships on a given side.  Talon does support large battles, but in some cases, you may be limited by the number of ship counters you own, in addition to having to use terrain in the current battle.  If you and your opponent own multiple copies of Talon, that can help keep more “ships in the air” so to speak. Otherwise, we just used the same Ship Battle Limit rules that we have in the Empire war section of the Play Book – Let’s say you require more DDs than you can field. First, field as many DDs as possible, then once one is destroyed, during the subsequent Reinforcement Phase of the Talon battle, remaining ships may FTL into battle.

A lot of the crossover rules can be communicated in our conversion player aid card that is included in the Play Book and would be used instead of the Space Empires player aid cards:

I have one last big, big, BIG caveat to include regarding these crossover rules… it will make your Space Empires game take a LOOOONG time – Which, if you’re looking for that kind of big epic game, this will do the trick.

Space Empires was, if I can speak for Jim, really designed to be a streamlined way to get the “big” space 4x game to the table. You can play a really satisfying 4x game in 2-3 hours with Space Empires.  Talon, likewise, is a way to streamline big, complex space tactical games (like Star Fleet battles or X-Wing) such that most of these battles only take about 90 minutes depending on scale.  By themselves, those time estimates are really good, you can play the game in one sitting- multiple games in Talon’s case. By combining these two games, it will dramatically increase your play time and in a way it brings both of the games styles back to being huge. You’ll probably need a place to leave the boards set up for multiple sessions; it’ll take a commitment.

That said, the rules DO work and definitely give you the feel of being in an epic space conflict. The fate of planets could rest in your battleship’s ability to tighten her turning radius and destroy the incoming troop transports.  Your forward attack fleet may narrowly escape a Missile barrage and force its way into enemy territory, through enemy lines, at the last second. It also adds this really interesting ownership over the individual ships you build.  In original Space Empires, you might crank out 3 Cruisers during your Econ Phase.  These ships will just be represented by a #3 counter under your fleet marker.  This works perfectly for Space Empires. But what the conversion brings is ownership – those ships, in combat, will have names and will accomplish things on an individual level.  The Guderian might get a lucky shot with a torpedo at range (and her crew might gain a level of experience under the Close Encounter rules) and for the rest of the game, that ship will have a story.

We really hope the Space Empires fans out there can enjoy combining these great games.  If you do get a session in, please post it, we’d love to hear your stories.

Previous Article in the Series: Talon Tuesday Issue #13: Empire War

Next Article in the Series: Talon Tuesday Issue #15: Lifetime Score

Author: Bob Seifert