Unfortunately, it looks like
Star Fleet Marines: Assault may be delayed until later this year; still, if the finished product is that much better for it, well and good.
Damn if I pick up yet another collectible wargame to spend my time and money... and time is the more restrictive resource. But just out of curiosity, what it takes to play Starfleet Battles? What do equivalents of Introductory Box Set have? How thick are the equivalents of BattleTech's Introductory Rulebook and Total Warfare?
Before you decide which game (if any) to jump into, there are a couple of things I would suggest looking at first.
For
SFB, there's the
Cadet Training Manual; pdfs with rules, Cadet SSDs and a sample game are on
this page. Cadet ships are at a different scale to "full" SFB SSDs, but they are enough to help ease you into the basic game mechanics.
For FC, there's
Federation Commander: First Missions; which has the rules needed to dust off a couple of Fleet Scale intro ships.
(To clarify,
Federation Commander Ship Cards present units in two separate scales. Squadron Scale is the same as that seen in an
SFB SSD, while Fleet Scale is closer to that used in
SFB for the Cadet ships.)
Plus, there are a number of free Ship Cards (in both scales) in the online
Commander's Circle.
The
Starmada adaptation uses the standard rules for that system, albeit with a few setting-specific edits; you can see the basic rules (without the SFU-specifc details)
here, while a few sample SFU-specific ship pages can be found
on this page.
Can we include Starfleet Command computer games to the discussion? I still have SFC2: Orion Pirates with lots of mods installed. Some might be in need of updates... and I might do the updates just to get to play some decent multiplayer again. Does anyone in here have any interest for such?
While I don't mind talking about the
SFC computer games, it is worth bearing in mind that they are a half-step removed from the "true" Star Fleet Universe; some things that work a certain way in the games are, at times, liable to go in a different direction in the likes of
SFB or
FC.