[Stormcrow]

The combat system in Spaceships is quite playable, but its value depends on what you want to get out of spaceship combat.

If you want a team effort in which each PC can do his or her bit, it works great.

If you want an experience in which each PC gets to blow up an enemy spaceship separately, it won't do unless each PC is flying his or her own fighter.

It assumes relatively complex spaceships, not completely cinematic metal shells swooping around going PEW! PEW! PEW! It's got some cinematic options, but there are limits. At a certain cinematic point, it makes more sense just to make up the action in your heads.

It's not hard to play, but it does take a bit of getting used to until you fully understand how the different maneuvers affect what you can do.

Besides the obvious need for pilots and gunners, you also need sensor operators, because getting accurate information about the enemy ships gives you bonuses to hit them and knowledge of where they're vulnerable, engineers, to route limited power to systems that need it and to operate force fields if you have them, and damage control workers, and leaders, who not only tell everyone what to do, but give them bonuses to their own rolls.

If you want to break space combat into these tasks, Spaceships is excellent. If you want to go ZOOM! ZOOM! PEW! PEW! PEW!, it's unnecessary.

I tried Spaceships combat with Tales of the Solar Patrol for a while, and finally realized I just wanted to go zoom! and pew!, so I dropped it.