Full Thrust Solo Cloaked Ship Movement—an Introduction
As an avid solo player of the spaceship miniature rules “Full Thrust” by Ground Zero Games, one of my favorite universes to play is Star Trek. On my webpage I have a couple of scenarios,Trek ship conversions,a pic of some homemade Trek counters,rules for the Cardassian orbital weapons platforms from DS9 series,and am hosting my buddy Jay’s Trek counters that he created. (my webpage is , BTW.)
One of the inherent problems I have always had when playing Trek is I could not find a suitable method for solo play of Cloaked ships. This could be a real handicap , especially for the Romulan starships. Since the Romulans relied heavily on Cloaked ships (and to some extent,so did the Klingons) a vital tactical aspect was missing .
After asking at quite a few of the online wargaming forums I frequent,some ideas were forthcoming from other players. The most common response was to have 3 or 4 different tracks and randomly determine which track the Cloaked ship followed.The next popular response was to have some sort of player-created random movement tables;and some of the players explained some very detailed factors to consider when creating these tables (such as crew quality , electronic warfare differences , type of mission , each players posture/attitude , just to name a few factors.)
So obviously I would need to create some sort of system to handle Cloaked ship movement.But how? After some thought,I decided to focus on a very simple AI for two reasons: to keep bookkeeping to minimum , and my inexperience with creating my own solo tables.
After looking through my solo gaming files on my pc I found a saved PDF file by David Manley for a solo system he created for the ACW naval rules “Iron and Fire.” The first 7 tables in his system had to do with generating the course of a river for the Union naval squadron’s movement. Reading through the tables I could see they matched almost perfectly with forward movement/turn arcs of a spaceship. A simple matter of mating David’s generation tables (which are now the Cloaked ship’s movement tables) with the few rules I already had established for Cloaked ship movement and in no time Voila! --- simple solo system for handling Cloaked ships. A few quick solo tests proved how easy the AI works, but one thing to remember is once the ship Cloaks to remove it from the table and just use the solo tables to record its move until such time it Decloaks. When it Decloaks then I go through that ship’s movement on the table to see where it will wind up. However feel free to make your own adjustments to the system—after all the point of Full Thrust is to play the game,not the rules!