I put a lot of hours into fighting Spelljammers across the hexed skies back when I first got the set but it has been easily a quarter century ago so this was a vital refresher to confirm that my memories were broadly correct.
This time around I had calculated a Nautiloid and a Damselfly as fitting the pattern of heavy vs fast that we had been playing too, however on seeing the rate of fire rules for the weapons, we threw in a second Damselfly to help try and stop the Nautiloid escaping. Basic Spelljammer flattens 3D into 2D so there was no altitude to worry about, we made the scenario a straight run across the map as the Nautiloids victory condition. By the rules, a Nautiloid can make it from surface to orbit in 4 rounds, and then punch up to Spelljamming speed so a vertical escape would have been pointless.
We set up on a big hex grid, Nautiloid in one corner, aiming for the other corner and the Damselflies halfway down the nearest edge. We diced for propulsion on each of the ships - odd/even for minor/major helm for the Damselflies, d% for series vs pool helm on the Nautiloid. Both Damselflies ended up with minor helms and after a d20 to determine the pilot-mage's level they ended up with two mages levels 19 (!) and 9 for Ship Ratings of 6 and 3 respectively. Throughout all this the 'Spelljammers are gear for an existing party' feel was coming through quite strongly. The Nautiloid rolled up a series helm, then d4+1 gave it a Ship Rating of 4. At this point old memories are nagging me saying 'Ship Rating is really, really important' but I cannot recall quite why.
Round 1 we dice up initiative and get Fast Damselfly, the Nautiloid and Slow Damselfly. As we set off it comes back to me - each hex moved and hex-face turn costs 1 SR point - all these craft have the same maneuver rating of D which says 1 hex face turned per hex moved forward - very much in the ships-of-the-line stately duel mode. Round 1 and 2 everyone just moves - a check of our weapon ranges has revealed that the Damselflies are carrying heavy ballista with only 2 hexes range. The Nautiloid has a medium catapult and medium ballistae with range of 4. The other pieces we noted was the rates of fire - the heavy ballistae fired once per 4 rounds, the medium once per 3. This is slow compared to other systems by a large margin.
Round 3 - Fast Damselfly moves coming into range with its heavy ballista. Now we have the joys of THAC0 calculation, figuring out how the THAC0 12 medium ballista could hit the armour rating 4 Nautiloid (on an 8) which I had completely forgotten. Next the Nautiloid moves on but keeps Fast Damselfly in range and fires its fully battery of medium ballistae. 2 hits on the Damselfly for 3 points hull damage (out of 20) and then the slow Damselfly moves in. Everyone sets to reloading frantically.
Turn 4 - fast Damselfly moves, the Nautiloid fires back with its Catapult for a critical hit... and rolled 'hull holed' which is no use in this type of ship-to-ship beatdown. The slow Damselfly moves up, shoots and hits for 5 points damage (out of 35 for the Nautiloid). More reloading.
Turn 5, 6 - the Nautiloid makes for its destination while the Damselflies pace it.
Turn 7 - the fast Damselfly moves ahead and fires but misses while the Nautiloid turns on the slow Damselfly - firing 2 ballistae and hitting once for 3 hull points. The slow Damselfly fires back and gets a crit! 6 hull points of damage is followed by a roll for '10 more hullpoints damage' which knocks the Nautiloid to 14 hull, under half, and it immediately rolls again on the critical table. This time the roll is a 'loss of maneuverability' which reduces it from class D to class E - functionally no difference since it was pretty clumsy in the first place.
Turn 8 - the unhappy Nautiloid captain makes all speed for the end point, firing a ballista at his pursuers and missing. The forward pointing catapult is no use at this point and although the Nautiloid has a big pointy ram on the front, the captain chooses not to slow and let slow Damselfly get more shots on him. From this point on, Slow Damselfly is more or less out of the fight, following as a blocker to close the Nautiloids room to maneuver but unable to catch up and get in range to fire.
Turns 9 - 11 - the Nautiloid ran away - outpacing the slow Damselfly who could not keep up on a stern chase (SR 3 outmatched by the Nautiloids SR 4) and while fast Damselfly stayed in tight pursuit, their turn 10 shot was not the needed critical and the Nautiloid reached the board edge and escaped.
All told, the rate of fire issue with the weapons made this a very different game compared to the others and the detailed critical hit table also brought back memories of a very different style of game. Talking through how things played out, we took a view that trading down from heavy to medium ballistae on the Damselflies could be a good idea to buy higher rate of fire and greater range with a minor sacrifice in damage potential.
Overall the system felt light enough to be a good bolt-on to facilitate flying ship combat while an adventuring party remains the focus of active play - lots of scope for spell-casters and archers to get involved as there were frequent turns where the ships and their crews were doing no more than pacing each other while the weapons-crews reloaded. There were a couple of old school lay-out quibbles that could be solved with a good combat cheat-sheet - THAC0 was a nuisance to try and remember for just this one occassion and there were a few things like the maneuverability rating that are buried in text that would benefit from being summarised in easily-spotted tables, etc.
The ships feel big, heavy and durable compared to Spider Moon and Aces High which may or may not be what you want. This definitely felt like 'ship combat as the back-drop to heroics' as opposed to the central focus. All in all, the tactical movement felt like a nice balance of light but still had some crunch to it and the ranged-weapons lack of effectiveness and slow rate of fire pushed the feel towards something that fore-grounds boarding actions and the might of spell-slingers.
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