It’s finally done… The shipyards stand silent, their vast purpose completed (for now). My fleet, for use with A Billion Suns, stands ready!
I suggest putting on this playlist while checking out the ships (just to get in the mood).
These miniatures represent nearly 200 hours of combined printing and painting time. They also represent a gradual increase in quality, which is why some ships look much better than others.
In the end, it was all about filling out a fleet of various sizes so that ship types could be easily identified at a glance on the tabletop.
Without further ado, let’s get into it.
This was done in stages, of course. Pictured here are a few of the early prints with just their base coats.
The green ships are all Utility ships with white squares (they look a bit more like dots).
Picture here are the finished Utilities. Good for a 2-player scale 7 game, but I think I may need more. Damn the ever-escalating requirements of corporate warfare!
Pictured below are a few of the initial prints. The ship design with the wheel-like top was one of the smoothest prints in this entire project! Almost no supports, and perfect detail!
In A Billion Suns, you play as 2-4 corporate CEOs, working in competition to accomplish various exploitive goals. The rules are fairly easy to get the hang of, and are among the simpler rules for starship wargames out there. The book has some fun flavor, and is very well laid out!
Particularly interesting is the fact that you don’t pre-build your fleet for a game: you pay credits to buy ships (taking you into debt), and then you hope to get those credits back by completing objectives! It creates a compelling situation where you have to estimate how worth it an objective is. Spend too little, and you have little chance of succeeding; spend too much, and no amount of incoming credits can pay back what it cost to hire all those ships…
The only ships which were not 3D-printed were a set of spare Twilight Imperium ships I ordered. The Nuln oil looked great on their cracks and fine details.
I had to print the Kestrels from FTL in halves so as to use minimal supports. The final glue jobs looked pretty good!
This boy… what started as a failed print of a battleship-class starship, I decided to turn into something else!
With a bit of Green Stuff, I channeled my love of eldritch horror and created a ship consumed by a massive parasitic organism!
Behold! It has wrapped itself around the control systems, gripping any wreckage which remains in its grisly pseudopods!
Any crews who get too close to this thing had best be ready to repel biological agents as well as the revived particle canons!
I’m very pleased with the consistent iconography I used for the carrier-class ships. A simple circle over a horizon to indicate carrying capability, and it was perfect!
Pictured here: an artistic representation of the action encompassed by A Billion Suns!
All it needs now is corporate middle-men sweating over the lost credits when a battleship blows up…
All in all, I can’t recommend A Billion Suns enough. It may not be for everyone, (i.e. if you prefer less RNG in your strategy, if the miniatures commitment for wargaming is a bit too much, or if starships just aren’t your thing) but I find that any game with a unique vision isn’t for everyone in any case.
It’s by Mike Hutchinson after all, the creator of Gaslands! That guy knows how to keep wargames short, interesting, and fun.
Happy gaming, everyone!
Joseph Erwin - Freelance Dungeon Master 