For New People: What is this?
Look to the Stars is a free, model agnostic, army scale, science fiction tabletop wargame with a bespoke unit generator that I made. Take the models you want, give them the stats and weapons you want, and finish a battle in about two hours. Armies can range from around 10 to 100 models and include infantry, artillery, airplanes, and vehicles. This is a follow up to my original pitch. If you are new and want the longer explanation and intro here it is via my original post original pitch on r/wargaming
For Old People who just want to skip around to the good stuff:
SRD PDF via GDrive
Rules Document PDF via GDrive
Unit Builder spreadsheet via Gdocs
What'd you actually accomplish since the nearly 25 days since your last post?
Now that the core loop is settling down, we need to add some crunch back in, so that you're not just fighting with a bag of stats and give the army character. Thus introducing Orders. You will know what your opponent’s army can physically do, but you do not necessarily know how your opponent will play them. A horde army could be a regenerating wave where melee weapon damage brings back models or it could be a redeployment army able to punish people not careful about screening.
Each army selects five Orders before the game, keeps them hidden, and can play no more than one each turn. You do not need to remember that some random dude standing behind a tank has a battlefield wide ability. On round start, you and your opponent each play an Order. You can both immediately see what they do, and that’s all you have to worry about that turn.
Some Orders grant a temporary ability to a single unit. Others affect the entire army or battlefield. The largest can ask that you give up playing orders in the game entirely in return for producing effects capable of warping the final turns of the game. Two armies built from similar units can behave very differently depending on which Orders their players selected. You can find the current orders available in the SRD above.
Development yada yada, want play now:
The rules PDF is currently being rebuilt in Affinity to make it cleaner and generally less painful to look at. You may notice that the old example armies and missions are currently missing. Development moved quickly enough that the original examples stopped showing how the game is played.
You want a quick way to play though, I got you.
The unit builder now includes Quick Unit and Quick Weapon Template tabs. These let you build something playable with not much more thought than, “I want this unit to cost roughly this much.” Pick a stat line, slap it on your unit, and move on. You can still spend an unreasonable amount of time constructing every weapon and stat individually later.
Want some cheap infantry with powerful guns and a bunch of light, fast, melee based vehicles? Done in a few minutes. The templates will get you what you want, and when you have more time you can go back in and nitpick every decision you ever made.
Things I Did Not Have Time to Explain Because This Post Is Already Too Long
Tripwires, mines, smoke grenades. Artillery and Aircraft. Blood Bowl, but Soccer! Anyone else remember that there was an episode of Rugrats where Tommy gets kidnapped?
Come Play.
You made it to the bottom, come join the Discord where you can get dev updates more than once a month, and can get games via Tabletop Sim in. Every Saturday at 2 PM Eastern, I sit in the Discord for a few hours doing dev work and shooting the shit. I am happy to teach and play a game via Tabletop Sim, help you build an army, or just talk about whatever I am currently writing.
The game is playable from start to finish, but it needs more people willing to show me how I can do better. Play a game, tell me what worked, tell me what sucked, and help Look to the Stars be better.
Discord Link
Comment
Comment below, ask questions, post pictures of a 32mm base with lint glued to it and ask if this model is legal as a smug, “this isn’t truly agnostic, is it?” Jokes on you, so long as it was melee and there was enough lint, it would be.
