Reynard
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Over the weekend I ran a long Starfinder convention mini-campaign at TotalCon in Marlborough, MA USA. As the grande finale I ran a big fat space battle. I know some folks have had some reservations about the space combat system, so I thought I would offer up this example.
First of all, there were 3 factions in the Battle for Nebula City -- the invading Azlanti Fleet (played by me, the GM), a fleet of pirate vessels that were wild cards (four players) and a station defense fleet (four other players). I allowed each player 5 tiers of ships and most of the players took 2 ships each (a 2 and a 3 or a 1 and a 4), while my invading force consisted of 6 Tier 1/2 fighters, 2 tier 6 battleships and a tier 7 flagship. The invader's goal was to destroy the defenders and run off the pirates. All told there were about 25 or so ships on the table at the start of the battle. I held a Nova Spawn in reserve in case it looked like the invaders might go down to easy.
The introduction and ship choosing phase took about an hour. Some folks had played Starfinder before but few had done much space combat. The ships came from the main book and APs as well as some commercially available on DriveThru. Most seemed generally balanced. The first round of combat took quite a while -- another hour -- while players tried to figure out their vessels in action and all the different phase action choices. It was a little clunky and frustrating -- not least because 3 of 4 almost immediately the pirate players decided they would focus fire on defender ships (even though they had been offered amnesty for helping fight off the Azlanti). The second round of combat went faster -- I trusted the players to take care of the department/crew actions that only affected themselves and enforced a "roll attack and damage at the same time" rule. By the end of that round a couple pirate vessels were dead, a couple Azlanti fighters were dead and one defender ship was very close to fireball city.
We took 10 as I got checked out of my hotel room. When I return a couple players had left for lunch and another game and had been replaced by a couple people who had been hoping to get a slot. the newcomers just took over existing ships in the pirate fleet. Two of the three players that had left were children, and while I like gaming with kids and encourage them, things sped up considerably once they were no longer at the table.
From there it was pretty smooth, exciting sailing. As the weaker ships got knocked out the battle grew more intense. As players got comfortable with the basic rules, they tried more and more options, including piloting maneuvers and stuff. The game system held up pretty well, having the same swingy quality of the RPG parts of play. Note that I let players use Resolve points to buy rerolls and such in play and so gave each player some "awesome points" to do the same thing. This certainly sped things up as some misses turned into hits and hits into crits, but many of these awesome points fizzled (you can still roll low on a reroll or a d30!) and I don't think it made the game unrecognizable.
In the end the pirates and defenders joined forces and focused fire on the pirates. Focusing fire is essential in Starfinder space combat, since it is trivial in most cases to re balance shields. So if you can get a ship's shields down and hammer that same quadrant you can do real damage and cause critical system failures. Had the pirates kept fighting the defenders or even fled the outcome was in no way certain.
In general I don't think Starfinder ship combat is especially deep, and as such it might grow stale if played constantly. That said, I was impressed on how it handled a lot of players and vessels and think it makes a good addition to the game. A space combat every few sessions can change up the pace of the game and offer a nice diversion.