[devlin1]

At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I have to say that if your SotC combat isn't exciting, you're doing it wrong. I've never had such kick-ass fights as I have in SotC. I just got back from GameX in L.A. last night (6 games in two days!), and the last SotC game there I played in -- Colin's Spirit of the Force game, using SotC -- was one exciting bit of awesome after another, and it was nearly wall-to-wall fightin'.

FATE does indeed differentiate between enemies and weapons; it just doesn't really do it in terms that most games (e.g., Savage Worlds) might. Aspects are everything in FATE, especially in SotC. And with stunts, maneuvers, and declarations/assessments, it's actually potentially quite a tactical -- and dare I say crunchy -- game, with as much or as little detail as you want. The style of play can even change from player to player with no difficulty.

SotC can take a beating, mechanics-wise, and still come out smelling like a rose, so if some bit of it (e.g., no differentiation between weapons) isn't working for you, it's dead easy to tweak it into something that does. If you ask me, that's a strength of the system, not a weakness. Look at Spirit of the Far Future, f'instance -- very gear-heavy, and plenty of distinction between different weapons and the like. My own fantasy SotC hack mainly uses aspects to accomplish the same thing.

Personally, I find it more compelling to say "I have a bullet with your name on it!" rather than "My rifle has an accuracy bonus of +1." I've never had a SotC game that was anything less than a ton of fun.