Starfleet Battles // Federation Commander

[ECSNorway]

Been getting back into this classic game lately. Anyone else around who plays?
(Ironically, there are now -four- completely independent rules sets for it... SFB, FedCom, Klingon Armada, and A Call to Arms... pick your level of complexity, eh?)
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Logan Darklighter]

Just curious - are you talking about the pen and paper game? The one that's vaguely based on Star Trek but is decidedly non-canon?
Or is this a computer game based on it?

[ECSNorway]

There is a computer game (Starfleet Command, released for the PC several years ago), but I mean the pen-and-paper hex-and-chit wargame, yes.

And the history of the licensing deal with p'mount is... complicated.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Mark Skarr]

Yeah, SFB has a strange agreement with Paramount studios.
Prior to Federation Commander, I had read several versions of SFB and had no idea how to play it. After picking up just the free, demo version of FedCom it worked as a Rosetta Stone to decypher the more cryptic parts of SFB. Not that I'd ever want to play SFB now having picked up FedCom.
Federation Commander is playable. It's relatively fast and it doesn't suck. However, their forum people are very set in their ways and incapable of performing basic mathematic functions it seems like (according to them, a weapon that causes 100 points of damage and takes 100 turns to arm is 1000x better than a weapon that does 1 point of damage and takes 1 turn to arm). When trying to get information about "why x weapon is (the bomb/the crap/useless)" they tend to give answers like "you just don't get it" or "once you use them in combat, you'll understand." I have, I don't. Photon Torpedoes are "so powerful they break the game" but I have yet to see it. Sure, if I get lucky and am a point-blank range photons can win me the fight . . . but getting to that range over weapons that do less damage, but are more accurate at longer ranges (but listed as "teh p00p") is nearly impossible.
I can, personally, recommend FedCom, but not their forums.
I'd recommend the Reference Rulebook from e23 and then grab yourself a couple of ship packs (Say Federation Ship Pack 1 and Klingon Ship Pack 1) and you should be good to go. They used to have a slew of free ship cards on their website, but I'll be darned if I can find them anymore.

[ECSNorway]

I've played a bit of both (and actually have a largish collection of stuff that I've barely read).

I do understand some of the idiocy you've pointed out -- a weapon that only does one damage at a time is all too likely to get bounced by shield reinforcement, that can be refreshed every turn, while a weapon that does more damage all at once can pretty much guarantee doing at least some damage to the shield boxes themselves, which is much harder to remove.

(You have three -- sometimes four, if you're using an armored ship like a Romulan Warbird or an old Federation CL -- layers of protection. The basic shield has a set number of boxes of strength, usually about 20-40 depending on the ship. You can buy Specific Reinforcement (extra boxes to any one shield arc) for 1 power point each, or General Reinforcement (360-degree shield points) for 2 energy each. Damage destroys general reinforcement first, then specific reinforcement, then actual shield boxes, which are the hardest to regain.)
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Rod.H]

Or there's an officially licensed way: Star Trek Heroclix Tactics. Of which I'm still trying to track down the starter pack, the only booster pack I've picked up contained Kronos One. Cause that doesn't mean that you can't re-purpose the miniatures for use in other game systems.

[ECSNorway]

Or there's an officially licensed way: Star Trek Heroclix Tactics. Of which I'm still trying to track down the starter pack, the only booster pack I've picked up contained Kronos One. Cause that doesn't mean that you can't re-purpose the miniatures for use in other game systems.

Uhm, SFB and its associate products (such as the new minis from Mongoose that I'm drooling over) -are- officially licensed. It's a complicated sort of story, but the tl;dr version is, P'mount made some -big- negotiating booboos back in their pre-TMP "We don't give a flying frak about Trek" phase. ADB has pretty much full legal rights in perpetuity to use any material released before TMP. And my opinion of anything released post-ST4:TVH is, well, "Huh. Somebody spent a lot of money on fanfic."
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Rod.H]

Ah, some clarity & my mistake. Although there's no doubt 'people' at Paramount that are trying to make my initial view on the issue, a reality.

[ECSNorway]

Heh.

So, might there be any interest in the occasional attempt at an online game or two?
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.