Federation Commander

[pickledteak]

Has anyone played any campaigns (excluding day one mini) with KLA or RA yet? If so i'd love to hear how they went. I'm looking at starting a home brew in the next week using KLA as source.

Thanks!
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[pickledteak]

I played my first day of my campaign. Two of my gaming buddies and myself are playing a generic "expand and destroy" campaign using the Klingons, Feds and the Kzinti. Actually went pretty smoothly, and we were able to get in 18 campaign turns before we had to call it a night.

No combats took place, as everyone was expanding and exploring to gain resources. Although next game there will be several combats to resolve as borders are getting tighter.

I'm playing the Klingons this game, and now curse the Federation for their ships with higher science as they are exploring sectors faster than I can.

Our Kzinti player is going to be a force to reckon with as he controls 33 sectors and has invested in fast cruisers heavily (he has two raiding groups of 3 fast cruisers each).

Our Federation player has expanded fairly quickly as well (controlling 27 sectors) and has invested in dreadnoughts and battlecruisers quite extensively. I believe he has three fleets led by dreadnoughts now, and I'm hoping that their horrible strategic speed keeps them off my back for a bit.

I only have 14 sectors But have purchased several battlestations to strengthen against impending Federation invasion fleets. My primary fleets are made of D7C's and D6's with F5 screening elements. I've researched D5 War cruisers, and keep them in reserve so I can bring out up to seven at once if I need to (The maint will kill me fielding that many war cruisers, but at least they're cheap)

Overall pretty fun. The system we've created to play with seems to work very well and only needs a few adjustments now.
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[vejlin]

sounds like fun! Can you share a bit about how your campaign system works? Sources of inspiration?

[pickledteak]

Sure thing.

My two buddies and myself have been wanting a good campaign system for one of our tactical space games for some time, but haven't really found anything that's manageable with "real" life. So I decided to start writing some basic rules, and had the two of them jump in to hammer some of them out and play it.

My primary goal was to keep it in line with the Starmada mechanic as much as possible. So we have preplotted strategic movement, and a turn structure that is very close the core game/KLA.

I ended up pricing all the ships in KLA using their BP's as a base, modifying those numbers with a ships science ratings (not calculated in the bp normally) and any special features (Klingon D5 War Cruiser, cheaper but higher maintenance). Along with that maintenance and command ratings were issued as well as speed (Strategic map).

The next thing we focused on was figuring a way to include all of the auxiliary systems in a meaningful way. We did science first, using that as a ships ability to take un occupied/un explored hexes. Every 50 pts of science a ship has confers a +1 bonus to a d6 roll they use while exploring. Their target is a 6, at which point the hex transfers ownership to the player who explored it.

In a similar fashion we did cargo as well, except using a variation of the transporter rules for supply on the strategic map. We've already learned the hard way that freighters are necessary if you plan on roving 5+ hexes from your controlled space. I almost lost a frigate squadron doing that

Every turn we collect our Economic points, and use that to purchase new ships as well as research new designs. We all started with just 2 designs at the beginning of the game. I grouped the ships into 4 tiers, each costing 10 EP per tier level. So the Fed DN is a tier 4 ship and costs 40 EP to unlock and then 61 ep to purchase.

We also have fleet flagships implemented as well, as a means of balancing fleet sizes, other wise I'm pretty sure my Kzinti player would have had his 18 Frigate squadron by now
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