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Good Scenario for New Players / Newbie Questions

 
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Allanimal
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Joined: 10 Sep 2014
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 10:51 pm    Post subject: Good Scenario for New Players / Newbie Questions Reply with quote

I was an SFB player back in the late 80's and 90's, and loved the game. But between a house flood wiping out all my SFB stuff and moving away from my gaming group, I never got back into playing it, but always thought about the fun times I had with it.

Well, fast forward a couple decades, and now I have Federation Commander "Academy" and "Graduation" as well as some friends excited to learn to play.

Saturday is the big day when the four of us learn to play this game. I'm wondering if anyone can recommend a good scenario for four players to get started (most seem to be geared to two), and also if anyone has any tips for newbies, common pitfalls for learners, etc., that would be great.

One other question... One player is vision impaired - he can see things if they are big & close enough, so I'd like to print out giant-sized SSDs for him. Because of that, I was thinking of trying to use ships found in Communique PDFs. I dont have a color printer though - how much of an issue will this be do you think? (color of the box indicates repair cost, and helps find the various systems, right? A nice to have, but color's not absolutely required for play, right? Or...?) If you have any other ideas that would help him to magnify the SSDs, that would be helpful as well.

Thanks!
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DNordeen
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Joined: 05 Apr 2007
Posts: 564

PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 12:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Color's not required to play. It just makes it easier to find the boxes you're looking for.

The biggest problem for you will be "forgetting" the SFB rules. I still have to be corrected while playing Smile
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Mike
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Joined: 07 May 2007
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Location: South Carolina

PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 1:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do you want a scenario with 2 on 2 or all 4 independent and each one trying to "win"?
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storeylf
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Joined: 24 Jul 2008
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 1:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Refiners fire is a good 4 player scenario from what I remember (if you have access to all the ships/rules). I'd be wary of many FC scenarios, our experience was poor balance, but I haven't played any in a long time.
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Allanimal
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Joined: 10 Sep 2014
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 7:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks everyone for the replies.

DNordeen wrote:
The biggest problem for you will be "forgetting" the SFB rules. I still have to be corrected while playing Smile


Yeah, I have been worried about that as well. It really has been a long time since I last played SFB, so I am sure I will only remember SFB rules at the worst possible, most embarrassing moment. Smile

Mike wrote:
Do you want a scenario with 2 on 2 or all 4 independent and each one trying to "win"?


I think 2 on 2 would be better for learning purposes, but if there is a good 4 independent team scenario, we may want to give that a go.

storeylf wrote:
Refiners fire is a good 4 player scenario from what I remember (if you have access to all the ships/rules). I'd be wary of many FC scenarios, our experience was poor balance, but I haven't played any in a long time.


Where can I find Refiners Fire?

I guess the main thing I am looking for is a good reason for 4 starships (or more) to be clobbering each other. I'm not sure I want to deal with terrain on the first go (TBH I haven't looked at any terrain rules yet) so maybe there is a disabled shuttle craft containing a McGuffin that everyone's after. Or a time limit. Or both. Just some reason or goal that justifies the encounter.
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storeylf
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Joined: 24 Jul 2008
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 8:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Communique 7, which is freely available on this web site.

I can't off hand remember what it is like for balance, but I thought it was reasonably good as a scenario when we played it years ago. My vague recollection is that you should boost the Romulan side a bit.

It does involve Fed and Gorn vs Klingon and Romulan as I remember (or was it the Romulans who had klingon converted ships?). So it may not be much use of you don't have access to those ships yet.
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Allanimal
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Joined: 10 Sep 2014
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 11:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

storeylf wrote:

I can't off hand remember what it is like for balance, but I thought it was reasonably good as a scenario when we played it years ago. My vague recollection is that you should boost the Romulan side a bit.


That does look like a fun scenario. The Romulans are using two KRs. Hmmm, I think I would like to change those to the classic Romulans / non-Klingon hulls, so the Roms have a more distinct feel. I'll have to look at how the war eagle & similar compare, points wise, with the KRs. (TBH, I don't remember what size ship the KR is...)

You said the Romulans could use a bit of a boost. How much do you think is appropriate?
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storeylf
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 12:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I really can't remember, it has been a few years since we played it. Like I said above we found most scenarios had poor balance one way or another. That one was converted from SFB and FC does not play like SFB. I just seem to remember thinking it was a good scenario for 4 players, but that it was biased to the Gorn/Feds.
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Mike
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Joined: 07 May 2007
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Location: South Carolina

PostPosted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 6:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Refiner's Fire has 5 starships. Do you think anyone in your group can handle controlling 2 ships at once on their first (or one of their first) go-rounds?

If so, the one controlling 2 should be the Romulan player. As I recall, each of the four empire sides has different victory conditions. The one player doing the Romulan ships would have his/her own set of victory conditions apart from the others.

One of the things that makes Refiner's Fire a different experience in Federation Commander is that there is no "bricking" of shields so a ship can go low speed and beef up to take a plasma. Depending on the size of the map, Lee's excellent observations and tactics points found elsewhere here recently are worth reading.
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JimDauphinais
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Joined: 22 Nov 2009
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Location: Chesterfield, MO

PostPosted: Fri Sep 19, 2014 5:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

There are a couple of issues with Refiner's Fire.

First, while the Communique version correctly describes the location map for it, the Briefing #1 version does not.

Second, my recollection is that there may be a need to put a speed limit on the Gorns to prevent them from scoring an automatic victory. A search on this forum should reveal a previous discussion on this issue.

IMO, a simple one ship per player team duel is the best way for four players to start off. This has worked very well for me in the past for introducing new players. Skipping drones, plasma, shuttles, transporters, tractor beams and overloads will help simplify things at first as well (as is done in First Missions).

EDIT: I found the link to one of the past discussions on Refiner's Fire:

http://www.starfleetgames.com/federation/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=2780&highlight=refiners


Using the Communique 7 setup and limiting the Gorns to a speed of no greater than 16+1 (24 hexes per turn) will fix the scenario though players might want to weaken the Romulans a bit to help the Gorns out.
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Allanimal
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Joined: 10 Sep 2014
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PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 3:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, the plan was to do Refiner's fire, after a quick couple of turns at fleet scale to get familiar with the turn sequence, movement, firing arcs, etc.

For the training, 1st turn: A) everyone at base speed 16, No weapons fire (though photons and plasmas could do 1st turn of charging).

Everyone started in opposite corners, and the plan was to navigate around a fixed point in space towards the center of the map. The klingon did this gracefully with its good turn mode, the Gorn player figured it out really quick and rounded the goal without swinging too wide. The Fed and Romulan ended up quite far away from each other and everyone after taking the turn way to wide. So ended the 1st turn - Gorn and Klingon about 5 hexes apart, Fed and Romulan each a good 10 hexes (or more) from anything.

2nd turn, Weapons are now hot (though we are not dealing with Drones, shuttles, Tractors, transporters, for now). Klingon player speeds up, planning to overrun the Gorn with, overloaded disrupters if energy is available. Gorn didn't cooperate, and they are only 4 hexes apart after 1st impulse. Gorn player announces he's firing all phasers in arc and launching a 2-turn plasma F from the plasma S launcher. Gorn player was paying attention in plasma training! Klingon had planned to hold fire, try to close in, but decided not to eat plasma, so returned fire with his phaser-1s and disruptors, but only overloading one, saving ph-2's to weaken the plasma coming his way. Gorn rolls poorly, Klingon's shield is only dented. Klingon rolls decent, Gorn's shield is down. Gorn loses a couple power boxes. Romulan struggling to get anywhere near the action, Fed decides to ignore the Romulan and turns towards the Klingon & Gorn.

Klingon turns away from Gorn, Gorn needs a couple hexes to fulfill turn mode and turns, trying to get the other half of his phasers to bear. Klingon slips and turns as good as he can to get away from the plasma, but is only able to get 2 of the Ph-2's to fire on it before impact. More poor phaser rolls, and the plasma drops Klingon shield #3, with 2 internals: a disruptor and a phaser. While the Gorn and Klingon play tag (Gorn trying to get its remaining phasers to bear), Fed commander decides to unload at range 4 on the Gorn's #2. Gorn feels betrayed - he thought they were allies!

It starts getting a little hazy what was happening in the next couple turns, but some key points:

The Romulan eventually caught up and dropped a plasma-S and Phaser-1's on the Fed. The damage all fell on the weapon track, stripping the Fed of all weapons. Fed spends power every impulse to speed away and disengages. Rom chases, trying to get the RX phaser pointing at the Fed Downed shield, but to no avail.

Klingon plinked away on the Gorn a couple turns while the Romulan turned around to come back. Klingon wasn't counting properly and thought the Plasma-S was *next* turn. Gorn was phaser-less, but still had both torps and let the Klingon have it. Klingon is stripped of everything except Bridge/Aux Con, a few warp and a freshly repaired disruptor. He turns away for disengagement.

Romulan gets back to find a Gorn with Swiss cheese shields, no phasers left and plasmas freshly fired. Romulan had never been hit, so the outcome was obvious... The Gorn surrendered.

It took us all a bit longer to get the hang of the turn sequence, but by the end we had it all figured out. It was getting late and we decided to hold off on "Refiner's Fire" until next time.

A fun first game. We'll be playing again soon, I think.

Thanks for all your tips everyone!
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Kang
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Joined: 23 Sep 2007
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Location: Devon, UK

PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 6:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sounds like you had fun - which is the main objective!

Can I respectfully just check that you're doing your damage allocation correctly? As an ex-SFB player, I would imagine you're doing it right because it is similar, although FC uses one die-roll per ten hits rather than a dice roll per hit.

But the phrase that caught my eye was this, for the Fed's damage from the Rom plasma: "The damage all fell on the weapon track" - I wonder if you rolled once and allocated all the plasma damage by simply re-using the 'weapon track' damage for that initial die-roll of '6', or if the damage rolls were all 6's and the weapons were stripped in that way. You probably know this already, but you roll a new number for each 'batch' of ten hits.

Say you roll that first '6', then you run through the 'weapons track' as you say. But once you reach Row 10 and mark its 'Any Warp' hit on your ship card, you then roll the damage allocation die again to select a new 'track' on the damage table - of course that might be a '6' again, so it's more weapons lost, but what you don't do is to automatically make it the '6' (weapons) track every time until the damage is used up, just because you rolled a '6' originally. That same '6' does not apply to the whole salvo, if you like.

Of course, my inference here could all be due to incorrect deduction on my part! But I thought I'd better just ask Smile

Glad you and your friends are enjoying the game!
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Last edited by Kang on Mon Sep 22, 2014 6:46 am; edited 1 time in total
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Allanimal
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Joined: 10 Sep 2014
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 6:45 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

We rolled on the damage allocation table for each group of 10 (or fewer) hits. The fed player got unlucky in the damage allocation rolls.
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Mike
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 2:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

And it was Fleet scale, so fewer weapons to start with. A couple of 6's would take out just about everything the Fed had.

But I was wondering the same thing.
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Kang
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 22, 2014 7:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Allanimal wrote:
We rolled on the damage allocation table for each group of 10 (or fewer) hits. The fed player got unlucky in the damage allocation rolls.

Fair enough. Just checking! And Mike, well spotted about Fleet Scale; I'd missed that important detail! Embarassed
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