Federation Commander

[Sebastian380]

I mentioned kitchen table dogfight rules elsewhere but I'd be interested in any other home-brewed adaptations of SFB into FC that others have tried. I'm sure somebody besides me has experimented with this stuff and I'd be very interested in hearing about experiments with SFB drones, plasma options, other weapons or systems.

[rfeceo]

We did a bunch a things in our Early Years (Y75-Y100) campaign game, particularly with drones, and the associated technologies like building drones, racks, scatterpacks and wild weasels.

For the most part, it has a lot more work than it was useful.

However, a few things that we did like -

Sprinting Drones. We allowed the launching ship to set their drones for "sprint-mode" which increased their speed by 8, but reduced their endurance to only a single full turn. With ships routinely moving between Speed 8 and 16, and only occasional runs at 24 (usually for evasion purposes), this worked great.

Heavy Drones. Any drone could be a heavy drone by declaring it heavy at launch, and using up 2 ammo. Heavy Drones had a warhead of 12 and armor of 6 (I believe), but otherwise acted as any other drone. These could sprint, too.

Electronic Warfare. We played at Fleet Scale. Cost for each point of EW was 2 Energy Points. Each Point could be used offensively for a -1 DRM (against all targets) or defensively for a +1 DRM (against all incoming threats), up to the standard DRM maximums of -3 to +3. It could not be lent, but could stack with Scout Sensor EW. The net effect was that large ships and particularly Bases could generate large amounts of offensive and defensive EW, whereas smaller destroyers and Frigates usually had to choose on or the other, if at all. In practice, Wxx ship had little spare power to waste on EW, and Yxx class ships could afford a point or two, especially at the beginning of a battle of if they happened to lose a lot of weapons but not power.

We used scatterpacks, long lance ballistic targeting, wild weasels, armor/warhead balances, etc., but it was very hard to keep things simple and not overbalance a battle, or bog it down. At fleet scale, we used 3-drone scatterpacks, and that was usually not too bad because ships typically had a single shuttle to use, and using a spd 4 shuttle and launching only after drone impacts and defensive fire meant that deploying the scatterpack could easily be a fruitless endeavor. Wild weasels worked, but we would forget their special rules in the heat of battle. They did work well for Bases, which had large numbers of shuttles as well. But then Ballistic targeting rendered a base's wild weasel useless. Ballistic Heavy drones were terrifying because weasels and Sensors could not stop them, only phasers, tractors, and other drones.

In the end, we kept the scatterpacks, and ignored wild weasels and ballistic targeting.

We did experiment with warhead/armor balance (ie, increasing a drone's armor by 1 by reducing warhead strength by 2). That worked ok - and was declared at launch. It just forced the defender to waste more phaser fire on killing the drones, and the leakers did less damage. But sometimes that was advantageous.

[Sebastian380]

Wow, you guys were fearless. Interesting ideas. We had the same problem with bogging down the game in applying the dogfight rules. The adaptations can usually be made to work and that's always interesting but there's always some price to pay in terms of game-play.