Federation Commander

Hello folks! Long time no visit.

The Campaign in Wintry Kingston continues and the General War is well underway between the Klingons, Fed and Hydrans vs the Gorn, Kzinti, Lyran and Romulan.

Did try to help with the Fed Admiral playtest, but it just didn't work - my fault - I didn't much care for ...

What VBAM is trying to do is amazing. Our group has contributed a bit, but I haven't yet because what they are trying to do is soooooo complex. My head keeps exploding.

Haven't given up hope of being able to help. We'll see.

Our campaign is still running.

Interesting replies. What I conclude from them is that in a "minimum referee input" campaign standard political processes take effect and lead to two powerblocs; but in a campaign with "greater referee input" the individual races stay more separate.

larator - was this something you had in mind when ...

just take the Snipe that is included in Briefing #2 and remove the cloak. That is a Snipe-P.

Is that a Snipped Snipe?


ok, I'll go now...

dave: Yes - and I'm only just starting to get to grips with them so anything I said would probably turn out to be inaccurate anyway! :lol:

Thinking of which, I should make it clear that the comment about not catching me running it referred to the sort of massive campaign you refer to, not the VBAM ...

Well, we all know that the main point of a campaign is to generate battles that have consequences: lose THIS battle and your opponent gains territory and you (probably) have fewer ships in the area with which to oppose him next turn. This is in contrast with one-off games where if you lose, well ...

I think the answer is that Moderator burn-out is a problem in most campaigns. I've stayed running ours only because I've been able to shunt most of the turn resolution onto the players with the result that I'm really now just referee and custodian of the rules.

Just reading the VBAM rules at ...

I'll second Pallida on that: Thanks guys.

Jeez..... that's a hell of a big bang. I like it I assume the boxes you add up are the pre-damage values?

Oh, I was just being silly - we don't use explosion strengths in our campaign - we find the "rule of three" splits up fleets pretty well. I was reminded of the pre-Doomsday explosion ...

Excellent! Thanks Mike.

Now there's an interesting rules question. If you do accelerate, and move more than two hexes during your fade-in impulse, will that not void your cloak immediately, thereby losing you your +4 fade-in protection?

The way I read it -Yes.

Put the drone impacts on different shields.

Usually do-able. Not always. As regards accelerating away - I'm trying to get my alpha strike in... Point is, though, you've only really got one pass to do serious damage before his TOTAL firepower gets to you (main armament PLUS drones in a way no-one ...

fails to account for the crunch-power that concentrating your fire brings.

Think this is a key tactic for the game and you are doing him no favours if you don't teach him it. Play with varying sizes of fleet so the three-stack isn't always key? Otherwise he may "learn" to beat you, but if he ...

Only three ships can fire offensively across a single hex boundary in any one fire decision step. No Stacks o' Doom....

I have heard it theorised that a stack of 24 ships in a single hex would be able to fire three offensively each fire decision and thus get round the split shield problems, but not ...

The worst use of this tactic is probably against the Gorn or Kzinti, who will gladly let you slow down while they dump plasma/drones at you that you can no longer shoot down.

Agreed, but it's not just the Kzinti who can dump drones: how many Klingons and Fed can do so? As soon as you are above ...