F&E Map

[Charles Lewis]

It's being produced by [url=htp://www.vbamgames.com]VBAM (Victory By Any Means)[/url]

It's currently in playtest, but you can get more info from the forums on thier website.

The meat of Federation Admiral puts you in the chair of a border Admiral. Playtest games played a lot like you were in a TOS episode - with missions, cross border clashes and a desire not to let the lid blow off things too much. One of the great aspects of this level of play is the low unit density, making it pretty straightforward to use FC to resolve combats (though not required). In the extended example of play, the big gun available to the Feds is a Light Cruiser!

However, VBAM by default is a 4x game, so you certainly could use FA to run a Galatic Conquest-style game, and in fact there will be rules for that in the book, as well. Two F&E scenarios have been adapted for use with Federation Admiral, so there's plenty of large scale combat goodness, too.

As part of the VBAM design team, I encourage you to wander over to our forums (forums.vbamgames.com) for further discussion. We're really excited to get this opportunity, and we hope that when Federation Admiral sees the light of day that the Federation Commander community will enjoy playing it as much we enjoyed putting it together.

To get to more information quicker, here's the link to our forums

[Wolverin61]

I tried to register on the VBAM forum a few minutes ago with the same username as here and didn't get the confirmation email. It says my email address and username are already registered when I try to re-register. I don't see an administrator email link, so I don't know what else to do.

[mwaschak]

I tried to register on the VBAM forum a few minutes ago with the same username as here and didn't get the confirmation email. It says my email address and username are already registered when I try to re-register. I don't see an administrator email link, so I don't know what else to do.

Hmm, it looks like your account was successfully created yesterday. If you shoot me a PM we can try to troubleshoot it for you.

-Jay

[Sgt_G]

Actually, more like 50 terra-colony worlds and 200 domed-colony worlds.

That number seems rather high to me. That many, and I'd expect to see colonies all over the place in F&E.

[Wolverin61]

So one F&E hex is 1,542,750,990,000 SFB/FC hexes across? That's a lot of maps!

[Dal Downing]

Actually, more like 50 terra-colony worlds and 200 domed-colony worlds.

That number seems rather high to me. That many, and I'd expect to see colonies all over the place in F&E.

Garth remember all those planets the Big E went to that not only were Terran type worlds but also had indiginous Human Like Populations.

Also I think you may be getting the terms Colony and Settlement confused. Remember Colonies are usually big enough to start supporting PDUs, where as, a Agro Station might have GBDP but not have the population to start build Defensive Brigades.

[doughboy]

Once upon a time, I was trying to create a "lite" version of F&E but ran into some major problems and dropped the entire idea. However, I did come up with some useful stuff that maybe might could possibly be used for building a FedCmdr campaign.

As I mentioned, the F&E Order of Battle (OOB) starts with over six hundred ships in the Four Powers (Klingon, Lyran, Kzinti, and Hydran). Add in the Federation, and the count soars to over eight hundred. Way too much for a SFB/FedCmdr campaign.

Another problem is the Federation starts with over forty CA hulls. If you watched the show, you might recall that Capt JTK stated that there were only a dozen ships like the "E". In order to get the numbers down to a reasonable level, I cut all the fleets to one-third the F&E size. I dug the files out of my archives and extracted the OOB listed below:

Or you could dig up an old copy of Federation Space and use that compact OOB instead

[Sgt_G]

Once upon a time, I was trying to create a "lite" version of F&E ..... I dug the files out of my archives and extracted the OOB listed below:

Or you dig up an old copy of Federation Space and use that compact OOB

No. I drafted that up all by myself, just as I said I did.

I have FS, but, Heck, I can't remember if I ever even looked at its OOB. Now I'm curious.

[doughboy]

I so glad I've never tossed Fed Space which I acquired back in the early 80s. After busting my head on half a dozen attempts of setting up and playing Fed & Emp I've concluded that it was simply too much of a good thing..way too big!

I haven't done that much work since playing GDW Fire in the East/Scorched Earth.

I've thought about for some years after my last attempt at F&E about decade ago and figured it might be better to adopt the Fed Space rules for F&E and start with the original OOB from FS and use a simpler economic system than F&E.

The Economic rules is simply too much work for team and solitarie play and I really hated only playing the short Kzinti Lyran war everytiime. Really wanted to fast track it to include everybody into the General War. I suppose to a large degree what happens in one front is often independant to what is going in the other so down time should not be an issue.

Lately mused over the idea of getting the Mega Map but considering what a bear this F&E became I quickly dispense with that idea.

Some day I'll have to check out FS and see if the mechanics are indeed easier to scale with the F&E inventory. Til then other monster wargames beckon

[Finarvyn]

Once upon a time, I was trying to create a "lite" version of F&E but ran into some major problems and dropped the entire idea.

By the way -- this is a great idea and I loved reading that post, even if it was a FC essay instead of one on F&E.

I'd be curious to see what sorts of problems you encountered, and whether or not you ever came back to tinker with this project.

[Raider]

With the fine level of detail and ship types in F&E comes a level of fine level of detail in execution...F&E is already an abstraction of the SFB universe...do you really want a further abstraction?

[SFU_FEAR]

The other issue you have to deal with is TIME. Each turn in F&E is six months in length. The average SFB scenario, while it takes us many hours to execute, takes less than an hour of real time.

Hence, it takes numerous scenarios to recreate the six months of time that a F&E turn represents. It is a pure abstration of what might happen in average terrain to the ships present. Wether this be just a single ship garrisoning a province and the enemy sends a FF squadron to locate and kill it to massive fleet engagements that are just pinning actions, since the real battle is at the Major planet 500 parsecs away.