Federation Commander

Things blowing up always make things more exciting.

I do remember a NSM in Balance of Terror Seriously hurting the Big E though. Enough so it could paly dead and suck the Rom back in.

I do not miss the old commander edition blasts though. Every Andro player liked to rush a Terminator into point blank range with full batteries and panels and hope you would destroy him. More than one game was ended in a MAD situation....No winners, just lots of bits floating out there.

Adding blasts to FC would bring the tactic of blowing up a small ship near stacks of drones or fighters to kill the stack. Each large fleet would have on or two mobile drone killers just waiting to pop. Not a realistic tactic....And hard on frigates..

Nothing like rolling a cloaked Battlehawk with two enveloping G torps up to a basestation, uncloak with shields down --

A couple of ideas.

How about standardised planets? With set numbers of target locations and defending marines/fighters/DEFSATS/ground-based weapons?
The smallest would be lightly-defended outposts (a suitable target for a lone frigate), then larger and more heavily armed colonies (worth a cruiser), major worlds (a small fleet), and homeworlds (an armada).
In SFB you can do this by setting a points total and buying defences upto that limit; in FC this could be simplified to a set number of optional weapons, their number increasing at each level.
This would basically be a formalisation of SPP's Colony Evolution article for SFB. It would give an 'off-the-peg' objective for one-off games, and they could be customised to represent specific individual worlds for scenarios or 'historical' campaigns.

To go with this, like to see an inclusion of the Module M ground combat rules. They are simple and abstracted anyway, so I don't think they'd need any major changes. This would require troop-carrying freighters, and also assault variants of CWs, and/or DWHs.

Also, fighters for everybody as well as the Hydrans.

Type-H heavy drones as a surface-launched planetary defence weapon might be fun, too.

I can think of at least one heavier drone-like weapon I'd sooner want to see in the game system...


As regards fighters, I'd only want them to be used for empires who, for various reasons, have to have them, such as the Hivers and Souldra.

Even then, I'd want these units to be kept strictly to the hybrid-carrier concept of the current FC Hydrans, and not as a means of deploying any true carriers in vanilla FC.

Oh, and sticking with no more than the minimum array of such attrition units needed would be good, too.

Yeah, I know I'm a little late on posting here, but I wanted to cast my vote and qualify it a bit as well.

I really enjoy the game. It's streamlined and fun to play. Fleet Scale gives so many options. As long as we don't get too tedious, I'm game for any of the races. SFU has a lot of races to choose from and as long as they don't take away from the game mechanics, I'd like to see them added. A quick summary of those races I've listed below.

* ISC is a must. As you can tell by my little avatar, I'm a fan. I'm happy to see they should be coming to us.

* I don't see Jindarians as necessary, but their rules don't seem too complicated at all. Shouldn't be a big deal to add them.

* I'm worried about how Andros will be added without too much complexity. But they brought so much color to SFB that I look forward to the same in FC.

* I also find the web rules a bit bulky but I can still work with them. Don't know how else I would clean up the Tholian Web rules; haven't thought of it much yet.

* FRAX are really easy to add. Not aware of any new headaches they bring but certainly were fun in SFB.

* Other simulator races weren't too bad either. Really not too many more rules though some of those races were just wacky.

* Omega Octant needs to be far, far down the road. I'm glad it's not slated yet. Loved the variety in SFB, but wouldn't count it as a priority in FC yet.

* Fighters were just a logistic nightmare. I'm glad they are only found with the Hydrans so far. I'm ok if they stay with just the Hydrans. Worrying about all those pieces, damage points, and the stacks of doom weren't that much fun for me. Also, they always seemed over powered. I mean I could hit one with a standard photon and they kept coming. If we could come up with simplified squadrons or somethign like that so I didn't have all those darn pieces to keep track of.

* Gunboats are in the same boat as fighters. They were fun, but just another headache. Perhaps simplified flotillas at most.

* X-Ships were always fun. Don't know if we need to dwell on 1st or 2nd generation X Ships, just some X-Ship simple rules could be fun. Again, down the road though.

Pretty much I'd like to see everything that SFB had but just simplified.

That's exactly what I want too, I couldn't have said it better.

But I do want to see thosev other things in BoM someday.

* I'm worried about how Andros will be added without too much complexity. But they brought so much color to SFB that I look forward to the same in FC.

Given that the PA panels are the most complex and fiddly system, there is one proposal (from Loren Knight, IIRC) that the PA panels simply be changed to shields and the PA panel boxes on the SSD be deleted. So you'd simply assume that the Andro had two shields (one forward, one rear) equal to the number of PA panel boxes x 10 (the strength of reinforced PA panels).

I accept that the FC Andros might have to be very different from the SFB version in terms of game mechanics to maintain playability.

That's fine. As long as they retain enough of their oddness factor - DisDevs, Sat Ships, who (what) the hell are they anyway - I don't mind if their ship cards look nothing like the SFB originals.

I'm totally cool with Andros being different. I too would like them to continue being odd and a bit unpredictable. I agree with you that it's the PAs that make them a hassle to play with. Shields that worked like the PAs? Not a bad thought. Would make accounting much easier. As the shields leak now, it wouldn't change much for the Andros. Allow them the ability to shift some of that damage to batteries during the End Turn and tah-dah, we've got PAs that look like shields.

I agree with you that it's the PAs that make them a hassle to play with.

Yes, but who's gonna fly them:
Players willing to make the effort to put up with that hassle ---
If a player wants their strengths, have to be willing to put up with the extra paperwork/cyphering they come with ----

Don't see any big changes needed for the port over ---

I want fast patrol ships, aka gunboats

I always thought necromancers would look like Care Bears!

To be fair it would only have been about the 11th thread after stickies on the page. For someone who doesn't post aften it may not have been exactly obvious that it was an old thread, I don't exactly go looking at dates straight away.

Thread necromancy is generally frowned upon in netiquette. However, in this forum it is acceptable if:
- The new post adds to the general discussion.
- The discussion is still relevant.

The simple fact that threads are not automatically locked after a set period of time means that we will be way more lenient on thread necromancy than other boards. So, in general, please go easy on the necromancer unless it is inappropriate for our standards. And, yes, the standards are very subjective.

That all said, I gotta agree with Terry's comment:

I always thought necromancers would look like Care Bears!