Federation Commander

Group them by flight as suggested.

Have flight act as actually a super-fighter (more hp, more weapons, count as one target ).

Reduce Flight armament in a more drastic way than single Fighter :

Flight at 66% HP lose half their armament,
Flight at 33% HP is crippled and cant shoot anymore.

Flight need to be repaired up to 50% before going out again.

Just posting this so people know where I stand so when things seem to be firming up noone goes why are you just now bring this up.

Flights are stupid. These are not B5 Starfurys BSG Vipers. These are still egg shells carrying antiship weapons. The are and should remain one fighter, one counter, one shuttle box per fighter etc. If people want flights just use heavy fighters and you have you flight of two in one simple package and guess what. They exist in the SFU.

Direct Fire Drones are broken. Once both players know how they work you start trading an entire squadron for 1 or 2 drone hits. Once a Fighter gets in range to launch a drone you simply switch fire to the fighters. A crippled fight is a drone kill. Plus a squadron full of crippils is as good as a cruiser kill for way less work.

Now if people want to work up a set of optional rules for flights fine but please agree up front it is an option and not the standard rule.

Dal Downing wrote: Flights are stupid.

No they are not. Whilst I realise people have different opinions, it's another thing to say they are stupid with no explanation as to why (or at least I didn't see one if you were trying to give one). Not a single player who I've played with face to face has understood why they are not represented via some sort of flight system. One counter = 1 fighter is the SFB style of play where people get bogged down in minute detail. It's one of the things that everyone I've met assumed would be amongst the first things to have changed in a 'streamlined' version of SFB.

The are and should remain one fighter, one counter, one shuttle box per fighter etc.

Why? why does that mean that they must remain represented in a game as one counter per fighter.

Sure it is not to bad playing 1 vs 1 where you have maybe 9 stingers. Play with 3 or 4 hydran ships and the 40 odd stingers and things break down. Like drones, sure a few are not so bad, but the game quickly bogs down once you start using some of the drone heavy forces with 40+ drones on the map.

Concur with Elf. That was uncalled for.

I myself have proposed flights in the past. It's not a bad idea. It's not perfect either. It's somewhere between the two.

It's not stupid to look for ways to keep the board clutter down and keep the game streamlined.

If that's all you got, maybe you should leave the conversation to those who can express themselves in less insulting ways.

At one point I thought flights made sense as a core BoM rule but not so much anymore. As an optional or house rule I would have no problem trying from time to time but the DFD and grouping proposals I've read so far aren't very elegant, even the ones I've proposed.

Players should expect lots of units in carrier engagements. That's the nature of the beast.

Players have direct control over map clutter by the scenarios they choose and the mode they play in. If they're that concerned over clutter in a carrier engagement flip the SSD's over to fleet scale and it reduces fighter count by half which reduces their drone and plasma count by half as well. I see no problem with BoM fighters following the existing template.

Be thankful there's no chaff, flares, electronic warfare, multi-type drones, booster packs, small target modifiers, etc...

When fighters get grouped they lose their distinction as fighters and become a bigger entity holding only one hex position on the map.

Let's please remain civil and not call each other names or ridicule other peoples' ideas. If you want to argue against an idea, fine. But argue against it, don't ridicule it.

Thank you.

Now, that all said, flights do have significant issues, and will add incongruities to the game:
- Fighters with flights and shuttles become totally divorced from each other. May not be a big deal, but that link is lost.
- Fighters with flights no longer match the shuttle boxes on a ship card. Or the ship cards have to change to match the flights, rather than the underlying fighters.
- Flights will break (4A3a).
- In fact, (4A3a) effectively limits flights to a maximum size of three fighters per flight.
- Flights will break the landing portion of (5Q1b).
- Flights complicate the tractor rules. Either the fighters become much more vulnerable (death-drag three-for-one!) or less vulnerable (need three tractors for a single flight) or the rules get complicated.
- Whatever size you want to make between fighters and flights isn't going to fit somewhere.

Then there is the issue that flights break things badly in one of two ways:
1) If you simply treat flights as a mandatory association of individual fighters, flights just become an accounting exercise. Sure, there are fewer counters on the board, but you still have to account for all of those fighters.
2) If you treat flights as a combined unit, you no longer have fighters. Assuming that three-to-one ratio, what you have is essentially introduced bombers into Federation Commander in the guise of fighters. It isn't really three fighters; it is a "three-space" bomber with a different name.

Direct Fire Drones are broken. Once both players know how they work you start trading an entire squadron for 1 or 2 drone hits. Once a Fighter gets in range to launch a drone you simply switch fire to the fighters. A crippled fight is a drone kill. Plus a squadron full of crippils is as good as a cruiser kill for way less work.

Direct fire drones certainly had issues but just to be clear, what you are saying is nothing to do with Direct fire drones at all. That aspect is entirely down to the range 8 launch restriction which was also the range for 'normal' fighter drones in the playtest carrier rules. In that respect DFD was actually the better option as at least the drones would have hit short of shooting down the fighter, whereas normal drones wouldn't have.

Barring some changes to the rules regarding seeker launching, or shooting at fighters, any fighter using seekers needs a range greater than 8, irrespective of how you track the seeker.


PS. I didn't take the flights are stupid remark as personal. More that if you are going to be so matter of fact then at least explain why.

MJ out of interest how much play test has there been with flights or at lest feed back and are there actual any play test rules for them? soz if this has been already covered in this post but not read it all as in a rush.

PS personal I'm into DFDs and Flights but I do understand like any thing there are draw backs.

Regarding the comment earlier, I was seeing flights as being more an optional rule, for those who don't want to play with mass fighters at an individual level. Just as the playtest carrier rules had fighters using drone counters following drone rules, with the DFD option, so could you have fighters using normal fighter counters and rules, with a flight option if you are happy with the compromises for less counter clutter and game slowdown.


Regarding MWests comment above, yes flights are at least partly an accounting exercise. In the same way DFD was. MWest also raises some possible rules issues, though I consider these all largely surmountable. Sure it means losing some of the minutae that is in the game now, but not so much as to make flights a non starter when you are getting towards larger numbers of fighters.

As it currently stands, FedCom allows you to play squadron and above games in a good time scale. For the most part even large fleet level games can be played in a day (or less). Unless, that is, you are playing Hydran or Kzinti (or Fed/Klik/Orion who really go drone heavy), then you have a game where the time to play each turn just escalates horrendously. It's only an anecdote but it took about the same amount of time to play our 12 andros vs 11 gorns in asteroids campaign game as it did a game with 4 drone armed orions vs 3 gorns in a tourney game I played a couple of tourneys ago.

To answer some of MWests points, from my point of view any way.

- Fighters with flights and shuttles become totally divorced from each other. May not be a big deal, but that link is lost.

I see them as divorced anyway. This isn't SFB where mass shuttles were the norm because they had Ph3s and were sometimes used like mini fighters. Shuttles in FC are just a seeking weapon.

- Fighters with flights no longer match the shuttle boxes on a ship card. Or the ship cards have to change to match the flights, rather than the underlying fighters.

The two things are independent. The shuttle boxes on the ship represent the space on the ship for the fighters. There is no reason to change just because the fighter operate differently once launched. Why would the fact that the fighters group up into X size for game purposes after they are launched require that the shuttle boxes on the ship need changing?

- Flights will break (4A3a).
- In fact, (4A3a) effectively limits flights to a maximum size of three fighters per flight.

Some thing needs to give there certainly. The stacking limit already works very poorly with fighters anyway, it slows the game down even more. Playing with 3-6 ships means the stacking limit is not a great hit on the game in terms of play speed. Once you have 18+ units though (because you have 12-18 fighters), it does start to bog the game down as you are having to constantly work out how to stack your units and manouver them all in the best way to hit the same shield or get the right ranges etc. This gets very noticeable once some get crippled and the flow of the game starts getting interupted by someone sorting through his stacks, looking for the cripples and working out how to move them to get maximum fire effect through the stacking limit by bringing up non cripples etc.

Also, drone armed fighters are largely immune to this rule, stacking only affect direct fire, there is nothing stopping 48 fighters from 4 carriers all sitting in the same hex and launching drones.

I'd therefore count each flight as a unit for stacking purposes. If a hand wavium reason is needed, then fighters being smaller get in the way of other things to a far lesser extent, those big warp engines on ships create a lot of distortion to other units trying to shoot in the same direction that fighters simply don't do.

- Flights will break the landing portion of (5Q1b).

This is one of those SFBisms that sort of bugs me, do i want to get into the minutae of different ways of landing. Though, to be honest, landing is not really that big an issue. Fighters usually die or win the game before it is important, seldom getting to land (and rearm) in such a way that changing these rules would create some major imbalance. So you just land a flight per impulse. If its 3 fighters or 1 fighter then so be it. Someone said that in SFB you can land 1 fighter per impulse, so landing by flight would actually be closer to SFB than we are now, as there are 4 times more impulses in SFB.

Same with launching. Not really an issue for hydrans who can launch everything at once. Others I would just change the launch rate to accomdate the flight size. So a carrier that launches 4 +1 (as I remember in the play test rules) per impulse would just change to launch 2 flights at once assuming 3 per flight (or 1 flight if you prefer a slower rate).

- Flights complicate the tractor rules. Either the fighters become much more vulnerable (death-drag three-for-one!) or less vulnerable (need three tractors for a single flight) or the rules get complicated.

The death drag bit, is again though one of those SFBism fiddly parts in my mind. Dragging around a single fighter! I'd rather have just treat a hostile tractor as instant death regardless of speed (tractor to the 11 setting to rip it apart). If a ship gets to range 1 of fighters, stingers in particular, with tractors left and power to use them then it deserves the kill, and without the fiddlyness of maybe having to move around and track the individual fighter.

Whether it causes an issue for flights depends on what the flights are. I was looking to have each flight still be X seperate fighters, with restrictions. So the tractor would just kill one of those, reducing the flight by 1 fighter.

- Whatever size you want to make between fighters and flights isn't going to fit somewhere.

Certainly. But that is a 'so what' issue to me. As you note, at least in part this is just a way to streamline the game when large numbers of fighters are involved. I was thinking flights of 3 on launch, with any spare forming a smaller 'flight'.


Broadly speaking here is what I was thinking as my home brew version.

A flight is X separate fighters. They are still use the fighter SSDs. Ships must launch in flights. Where possible you must use 3 (or whatever X is) fighters per flight, any left over can be launched as a seperate flight (maybe of just 1). As flights lose fighters they may end being 1 or 2 fighters as well.

The flight is 1 unit for stacking purposes. See above.
The flight can only shoot at 1 thing per impulse. You can choose which weapons you want to fire, but flights can't split fire in a single impulse.
Flights are 1 unit for volley purposes (all 3 fighters count as 1 volley when they fire).
You can't disengage cripples. Tough!.

The flight is a single unit for targetting purposes. Enemies cannot target individual fighters. When shot at, the fighter owner allocates each hit to a fighter starting with highest damage and working down. He allocates 1 hit to 1 fighter and the next to another, when he has done all fighters once he starts back at the first with the next hit.

E.g. A Fed cruiser hits a flight of 3 stingers with 2 photons (8 each), and 4 phasers for 4,4,3,1.

Fighter 1 takes 8
Fighter 2 takes 8
Fighter 3 takes 4
Fighter 1 takes 4 (dead)
Fighter 2 takes 3 (dead)
Fighter 3 takes 1.


So overall. There are less counters to move around and make movement decisions for each subpulse. There are less gymnastics of fighters working around the stacking limit. There is less shooting decisions from the fighters (phaser here, fusion there etc). There are less volleys. There is less shooting decisions from the enemy trying to work out the best division of weapons to kill each fighter.

The shooting rules may look like you lose some flexibility (you do), but it cuts both ways. Each side loses some thing in terms of shooting at each other, and also to a large extent these things average out in the end by the time you have any noticebale number of fighters. I personaly consider these a reasonable compromise compared to gaining less counter clutter and game slowing decisions to make.

I was trying to keep the idea of individual fighters in there, rather than make a flight just 1 generic 'lump'.

As an additional thought, just as I had proposed moving drones in a separate phase of the turn, and not by subpulse, I had also wondered about the same thing for fighters.

I personally prefer the one-fighter-per-stand concept, but do think that one fighter type per role (superiority, missile, torpedo) would be enough to work with.

Also, it may be worth considering how carrier deployments in BoM might be tied to the various fleet doctrine rules being worked up for FC (which in turn stemmed from a similar discussion going on for A Call to Arms: Star Fleet). If the on-table deployment of carriers (and/or PFTs) is given a similar set of restrictions to those in SFB, the actual numbers being talked about might be kept to a more reasonable level.

And if players decide to ignore the fleet restrictions anyway, it will be on them to try and handle a more "open" setup.

Back in the day I used to love SFB as a 'ship simulator'. It was great playing 1 vs 1 with all the tweaky bits and bobs you could do to win. The thing that used to bug me though was that I wanted to play battles in the SFU, not just 1 vs 1. That was where SFB fell down badly. It was so fiddly and time consuming that you had to be a sadist to ask someone to play a battle with half a dozen ships on each side, or even worse carriers on each side. Either that or you had to try and organize a dozen players (if you could find that many) so that you could control 1 ship each.

FedCom allows us to do those battles. Well almost. It has streamlined enough stuff to make it possible for most empires to take part in larger battles in a practical way. But, apart from mass EA, the things that stopped SFB being a good battle game were drones and fighters. Not Drones with Fighters particularly, but drones, or fighters, or yes both. But whilst a lot of fiddliness may have been removed in terms of oodles of options FedCom still suffers from drones and fighters becoming impractical in larger games. They still use the same basic game mechanics of SFB - a counter each, 1 move at a time and all the minutae that go around them in terms of shooting decisions etc. Playing Hydrans and Kzinti is still an exercise in game overhead frustration once you get to a certain (and not hugely large) size.

Flights of fighters, or drone streamlining isn't something that may be needed if carriers are introduced, they are something that the game could do with now. As a BOM option would be ok, some may consider those larger battles bordering on madness so it fits.

From a fighter flight perspective the fact that we may have carriers in BOM is irrelevant. Yay you bring 12 fighters, or if you put together some uber carrier group you have 36 fighters. Yet the core game has Hydrans who already dwarf those numbers without bringing a single carrier to the game. A basic 3 cruiser squadron has 27 stingers. Those fleet composition rules Nerroth pointed at would see Hydrans with a potential ~110 stingers, even a more reasonable mix of ships (hellbore ships and couple of scouts) could see 70 odd stingers.

In terms of drones, carriers are more of an issue if they include drone armed fightrers for obvious reasons. But again some streamlining of drone mechanics would be extremely useful even now to handle the Kzinti in larger games. It isn't hard for them to put out 24+ drones in even a 3 ship game. In a fleet action you are looking at 80-100 even without lots of drone frigates.

The fact that carriers are what seems to have started some of these discussions is more just a case of they concentrate your mind on something that FedCom still hasn't streamlined very well even though they are part of the basic game. Like SFB you don't notice necessarily so long as you are playing those small games, but it feels somehow broken that 2 empires in particular are hard to play, practically, at the same size of battle that others can reasonably play at.

Nerroth wrote:I personally prefer the one-fighter-per-stand concept, but do think that one fighter type per role (superiority, missile, torpedo) would be enough to work with.

Also, it may be worth considering how carrier deployments in BoM might be tied to the various fleet doctrine rules being worked up for FC (which in turn stemmed from a similar discussion going on for A Call to Arms: Star Fleet). If the on-table deployment of carriers (and/or PFTs) is given a similar set of restrictions to those in SFB, the actual numbers being talked about might be kept to a more reasonable level.

And if players decide to ignore the fleet restrictions anyway, it will be on them to try and handle a more "open" setup.

If you want to add carriers and fighters to non BoM FC then sure. However if the point of BoM is to enable using existing scenarios and SSDs from SFB or simulate F&E battles then neither one of those ideas is really workable. F&E and SFB actually already have very strict rules about fleet makeup.

Ok just tio be clear I did not call anyone stupid. I stated Flights are stupid and as far as I am concerned from a Star Fleet background they are. Do flights have a place, yes in a setting like B5 or BSG or even WWII naval battles. In those settings a single fighter is so underpowered they have to bunch up inorder to start affecting the capital ships. This is not the case n the SFU Fighters care ship grade weapons and if left on check a hornet can slam some one with 20points of damage in a turn.

Instead of using flights and having to cobble together a bunch of exceptions that make fighter more powerful why not look at the other options. One of those is ask for standard heavy fighters. A F101 replaces two F18s and still leaves ALL the exsisting fighter and shuttle-stinger rules intact. That F101 has roughly twice the damage of a single F18 can still only fire one drone (just reduced drone cluter) but makes up for it by having a Phaser-2 and a ADD. Also 3xF101 grouped can out put the damage ptential of 6xF18 into one hex facing.

MJW covered most of my concerns already so there is not a reason to rehash those instead lets look at Lee's proposals. Why when reading these do you want a flight instead of just asking for a fighter "swarm" counter?

First the Hydran 110 Fighter fleet. Okay that is 2200 points of ships you could buy instead and leave the fighters at home. For 2K points you could buy 11 Paladins or 14 Dragoons or 45 Hunters. So there already is a mechnism to combine thesse fighters into flights and just use Hunters to track them with for the Hydrans. Nothing is stopping you from just carrying a bunch or Admin Shuttles and only a Squadron or two of Stingers and a handful of small ships. If you want to run 110 stingers then obviouly you just want to do it. Now as you said a more sensible fleet would probably only have about 70 stingers and if you used the above mention heavy fighters you wind up with 35 Stinger-Ss which can be represented by 12 Swarm counters.

As for that 3 Cruiser squadron it is more likely going to be a CC, a DG. and a RNG carrying about 15 fighters. Yeah it is hard to remember that the Rangers fighters compliment cost more than the Ranger itself but, that is the fact of life for the three legged methane breathing trash cans.

As far as divorcing the mindset on fighters that is a potato pototo argument. I see what he is saying even though Lee might not and that what happens when different people look at situations everone see things a little differnt from everyone else. (Heance my flight is stupid comment)

Shuttle Boxes on the SSD are not indepenedent from the fighters in the air. What happens if you have to recover those flights of say 6 and you only have 4 undamged boxes? They also represent repair ad supply capabilty yes it is being streamlined but there is a relationship. Otherwise why don't we load all the ships up with fighters and just skip the Admins?

When dealing with large number of fighters yeah something may have to give but instead of pushing a flight as the answer what about advocating for a BoM ruling that for firing purpose when 4 or more fighters are in a single hex and targeting the same target it is assumed one of them really is an Elecrtronic Warefare fighter that is providing targetting data allowing upto 6 fighters to fire out of a single hex side with no penalty? This is really no more or a stretch than the F&E Leader Rule for F5s.

So why can't I break up two crippled flights and form two new flights one crippled one not? Or can I combine 2 half flights in flight into one flight?

If an enemy can not target individual fighters then why is damage round robined instead of pooled. Total damage should starting with the weakest fighter apply enough damage to completely destroy it then move on to the next weakest and so on and so forth. This results in faster fighter kills reducing the numbers quicker. It also allows the surving fighters to remain combat effective longer.