Federation Commander

Are Batteries charged with power before the game starts? Or do we have to charge them to begin with as the game progresses.

I don't have my rulebook handy but yes, they are charged before the game begins.

The one exception to this is that photon torpedos and hellbores may be preloaded at the start of the game at the expense of (some or all) battery power. You are not required to do this, but it allows for those multi turn arming weapons to be loaded and ready to fire during energy allocation on turn #1 (which can be very useful).

This is rule around rule 4C2.

I can't seem to find where it says in the rules about them being charged already. I'll look again, but if anyone can find the section it is in, that would be great.

It's going to be under the description for the weapon. It gives you the option to come in with multi-turn arming weapons armed to a certain level while usually expending the energy of the battery. Otherwise, your batteries are charged and ready for use. In this way Fusion armed Hydrans, Lyrans, Kzintis, and Klingons kind of have it a bit easier.

OGOPTIMUS wrote:I don't have my rulebook handy but yes, they are charged before the game begins.

This is rule around rule 4C2.

1E1 for the batteries - "During the first turn of a scenario, the ship has additional energy tokens equal to the number of batteries on the ship, representing power stored in the batteries.

and, as Paul referenced:
(4C2c) Pre-Game Arming: At the start of each scenario, the Federation player (or the player controllng any ship with a photon torpedo) has the option to have a Pre-Load mark for each photon torpedo on the ship, reflecting loading of the weapon on the previous turn... If the player takes this option, he cannot count the ships batteries in his starting energy.

Thanks everyone! for some reason I didn't see that. =P

dharras nailed it in one.