Archive through March 24, 2011
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Star Fleet Battles: Star Fleet Battles Online:
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War on a Budget:
Archive through March 24, 2011
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Jean
WebMom
Thanks Jean!
Okay guys, when I have more than a min, I will post all the ideas I had for the campaign here, we will sort out what you all like most, and get it rolling!
Tugger
Robert,
I tried both links and they are not working for me.
Cheers
Frank
Tugger,
They are not working for me either.
Lucky
What's the rules for this? I.e. this open to new players ?
links are recursively pointing to themselves
Interesting!
Well, I tweeked the first one a bit, check again, see if you can find the word of the day.
Eol, this the the renamed Economy of Force campaign I had started to set up in the Campaign Rules Discussion forums. The game is currently full, with one alt, but you can be our second alt.
Players are, Me, Josh, Troy, Tony, with Christopher as 1st alt.
Year will start at 169
There will be 2 rounds of 4-6 scenarios per year.
Think on your races.
No Wyn, Orion, LDR, Seltorian, Andromedan, Tholian, or simulator races other than Frax.
LMC races welcome.
The Admirals can allow other players to fight some the battles each round, if they dont have time to complete them all.
Still working on exact mechanics of game, going to start detailed discussion here, soon.
I can see the word of the day. Rules link not working still.
Thats because the links on the rule page were the same ones as above. I just had them there till I got this forum set up. The rules are not yet written, as I will be finalizing them here, with the players.
Will hopefully post what I have, in a day or two, pretty slammed at the moment.
Links must be working now. WooHoo!
Okay, updating the Rules document, with some background, ideas, and questions.
Please check it out, comment, ask questions, and lets get rolling!
Hey, I have already written campaign rules of this type, happy to post them, was originally going to send them in for maybe CL publication but I figure the odds of playing if I post are better than the odds of publication, so 
The concept is to basically follow the Admiral's game model, so victory or defeat in a given area affects which areas you can contest on the next round, but more fluid, so no lengthy, static battle lines. It's smaller than the Admiral's game, with fewer areas. There are convoy raids and piracy, but they aren't at the forefront. Economics are based on (eventual) replacements of losses rather than production each turn, so players are encouraged to fight but losses still hurt. Turns are about one month per strategic turn rather than six, so you will fight more battles in a year, and it also means that damaged ships spend more turns in repair and come back on a more irregular schedule. I've designed it with zero secret record keeping, so the GM can play.
I'll try to get them posted tonight but might be tomorrow, if there's interest.
Very! Thanks Sheap!
I sent my "discussion draft" rules to Tugger, and will send them to anyone else interested, just let me know.
Dang, another one slipped by me. I do wish the two campaign areas could be smooshed together. It would save some trouble keeping up on things.
I'm always happy to see new campaigns. I look forward to watching this one unfold. Hopefully you folks will be kind enough to post up some batreps for the rest of us to drool over.
In any case, I'd love to see those rules, Sheap. If you would be so kind, my email address is jssfb, and I use live.com
Rules draft sent.
Received, looking over it, but have a lot on my plate just at the moment.
Have to head out and do this, on Saturday...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T29JlzeveIY
Wheee!
Hmm, in Seattle somewhere? I haven't seen on of thise events in a loooong time. My best friend in high school and his dad were into that (like 20 years ago).
I have to say, though, I'm very displeased with how they butchered O Fortuna!
Hello all.
I have enjoyed playing SFB for many, many years now. I first played with my father, about 32 years ago. I have come and gone from the game, several times, played face to face, and enjoyed SFBOL hugely. However,I am very likely not going to be able to access the Internet for a good long while, very soon, and wanted to say farewell to all my friends and foes before I left.
Thank you all for the great games, and friendships, for blowing me up with salvos of Photons, and for letting me slam 3 large drones into your down shield.
Fare thee well, and be well!
Robert Grey
aka Tugger
Hope everything turns out OK and that you are able to come back soon.
Quote:letting me slam 3 large drones into your down shield.
I resemble that remark.
With Rob dropping this and Ken's campaign dying / dead, somebody plan to pick up the torch on this one? I got RL problems right now that will prevent me for GM'ing but can def play in this if somebody GM's it
Sheap had a campaign system that did not require an overseer. You might get some people together to try that, if he'd let you use his rules.
Well, if anybody's using my rules, I'm going to want to play (And since there's no GM, I don't see a problem with it!)
What I would really like to do is a campaign dry run to make sure all the knobs are set properly, i.e. the right BPV's, construction times and so on. It would involve playing the strategic level of the campaign and just agreeing to the outcome of battles, so it goes fast. It should not take very long to resolve each campaign turn. I'll send the rules to anyone that would potentially be interested.
The one thing is that it is a 2-sided campaign only, and won't really work for multi sided. I'm trying to think of a way to make multi sided happen that's more than "play the campaign independently against several people at once and sometimes you can borrow your ally's ships."
I really prefer systems in which the forces under your command don't pretend to be the sum total of the forces of your empire, but rather, are just your little corner of the world. It just "feels better" - there are a LOT of ships in the SFU.
I'm thinking something like Falcon 3.0's campaign, if anybody remembers that - you're only a small part of a larger war, but if you do better, miraculously, so do the rest of your troops. So instead of conducting a small war in great detail, you'd conduct a very large war, but only a few of the battles would go to SFB, and the rest would all happen by handwaving (but influenced by how you did).
The trouble with an approach like that is that you don't closely follow the career of a few ships, it really is the emperor's view of the war. In a good campaign, you can feel the loss of a CW and losing a DN is a major disaster, but in F&E, you can lose CWs all day and night and it's just part of the game. The scale of the campaign needs to fit the scale of the battles, in essence.
Well, I'm in the middle of reviewing your campaign rules right now. My OCD is making me create a word document in which I'm writing my comments on each rule, which I will mail to you when I am finished. From what I've read so far I think they're pretty good, and I'd probably be willing to do a dry run with you if we can match schedules (harder than it sounds, since I will be awake when you're most likely goiong to be asleep).
In answer to your question/comment about multiplayer: I do think that altering the number of players should be fairly easy. For instance: instead of having 7 hexes in a circle in a 3 player game, take those 7 hexes and put 3 additional equally space around the outside of the circle. Now those outside the circle are the original bases and the 7 interior hexes are the open battleground. No allies, the smallest fleet in a hex always retreats (unless defending a base, or attacking a base next to it's original base).
With how you've organized your economic system I think it will actually handle multiple players better than many systems. 4x games so often are won by the first to win a few key battles over valuable resources. However, it also makes stalemates more likely, as one player will rarely be able to get a big enough advantage over the other to successfully assault the opposing base.
Happy to get any feedback. My schedule is pretty flexible, so unless you live in India, we can probably get together without too much pain.
As far as multiplayer goes. I agree the economic system will handle it OK. I would never write a 4X style economic system because you're working against your players - the 4X style economics lead to unbalanced battles because admirals are incentivized to guard their resources, attack weak points and generally optimize for the strategic game, and the right thing to do strategically is to use overwhelming force on the attack and minimize losses on the defense - not an approach conducive to fun SFB battles. Also, it generates a tremendous amount of math, requires a GM, and generally is just more trouble than it's worth. I want to play SFB campaigns to have a context for SFB battles, not to use SFB as a really bulky and slow combat resolution system for some 4X game. AND, 4X games are too sensitive to early victories. So I don't think anyone should do 4X economics in an SFB campaign, I certainly won't (well, not again, I wrote a campaign once that had them but it was a long time ago, when I didn't know what I was doing).
The terrain generator and battle rules will be OK as well. The operational movement & scenario generator are what will not work.
I think everybody can agree that actual multi-way SFB battles don't work well, but the choice on whether to attack or retreat is something I would prefer to leave to the player (it's almost the only thing that the player gets to decide 100% for himself without some sort of die roll). It also makes defending bases a little harder. Everyone is always going to try to destroy forward bases and right now you get (effectively) two chances, then you have to defend your own. I'm afraid multi sided will mess this whole dynamic up. You are going to have to defend forward bases against a lot more attackers, and they are going to be stronger. So, if the forward base doesn't work right, the whole operational movement/scenario generator bit doesn't really work.
Finally, there's the problem that you don't often have 3 players in a campaign, it's usually like 6-8, and that's just way too many for something like this.
BTW, the crew quality and legendary officer situation isn't fully fleshed out, originally I had intended to submit this to ADB for possible publication. I knew players would want their own rules for crew quality & officers anyway so I just left it out. But later I decided not to because basically it is just too long, and SVC is doing Federation Admiral anyway which operates at the same level of detail. So I added some things that interact with crew quality and legendary officers, but there are still no rules that say where they come from in the first place. I don't like buying crews (and certainly don't like buying officers) because the distribution will be wrong, and there also has to be something to ensure that the distribution stays right over time. So, as far as that goes, crew quality & officers aren't really done yet.
As far as gaining an advantage over the other player to attack their home base, hopefully, it won't be that hard. Unless a player is getting clobbered, you should always have enough forces to produce one maxed-out fleet for an assault on the enemy base (and if you are getting clobbered, you are not going to have the prerequisites). Meanwhile, the clobber-ee gets the base itself and the free home base defenses to even the odds a little bit for his last stand.
Overall, my intent is for strategic advantage to be a temporary, local phenomenon caused by construction and repair times, rather than a lengthy grind of wearing down the enemy's forces. This sort of attrition warfare is no fun for the loser and isn't really all that fun for the winner either. Here, it only takes two strategic turns to pay for a destroyed ship, but three or four to actually get a replacement for it.