I'm wondering if there has been some discussion between people on making a much simplified combat system that takes place in minutes instead of hours using SSDs and avoiding F&E style of play.
Yes, that takes away from the fun of tactics (much like F&E) but I'm curious if there are other ideas that have been brought up (or haven't been brought up).
Thanks in advance.

By Jeff Williams (Jeff) on Friday, February 28, 2003 - 12:07 am: Edit

Well, that's just the issue. How MUCH are you willing to give up in tactics and flexibility to get how much simplicity?? And of course, every time you give up flexibility in one area, you screw someone over in some area of play-balance.

Nearest I might recommend is using the various levels of rules already included in the game (cadet, commander's, optional, etc.)

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Friday, February 28, 2003 - 01:16 am: Edit

The tournament game pretty much simplifies that.

Other than that, find a way to eliminate or automate EA.

By Glenn Hoepfner (Ikabar) on Friday, February 28, 2003 - 03:01 am: Edit

I'm looking more towards eliminating tactics altogether (again, without using F&E stuff).
What I'm envisioning is using the SSDs, and perhaps using dice to determine shield/internal damage on a turn for turn basis.
I'm not really sure if I'm explaining this right. I'm just determined to use SSDs in a campaign that will operate in game speed roughly twice that of F&E.
If you're not confused by now, I know I certainly am.

By David Slatter (Davidas) on Friday, February 28, 2003 - 06:26 am: Edit

Glenn

And then pigs might fly.... Seriously, to use SSDs and go faster than F&E, you will *have* to write an extensive and very complicated computer game.

I guess I would start by each player stating a "tactic" for each SFB turn. This will either be on a ship basis or on a fleet basis (depending on complexity). Each ship would be allocated a damage output depending on range (short, medium, long) and modulated by seeking weapons (more effective if enemy is closing). Depending on how the tactics interface, you allocate blocks of damage to various ships.

Rinse and repeat until someone retreats.

Just to spice things up, It would be fun to do tactics on a ship basis, and ppl have an amount of time depending on the command rating of their flagship to decide on the tactics. This time period will be somewhere between 10 seconds and a minute (they will ahve time to think during the damage allocation).

By Andy Palmer (Andypalmer) on Friday, February 28, 2003 - 08:22 am: Edit

A while back, there was an OpV thread where I worked out a combat system in between F&E and SFB. The Rules and a scenario are linked. I haven't looked at them for quite a while.

By Glenn Hoepfner (Ikabar) on Friday, February 28, 2003 - 10:46 am: Edit

Thanks to both of you, David and Andy.

And for the record, I did not mean to imply battles be twice as fast as F&E, but rather half as fast. That's what I get for not editing.
:-)

By Dave Morse (Dcm) on Friday, February 28, 2003 - 06:13 pm: Edit

I think its an intruiging idea.

It would be cool to have something with turn modes and most of the (non wacky klingon) arcs, but get rid of the DAC as we know it, get rid of the impulse chart, simplify EA to multiple choice: sprint, run-n-gun, starcastle. Sprint would mean you couldn't use heavy weapons. run-n-gun would give you one "energy point" towards heavy weapons. Starcastle would give three "energy points". Weapons fire would be a function of range, # of energy points, and damage.

SSDs would be used to calculate some abstracted stats for a ship, in an automated way. Also they might record weapons arcs.

or something totally different. Just brainstorming here.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Friday, February 28, 2003 - 11:11 pm: Edit

You can speed up SFB pretty quickly if you're willing to have a few changes.


1) You can block out values on the Dac or you could let players allocated damage as they please ( or you could use the system in the cadet training manual as lots of 1D6 is pretty quick rather than 2D6 then another 2D6 and so on ).
Blocking out is simply.
If the damage is less than 18 then you roll each point of damage.
If it's more than 18 then you place damage as would be applied with a "normal" set of results as written on you're table and then roll and remainder of the number of dice.
If it's 36 or more than you sed the 36 spread of 2D6 to build another normal result table and simply apply that with and additional rolls over 36 being applied as rolls.
It's take about 10 minutes out of the owrk of a 36+ point alpha strike.


You could also move based on a smaller number of impulses, be it the 16 impulse chart or the 8 impulse chart, then you divide the speed the ship is travelling at by the number of impulses in the chart ( with a remainder ) and then move that number of hexes every impulse and apply the remainder to the chart to determine if the vessel moves an extra hex that impulse.

On a 16 Impulse game ships can jump 4 hexes on eachother and on a 8 impulse game they could jump 8 hexes on eachother so it tends to be advatagious for Long range opponments like the Kzintis ( and ADD racks tend be useless as the Drones can jump 3 hexes in a hurry so you may want to make ADDs longer ranged to suit that effect, it's not like ADDs can be used against shipping ).

The 16 Impulse system will let you take about 14 minutes out of each turn and 20 out of each turn for the 8 impulse system.


Having an initative rule to force players to make declaration and stick to them ( without writting them down ) as opposed to the me too fire rule will save several minutes each turn as players won't be able to hold a firepower auction.


You might find that these make SFB so much quicker that you don't need any other simplifications.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Saturday, March 01, 2003 - 02:18 am: Edit

One way to make the game increadibly fast ( and when I mentioned this to Steve Cole, it was that unbeleibably brilliant that he tried not to respond.


Take a value called the threshhold.

Say 12 times the MC of the vessel.

And then just count the number of points of damage inflicted internally.

When the damage gets to four times your threshhold ( your starting point number ) then you roll against the ship's break down number.

For every full value of the thresshold number more than the starting point number that is inflicted internall on the vessel, the vessel rolls against the thresshold number with the breakdown number reduced by 1.


If at any stage the vessel fails one of these breakdown rolls ( although not with a het ) then the vessel simply explodes.


Now sure, it's a huge step away from SFB but it will go quickly.


Another way is to divide all the ships sheild boxes on each sheild by three and write that value down next to the sheilds as the sheild factor.

Then tripple the damage done to the ship in ahny volley.

The divide the damage generated by the a number which is one plus the effective shield factor.

The effective shield factor is equal to shield foctor plus 1 per full multiple of the full power value of the shields that is invested in SSReo ( and double that amount of power for GSReo ) plus one fifth ( rounded off ) of the num,ber of Armour Boxes.

Internal Damage =

Regular damage trippled divided by

( 1 + Shield Factor + SSReo ( divided by 2 for cruisers ) + GSReo ( divided by 4 for cruisers ) )

Rounded off.

Thus the ship doesn't loose shield boxes but rather a cetain percentage of the damage goes to internals which greatly reduces the time spent marking off shield boxes.
This makes long range sniping from a frigate a little more dangerous than usual, but it does resolve a little faster although you can't shoot through a downed shield unless the enmy hasn't got enough power to power his shields.

Note, low powered sheilds will produce a shield factor 3 for warships and 1 for frieghters.
Also note that transporters can transport through shields but will cost double power to transport through low powered shields and pentupple power to transport through full strength shields ( so D6 could beam over 5 BPs through it's full strength sheild and the enemy's full strength sheilds but it would cost a whooping 25 points of power to do so.


Combining these two systems will make for a very quick system of resolution indeed but you make need a pocket calculator to deal with the blue system.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Saturday, March 01, 2003 - 01:43 pm: Edit

I was thinking about this topic last night before I dozed off to sleep. I have an idea how to do tactical combat without a map, at least with one-on-one battles. Not sure how complex it gets when there's more than two ships "on the map". Let me see if I can explain this ....

Each player has a card with a large hexagon on it and large coutner for the ship. They turn the counter to show their ship's facing relative to the enemy ship.

Also on the card is a track for the ship's speed, which may be 0, 1, 2, 4, 6, or 8. There's another track for range. If your ship is facing directly at the enemy, the range will close equal to your speed; at half the speed if you're facing on a quartering approach. The range increases the same rates if your facing away. Obviously, this is cumlative with the enemy's speed and direction. Ergo, if both ships are faceing directly at each other at max speed, the range will close by 16. If the range reduces to "less than zero", both ships' direction reverses by 180 degrees and the range begins to increase.

Seeking weapons always close on the enemy ship; plasmas at speed 8, drones at speed 4 or 8. Fighters and shuttles will either stay in orbit around the mother ship or close on the enemy and return. Track their ranges accordingly.

At the end of each "impulse", you may fire weapons and then change speed and/or direction. There are four implulses per SFB turn, so it takes four impulses to recharge phasers and disuptors, 8 or 12 for multi-turn weapons.


Just some rough ideas to start from.


Garth L. Getgen

By Paul Rae (Soapyfrog) on Saturday, March 01, 2003 - 02:02 pm: Edit

Just convert SFB SSDs to Starfire, and use the Starfire combat system. It doesn't get much easier than that, while still retaining the flavour of ship individuality.

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Saturday, March 01, 2003 - 04:28 pm: Edit

HIre the guy that did Ace of Aces to do one for a Fed CA vs a Klink D7.

Ohhhh my god, I just got an idea. Hire those guys to do two SFB fighters for resolving dogfights!

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Saturday, March 01, 2003 - 09:31 pm: Edit

Actually running SFB without a map can speed up play quite well although SFB isn't like other games ( such as battletech ) that is based around the turn and thenmight happen to have a simaltainious movement system tacked on for those interested in supreme realism, it is rather stuck on impulses because with two ships moving at speed 16 and using the effective range of some weapon ( say the photon Torpedo 4 hexes ) you'll find that it takes 4 impulses to zoom into range and out of it, not more than a turn, which turn based system require.


But you could develop the movement of a vessel through the following mothod.


There are three basic directions; closing on something ( usually the enemy ship but possibly an oblique point with then enemy ship, opening and turning about.

When a vessel closes on a point then the range is reduced by the speed of the vessel.

When a vessel is opening from a point then the vessel's speed is added to the range.

If a vessel is coming about or turning about then no value is added to the or subtracted from the range due to the vessels move.

The range is calculated as the old range plus the effect of one vessel and then the effect of the other vessel.

In this way a vessel ( well pretend it has a facing A ) is opening at speed 16 but the other vessel is closing ( so also in direction A ) at a speed of 20 so the vessels move from the old range of 17 to the new range of 13 in this turn, even though the vessel A was trying to open the range, the range shrunk but this is the nature of relative movement.

A vessel takes a period of to turn based on the turn mode.
Turning completely about takes a number of hexes of movement equal to three times the listed turn mode number at the current speed. The vessel neither open nor closes range whilst turning and once it has purchased the turn will either open or close the range which ever is the oposite of it's heading previously.

Vessels could move to an oblique fire point fire but in that case should use a phase based time period.

Turns are best moved in phases because the vessels have such high speeds and such short ranges.

A vessel could elect to station keep in any phase, it will generate no opening nor closing movement but will not generate any hexes of movement toward turning around either. A vessel that elects to station keep must be most than 20 hexes from the other vessel.

Each phase should be a group of either 8 ( fast ) or 4 ( regular ) impulses. Add the number of hexes moved on the impulse table at ech speed to create a table of the number of hexes moved at that speed in each phase.

When a vessel fire it fires at the end of the phase for this reason Plasma Torps are reduced in warhead strength by 1 point per point of damage and Type I & IV drones are destroyed by 2&3 points of damage respectively.
All seeking weapons always close with the target.

When a vessel moves it may move to an oblique attack point.
The ship must be more than 20 hexes from the target and closing and the player who wins the initative will announce if it is his plan to close on an oblique point.
The other play may consent to the oblique point or may choose to fight it.

If the non initative player chooses to fight the oblique then the range of the oblique shall be reduced by the first third and fifth hex of movement per phase that the non initiative player generated more than the initative player that phase.
If the non iniative player generates less movement in a latter phase ) then the initative ship ) then the initative vessel may increase the oblique range by one on the first, third and fifth hex he generates in that phase more than the non initiative vessel but to no greater degree than the announce oblique range.

When the ships move to the oblique range or any time when the vessels reach the oblique range during a phase the vessels may fire at each other at the oblique range.
The initative vessel could anounce a range to fire at whilst not making an oblique attack and would fire at that range and turn about with any hexes still generated that phase...but turning about infront of the enemy is quite dnagerous.
The iniative vessel need only announce that range at the start of that phase.

Once a vessel fires from an oblique point it may turn away. Turning away allows a vessel to turn about ( facing such that it begins opening the range away from the enemy vessel, not turning 1800 degrees ) and this turning away will only cost as many hexes as twice the current turn mode.
A vessel that reaches an oblique may turn to chase spending twice the current turn mode to chase a vessel that is turning away or simply the turn mode value if one is turning to chase a vessel that is also turning to chase.
The vessel in an oblique must elect to either turn to chase or turn away.
A vessel could turn away earlier but this must be done inside a range equal to twice the oblique range otherwise the vessel must turn about if it is to turn at all.

Oblique attacks are considered to be a perfect oblique for the purposses of firing arcs.
Closing attacks are considered to be forward centerlines for firing arc purposses.
Defensive attacks by ship that are facing away but being closes on by and enemy vessel, shall be considered the rear centerline.
Vessel moving to an oblique that fire on a segment before it reaches the oblique point shall fire in a non perfect oblique.
The left and right:- ness, of the oblique shall be selected by the iniative vessel's player when he originally slected the oblique.

Once vessels have reached range zero, and the vessels generate any more hexes of movement then the vessels shall flip their relative facings and closing vessels shall be considered to be opening and visa versa before that hex is dealt with in the range calculation.

In this way with a full phase chart written up, the EAFs and the SSDs, you should be able to track the range (which is the only real value of location because these vessels are only measuring their positions relative to each other ) between the vessels from phase to phase and thus play a successful and quick game of SFB.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Saturday, March 01, 2003 - 11:32 pm: Edit

Other things to optimize the process is to generate blocks of Damage rolls and simply roll once to see which block is used.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Sunday, March 02, 2003 - 01:09 am: Edit

The firing arcs when turning around...I knew I'd forgotten something.

Will change with each full and complete payment of the current turn mode total.

Starting with Forward, then moving to Pa perfect oblique firing line .
Then moving from a perfect oblique firing line to a perfect oblique firing line running in reverse.
And finnaly moving from a perfect oblique in reverse firing line to a rear centerline firing arc.

Ships turning around from opening to closing ( unlike the closing to opening listed above ) shall use the same firing arcs in reverse order.

Ships turning to chase from an oblique will require one change from the perfect oblique to the centerline forward.
Ships turning away from an oblique will follow the above order moving from Perfect oblique throur perfect reverse oblique to rear centerline.

A ship that is stationkeeping shall be able to be fired upon as though the attacking vessel ( and return fire to that vessel ) as the it ( the attacking vessel ) was in a line that boarders the FH and RH firing arcs, with the defender in each situation choosing at his leasure which sheild shall take the dame for any volley ( although all damage in that volley must be applied on the one shield ).

By Jay Paulson (Etjake) on Sunday, March 02, 2003 - 04:55 am: Edit

It's hard to get SFB down to playable for fleet engagements. A couple of quick hints: plot a fleet speed, move blocks of 4 or 8 impulses at a time whenever possible, make a DAC tray with a counter tray and 12 or 16 pairs of small dice in the tray. Allowing a player no more than 10 seconds for decisions during the turn helps too. Remember a whole turn is only about 10 seconds.

Plotted movement actually speeds the game up, playing with miniatures and directed turns modes does also since movement is always done in blocks.

By Jay Paulson (Etjake) on Sunday, March 02, 2003 - 04:57 am: Edit

Check out full thrust for a miniatures system for playing fleet battles. Adapting SFB weapons shouldn't be that hard.

By Dan Ibekwe (Danibq) on Sunday, March 02, 2003 - 08:27 am: Edit

Or look forward to Star Fleet Action from ADB, hopefully still on track for playtesting at this years Origins.

Full Thrust is fun but largely tactics-free. It would be difficult to take any of the flavour of SFB into it.

By Jay Paulson (Etjake) on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 12:31 pm: Edit

Put in some of the SFB movement system, and a mini EA allocation. Maybe allocate in blocks of 2/4/6 for 4/3/2 vessels and make movement in 4 hex blocks.

By Stephen Cobb (Ghengiskhabb) on Saturday, May 03, 2003 - 05:59 pm: Edit

Has anybody out there combined Full Thrust to SFB?

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Sunday, May 04, 2003 - 11:58 am: Edit

Stephen:

I've tried doing FT > SFB. Dean Gundburg has had much more success at it than I have; it seems to be a case of attitude.

Dean wants Full Thrust with SFB ships.

I want SFB games with Full Thrust speed.

Full Thrust lends itself to Dean's method more so than SFB lends itself to mine; once you've put some kind of energy allocation mechanic on FT to regulate weapons fire, and start using SFB's firing arcs, weapons tables and SSDs, you end up wanting half the things in SFB that FY can't support. (Impulse movement, mid turn speed changes, seeking weapons...)

We were never able to get the proper seeking weapon feel for SFB mapped to FT.

By Ken Burnside (Ken_Burnside) on Sunday, May 04, 2003 - 12:48 pm: Edit

Pay As You Go SFB:

This is an idea we used for a "fast play" SFB variant. It worked, but far from perfectly. (And broke slightly when you used move cost 2/3 ships, and really broke for MC 1/3 ships or less.)

1: Greatly reduce EA.

You get 1 white chip per box of warp you have. You get a number of red chips equal to your impulse power, and a number of blue chips equal to your APR power. All battery hits were treated as F hull, and housekeeping was eliminated.

It helped to have roughly 6 small white chips and 2 small red chips for fractional accounting. We didn't have a good way to show thirds of a point of power. For war cruisers, we put circles inside the top 12 warp engine boxes (evenly through all engines) and said that those specific boxes created 2 warp tokens, and otherwise treated them as movement cost one ships. (Warp boxes with circles in them were destroyed first).

Orion engine doubling simply added one token per doubled engine box.

You had a series of boxes to put tokens in: 1 for each heavy weapon (which had a series of numbers for the maximum that could be put in on any turn), and one for your phaser capacitors.

We had a grid of 7 hexagons for shield reinforcement -- center one was general, the outer ones were specific.

There was also a "general" box -- power put here could be used to arm special shuttles or tractors or power labs for EDR, or in essence, anything other than "Moving, defending, or blowing stuff up." We played it fast and loose for this.

There were 8 boxes for movement -- one for each impulse.

Everything other than movement and general reinforcement had to be allocated at the start of the turn. Any APR power not spent at the start of the turn was lost.

Movement and general reinforcement was done on a pay as you go rule, using warp tokens, and up to one impulse power.

2: Rapid-plot movement.

We broke the turn down into 8 impulses, from 32. Anything that didn't have a delay measured in 4 impulse increments was rounded to the nearest 4 impulse block.

The movement rules were very simple.

1: You could never spend more than 8 movement points of warp on a given impulse, so 3 points of movement and a HET.
2: You could spend 1 impulse point on movement per turn; this could be on the same impulse that you moved 3 hexes and HETed. The other points of impulse could be spent on general reinforcement.
3: The maximum number of movement points you could buy on any impulse was the amount you spent last impulse, +/- 1. This DID carry over the turn break (and got rid of one of the things that had always annoyed Michaal).
4: Turn and sideslip mode are unchanged -- place the markers on the map.

At the start of each impulse, you A) spent your tokens on movement and B) drew your movement on a plotting board that was 6 hexes wide by 6 hexes up/down.

Once everyone had their movement plotted, everyone laid their plot down simultaneously, everyone moved, then seeking weapons and shuttles would move freely, Fighters moved either 8, 12 or 16, no change in turn mode (use the closest fighter speed)

Admins moved 1 hex per impulse, except on impulses 1 and 5.

Speed 8 is 1 hex/imp, speed 12 is 1/2 in alteration, speed 16 is 2 per impulse. Speed 20 is 2/3 in alternation, speed 24 is 3 in alternation, speed 28 is 3/4 in alternation and speed 32 is 4 hexes/impulse.

A warp booster pack on a fighter added 12 to its speed.

Any shuttle dragged for 4 hexes in one impulse was death dragged.

If a seeking weapon entered your hex during movement, it hit you -- no chance to shoot it down, even if it managed to jump 7 hexes in doing so. (1 to 2 hex jumps were not unheard of, and with the short plotting time, it wasn't hard to arrange 1 hex shots. Just not guarenteed...)

Countering this, we made WWs a little easier to use: On any impulse where you move 0 or 1 hexes, you can WW. The WW is voided if you move 1 hex on two consecutive impulses.

For TACs, if you moved 0 on the last impulse, and 1 on the current impulse, you could choose to change facing by one hex side rather than move. You can spend a point of impulse and a point of warp on the same impulse and get 2 TACs.

For tractored ships, both ships spent their movement points normally; subtract the smaller amount of movement from the larger amount, and let the person with the remainder move the ships.

For death dragging, any shuttle that got pulled 3 or more hexes in a given impulse was destroyed (4 for a speed 16 fighter).

All in all, it worked OK -- it had speed of play that was, at 3 ships per player, close to FT. It didn't work quite as well for more than that.

While a lot of standard SFB tactics worked with this game, quite a few did not.

The Mizia volley didn't work real well with this mode of use.

There was a fair bit of granularity on seeking weapon (and scatter pack) launch points that got some getting used to, and plasmas on an open map were a little closer to nonsuckfulness.

Cloaks were too powerful (1 impulse spent fading out, one impulse spent fading in), and ESGs were a nightmare.

If I ever get mad enough to do 3-D SFB, I'll probably use a chunk of this for energy allocation and movement handling.

By Jay Paulson (Etjake) on Monday, May 05, 2003 - 03:22 am: Edit

I think the problem is to really speed up SFB, you have to get rid of the SSDs and simplify DAC and the impulse chart. Fleet actions can be greatly sped up by moving 4 impulses at a time and using fleet fire orders and fleet speeds. This doesn't change the rules really, because you have an option to go impulse by impulse if it is critical.

DAC can be sped up slightly by doing internals from one weapon down one row, although this DOES change the rules.

By Ed Crutchfield (Librarian101) on Monday, May 05, 2003 - 08:34 am: Edit

Jay,

I have tried the one weapon routine and it works out fairly well, especially for large numbers of hits the out come is fairly similiar.

By Jean-Baptiste LONGOUR (Skanvak) on Monday, November 22, 2004 - 12:36 pm: Edit

I know of two rules that speed play a bit :

Hard hit : reduce damage allocation time. each weapon roll only once on the DAC and apply damage to group of boxes on the SSD.

2 or 4 impulse play : reduce turn length (a lot). Ship move and act in turn, moving a quarter or half their turn speed. Each move is a firing opportunity.

None are from me, but they do exist and I am improving the hard hit rule to be used with a simplified DAC.