| By David Kass (Dkass) on Saturday, July 12, 2003 - 08:56 pm: Edit |
I hope to get on SFBOL sometime in the near future (my work schedule won't allow any chance before mid August). After I learn the interface, I was thinking of trying to run the "Lone Wolf" mini-campaign. My idea was that I'd play the Lone Wolf (and keep track of all the details) and try for a scenario at a fixed time (maybe once a week or something) and have whomever showed up playing the Kzintis. About the only change would be that a ship's drone load out wouldn't be determined until brought into play.
Do people think this would work? Would you be interested in playing the Kzintis? Or even play the Lone Wolf (C8K)?
If anyone likes the idea, feel free to go ahead and start a campaign without me.
I picked the Lone Wolf to start since only one side needs to remember secret information from scenario to scenario (the Klingons) and the battles are fairly small. Many of the other mini-campaigns will work equally well. And ideally I'd like to get a "group" that does this regularly so that anyone who wanted to could run one and have a good chance of regularly finding opponents.
| By Aaron M. Staley (Aaron_Staley) on Saturday, July 12, 2003 - 09:03 pm: Edit |
oooh, that should be fun.
| By Les LeBlanc (Lessss) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 10:13 am: Edit |
Paul Scott: Seeing as you have found fault with every campaign put forth yet.....
Could you please design a Campaign rules set to accomplish the following please.
1) limit fleets to Half of their regular maximum size (4 to 6 ships) so battles don't become unplayable by players less used to controlling many ships ( and to keep the Kzinti ship Captains from committing suicide when they see how many drones can fit in a 12 ship fleet).
2) Puts more emphasis and more smaller ships rather than fewer LARGE ships.
3) encourages constant skirmishes with multiple neighbors and prevents the avoid battle amass a huge fleet then attack syndrome that kills campaigns.
4) Is not a commanders options twist and tweak to optimize for the specific race you are playing string of unrelated loosly held together scenarios. In otherwords your fleet deploys against a specific border or a area that may have the chance of up to three different races to fight against but no opportunity to repurchase what you are carrying to min max against the race you do fight. The idea here is that the people who fight the battles don't have to think about purchasing items at all. They are given their force in complete, and given their opponnent, and all they need do is fight the batttle.
5) Has simple economics
6) does't degenerate or rely on Diplomacy/favoritism
7) Doesn't become a game of lets purchase ships. In otherwords has about 3 to 4 times the opportunity to start battles vs opportunities to purchase new ships.
8) Is fair to all in regards to what items are resupplied for free, and what items they need to pay for.
9) Is something that you and opthers would like to play.
| By Paul Scott (The_Rock) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 10:46 am: Edit |
Conditions 3 and 6 are mutually exclusive. If you use a strategic map with empires having more than one border, avoiding diplomacy is impossible.
Geoff's campaign accomplishes most of the goals you outlined, however. I am assuming you don't like it because it has no strategic map.
As an aside, condition 2 is an aestheic I do not subscribe to. The creation of multiple small units (except fighters/PFs) has never made any sense to me under SFB's economic structure. As an example, a typical 150 point BVP ship is far more effective that even 3 75 BVP ships. This is especially true for disruptor and plasma races, less true for the Federation. So why are these units ever being built? Their only purpose seems to be for highly specialized missions - drone bombardment being the most obvious, where you want to cram on to a hull as many weapons/special sensors/etc. as possible and never intend the ship to actually engage in combat.
This fact is reflected pretty clearly in most campaigns where either - the designer has to force people to spend points on these mostly worthless units or if the players are not forced to do so, they don't build them. The trouble with these ships is compounded dramatically by command limits, making them not only a bad buy ecconomically, but a bad buy numerically as well. If you really wanted to encorage their use, its the command limits I would go after. Make each unit count as its movement rate in command points and people will start buying them, except of course for Disruptor/Plasma races, where the lack of R30 Disruptors or Heavy torps make such units pretty much worthless anyway.
| By Andy Palmer (Andypalmer) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 11:05 am: Edit |
While Command Limits do make the small ship vs large issue worse, it can be helped overall if the construction rules are done correctly. For example, if you can build a DD in half the time it takes to build a CA, there could very well be cases when you want to get some additional firepower to the front sooner rather than more later.
TacIntel also helps small ships, since at long ranges (S1-5) you can't tell a F-L from a DD or a F-S from a FF.
For our campaign, we required that the number of AT START SC4 warships be >= the number of SC3 and SC2 warships combined. After that, I believe our build system will keep small ships in flavor (6 turns for a DN will keep them rare).
| By Andy Vancil (Andy) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 11:57 am: Edit |
Why would you even want to encourage people to have more, smaller ships? Big ships are FUN. Battles involving zillions of small units are unplayable.
Ultimately, I think the best option for a campaign that focuses on good battles as opposed to the metagaming of ship construction is to design a balanced set of build schedules for each race, then let players pick races.
| By Andy Palmer (Andypalmer) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 12:26 pm: Edit |
Andy Vancil.
Playability. A fight between 5 small ships and 5 small ships is over quicker than a fight between 5 large ships and 5 large ships.
Balance. Hydran ships are more bang per SC than others, especially on a 2x3 fixed map. You take a Klingon DN+5CA fleet vs a Hydran DN+5CA fleet and the Klingons will get swamped. Make it Hydran DN+3CA+2DD fleet and it might be close for a turn or two.
| By Les LeBlanc (Lessss) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 01:04 pm: Edit |
Not only that there is racial fleet composition. The Klingons for instance are supposed to have lots and loats of tiny ships.
| By Paul Franz (Andromedan) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 01:11 pm: Edit |
Andy V.,
The question is, what is the goal of a particular campaign? If the primary goal is to generate fun battles or is the primary goal of the campaign to play a simplified F&E game using SFB to decide the winners and losers of battles?
Paul Franz
| By Andrew Harding (Warlock) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 05:26 pm: Edit |
I have a file on my hard drive that does pretty much everything requested except 6 (6 being kinda essential to call it a campaign). Though I've had a lot of input into it, it's not my set of rules. I'll ask the author for his OK to post.
Basic concepts are to have a lot of fragile targets (so that unopposed small forces can be effective), replacements rather than new production (so that players can fight battles without crippling themselves relative to neutral players), faster construction of small units (frigates replace faster than cruisers). There is no fleet size limit other than S8, but total forces are such that assembling 2000 points in one place is impractical.
| By Andy Vancil (Andy) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 05:59 pm: Edit |
Paul - Very good point. Determine your goals first. If you want fun battles, don't put too many limits on big ships.
Andy P - Well, sure, a bigger battle will take longer. But for a given BPV, battles with larger ships will be faster because there are fewer of them.
For good battles, you should look at ways to balance BPV, not just numbers of ships. Sure, 5 Hydran CAs will be better than 5 Klingon CAs. Heck, 5 ISC CAs could easily defeat 5 CAs of any other race. But they also cost a lot more.
| By Andy Palmer (Andypalmer) on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 - 06:15 pm: Edit |
Andy Vancil. The whole idea of a campaign is not to fight any fights that you can't win, so BPV goes out the window.
| By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 11:05 am: Edit |
Comment on Condition 2 - (Emphasis on small ships) above:
Historically, major fleet battles (Trafalger, Tsushima, Jutland) usually involved massing as many battleships as possible into one force, for reasons very similar to those Paul Scott has already pointed out. This is not to say that small ships had no role in such actions. (The German destroyers launched a torpedo attack at Jutland that did not actually damage any British ships but did buy time for the German battle fleet to escape after the British had "crossed the T".) But the role of small ships in these battles was to support fleets of massed battleships.
In this regard the SFB rules restricting, for example, a single fleet to only one SC2 ship are ahistorical to say the least. Smaller warships were frequently important but for roles such as screening and reconnaissance, anti-piracy, commerce raiding, blockade, etc. The blockade against Germany during WWI was actually carried out by cruisers (a "small ship" compared to the Dreadnoughts that formed the major battle fleets.) The purpose of the British battleships in the Grand Fleet was to ensure that the German battleships in the High Seas Fleet didn't crush the blockade.
An SFB campaign that focuses heavily on battles must either rely on artificial limits to the number of big ships or it will see very few destroyers and frigates built. If you want the campaign to include significant numbers of small ships the campaign will have to include situations where numbers of units are more important than the power of individual ships.
Some possibilities:
1) Reconnaissance and Screening - This requires a non-playing games master to be fully effective. It also requires a low ship density on the strategic map and is unsuitable for F&E but could work in an ahistorical campaign. Suppose the campaign rules specify that you are unaware of the position of an enemy fleet until you are in an adjacent hex on the strategic map (scouts and X-ships detect two hexes away, X-scouts detect at three) and the front you have to cover is large compared to total fleet size. Building nothing but large ships may leave too many gaps where an enemy force could slip through and wreck havoc on rear-area planets. Players might find it wise to build both small ships that would spread out to provide coverage, and big ships that would fight in concentrated fleets to defeat the enemy fleet once it was located.
2) Anti-piracy - Imagine the following hypothetical rule. Any friendly province that does not have a warship stationed in it has to roll on a piracy chart. On a 1-3, the province produces at full value. On a 4 or 5 it produces at 2/3 value. On a 6 it produces at 1/3 value. If the province contains a base or planet with PFs or fighters, subtract one from the die roll. These units can not cover the volume of space a true ship can but do extend the coverage well beyond that of the base's own weapons. This rule assumes the pirates are not Orions (with ships capable of fighting a regular warship) but rather have ships comparable to a small armed freighter or a slightly upgunned Federation Express. It also assumes you have to patrol a lot of provinces and can not cover them adequately with just SC2 or SC3 ships.
3) Commerce Raiding - Suppose that you are using the Anti-piracy rule above but in addition, if the enemy can place a true warship (even if only a frigate), in one of your provinces where you have no warships, you add two to the piracy die-roll (and a roll of seven or higher means the province produces at zero for that turn).
The above rules are very simple but will still complicate the administration of the campaign. Finding the right balance may require considerable trial and error. But something along these lines does at least give a real reason to produce large numbers of small ships, by assigning them more historically (real-world, not SFU history) accurate roles.
| By Timothy Sheehy (Spydaer) on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 11:40 am: Edit |
The triangular silhouette of an Imperial cruiser has come a long way since its Republic-inspired design. While vessels of the Jedi order were met with feelings of pride and relief as they came soaring to solve galactic strife, the Imperial Star Destroyer's gargantuan size cleary inspires both awe and terror.
The wedge-shaped capital ship is bristling with weapons emplacements. Turbolasers and tractor beam projectors dot its surface. Its ventral bay can launch TIE fighters, boarding craft, land assault units, hyperspace probes, or be used to hold captured craft. Its bustling bridge is staffed by the finest crewers in the Imperial starfleet.
| By David Kass (Dkass) on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 01:57 pm: Edit |
The other driver for small ships is shipyard space and production times. For example, a slip for a CA may cost 10 times the cost of an FF slip (and both are very expensive relative to the size of the ships).
| By Andrew Harding (Warlock) on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 02:39 pm: Edit |
The catch with "just need a ship, any ship" as a method of requiring some small ships is that players will often fill the job with the cheapest possible small ship, leaving more points for the line. (If you have to pay for ten ships that will never see action, why not use Pols or even F-S for the job instead of DW? The points saved will pay for more war cruisers.)
For whatever reason, historical SFU races build and use a large variety of ships, which makes for interesting battles. Campaign players, barring rules that force construction of a mixture, tend to pick one good value ship (often but not always the war cruiser) and build in quantity, with other types only built to meet special requirements. This is because it is tactically sensible to do so, though it can make campaign battles repetitive.
| By Andy Vancil (Andy) on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 03:16 pm: Edit |
If your goal is to make players use a variety of ships of different sizes, then the most effective, simplest approach is to have scheduled builds, e.g., turn 3, you get a Pol, a DDS and a CW. Turn 4 you get...
With predetermined build schedules, you can do a better job of balancing out the races, e.g. Klingons can no longer just build a zillion D5s, Gorns don't have to build a bunch of frigates that suck, etc. You can force people to have an interesting variety of ships, with a balance of different sizes.
This also eliminates the destabilizing effect of economics, i.e, one player wins a couple battles, thus gets more money, thus buys better ships, thus has better fleets, thus wins the campaign based on an advantage earned early. Instead, you get the same reinforcements even if you have less territory. (They arrive through the stargate, or some such mechanism.)
| By Andy Vancil (Andy) on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 03:20 pm: Edit |
Andy Palmer - Sure, you don't WANT to fight battles you can't win, but depending on the campaign mechanics, you might be forced to. Or, you could be in a position where not fighting means giving up critical territory, and so on. Any good system for controlling fleet size must prevent a player from building an uber-fleet that others can't match.
| By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 03:46 pm: Edit |
Andrew Harding:
You "just need a ship, any ship" for the anti-piracy mission, under my assumptions. But for the recon/screening and commerce raiding missions it's more complicated. Hypothetically, you're the Klingons, I'm the Tholians (not usually treated as a major race, but they're my favorite race and I'm being hypothical here). You build lots of G-2s or E-3s for your screen. They start encountering my screen of Patrol Corvettes. The Tholians will win the recon battle and give my main forces an advantage in that I can locate you better than you can locate me. You upgrade your screening forces to E-4s (approximately an even match for a Tholian PC but still with a Tholian edge IMO) or F-5s (Klingons win the recon battle now). In response I build Tholian Destroyers (superior to any version of the F-5 short of at least an F-5K with fast drones). You upgrade your forces again to F-5Ws or even D-5s and - oops, wait a minute - now you can't build enough of them to provide an adequate number of hulls to cover the frontier.
The goal is to come up with campaign rules that will not allow a single "best" build strategy but will be unstable in that my best build strategy depends on what you're building. (And the best I can do is make an educated quess at what you're really building.) As I acknowledged in my previous post, considerable trial and error may be required to make this work for any given campaign. But from experience, it is possible.
| By Andrew Harding (Warlock) on Wednesday, July 16, 2003 - 04:04 pm: Edit |
Nods - if ships are going to be seeing combat, then it matters what hull they are.
Defined builds does work. It's even possible to include them in a more freeform campaign - for instance "ok, you've captured Zursk, a major planet with a fighter special. That gives you a Pol and half a fighter squadron for system security, which as you know can't leave the system. Hold it for two turns and it becomes "occupied", adding a MB to system forces and a DD to your fleet, plus allow you convert some other ships to a carrier group with up to twelve class II fighters. A further four turns to make it "controlled" will give you a CL as well, six more to "loyal" and you get to swap the MB for a BS, to use the war construction versions of the hulls and to use high-end fighters."
| By Jon Murdock (Xenocide) on Saturday, January 10, 2004 - 12:39 am: Edit |
The best campaign build system I've used involved set fleet builds, mostly CW's and DW's along with a pre-set fleet. You also got some amount (30 or 40?) BPV per turn to do whatever you want. You could sacrifice the builds for more whatever you want ships but the conversion was something like 1/3 of the cost of the ship so building like that crippled fleet size.
This gives you some options while simulating real builds. FF's become obsolete shortly into the war but we had no problems with that as they did in the General War as well yet they rarely died. Most engagements involved the 'war' ships with occasional 'trash' fleets duking it out over weaker areas.
| By Les LeBlanc (Lessss) on Sunday, March 21, 2004 - 02:45 am: Edit |
U?? SFB 3 ship Ladder Campaign
By Leslie LeBlanc
This campaign is an achievement based game that will take individual players up a ladder of scenarios. The score is not so much decided by victory points but by how few games it takes you to climb the ladder.
U?? Fleet Formation
Players do not necessarily have to take just 1 race but may attempt to climb the ladder with any race for any round. Each race will have a set class of ships the player must fly and climb from that ship to a squadron composed of that class up to the next class of ships. The year is irrelevant but will proceed through refits available. First pick your ship(s) and it’s refit(s), then find a player and he may choose his ship(s).
Start with the first available year you can take the ship without refits, only increase the year to the point the opponent has a ship available. Take the lowest ship available, that is an FF before taking and FW.
Post the Game as soon as it starts on the day you play it to the ADB board. When completed report the win or loss. If the game start is not posted the game win will not count. In other words just posting the win all by itself will not count .Conjectural ships are not allowed(except BB's), unique limited ships are. Only 1 limited unique ship per game.
Any SFBOL member may be played but the opponent race MUST be an historical enemy, neighbor or civil war. We will leave out Orions and Andro’s unless the player would like to fight them. They may not be taken for the BB games. Each round you opponent has the same amount of bpv as you to use.
If there is no ship within 10 bpv of your ship, take another refit or more expensive drones to increase you bpv for the opponent’s ship to be available. If this still does not help fight against another race.
Play the game, if you lose play it again with more refits or commanders options. Each game is recorded and reported.
U?? Campaign Round Sequence
| Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 3 | Round 4 | Round 5 | Round 6 | Round 7 | Round 8 | Round 9 | Round 10 |
| Frigates | Destroyers | WarDD | CL’s | Cw’s | Ca’s | NCA | BCH | DN + CL + DD | BB + CL + DD |
| 2 Frigates | 2 DD | 2 DW | 2 CL | 2 CW | 2 Ca’s | 2 NCA | FF+DD+BCH | DW+CL+DN | CW+CA+BB |
| Squadron | squadron | Squadron | Squadron | Squadron | Squadron | Squadron | DD + DW + BCH | CL +CW+DN | CA+NCA+BB |
| By Don Sample (Kailae) on Sunday, March 28, 2004 - 01:21 pm: Edit |
Seems to me that perhaps the best way to go would be to play out some of the smaller F&E scenarios (with a limited amount of SE) and run off of that. F&E already effectively limits battles to about 10 ships per side. That's still a big fight but if you get enough people interested in it it could be done I think. If that were to be proven too many, then you could fiddle with command ratings, production cycles, or economic points to achieve the reduction in SE that you need.
| By Christopher E. Fant (Cfant) on Saturday, April 24, 2004 - 01:34 am: Edit |
Don, these days the typical F&E fleet is about.....14-17 at any primary battle.
| By Aaron M. Staley (Aaron_Staley) on Sunday, May 23, 2004 - 08:42 pm: Edit |
On Absolute War rules:
In (AA1.15), it states that if one player wants to use (M2.6) [which is the rule for hidden mines] then the rule is in effect. Players are required to discuss this before the scenario begins, otherwise the rule (M2.6) is in effect.
(M2.6) does not govern only NSM's, but any mine (Small or Large) that is laid; either by minerack or shuttle bay.
Further, there is only one true way (at this time) to handle laying t-bombs or NSM's secretly in SFBOL. You must use a log entry for each mine laid. This accomplishes 2 things.
1. The Log only allows you to enter the mine's data on an impulse and will not let you change the data on another impulse.
2. The Log allows you to reveal just the one entry for that mine.
If you use the new Notes feature (which I haven't thoroughly explored yet), you could change that data and would have to reveal everything. The Notes feature is there for a player's convenience, but cannot be used in resolving a game decision.
I will entertain any questions on this discussion here.
| By Kenneth Jones (Kludge) on Monday, May 24, 2004 - 10:59 am: Edit |
Log is what I suggested for prelaid mines.
I haven't had time to check out the newer features lately. So I can't really comment on the use of the Notes feature during the game.
| By Les LeBlanc (Lessss) on Saturday, July 24, 2004 - 08:50 pm: Edit |
notes is nothing more than a notepad
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