---

Quote:

Kosta: Yes, I believe Federation Admiral is a simpler F&E for FC.

---

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, September 07, 2010 - 11:44 am: Edit

FA is not a simpler version of F&E. It's a campaign system, and it works better for SFB than FC (since FC doesn't have the shps that FA needs, at least not yet; technically speaking, if FA were on the market today, it would not work with FC at all). Federation Admiral is NOT a "strategic game" and isn't even remotely related to, comparable to, or anything like F&E or a straegic game. FA is in fact more complex than F&E.

Make no mistake that FA is a good product and I am looking forward to getting to work on it (when Jay finishes the last blind tester review), but it's a campaign system, not a strategic game engine. Apples and Oranges.

By Scott Johnson (Sejembalm) on Tuesday, September 07, 2010 - 09:38 pm: Edit

Perhaps this confusion was born of the name, Federation Admiral. People may immediately associate it with Federation Commander.

Perhaps you should have named it Star Fleet Campaigns.

Anyway, hoping to see how it turns out.

Best luck and good fortune!

By Ken Rodeghero (Ken_Rodeghero) on Thursday, September 09, 2010 - 02:39 pm: Edit

Would there be any interest (in players buying or ADB selling) counter graphics on e23 to allow people to make their own game counters? Perhaps someone wants more of a certain unit. Granted, you can scan and print to do this now but it would look "better" with the real graphics and allow one to skip the scanning step.

I suspect this is counterproductive (forgive the pun) given the cost to ADB of printing and mounting counters that they would like to sell.

I am skeptical that significant interest from players would be there but thought I would throw it out for discussion.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, September 10, 2010 - 11:25 am: Edit

It's incredibly easy for me to do such things. I doubt i'd try to sell them, but I'll do one or two per person via Customer Request Wednesday.

By Troy Williams (Jungletoy) on Saturday, October 02, 2010 - 02:17 pm: Edit

Has ADB considered counter sheets printed on magnetic stock and the basic map printed on same?

I created a prototype with some tail stock sheet metal with the downloadable map sheet from the player aid section 2'x3' and the Cadet countersheet printed on magnetic card stock I found at Office Depot. It looks ok and functions perfectly mounted on the wall of my den keeping the board integrity and game state safe from pets, kids, wind or jostling. The obvious benefit of this is for PBEM type engagements or as an offline supplement to SFBOL.

The only issues I found were with stacking but simply alternating face up/face down defeated the polarity issue. The counters are slghtly thinner when printed directly to the mag stock but you could glue standard counters on mag stock as well. Manually cutting the mag stock is tedious so die-cut would be nicer and commercial printers could handle thicker stock. I printed the mag sheet counters on a Dell 5130 color laser printer with no problems but mass production may present other challenges.

I'm also looking for a metal etcher that would create a very nice chemical etch on 2'x'3 thin metal stock suitable for framing.

Sorry if this has already been suggested but it seems like a fairly obvious solution to any tactical board game in general. Thanks for your consideration.

By Loren Knight (Loren) on Saturday, October 02, 2010 - 05:00 pm: Edit

Yeah, we've talked about that a long time ago.

One neat idea was just printing them out on sticker paper then attacking those to magnetic sheet.

Could the die cut counter company die cut blank sheets of magnetic sheet? Would there be any market?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, October 02, 2010 - 06:46 pm: Edit

The market for this would be tiny, the cost would be huge, and while we did look into this (more than once) it's only a way to lose a gigantic amount of money.

By Mike Kenyon (Mikek) on Tuesday, October 05, 2010 - 08:20 pm: Edit

Metal shop on demand? It's a cool idea, we manufacture them ourselves for campaign purposes, but once we added terrain tiles, the magnetic ships didn't stick so well. If something worked well, it'd be really nice, but I'm not sure it'd be worth what the cost was to me.

By Michael Bennett (Mike) on Tuesday, October 05, 2010 - 10:55 pm: Edit

Sounds attractive to me...

By Brian J. Brusky (Killerbee) on Tuesday, October 12, 2010 - 05:40 pm: Edit

On a slightly different tack, I would love to see the Pinwheel Galaxy even in a playtest module. My understanding from looking at older web pages is that PW-1, PW-2, and PW-3 from the now defunct Pinwheel Games, were submitted to ADB. I could be wrong. I know there were discussions with lawyers advertised on those old web pages, that never seemed to bear fruit. One of the Star Fleet Times I don't have, was to have done a preview of races from this set. Any chance of that being resurrected? Just curious.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, October 13, 2010 - 11:53 am: Edit

They would need to contact us about that.

By Gary Carney (Nerroth) on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 01:26 pm: Edit

Not sure if this should be in this thread or not, but anyway:

Between the three Y-modules and the various entries for that era in Captain's Log, is there enough material in print to make an Early Years Master Rulebook viable; or would such a file (in print or e23 form) be better off waiting for a potential Module Y4 to be published first?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 02:32 pm: Edit

I'd do it after Y4. Petrick needs to focus on other things.

By John Erwin Hacker (Godzillaking) on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 03:27 pm: Edit

SVC:

Can you do DVD's / CD's of SSD's ?? It would be a great way for those of us who play the game of making copies without "wearing out" our SSD books. They can be made with very little cost (less than 1 dollar each) and it would be a GREAT SPACE SAVER for the game. Every SSD in the game could be put onto 1 DVD disc and we wouldn't have to sort through "almost endless" product to get to the SSD we need to get copied.

The races can be arranged in size class then BPV order within that size class for ease of look up or they could be arranged by BPV ranking from the largest to the smallest starship.

And if you are worried about people copying them there is the technology in place that can make copying the DVD / CD impossible.

Just a thought for sake of player convenience that is all.

John Erwin Hacker

By Jean Sexton (Jsexton) on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 04:12 pm: Edit

John, there is always the option of getting the materials on e23. How you store your electronic copy is up to you.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 04:42 pm: Edit

I believe it is a good idea, perhaps in the future when there are more things on e23, to offer CD versions of the e23 products. Some people only have have dial up, and don't like the big downloads. For example Far Future Enterprises sell individual downloads through DriveThru RPGas GDW Link: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=4
but sells CD-roms on their website. Link: http://www.farfuture.net/cdroms.html The prices are pretty low compared to ADB stuff, but all of this stuff is old. Comparable to Designers edition stuff for SFB.

By Gary Plana (Garyplana) on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 04:48 pm: Edit

JEH, last year (make that 2009) one of my customers priced out the equipment needed to make CDs or DVDs with DRM anti-copy production on them. In less than 1000 unit per month production rates amortized over 5 years the up-front capital equipment costs were impossibly high. Then when you added in the salary for the operator, and other recurring costs ... no flippin way.

Outsourcing production was considered but as the masters being updated would involve an entire new production run, kinda like a few years back when ADB outsourced printing before they went to Print-On-Demand.

As a result they decided to go kinda like the e23-ish way ADB and SJG are using now.

By Howard Bampton (Bampton) on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - 05:22 pm: Edit

DRM ties you to a platform. It doesn't play nice with Linux as a rule of thumb, if it is even supported (some of the stuff is legal outside the USA so there are grey hat workarounds that allow one to comply with the intent of the law) there is also a good chance that the DRM won't work a few OS revs out (say, Windows 9), forcing you to rebuy stuff or lose access to it.

Think 8 track tape or 5 1/4" floppy.

Watermarked PDFs play nice with pretty much anything and are not likely to be incompatible with future PDF standards (particularly on the open source front).

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Thursday, January 27, 2011 - 02:20 am: Edit

The files aren't copy protected now, and since they wouldn't sell more than they sell on e23 why wouldn't they just use recordable cds and computers they have now. Surely, one of their computers has a burner. Someone orders a disc, they burn a disc and ship it, if they order several files at once burn them to a DVD.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, January 27, 2011 - 11:32 am: Edit

It's something to think about at a point in time months from now. I'd not want to do it now as the SSDs haven't gone through the update step. If we put them on e23, you'd have your update when Petrick does it. If you bought a CD now, you'd have to upgrade later.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Thursday, January 27, 2011 - 11:31 pm: Edit

SVC:

Are you familiar with the games Master of Orion, or Sid Meiers Civilization?

The reason I ask, is because (after reading the discussion about the Delta Octant and the Hydran Colonies and the Lyran Far Stars) it occurred to me that it might be possible to use the Delta Quadrant as the same kind of open map/exploration game setting (ala MOO or Sid Meiers CiV) for a F&E variant.

Perhaps each race home world has found a vortex/ wrorm hole thingy to a different area on the Delta Octent map, and players could build or send ships and colonists through to "Build and empire".

May be limit the traffic to a single ship once per game turn (call it 6 months, just like in F&E)... and the first order of business for each player is to build the infrastructure to build ships, colonies, bases etc.

Or make it simpler, each player starts with a tug and a colony that they place on a world in a random hex in the Delta Quadrant.

There would be no map that you would have to create (other than a blank hex map) as every game would be different, and players would have to explore to find what is actually out there.

You'd have to create a modified production system for it, but since it wouldn't be applicable to "regular F&E", it might work out.

Even better, players gould use the regular F&E counters, with only a few "single sided" counters to denote special units on the delta octent game map.

(or maybe not... might even be a "rules only module!")

By Terry O'Carroll (Terryoc) on Friday, January 28, 2011 - 12:03 am: Edit

Jeff, I think the F&E guys have a similar "4X" (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) scenario called Early Beginnings that they run at Origins every year. Perhaps they can be persuaded to write it up for Captain's Log.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, January 28, 2011 - 11:51 am: Edit

For that matter, I'd love to see somebody design a computer game like MoO for F&E/SFU and let us market it.

By Tim Losberg (Krager) on Friday, January 28, 2011 - 03:40 pm: Edit

Jeff, if you like, you can check out my rules for F&E Early Beginnings. The link to the rules are in the link in my profile. I haven't submitted them yet for CL or anything official yet, Waiting until the rules are as fool proof as possible but we have been playing at Origins every year for the last 6 years