Yeah, well, my own pain meds (another torn something, this one in my left ankle) is interfering with my stunningly brilliant ability to communicate clearly.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Friday, August 05, 2016 - 07:53 am: Edit

I just mean't that you set a very high goal.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Friday, August 05, 2016 - 08:22 am: Edit

I am quite excited and hopeful for Federation Admiral.

When it is released in some form, I intend to run a PBEM campaign as Campaign Moderator.

By Lee Hanna (Lee) on Friday, August 05, 2016 - 10:57 am: Edit

I remain eager to play this, the mission-assignment bit sounds like what I've been wanting for years.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, August 05, 2016 - 12:26 pm: Edit

The objective of SFB, FC, Starmada, F&E-300, and ACTASF is to give the same results (more or less).

The objective of Fed Admiral is the same. Yes, it's a high standard and not always met in every case, and your mileage may vary in individual battles.

By Richard B. Eitzen (Rbeitzen) on Friday, August 05, 2016 - 01:38 pm: Edit

Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, August 07, 2016 - 05:31 pm: Edit

I was kind of hoping for a combat system more than F&E but less than FedCmdr or ACTA:SF, something like what was hinted at when you described the first F&E prototype system.


Garth L. Getgen

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, August 09, 2016 - 07:35 pm: Edit

Major progress today as ten pages (11-20, covering campaign turns, construction, and technology) went to the staff.

From the number of questions and comments that Jean and Petrick made, it is clear that this game was never given any serious playtesting, but the playtesters I hired last week are already busy doing that now.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Tuesday, August 09, 2016 - 08:29 pm: Edit

Based on comments by several persons here, I suspect that the original play-testers were simply playing the game and not trying to break it. They probably had an idea of how they wanted the game system to work, so they stayed within those boundaries and never pushed the envelope much. Even if a rule wasn't written clearly enough, they already knew what it was supposed to mean and thus never got identified as an error.

Putting fresh eyes on a project before submitting it for publication is a great idea.


Garth L. Getgen

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, August 09, 2016 - 11:28 pm: Edit

That's fair.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - 07:43 pm: Edit

Paul Brown is running his mouth at BGG claiming that I, Tony Thomas, Mike West, and Jean Sexton are liars who are ruining a perfectly good game (that being the original draft of Fed Admiral) apparently for no reason. Or perhaps we're ruining the game because of our own ego, incompetence, or a personal vendetta against Paul Brown. Seriously, this guy has never seen the game, but the people who HAVE seen it know that it was never playtested effectively. (There are just too many questions coming up on a casual reading of the manuscript, questions that would have come up if the game had actually been tested).

I really don't know what Paul's problem is, other than that he's someone who appareently just likes attacking ADB. (He's now off doing some kind of cost comparison of ADB products and some other products which have totally different components. In his mind he's proving something, but no one seems able to figure out what.)

Anyone who has taken the time to look at the sample pages which are color-coded with mistakes we fixed and missing rules we had to add knows that ADB did not screw up a perfectly OK game, but that we finished a brilliant design that was not ready for publication.

Paul (and more than a few others) have no concept that "playing" a game and "playtesting" a game are not the same thing.

Just one example: In one place is says when you declare war your economy goes to 100%. A paragraph later it says no, it goes to 110% for the first two years. How could anyone have playTESTED the game without noticing this contradiction and reported it to Jay for fixing? Never fixed ergo no report ergo no playtesting. (If you playtest a game and never send a report then you didn't playtest it. You played it. Not the same thing.)

Now, beyond that "not effectively playtested" we have the problem that the writer ignored the specific instruction to stay consistent with the SFU. (The writer insisted that he knew all about the SFU and would have no problem doing that.) And yet, the "command cost" thing is straight out of the non-SFU version of the game and contradicts the SFU. The technology system treated the Gorn CLE as a tech tier of the Gorn CL/HDD track without noticing that if you haven't researched "escort" you cannot build a CLE and if you have researched "escort" then you can build ANY escort variant of any base hull (south of move cost 1 anyway).

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, August 11, 2016 - 01:41 am: Edit

Which reminds me that nobody would know what the move cost of a FA ship is without buying a copy of FC but that is a simple fix as long as someone reminds me to make it.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, August 11, 2016 - 01:10 pm: Edit

The subject came up of the high cost of battleship maintenance and whether this would convince people not to build battleships. Lots to say on this issue and all of it needs to be the first thing said.

1. The long-announced plan is to upload the beta version and see what players say. Given that, if it proves to be the wrong cost we'll find out and fix it.

1. Jay's original ("playtested") draft did not include BBs but did include DNHs which had a maintenance cost of 4, so a battleship is going to have to be 5 or 6. The way Jay was calculating the stuff, 6 was the right answer, but see #1.

1. Maintenance is not a concept used in SFU games because players hate it. [It really should be in F&E and I speak as someone with a literal Masters of Military Science degree.] It's tedious and time consuming and no fun. It's like me writing a rule that you have to recite the Gettysburg Address at the start of every turn. It takes time, nobody enjoys it, nobody wants to do it, and players may well have a tendency to ignore that rule. What I did in F&E was to calculate the average fleet size and the average maintenance cost and just use that as part of the equation to decide that planets produced 3EP or 5EP and provinces 2EP instead of some other numbers. [You F&E players have been paying maintenance costs all along but you never noticed because dedicated staff officers took care of it for you.] The only design error would be to include a maintenance cost rule, have players ignore it because it's too much trouble, and then players have too much money to spend. Now the theory is that Fed Admiral runs a game with about 30 ships instead of 300 so calculating maintenance may not be so bad. We will find out when the beta is properly playtested.

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Thursday, August 11, 2016 - 05:30 pm: Edit

I guess I'm kind of an oddball on this, but I like strategic games with maintenance costs - but only if one of two conditions apply (and neither applies to F&E).

1. I only have a few units so calculating the maintenance costs is relatively quick and simple.

- or -

2. I'm playing a computer game which automatically calculates the maintenance costs for me.

By Thomas Mathews (Turtle) on Thursday, August 11, 2016 - 06:50 pm: Edit

I generally don't say things about other people here on the BBS unless I'm speaking directly to something they said or asked that I either disagree with or question how they have come to that conclusion. However, in this case, Paul is definitely in the wrong. While F&E itself has been around for almost 30 years now, ISC War is only 4 or 5 years old, and Minor Empires is just a few months old. The rules added to F&E in these expansions as well as the changes in DF&E to F&E2KX are the result of good playtesting, careful consideration in what should be changed and a lot of communication between players, the F&E Staff and SVC. The first time I played F&E was back in 1991. The first time I played SFB was back in 1982 or 1983 with the Pocked Edition. Even the changes to Fighter Operations 2015/2016 are the result of good solid playtesting and questions that have been asked and researched very thoroughly. I have seen both games mature over the years, and while I may question some of the changes I believe both games are tremendously better now than they were from the first time I played them.

Will I spend money on Federation Admiral, maybe. I will certainly spend my money on the SFB Products that I don't currently have. I will be spend definitely be spending my money on more F&E counters when I realize that I don't have enough in face to face games.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, August 12, 2016 - 01:22 pm: Edit

Paul's latest is to gripe that we are not open and transparent, but every single thing he gripes about it something we openly and transparently told everyone about. Really, you guys know me, and you know that no company is more open and more transparent than ADB. Claiming otherwise is instant credibility suicide.

By Randy Blair (Randyblair) on Friday, August 12, 2016 - 01:50 pm: Edit

What a rube...

By Jon Berry (Laz_Longsmith) on Friday, August 12, 2016 - 04:51 pm: Edit

Waita...

Are you being transparent or transporent? Because I'm not sure what our pores have to do with FedAdm.

By Thomas Mathews (Turtle) on Friday, August 12, 2016 - 06:47 pm: Edit

The whole point of good playtesting is not to win a game, but to break it so it can be fixed to make it better. It is a shame that some people do not understand this.

I know we have broken a lot of different things over the years in both SFB and F&E. I'm willing to bet that Tony L Thomas has broken a great many things in FC and ACTA-SF to make them better.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, August 12, 2016 - 07:10 pm: Edit

Playtesting is an art and a science.

Partly it is doing exactly what makes sense and seeing if it actually works. Is there any point at which you cannot use the existing rules to generate the answer to a question? (What happens when I fire a quasi-cannon on pacifist fire control during a solar vortex?) If there are places without answers, it means there are missing rules, and that needs work. While we're at it, rules that can mean two different things or be misinterpreted by a player (or deliberately misinterpreted by a rules lawyer) more work is needed. Some of that can be detected by an advanced player simply reading the rules and sometimes you have to actually play the game. Unfortunately, too few players want to actually play the game and write the tedious reports. Lots of people want to read new rules and ask questions based on perceived tactical problems that haven't actually come up because the reader hasn't actually played the game.

Partly it is doing what is not tactically logical just to see if a question arises that has never been answered. The point is not "do stupid stuff and see if something stupid happens" but "someday somebody is going to come up with a new strategy nobody ever thought of and if that leads them to a question that the rules cannot answer then you did a less than perfect job." Since you cannot anticipate when a new strategy (one actually worth using) will appear you test new strategies that don't actually make tactical sense but just might generate unanswered questions.

Partly it is a matter of seeing if the balance is right. Do both sides have a change to win?

Partly it's a matter of making it fun. If the game includes too much "work for no fun" (like maintenance costs for a game with a thousand ships on each side) then maybe the design needs a look.

While not actually playtesting, proofreading for spelling, grammar, punctuation, formatting, and so forth is part of the ongoing process. Playtesters are always reporting minor typos that we fix.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Sunday, August 21, 2016 - 12:42 am: Edit

How long does each turn represent? If it's a month or so, my next question is: how are new construction builds done? I presume the cost is lifted from F&E, no?

One of the ideas I had for a campaign is that a shipyard can add one "point" per month to build a new ship, so a CA typically takes eight months to build. Is that something worth using in FA, even if as an optional rule?


Garth L. Getgen

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, August 21, 2016 - 01:41 am: Edit

Turns vary from scale to scale (local, regional, grand) which is a lot of the problem. The original text talked about turns and hexes and EPs with only the vaguest mention that each meant something very different at each scale. The original and current text has yet to rationalize this. I just today started trying to straighten it out but it is totally confusing as originally written.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - 04:07 pm: Edit

An update...

I have sent everything through page 37 to Jean and Petrick but await getting it back from them before it goes to the playtesters. We continue to find missing stuff, things that were never done in the original.

Way back when I sent 38-44 to Jay and he sent a report. (At the time, these were 37-43, but work on previous chapters grew enough to slide everything a page forward.) I will next process those reports which will let me send those pages to Jean/Petrick.

There is a major "missing matter" in the case of scale. The campaign has three vaguely defined scales which are very different. One is F&E scale which is 500 parsecs per hex and six months to turn.

The next down is regional which is one month turns and hexes that aren't defined but 125 parsecs is probably a reasonable guess, I'm just not sure, maybe 83? Jay left it for the CM to make up as he went along. It's not that I don't trust CMs to figure it out, I just don't think they want to have to.

The next one down is local which is one week turns and hexes that might be 20 or 30 or 50 parsecs.

The problem is that the whole book says "turns" and "hexes" without defining which scale you are using or how big those things are.

Then another matter is that the thing I really love (a chart of 52 missions you might be assigned and you might have three or six running at once and it might take two to ten turns to finish them) can really only be done in peacetime, but nothing says "in the event of full scale war, you just cannot really do this". Similarly, there is a whole bunch of diplomatic stuff about who you're at war with or allied with which really cannot ever work except in grand/F&E scale.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, August 23, 2016 - 04:08 pm: Edit

This might be fun information...

Chapter 3
Pages 11-13 turns
Pages 14-16 ship construction, other construction
Pages 17-20 Technology, research, mission variants
Pages 21-23 intelligence
Pages 24-27 diplomacy
Pages 28-30 Movement
Pages 31-33 supply
Pages 34-37 encounters
Pages 38-43 scenarios
Pages 44-45 ground combat
Pages 46-49 various steps of the turn after combat to the end

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, August 25, 2016 - 06:56 pm: Edit

Working my way past the scale issues. The trick is that you've got two proportions working.

Say you start with the idea that a ship can move in (based on F&E) combat mode 3,000 parsecs in six months, fight a battle, then retreat to a base 3,000 parsecs away. Then let's say you want your local campaign (defined by Jay as one week turns) to have 20 parsec hexes. Well, let's say that there are 24 weeks in six months (just to avoid fractions) so 6,000 divided by 24 is 250 parsecs. So your ship needs to move 250 parsecs in a one week turn, so with 20 parsec hexes you have a speed of 12 but if your campaign manager liked 40 parsecs per hex you'd move 6 hexes per turn. Now, I personally don't care if you "do the math right" or not. If your campaign has hexes of undefined size and your campaign manager thinks a speed of 8 makes for better game play, then nobody from ADB is going to barge in and force you to change. But if it takes 18 months to build a DN and your campaign is building them in 18 weeks because "a turn is a turn is a turn" then you may break the game system, or at least produce a very very different one.