Subtopic	Posts		Updated
	Archive through March 20, 2012	0		03/20 04:55pm

Rules mentioned as wanted:
Maulers
Tugs and pods
Aegis
Planetary defense units

By A. David Merritt (Adm) on Tuesday, October 01, 2019 - 08:09 am: Edit

By Matthew G Lawson (Mglawson) on Tuesday, October 01, 2019 - 10:46 am: Edit

By Tony L. Thomas (Scoutdad) on Tuesday, October 01, 2019 - 11:52 am: Edit

Maulers will be in Book 3. Probably only one or two for each empire.
More maulers in Book 4.

Tugs and Pods have been discussed. They will require a bit more play testing, so not in Book 3.

Aegis... a lot of this was subsumed into the Escort trait in Book 2.
Full Aegis may get its own addition in a future book.

PDUs... PDUs (and ground bases) are in our minds, but again need more play testing to make sure they work.

By Tony L. Thomas (Scoutdad) on Tuesday, October 01, 2019 - 11:55 am: Edit

Speaking of play testing...

This is the single largest hold-up on anything new.
Everyone says they want to help play test, but very rarely do they help.

Through the two year (well, 101 week) course of play testing Book 2 - I had 23 different groups volunteer to help. 3 groups played games and made reports. 20 groups got the new rules and disappeared from the face of the Earth.

If you want to help with Book 3 (and eventually Book 4 and 5) and will actually play games and report the results - contact me.

tony [dot] l [dot] Thomas [at] comcast [dot] net

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, October 01, 2019 - 02:04 pm: Edit

By Cole M Jenkins (Sirpudding) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 09:02 am: Edit

I would really like an expansion of the campaign system to include strategic targets. This was a real feature of the B5 rules and we were disappointed that the Star Fleet rules are just a series of meaninglessness battles. Honestly this is the main reason we keep going back to the B5 rules instead of playing ACTA:SF.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 09:04 am: Edit

Tony, are you familiar with that? I have never seen the B5 rules for ACTA and am not aware of such things.

By Cole M Jenkins (Sirpudding) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 09:36 am: Edit

Steve, in the B5 rules you procedurely generate a star system in which the campaign takes place (in Star Fleet this probably should be a sector instead, given the larger scale of warfare in the setting) as a list of strategic targets. Each strategic target may give a Repair and Reinforcement point income each campaign turn and have other rules (for example asteroid belts generate D3 additional asteroid fields for battles fought there and increases the multiplier for XP dice spent on field repairs for the controlling player; military academies allow rerolls on XP spent on improving crew quality and so on).


Instead of challenging an opponent, you nominate a strategic target on your campaign turn. If it's held by another player they will have to defend it it. If it's neutral another player can opt to intercept and be the defender in the battle (and if no one chooses to, you can take control unopposed).

This makes for a much more narrative campaign experience, and in my opinion is the best feature of the original game. I was very surprised to see it wasn't done for ACTA:SF.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 10:37 am: Edit

I have never seen or heard of such a thing, but I can sort of see how it would work. From the description this involves several players, not just two?

By Cole M Jenkins (Sirpudding) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 10:54 am: Edit

The campaign rules support 2+ players, but this isn't any different in your version (since you can challenge any player in the campaign). I've only played two player campaigns.

By Zac Belado (Pixelgeek) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 11:38 am: Edit

The B5 campaign rules aren't set up for a specific number of players Steve so you can run them with whatever number you have on hand.

It might be a bit more work to bring them to the SFU since there are a few more historical restrictions on where ships can be. Mind you, you can always say its a training simulator :-)

By Zac Belado (Pixelgeek) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 11:59 am: Edit

The campaign system in the Noble Armada rulebook might make a better start as it doesn't have the B5 specific terrain and targets in it

By Cole M Jenkins (Sirpudding) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 12:01 pm: Edit

You can make "historical" parameters optional during fleet selection if you want.

As much as this is an issue, it's an issue that's already present in the campaign rules as published anyway. There's nothing there that restricts fleet composition or opponents to historical ones. It even suggests you could have multiple fleets of the same faction fighting each other ("Ideally,
every fleet should be different, so you can represent the Federation,Klingon Empire, Romulan Star Empire, and so on, but it is okay to have the same type of fleet on differing sides, with one representing a rogue faction of their government, perhaps." Book I p.41)! Adding strategic targets doesn't change much, if anything.

By Cole M Jenkins (Sirpudding) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 12:11 pm: Edit

Zac, doesn't the Noble Armada have Fading Suns specific stuff instead? I don't have that book, but I suppose I can get a copy. At any rate I was expecting a version of the campaign rules with targets that resembled system mechanics in F&E (or that were in episodes of TOS) instead.

Obviously you don't have Jump Points in SFU, but a lot of the rest of the original rules are probably still directly applicable, since you do have settled planets, unexplored planets, gas giants and so on.

By Zac Belado (Pixelgeek) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 12:14 pm: Edit

I just cam back to say that the Noble Armada rules appear to have even more universe specific stuff. Its just all in the upgrades and refits

By Cole M Jenkins (Sirpudding) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 12:27 pm: Edit

Well the single universal refit table instead of the faction specific ones is another difference that expanded rules could address, but IMO is less important than the strategic targets.

By Zac Belado (Pixelgeek) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 01:01 pm: Edit

Indeed. I forgot what a huge pile of weirdness there was in the Noble Armada rules.

A targets table and the basics of the system would be a good place to start.

Let me see if I can rip out the universe specific stuff from the rules and post something. Or have you done something like that already?

By Cole M Jenkins (Sirpudding) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 01:36 pm: Edit

I've definitely thought about it, there's obviously stuff that's more SFU that could be added as well. It would help if I knew why they made the changes to the rules for the version that is in Book I, in the first place, though. Like why the Prestige Point system for instance.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, May 20, 2021 - 03:40 pm: Edit

I have never even seen one of these things so I'm not the guy to write it, but if Tony wants to write it in book 3 or get someone to do that, fine by me. I will format and edit and if I see a mechanical flaw I'll let you know to fix it.

By Steve Stewart (Stevestewart) on Friday, May 21, 2021 - 07:58 am: Edit

The B5 campaign rules were really well adapted for the setting IIRC. Each race had special campaign events that could be generated (e.g. the Minbari might get the "Vorlon Directive" event which gave them a bunch of extra resources if they were successful. The way they were written caught the feel of the show and the constant low-level skirmishing between races. Might not work quite as well in an all-out GW scenario.

By Daniel Eastland (Democratus) on Friday, May 21, 2021 - 09:02 am: Edit

Great idea.

B5: ACTA was the first game that really got me into the ACTA system. We nearly exclusively used the campaign rules to run multiple years-long campaigns with 3+ factions jockying for supremacy.

Even if you just wanted to have rules for a 2-faction "admiral's game", that would be fantastic.

Battles are always so much better when they happen within the context of a larger story, imho.

By Tony L. Thomas (Scoutdad) on Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - 10:03 am: Edit

The current version of the ACTASF campaign rules were generated by Mongoose Publishing, so I cannot answer any questions regarding why things were done as they were.

When we created version 1.2, we didn't have time to rewrite the campaign rules (and frankly, no one until now) has ever asked about them. We simply made any changes needed to update them to version 1.2.

For our group, since we play Fed and Empire, that's the natural go to for us when needing a campaign system. We play F&E, and then select some battles to be fought using ACTASF to determine the results.

By Tony L. Thomas (Scoutdad) on Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - 10:05 am: Edit

I don't think there will be room for a campaign system in Book 3, but who knows.
I'll get with the guys and we'll see what we can come up with.

By Cole M Jenkins (Sirpudding) on Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - 10:33 am: Edit

RE: Using Federation and Empire as a campaign system.

I realize there are people who have a space where they can leave a game set up for days or weeks without it being disturbed, but I don't actually know anyone like that.

By Zac Belado (Pixelgeek) on Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - 12:08 pm: Edit

Use Vassal.

By William Linton (Bill) on Thursday, October 14, 2021 - 04:59 pm: Edit

Or Cyberboard