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Federation Admiral
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Steve Cole
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 5:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Without the logistical units, you don't need fed admiral, you just need a kitchen table, because you just have battles.

FA does not "need" nor does it "require" gunboats or carriers, but it could use them if the players wanted to use them. (No matter what combat engine you use, everyone can feel free to leave out whatever they want to leave out.) Making it possible for FA to use carriers and such adds about one page (and about an hour of work).

The problem is the logistics. Campaigns have to have some logistics or they aren't campaigns, by definition, and the earlier statement of "then just add" made me laugh as the additions are a lot of ships (although most are in TrA and it's boosters).

None of which is the point. Including or not including SFB, including or not including transports, would not speed up or slow down the project by a single day. THOSE are NOT the problem.

The problem is that the manuscript is VERY big and every page includes things Jay didn't get right and which have to be fixed. And every page means I have to work on it, send it to Jay who has to work on it, then Jay sends it back for me to work on again. And I don't even want to talk about Jean working on it.

Like I said, we all assumed that the FA manuscript was plug and play and it turned out not to be. In all seriousness, this project should never have been mentioned in public until it was finished, and those who playtested it did not point out the "universe consistency issues" to Jay, which meant that all of the playtesting was wasted as they were playtesting rules that could not be published.

The best thing to do would be to publicly cancel the project, work on it in secret, and then suddenly announce it was not cancelled at all, but I don't like treating my customers that way.
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storeylf
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 8:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Steve Cole wrote:
Without the logistical units, you don't need fed admiral, you just need a kitchen table, because you just have battles.


Given FedCom is just a tactical battle game, I'm not sure what that is meant to mean. If you aren't going to play battles then you are not playing FedCom anyway, but presumably some seperate strategy game. What would you do other than just play battles even once FedCom has the ships.

Quote:
The problem is the logistics. Campaigns have to have some logistics or they aren't campaigns, by definition, and the earlier statement of "then just add" made me laugh as the additions are a lot of ships (although most are in TrA and it's boosters).


It is true that some people may want logistics units in their campaigns. It may be true that FA needs logistics stuff to be a proper complete product. But since when has the defintion of a campaign system for a tactical game meant logistics (and the units in particular) are mandatory?

A campaign for a game at FedComs tactical scale usually means something that allows you to play a series of games where results of one feed into others, or an over-arcing victory condition. Practically standalone strategic games (with logistics) are just one of many ways of achieving that.


Last edited by storeylf on Thu Sep 15, 2011 7:38 am; edited 1 time in total
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Bolo_MK_XL
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 14, 2011 10:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Isn't the point of a Campaign engine to provide battles, that losing a ship affects future battles --
Instead of just using the best fleet you can pick, with no regard to losing them ----

There are those that wouldn't ever change their fleets if not forced (gets boring after a while) ---
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Steve Cole
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 15, 2011 5:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That is always an issue. Given their choice, people want a fleet of 11 dreadnoughts, but that means 10 other battles don't have a dreadnought.
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Paul B
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 9:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm confused about something here. Basically at some point in the past the following two things happened:

1. It was decided that logistical ships would never be in Federation Commander
2. ADB talked to Jay about making a campaign system for Federation Commander


So if logistics are required for any campaign, and federation commander will never include logistic ships, then how is a campaign system even possible for Federation Commander? By that logic it isn't.

Unless of course you simply abstract logistics within the campaign, which I believe the VBAM system typically does.


Or another question,
was not the intended scope of the Federation Commander game explained to Jay&co before and during their work on the project? And if so was it the case that the submitted first draft required units on field that were never going to be published under FC?

Or instead was it the case that ADB looked at the system, and despite the fact it did not need logistical ships as written, decided that it would work better with them and thus sought to have them included and by doing so effectively made it no longer an FC campaign system because it now requires elements that will never be in the FC game. (BoM not being FC)
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mjwest
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 1:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Paul B wrote:
1. It was decided that logistical ships would never be in Federation Commander

Uh, no. Logistical ships are intended to be in Federation Commander. That is why there is a Transports Attacked product, and why Briefing #3 is still planned.

The issue is that they don't exist yet, not that they never will.
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Steve Cole
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2011 4:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

No decision has ever been made to not do logistical ships. It was always a matter of just when we got around to it.
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Steve Cole
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2011 6:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Last Saturday I did 4 more pages and Sunday (see blog for why I worked sunday when I haven't since Origins) I did about 8 more.

There continue to be problems with the text from Jay.

Lots of silly typos like mis-spellings and lack of puctuation and I fix those on the fly. Missing words in the middle of every second or third sentence I fix almost as fast. Missing sentence in every second or third paragraph, yeah, master game designer can handle that easily enough and run it back by Jay to see if I guessed what he meant. It's slow going (an hour per page sometimes, but in any case about four times as much work as Petrick's monster articles, but then, Petrick has 20 years experience on Jay).

Then I ran into the scenario system which had a lot of missing and badly explained and bass-akward structures. Then I ran into FASCRs (the simple combat system and my fixes, addition of missing bits, and notes about what was just wrong were as long as the text. Basically, Jay needs to go do FASCRs over again before I work on FA any further. We're evaluating if we need to reschedule this.
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Steve Cole
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 27, 2011 9:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is definitely now a 2012 product.

I have four major things for the fall of 2011.

CL44, the highest priority.

Anything Mongoose wants me to look at, do for them, find for them, advise them on, etc. which is taking about 5 times as many hours as planned. (I'll wimp out on that one and say nobody could have predicted how much work this would take but maybe somebody should have been able to tell.)

Star Fleet Marines (which may also have to be delayed, no word yet). This one is my @#$% fault in that I did a design years ago, some playtesters dabbled at it for a while and said it was fine, so I put it on the schedule, then when the counters came in I sat down to enjoy playing it and it was NOT fine and basically had to be trashed and done over. I am about halfway through with that. The infantry works, but I have yet to redo the armor and the shuttles/gunboats.

Fed Admiral: My fault here, in that my enthusiasm for the project (Jay is downright infectious! I love the guy's passion) got me to put it on the schedule without seriously checking the workload required. Some of that is normal editing stuff. (I'd rather have a well-designed game full of typos that a perfectly proofread game that you cannot play.) Some of that is missing rules (which I just have to identify and tell Jay to go write, something editors have been doing for game designers for decades). Some if it is SFU compliance, which, again, is just point it out to Jay and let him go fix it. (If a DN can command 10 ships in SFU, it cannot command 40 in FA.) One can argue that Jay should have done a better manuscript but then I didn't get FC right the first time. (It's now on revision six with a half a page of corrections to even that.) It's a huge book (something over 200 pages) and it's slow progress (every few pages I have to send them back to Jay for fixes to the previous section and the next section before I can move forward.) I sent the last 12 pages to Jean, Leanna, and Petrick, and they came to me with a "please admit that you do not have time this year to finish this" plea and "please let Jay do it right and not force him to do it wrong" plea and, well, ADB has standards (we TRY anyway) and we just did not have time for this project to get there. Maybe if Mongoose had not taken so much of my time this might still have happened (at the expense of Marines) but right now I don't know if either will happen.
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Paul B
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2011 1:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

mjwest wrote:
Paul B wrote:
1. It was decided that logistical ships would never be in Federation Commander

Uh, no. Logistical ships are intended to be in Federation Commander. That is why there is a Transports Attacked product, and why Briefing #3 is still planned.

The issue is that they don't exist yet, not that they never will.


Oh I thought they were BoM territory. My mistake
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Steve Cole
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PostPosted: Thu Sep 29, 2011 4:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

We have the 16 tugs/transports in TrA and 16 more cargo ships of various types in Boosters 31-32-33 so FA needs somewhat less stuff than the original Briefing #3 list, stuff like commando ships.

While it's well known that I historically have zero interest in campaign books(*), working on FA has become infectious (Jay is that kind of writer) and it speaks volumes that last Sunday when I could have worked on anything (or taken the cat rabbit hunting) I worked on FA. Leanna wants me to put the thing away until December but I have fought for permission to spend an hour per week doing whatever will get done. The problem is mostly one of identifying things Jay needs to add or revise, and that's a fairly straightforward process and a lot more work for Jay than for me so an hour of my work gives Jay a couple of evenings of work to do.
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schoon9953
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 04, 2011 4:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

As always, thank-you for the updates, Steve!
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asguard101
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 12:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Is there a expected release date in 2012 for FA?
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Jean
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 1:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Not yet. Smile Give us time to get ACTA:SF out and then to work on Star Fleet Marines.
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Steve Cole
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 4:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The expected release date is 2012.

I won't know a month for a while.

Jay W and I are absolutely committed to publishing this, but we're going to have to work our way through it a few pages a week and when we're 90% done we'll post a date.
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