Federation Commander

[Maxwell Luther]

Questions in the title. Is it useful for FC and how does it play?

[Shadow Warrior]

Not particularly I would say. There is a project to produce a campaign system for FC (called Federation Admiral) but I think it is on the back burner at the moment.

It is useful if you are a player in one of the existing Galactic Conquest campaigns but as far as setting up your own campaign goes I think you would need to do a fair bit of work yourself to get it up and running.

[Maxwell Luther]

[Shadow Warrior]

My thoughts precisely, Maxwell.

I did buy a copy and quickly concluded its primary use was to support a player in an existing GC campaign. It is not of great utility if you want to set up your own campaign, plus it assumes ownership of many different SFB products.

For now, you probably would be best working up something yourself, although you would not go far wrong on basing it on the "Our 4 Player Campaign" rules in this very forum. They are very good in my opinion. I'm using them as the basis for a SFBF campaign I'm working on.

Other good bases are the Star Fleet Warlord rules (but they are very detailed) and the Federation Space rules, especially the Lyran Space variant which files off quite a lot of the rough edges.

[Maxwell Luther]

[paulgenna]

ML,

Our group also looked at a bunch of alternatives and finally just got some hex paper, in a large roll, and lamenated it ourselves. We then mapped out a 10x10 hex area. For the starting galaxy for rach race we determined a number of planets (6-8) and rolled percentile dice to place the planets. As scouts explored other quadrants we again determined the number of planets in the area and rolled percentile dice to place them.

Players had to scout the planets in the system by spending two entire 5-inpulse turns at the planet. Once they spent the time there we had the player roll to determine the mineral wealth of the planet (0-50 points with the majority of the percentage in 25points) per turn. The player then had to buy freighters to the planet so we use a 10point cost per hex to the planet to a starbase, up to 15 hexes as the maximum. As the player accumulated wealth they could start building new starbases, to expand out an additional 15 hexes, and warships.

[Hudson]

We made our own rules with random encounters and everything as well as magnetic sector maps and the works to hang on the wall.

Our campaign rules ended up being fairly extensive and written out pretty well.

We actually devoted an entire website to them.

[Jean]

As a player of Galactic Conquest, I would say that it can be used to set up a campaign, but just as SFB scenarios take effort to convert to FD, so would GC. We've had a person set up his own campaign using it and he's received mentoring off and on the BBS. It can be done -- it is just going to take more time than expected as it is balanced for SFB with its full complement of ships.
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[Shadow Warrior]