Federation Commander

[Savedfromwhat]

So I have been trying to get my hands on this game for awhile now and it keeps slipping through my fingers. has anyone played it? I had some gaming buddies express interest in a campaign for fedcom but they don't want to have anything to do with Federation and empire. According to one guy the game is nigh unplayable in less then 6 months. Federation Space says it lasts 1-2 hours is this even remotely accurate (is it a watered down version of F & E?).

[Mike]

I had Federation Space many, many years ago and from what I've been told it has no resemblance to Federation & Empire (I don't have Fed & Emp).

I messed with FS a little bit, but found it to be more of a slugfest than anything else. You could put up to 6 ships in one hex and if you encountered an enemy force the ships were paired off and rounds of fighting began. Each ship had an offensive rating, defensive rating, and a movement factor. Ships with a certain movement factor could follow up on victories in pursuit, but the big ships didn't have enough, so they could never pursue. I don't remember exactly, but I think the Fed CA had ratings of 8 Off., 8 Def., and 6 movement. A Klingon D7 had 8 Off., 6 Def., and 6 movement. I might be wrong about those. Anyway, one ship would compare its Off. with its battle pair's Def. and take the difference. That number (or less) would be the required die roll to cause damage on the other ship. Each round was simultaneous. If the Off-Def. was even, seems like I remember you could still roll a 1 to cause damage. If there were ships of one squadron without enemy paired ships, they could gang up on other enemy ships in that battle. The game continued with bunches of these battles.

Someone has said that Task Force Games produced that game without input from the designer of Star Fleet Battles and that it wasn't representative of the SFU.

I got rid of my copy a long time ago, but wouldn't mind finding another real cheap sometime.

[Savedfromwhat]

Thanks Mike for the info, sounds kinda neat if you ask me, I am all into space combat

[OGREAI]

Saved,

I own it, it currently is packed into my Federation Commander traveling boxes. As SVC has stated before, it was done by Task Force Games with (If I remember correctly) no input from ADB. It shares a thin veneer with the SFU (Federation CA, Klingon D7, etc.) but as published... it was not well done.

The map work was fine, the ship factors are skewed BADLY. The ships are rated Offesive power, Defensive Power and Movement. A Federation CA rates 8 8 6 and as printed a Klingon D7 was rated 6 6 6. With the combat tables being a strength differential system this meant in a simultanious round of combat, the Fed CA would disable the D7 67% of the time, while the D7 only had a 33% chance of disabling the Fed CA. There was a printed correction to "some of the ships" in Nexus magazine #8 (or #7... got to check my old copies) to show how TFG (I assume) thought some of the ships should be corrected, so that we, the players, could figure out the rest.

Now, I got it the summer it came out and... I tried my best to wear it out. I also saw fundimental issues with it and shelved it once Federation & Empire came out. I've recently dusted it off. It provides "basic" tools for our group to run a campaign, and I've always been a game tinkerer.

If there is anything else you need to know about it, I'll be glad to help.

OGRE AI

[Davec_24]

Ah, I remember that game... As OGREAI says, the combat was pretty skewed and overall the game wasn't great if you expected it to be like SFB on a strategic scale. I suppose it worked alright as a stand-alone game, but didn't really work well as part of the SFU. If I remember rightly, the ships could be intact or damaged (or destroyed, this speaks for itself!) and when damaged, you flipped the counter over and it had reduced factors on the flip-side to represent the reduction in capability due to damage - that at least was a fairly good idea.

I suppose you could use it as a basis for a campaign, fighting the battles in FC, and this would stop the combat factors from being so skewed. The movement system works fine, so could be used. Also the having a maximum of 6 ships per empire in a hex could be handy for reducing the sizes of your FC battles if you do it that way, keeping the game fairly fast-paced. The ships included in Fed Space are all "early era" type ships such as the Fed CA, DN, Klingon D6 and D7, so you don't have any war cruisers, war destroyers, or anything like that. I doubt it would be hard to put those in yourself whether you played the battles in FC or with Fed Space as is.

[Savedfromwhat]

Thanks fellas this sounds like a great game to mess around with. Basically a good starting backbone for a campaign starter until we get some definative campaign rules.

[Finarvyn]

I really like Federation Space. Although I haven't played it in years and it's packed away somewhere, I have really fond memories of playing it years ago.

1. In the Original Series, I always got the impression that there were darned few decent-sized starships. F&E just seems to have too many, but Fed Space fits my concept of fleet scale a little better.

2. The warp factors are messed up if you get picky. WF-6 represents a move of 6 hexes per turn and WF-5 is 5 hexes per turn. This is quite contrary to the c^3 most commonly accepted. On the other hand, even though it doesn't fit the canon Star Trek universe, it seems to work well to me. (In "real" Star Trek, a WF-6 ship would run circles around a WF-5 ship, which really would mess up a game system.) Heck, if I can allow ships to go faster than light, I can forget about the exact definition of a Warp Factor in my game.

3. The game is a lot simpler than Federation & Empire. F&E is a lot like Avalon Hill's Third Reich or MB's Axis & Allies with comparible complexity, but Federation Space isn't as difficult to learn and doesn't have so many rules like economic systems and so on.

4. I actually like the FS map better than the F&E map. In F&E, every nation has a neutral zone in between every other nation. In Fed Space these neutral zones aren't all there. This promotes "hot zones" such as the Klingon-Kzinti and Gorn-Romulan borders.

4A. I like to use the "Lyran Space" expansion to the "north-west" section of the Federation Space board.

4B. I "home brew" a couple of hexes to the "south" of the Tholians (I make the Tholian empire round on all sides) and connect the Klingons and Romulins just below the Tholians. I feel like this fits the Klingon-Romulin alliance theme better.

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.....
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Marv (Finarvyn)
Captain, U.S.S. Lexington -- NCC 1703
United Federation of Planets

[nyhotep]

Have a look at the entry on Boardgamegeek:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/1594

I think most people buying it wanted it as a scenario generator for SFB.

[Dan Ibekwe]

I've just won an auction on Ebay for a copy of Federation Space. The delivery time was described as 'variable' so I'll post a review in a month or six when it finally arrives.

[Dan Ibekwe]

Well, it arrived suprisingly quickly.

The good news - the map and counters are in mint condition and most of the play aids are complete.

The not so good news - the rule book is totally messed up. It has suffered a binding error, so I've got pages 1-4 and 13-16 twice, and no sign of 5 to 12 at all.

So no combat, disengagement, reaction movement, starbase, economics and repair rules, and so on, and so on.

Not much point contacting the vendor as he'll simply say he was unaware of it, and there's no reason to think he's got the missing materiel anyway.

Until I can locate a complete rulebook, so much for that, then.

[Jack Bohn]

I flipped through some old random NEXUS magazines I have to see if there was any errata or addenda to shed light on the missing rules for you.

No luck. Interestingly, though, Nexus #6, with the Lyran Space has pages 9-20 twice followed by 21-32 twice. The curse of Federation Space strikes again!?! (With no table of contents, I don't even know what I'm missing on pages 1-8.)
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-Jack

[Dan Ibekwe]

Sounds like TFG had a recurring problem there.

I've won a second ebay auction for the game. The vendor is a bit closer this time, in Yorkshire (i.e. well within driving range)...

First the guy apologises for the delay in sending the game saying he's moving house, now he's stopped responding to emails.

*sigh*

EDIT - it did finally turn up, perfect and complete. Thankyou also to those who offered assistance. I've had one solo game, a Romulan attack on a Gorn Starbase.

The mechanics are very quick and clean, although some of the ship stats look a bit odd - a KR is much tougher than a D6 for some reason (and that's *not* counting the very useful cloaking device rules).

It doesn't really work as a solo game; the opportunities for misdirection, suprise and generally 'messing with your opponent's head' are too good to miss out.

Starbases are *very* hard to kill, and can easily vapourise a DN with one shot...ouch.

The heavily outnumbered Gorns lost two border BATS, two DDs and a few ships damaged; the Romulans lost their DN and five WEs and had over half their other ships damaged. They didn't get the base.

As for my favourite fleet...back in 1981 the Hydrans were a new addition to the game, and were delivering shock and awe. Their in-game stats reflect this; a Lancer with fighters is a handful for a D7, a Ranger with fighters stands a fighting chance against a DN.

Ah, happy far-off days...

[Finarvyn]

I had an idea for making Federation Space battles more interesting, but it makes for more book-keeping.

What if each point on the ship counter was like a "hit point" and you roll randomly on a hit to see if they lose a point of offense, defense, or movement? So if a 8-8-6 ship takes damage, rather than flipping the counter over it might become 7-8-6 or 8-7-6 or 8-8-5.

I was thinking more from a campaign-game aspect, not just to slow down play. That way a ship might fight and run away instead of just getting blown up. It's possible that you could run most combats the regular way but "significant" combats the more detailed way.

Just me thinking out loud.
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Marv (Finarvyn)
Captain, U.S.S. Lexington -- NCC 1703
United Federation of Planets

[Kang]

Interesting idea. I did consider using a similar system some time ago, but never actually got round to it.

The idea in my case came from the Avalon Hill games Victory in the Pacific and War at Sea - the three factors are attack-defence-move, as in Fed Space, but the attack factor is the number of dice you roll to attack your target. A roll of six is a 'hit', a five is a 'Disabled', which means that the target has to leave the battle at the end of the current round of combat [this can mean either that the ship manages to evade its pursuers or is hit critically but can be repaired after the battle]. Each 'hit' results in another die being rolled, the number on that die being the number of damage points scored on the target. As an aside, this gave the War at Sea game the derogatory nickname of 'Yahtzee At Sea', which is understandable

Damage points were placed on the counters - the ships were 1" counters, the damage markers were 1/2" counters, which minimised the bookkeeping.

Each damage point reduces the speed and the defence factor by one point, so a 6-6-6 taking two points of damage would become a 6-4-4. Once a number of points equal to the original defence factor have been scored [in the example, six points], the ship becomes 'crippled' and is counted as a 1-0-1 - only one attack die and a token one point of speed. The ship's attack factor is reduced only at this point. If a ship takes more damage than this, it is destroyed. So the ship above would be crippled on six damage points, destroyed on seven. Effectively the defence factor is the ship's 'hit points'.

So you get ships like the Yamato as a 6-9-5, the Royal Navy's Nelson is a 5-5-3, and the Iowas are 5-9-7.

Like I said, I have not tried this method- and do not plan to do so in the near future - but I would be interested to hear if anyone else has done so.
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[Shawn Hantke]

Per Leanna Cole, can someone email me a scan of the Federation Space map? shawnhantke@rushmore.com
Federation Space countersheet scans are also needed. The back of sheet #2 and the front and back of sheet #4 would be highly appreciated, thanks.