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Point System Adjustment

 
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Shawn350
Ensign


Joined: 24 Mar 2009
Posts: 4

PostPosted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 2:43 am    Post subject: Point System Adjustment Reply with quote

The group I play with is under the impression that the SFB Point system is only valid with SFB. So they are trying to come up with a system to balance the "better ships" so that you dont have everyone always bringing the same model of ship.

First Idea was... a system where ships were rated Rare, Uncommon, Common. Where as your force could be up to 100% common 50% Uncommon and 25% Rare.

Second Idea.. They are trying to point out all the equipment, 10points for a Phaser 1, 5 points for etc.

Anyone have any experience with this issue?


Thanks!
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djdood
Commodore


Joined: 01 Feb 2007
Posts: 3412
Location: Seattle, WA

PostPosted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 4:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've never had a problem with the point system as-is.
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Sgt_G
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Joined: 07 Oct 2006
Posts: 529
Location: Offutt AFB, Nebraska

PostPosted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:31 pm    Post subject: Re: Point System Adjustment Reply with quote

Shawn350 wrote:
First Idea was... a system where ships were rated Rare, Uncommon, Common. Where as your force could be up to 100% common 50% Uncommon and 25% Rare.


But how do you figure which ships git to which category? Besides, most of the varient ships cost more than the base-hull version already. Not a 100% markup, of course.

On the flip side, most of the SFB varients havent' made it over to Fed Cmdr yet, nor will they save for until "Borders of Madness" comes out.

What you could do is have a house rule stating something like one-half of the fleet must be base-hull version, and of the other half no more than one per three Size Four / one per five Size Three base-hull ships may be Command / Leader versions. That leaves you with two per six / four per ten ships can be carriers, scouts, drone ships, carrier escorts, etc, etc.

Quote:
Second Idea.. They are trying to point out all the equipment, 10points for a Phaser 1, 5 points for etc.


That doesn't always work out fairly. Over in SFB, there are two ships that both get an upgrade of a pair of Rear Arc PH-3. The Fed ship cost +2 points more, but the Romulan(?) ship costs +6 points more (if memory serves). Why so much more for the Romulan? Because the Fed already had rear-firing Phasers; the Romulan didn't. The whole does not always equal the sum of the parts. Sometimes it's more, sometimes less.
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Steve Cole
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 2:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

SFB has a point system and uses rule S8 to account for what is rare or not. You could adapt the S8 rules to FC is about 30 seconds.

As for trying to count the points of systems, the whole is not the sum of the parts. Adding a phaser to a ship with surplus power is worth more than adding a phaser to a ship that doesn't have enough power. Adding a phaser that shoots to the front is worth more than one that shoots to the back, unless you're in one of those ships which has no phasers shooting to the back, in which case, a phaser shooting to the back might be worth even more. Adding a couple of labs to a ship is worth X, adding four of them is not worth 2 times X.
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junior
Captain


Joined: 08 May 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 7:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As one of the people responsible for the Common, Uncommon, Rare designation within our group...

Our first game in our campaign consisted of, on the Fed side, four NCLs, a CS, and a Police Cutter. There was a discussion among some of us that it might be nice to find a way to encourage ship variety, and this was the result that we plotters eventually settled on. Ship rarity was determined by two factors -

1.) Was it historically rare? (i.e. the Fed CS, Klingon F6, etc...)
2.) How combat efficient is the ship considered to be compared to its cost? The rationale to justify this one is that if a ship is more efficient, then more local commanders are going to be clamoring to get them assigned to their fleets, making it more difficult to get them assigned to your own effort. For instance war cruisers - the extremely popular 125 point choice, as shown by our first game - were all classifed as uncommon. Or in other words, you can't have a fleet made up of nothing but D5s. The base heavy cruisers, on the other hand, were all listed as common.

The system isn't perfect and definitely open to argumentation, but we do see a little more ship variety in our games.

I'm not so keen on the "redoing points" thing myself. Ship points in Fed Com have problems in at least a couple of well-known cases (the F5 has been discussed here on these boards before, and the LDR have come up as well), but I've a sneaking suspicion that attempting to recalculate the points costs would cause more problems than it would solve. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to sit down and figure out how best to approach that argument yet.


Quote:
Besides, most of the varient ships cost more than the base-hull version already. Not a 100% markup, of course


Remember that the variants by and large don't exist within FedCom, and are almost entirely restricted to the ships that appear in Briefing #1.
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Shawn350
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Joined: 24 Mar 2009
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 3:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree with you on that Junior the changing of the points would be to much work in my opinion. I am so new to the game I haven't experienced the lack of variation.

I am not familiar with the S8 Rules. Where do I find these.

Also, I guess my biggest distaste for the Rare common uncommon is the making of the Orions as all Rare. Again I may be to new to understand why they may be "Broken" but I love the idea of being able to switch out load outs on the ships and the idea of pirates is only trumped by Space Pirates!

I was just hoping to glean and idea or two to help with the discussion.
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Kang
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Joined: 23 Sep 2007
Posts: 1976
Location: Devon, UK

PostPosted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 6:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Shawn350 wrote:
I am not familiar with the S8 Rules. Where do I find these.


He's referring to rules section S8 in the Star Fleet Battles rulebook.
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junior
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Joined: 08 May 2007
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 6:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Orions are rare largely for two reasons. The first is that they shouldn't be showing up in every battle (those that appear are mercenaries, which is also why they're forced to disengage if you cripple them). The second is that some of the weapons loadouts can be pretty potent - though I believe that the REALLY nasty ones are largely prohibited. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what would be particularly dangerous in your hands.

Razz

Back when Orion Attack first came out, one of the guys (who hasn't been to the store in months) claimed that even with the limits he'd figured out an insanely good weapons loadout that could effectively beat anything. But I don't remember what that loadout was.


iirc S8 refers to the rules section in Starfleet Battles that lays out the restrictions involved in building fleets. As I recall, the rules focus on two things.

The first is that each ship has a command rating. The rating represents the ability of the ship to handle the data needed to coordinate actions among multiple ships. Smaller ships have a smaller rating, larger ships have a larger rating, and dedicated command ships have a slightly larger rating than other ships their size. For instance, off the top of my head your average frigate will have a command rating of 3, while a command frigate will have a rating of 4. You're only allowed to take additional ships up to the highest command rating in the fleet. The end result of this rule is basically to disallow things like huge fleets of Police Frigates - though you COULD take a dreadnought leading a swarm of Police Frigates.

The second rule involves limits (typically of only one ship each) on specialty ships such as carriers, scouts, drone ships, etc... Since most of these ships don't exist in FedCom (outside of Borders of Madness), that rule wouldn't really be used all that often in a FedCom campaign (unless your opponent decided to bring a fleet made up of nothing but drone ships...).

What those rules do NOT do is force variety among the warships in the fleet. If you want to have a fleet made up of half a dozen war cruisers (and have the points), then you can do so. If you want a fleet made up of a dreadnought, two heavy cruisers, two destroyers, and two frigates, and have the points to do so, then you can do that as well. So for the purposes intended by we plotters when we designed the fleet rules, unfortunately S8 didn't meet our needs. We were particularly trying to block things like constantly seeing nothing but war cruisers every week, and that's why we had to come up with a new system instead.
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djdood
Commodore


Joined: 01 Feb 2007
Posts: 3412
Location: Seattle, WA

PostPosted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 6:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

BTW - SFB S8 rules are posted for download HERE.

My group uses what amounts to a modified version of the S8 limits to keep fleets properly mixed. It wasn't hard to implement, as all the guys in my group are more interested in trying different configurations of new ships than finding the "always wins" fleet mix.

We all have or favorites (I like the fed CS, our Klingon lurvs the D-5W), but we usually limit ourselves to one of each "rarer" type like that. Typically, we never have more than two of anything, other than Frigates or War Destroyers.

A typical mix for us (in a larger battle) would be:
C-7 (or DN/BB), D-7, D-5W, D-5, F-5, F-5, E-4
BCJ (or DN/BB), CA, CS, NCL, DW, FF, FF
(going from memory here, so probably not an exact match).
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Lieutenant JG


Joined: 14 May 2008
Posts: 76

PostPosted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 3:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi Shawn,

We had the same problem in our old group. There were a lot of ships that looked fun to fly, but if we wanted to win, we would default to the same underpointed ships.

So here’s what we did about it: We would use the BPVs as a starting point and create 2 fleets -- this is after determining map type (size, fixed vs. floating) and starting positions of course. Create 2 fleets using any ships that looked fun – not worrying about how good they were compared to their BPV. Want an F5? Take 2 of them. Always wanted to fly that shiny new BB but didn’t think it was worth the points? Take that too.

Once the fleets were created each person would say which fleet they thought was better -- combat-wise that is. (Or if you thought the fleets are close enough say that).

If each player picked a different side, then great. If both players picked the same fleet, then make an adjustment. -- Add a small ship, upgrade or downgrade one of the ships, add a bit of damage to one of the ships, etc. You can figure out what works. Afterwards, vote again. Repeat until each player takes a different side, or at least one says “close enough”. This should not take too many iterations.

This also works great for multi-player groups. We had 4 people in our group and just went until 2 picked one side and 2 picked the other.

With this method you get the benefit of flying all those ships that would otherwise go unused. The other benefit is that you don’t have anyone at the beginning of the game thinking “I am going to lose this battle because my fleet is worse”. -- Remember - you chose that fleet because you thought it could win against the other fleet! You don’t get blind-sided by someone walking in with an uber-fleet.

This worked for us because we always did pick-up games. If you are doing a campaign or only like to use a certain race then this obviously won’t work.

Anyway, I hope this helps!
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