Federation Commander

[Steve Cole]

Actually we may bounce the Frax to an expansion. Getting this thing DONE any time soon is going to require focus. The Frax aren't in F&E so all of their data has to be created rather than just copied, about 100 times as much work.

Same thing for the other simulator empires. Maybe we'll do them in a future expansion. Remember they don't even exist outside of SFB so unless you're using SFB you can't do much with them anyway. But that does make for a super expansion idea for Starmada, ACTA, and FedComm.
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Scharwenka]

Awesome and good to know! Can't wait for this product!
_________________

[Steve Cole]

Updated chart

http://www.starfleetgames.com/discus/messages/12033/35565.html?1469044813#POST759078

Ah, yes, the Frax. My thought yesterday was to bounce them to an expansion since their F&E data doesn't exist and they aren't real.

After moving them to the bottom of the chart yesterday, I was surprised this morning by someone saying how excited he was to see the Frax included. I can't stand disappointing people. Oh well, they weren't THAT hard to add (took an hour, easier than expected as they have no special stuff or oddballs) and I guess we could include them or make them an expansion. After all, the FC cards exist. We will have to invent Frax submarine rules.
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Steve Cole]

Thanks for all the help. I am creating an FA staff (Jay or course, plus Gary Carney, Richard Eitzen, Dal Downing, Ken Kazinski) of people who I know can perform. I might add one or two more from outside the "Circle of Usual Suspects (TM)" if someone demonstrates an interest and ability.

I got the first batch of lab/shuttle data (Richard Eitzen) which filled in the Feds. He and other volunteers will doubtless fill in the rest over time. Due to the local convention this weekend I probably won't get any actual work done on this until Monday, but today I did process all report line items (which is how I picked the staff).

I actually do plan to have the newly created staff run some playtest drills, a few sample battles each with the FA/FASCARS system so we can dial in the anti-fighter thing with which no one has any experience.

I don't think I've got a prayer of getting this thing (tested or not) into the PDF stores by 1 August (my goal a while back). The chart and the local convention are just consuming too much time and there is too much more to do. That said, I want to get an upload during August and then let this thing "simmer" while I do another project and then CL52. If you want a "tested" product then come back next year. If you want to be part of the test, watch for the upload. Campaign ribbons for more of my loyal customers!
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Steve Cole]

The converntion was boring so I finished the FedAdm chart.

http://www.starfleetgames.com/discus/messages/12033/35565.html?1469393636#POST759211
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Steve Cole]

Snippet from playtesting dialogue.

While the combat system, whatever we use, needs to be able to handle 11-vs-11, that isn't what happens often in Fed Admiral.

F&E sees 200+ ships fighting on a front line 12 hexes wide.

Fed Admiral sees 25 ships fighting in an area 30-40 hexes wide and 20-30 hexes deep. There is no real way to have the kind of frontline/intercept system F&E has. Fed Admiral (see the pages posted at the link below) is a system where every turn you are given some missions, some of which last one turn and others six or ten. Every turn, some of your ships finish missions, others start missions, some missions are blocked by the enemy, and other missions are abandoned. You rack up points for missions accomplished. If you have ships that aren't busy (or free up ships by finishing or abandoning missions) then you can use them to mess with enemy ships trying to complete missions.

The player player (think "area commodore") has ships all over the battle space doing no end of things, and you cannot win the game by stacking all 25 ships in one hex and running around crushing things. (For one thing, you'll never catch most of the enemy ships; they'll stay out of your reach.)

Think of it as one player occupying Canada and the other Mexico.

On turn #1, The Canadian player gets three missions: send a ship to do research in Ohio (moved a survey ship in that direction but he won't get there until turn #2), put down revolt in Utah (sent four ships, one of them a commando cruiser; they'll arrive on Turn #3), send ships to open trade with Alabama (sent a tug and a cruiser to arrive on Turn #4).

Then on his Turn #1, the Mexican player gets two missions: show some force in Nevada (dispatch five ships) and deliver a diplomat to Tennessee (sent a frigate). Notiding the Canadian survey ship en route to Ohio, sent a war cruiser there to see what he's doing. Noticing a stack of ships en route to Utah, sent a cruiser to find out what his mission is. Noticing a stack of ships moving south and worried that he might be trying to invade our colony in Arkansas, sent some ships in that general direction.

On Turn #2 the Canadian player gets two more missions (research in Oregon, sent a destroyer) and show force in Pennsylvania, sent a command cruiser and two other ships). Sent three ships to Tennessee to keep that diplomat out of there.

That's hwo the system works. It's brilliant and you need to go review those posted pages.

http://www.starfleetgames.com/documents/Fed_Admiral_4-56-59.pdf
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Sneaky Scot]

Looks like an interesting product!
_________________
Nothing is quite as persuasive as a disruptor pistol on slow burn and a rotisserie......

[Steve Cole]

Major progress today as ten pages (11-20, covering campaign turns, construction, and technology) went to the new playtest staff I hired last week.

From the number of questions and comments that Jean and Petrick made, it is clear that this game was never given any serious playtesting, but the playtesters I hired last week are already busy doing that now.
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Steve Cole]

An update...

I have sent everything through page 37 to Jean and Petrick but await getting it back from them before it goes to the playtesters. We continue to find missing stuff, things that were never done in the original.

Way back when I sent 38-44 to Jay and he sent a report. (At the time, these were 37-43, but work on previous chapters grew enough to slide everything a page forward.) I will next process those reports which will let me send those pages to Jean/Petrick.

There is a major "missing matter" in the case of scale. The campaign has three vaguely defined scales which are very different. One is F&E scale which is 500 parsecs per hex and six months to turn.

The next down is regional which is one month turns and hexes that aren't defined but 125 parsecs is probably a reasonable guess, I'm just not sure, maybe 83? Jay left it for the CM to make up as he went along. It's not that I don't trust CMs to figure it out, I just don't think they want to have to.

The next one down is local which is one week turns and hexes that might be 20 or 30 or 50 parsecs.

The problem is that the whole book says "turns" and "hexes" without defining which scale you are using or how big those things are.

Then another matter is that the thing I really love (a chart of 52 missions you might be assigned and you might have three or six running at once and it might take two to ten turns to finish them) can really only be done in peacetime, but nothing says "in the event of full scale war, you just cannot really do this". Similarly, there is a whole bunch of diplomatic stuff about who you're at war with or allied with which really cannot ever work except in grand/F&E scale.
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Steve Cole]

This might be fun information...

Chapter 3
Pages 11-13 turns
Pages 14-16 ship construction, other construction
Pages 17-20 Technology, research, mission variants
Pages 21-23 intelligence
Pages 24-27 diplomacy
Pages 28-30 Movement
Pages 31-33 supply
Pages 34-37 encounters
Pages 38-43 scenarios
Pages 44-45 ground combat
Pages 46-49 various steps of the turn after combat to the end
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Steve Cole]

Sent 12 more pages to Jean today (Friday), which gets me to the end of Chapter 3. Any claim that the original manuscript was perfect and complete is just not supported by the manuscript. For example, it says that for each "point of census" on the captured planet, you must have one "unit of troops" to force them to work in the factories. Which is all well and good, except that there is no definition of unit (squad of 5 men? Division of 10,000?) or point of census (a million? a billion?), and Jay's report (from back in 2012) says that a unit of census might be one thing in local campaigns and a very different number of people in regional or grand campaigns (a detail not in the original manuscript). We'll straighten this all out but this is why the product wasn't printed a decade ago. Too much was missing and non-ADB playtesting was obviously not effective or this would have been noticed and fixed.
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[ku4tp]

When FA gets released will we see a .pdf version right away?

[Steve Cole]

We plan to release it as a PDF only for probably at least a year. It will need a lot of player input before it stabilizes. It is too big with too many moving parts. The original design was not adequately playtested, and we're doing more playtesting now, but really it's three (or ten) separate games all overlapping and using varous combinations of rules and I suspect it will take 100 actual players a year to find everything. Doing it as a PDF means we can continually improve it until it is what it should be.
_________________
The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Jean]

Amarillo Design Bureau has decided that our original plans for public beta testing of Federation Admiral cannot be implemented. Developmental testing of this creative and exciting campaign system which is powered by VBAM will be kept in-house with veteran players familiar with campaigns and the Star Fleet Universe. Regrettably, this means that the PDF sales of a playtest version of Federation Admiral will be delayed until next year. Both VBAM and ADB wish to make sure that this is the quality product that you expect from either company, and the reality is that it's just going to take more work to produce a beta-test document that blends VBAM with the SFU and is contract compliant. We've all put hundreds of man-hours into making this campaign system work well with all the games of the Star Fleet Universe. During the next few months, work will focus on creating a workable combat system and testing it to the point that testing by a broader public group of players can begin. (As of today, there is not a complete system for anyone to test and we do not want to just say "use the F&E combat system for now.") We expect to have usable reports by early 2017 and will incorporate that data into the system.
_________________
Business Manager/RPG Line Editor
Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.

[asguard101]

I have not seen any update on this project lately, is it still thing?