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Using SFB materials to play FC

 
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kinshi
Lieutenant JG


Joined: 09 Apr 2011
Posts: 86
Location: Port Orchard, WA

PostPosted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 4:06 am    Post subject: Using SFB materials to play FC Reply with quote

I was digging around in the FC communiques and saw the materials written in Captain's Log #37 & 38 (Project Z) for converting SFB ship designs to FC squadron scale.

I still want to buy the Klingon Border set, but will be a while before I have enough saved up to get it, so was considering making a purchase of the main rules from e23, and leveraging my extensive library of SFB stuff in the interim. (I have time, so having to make up my own ship cards is not an issue)

As an aside, I find it extremely awesome that I even have the option to do this..that I actually can keep using my 20+years accumulation of SFB SSDs, counters, and maps with FC all for the price of a rulebook.

So my question is, how well has this worked out for folks? Have the converted ships worked out well, any gotchas or caveats? and did they subsequently convert down to fleet scale well?
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terryoc
Captain


Joined: 07 Oct 2006
Posts: 1386

PostPosted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 5:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Haven't actually tried it myself.

It should generally work pretty well. The FC Ship Cards are derived directly from the SFB SSDs, after all. Converting down to Fleet Scale can be tricky (as Mike West noted in the article). Some ships are a bit unbalanced at Fleet Scale, such as the infamous Orion CR (which is very good at Fleet Scale). Some weapons are better than you'd expect at that scale too, such as ADDs. If you don't load your fleet up with ships that are better than their points, and take a realistic mix of ships, it should all be about right.
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Mike
Fleet Captain


Joined: 07 May 2007
Posts: 1675
Location: South Carolina

PostPosted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 2:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

May I suggest the downloadable "ship cards" from Commander's Circle? There are more ships there than you can shake a stick at. Many are in color while some are in monotone.

I also have an extensive Commander's material set of SFB stuff, but I've copied every ship from every Communique to make a pretty nice collection of FC ships.

One other thing that I used to do was to make the free ship cards into jpg's. They can be positioned (in a word processing program) on one side of a sheet of 8.5"x11" paper in landscape mode. On the other side can be put all the charts needed for that ship's weapons, boarding actions, firing arcs, damage repair, etc. I made the charts in a spreadsheet and turned each one into its own jpg image. Now when a new ship card is needed to be made, I turn the ship diagram into a jpg image, position it on the paper, and bring in all the charts that are needed for the other side of the paper. Print it, fold it in half, tuck it into a 5.5"x8" plastic sleeve, and it's game time!
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terryoc
Captain


Joined: 07 Oct 2006
Posts: 1386

PostPosted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 3:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, Mike is right there are plenty of free ships in the Commander's Circle. IIUC the plan is to (eventually) have all the ships in FC in the CC as downloads, but in low-res B&W not in high-res colour (like the laminated cards or the e23 cards).
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mjwest
Commodore


Joined: 08 Oct 2006
Posts: 4069
Location: Dallas, Texas

PostPosted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 5:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

terryoc wrote:
Yes, Mike is right there are plenty of free ships in the Commander's Circle. IIUC the plan is to (eventually) have all the ships in FC in the CC as downloads, but in low-res B&W not in high-res colour (like the laminated cards or the e23 cards).

I would expect that the plan is to have all non-bonus ships in Commanders' Circle as greyscale ship cards. While some bonus ships will be done, I would be very surprised if all of them are.

But that would be a very long process.

That all said, all of the ships from Klingon Border and Romulan Border are up in the Commanders' Circle. Assuming you have counters and maps, simply buying a Reference Rulebook and using the Commanders' Circle ships is a perfectly reasonable "low-cost" solution until you want to finally branch out for the other material.
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kinshi
Lieutenant JG


Joined: 09 Apr 2011
Posts: 86
Location: Port Orchard, WA

PostPosted: Wed Jun 29, 2011 1:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yea counter and maps I got..hehe pretty much EVERYTHING that came with Commanders Edition VOL I, II & III, and supplements 1 & 2, CL #1-4, Commanders Edt. SSD books 1-8 and Nexus #1-16, along with the Captains Edt. Basic set.

Also most of my SSDs are scanned in and converted to JPGs, so not too big a deal to revamp my favorites into FC ship cards if they don't already exist. (not too hard to make them colorful either, color printer and all..like I said, I have time right now hehe)
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