Federation Commander

[Zencal]

A few years ago, I came across Marcowargamer's videos on Federation Commander and thought FC was like something I'd like to get into -- less complicated than SFB (which I tried in the 90s), but closer to BattleTech, which I thoroughly enjoy. So I ordered Romulan Border, had some fun, and started to look into where to go next.

I have limited storage space (London 1-bed flat + married = just one bookcase for gaming), so wanted to explore pdf offerings; but I found it so frustrating to work out which of the pdfs included the ships from the core sets (and was surprised how many simply weren't available as pdfs) that I gave up on FC.

Well, there's a new kid on the block doing videos--djthorsilver--and my interest is again piqued. But I've had another look and it seems there's been little change in the pdf offerings for FC--and still no pdf of one of my favourites, the fed destroyer from Franz Joseph's book.

Still, I bit the bullet and picked up a few of the ship packs from Warehouse 23 after reviewing the master ship chart and working out which had at least some of the ships from the Romulan Border set, but was disappointed to find they have huge, unequal margins. (The pdf previews really should show at least one of the ship cards with a huge watermark to make this clear.) I was expecting to print two ships to a sheet, double-sided, and cut the sheet in half; but the margins mean this isn't going to look nice at all. To get something nice, I'd need to take snippets of each page to capture just the ship card and print the images instead. Doable, but not as simple as it should be.

Anyway, the point is I think the pdf offerings hurt the growth of what I think could be a more popular game, especially when physical stock can be hard to find.

I expect these suggestions have been made before, but here's my 2 cents:

1) Every ship in the core products needs a pdf. (Pdfs are useful even if you have the physical products. I'm not a fan of dry-erase; I'd much rather print out ships for the Romulan Border set I have and use these with a pencil and eraser. Yes, I can and have scanned; but that takes more time, especially if you want to achieve good quality and no skewing.)

2) The ship card pdfs should have minimal white margin, to allow printing 1 or more ships per page without wasting space because of large, uneven margins

3) This may be heresy, but I think ADB should sell individual 'empire' pdfs that include most of the ships for that empire (certainly those from the border + assault products + selected general ships), with separate pdfs for things 'middle era' (to include all empires).

Anyway, just some hopefully seen-to-be constructive suggestions from someone who will likely now buy a couple of more physical FC products and stop there, but who would spend many more

[Zencal]

Oh, looks like my last sentence got truncated... I had used the British pound symbol just were it was truncated.... maybe that broke something?

It was meant to be:

Anyway, just some hopefully seen-to-be constructive suggestions from someone who will likely now buy a couple of more physical FC products and stop there, but who would spend many more (british pounds) if the pdf offerings were better.

[Steve Cole]

1) Every ship in the core products needs a pdf.
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I think they do. Did you check the commander's circle?
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2) The ship card pdfs should have minimal white margin, to allow printing 1 or more ships per page without wasting space because of large, uneven margins.
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We tried that and it didn't work for most people as their printers could not print that close to the edge. So we stopped doing it. We tried doing them slightly smaller so they would print like that and people were unhappy that they were smaller. So, no way for us to do this, the home printing technology cannot handle it.
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3) This may be heresy, but I think ADB should sell individual 'empire' pdfs that include most of the ships for that empire.
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The reason we do not is that having bought the pack of all Klingon PDFs you would expect free updates every time we did a new product, meaning all of the work for a new product would go out the door for free and we wouldn't get paid for the time to create it (hence, there would be no further products). The solution we adopted was to do every ship for an empire in some pack or other so you could buy the whole empire (just not in one pack, it would be the same price, you could not expect 74 Klingon cards for the price of six) and we could update them as time went by through the process of more packs. Then the packs didn't sell well and it wasn't worth our time to do more packs.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[mjwest]

For the record, every ship card from Klingon Border and Attack, and Romulan Border and Attack, is available in the back issues of Communique. Granted, you'll have to spend some time paging through them to collect the ship cards, but they are all there.

There are also a ton of other ship cards available in Communique.
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Federation Commander Answer Guy

[Zencal]

Huh... I composed my reply in a text editor and it looks like the forum doesn't like the curly apostrophes that were in it any more than the british pound symbol... (though it looked ok in preview). Take two.
[Mod: I deleted the truncated post. Yes, smart punctuation breaks the posting on the forum. Please avoid that.]

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Thanks for the reply!

[Zencal]

[Zencal]

[Zencal]

I've finished going through the cards included in my Romulan Border set and found them all in the communiques. I've perfected my workflow and have cleaned them up to trim the margins for my personal printing.

Just one niggle - the fleet scale version of the Romulan Condor Dreadnought CON is only available in 'low toner' greyscale as far as I can find. If that could be added to the queue for a colour version at some point (e.g., the next Romulan pack), that would be appreciated!

[Dal Downing]

Zencal, just a friendly tip. Don't forget to sign up on for the Hailing Frequency Newsletter.

ADB decided to focus a newsletter as a whole on the company and not just one game. They sprinkle a new Ship Card in every now or then. Plus it's a good read.
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-Dal

"Which one of you is the Biggest, Baddest, Bootlicker of the bunch?"
"I am."
"ARCHERS!!! THAT ONE!!!!"

[Zencal]

[Steve Cole]

suggest adding a communique column to the master ship list.

Such a column has been there for 15 years.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[Zencal]

[Zencal]

[xris]

[Zencal]

And the last sentence was meant to be: Anyway, that is me done. o7

Rather than using my Mac, I was writing this on my iPad in Safari, which apparently uses the curly quotes unliked by the forum software; hence me now writing as Data speaks