Federation Commander

The only house rule I've used with any degree of consistency is a "port" we did of the old SFB (pre-Captain's Edition) explosion rules.

Since we always played with minis, it built in a desire for dispersion to fleets and prevented some of the "up close" physical conflicts between models. Nobody wants their whole fleet damaged from the other guy popping a the frigate in your midst.

None of us were particularly competitive "must-win/has-to-be-balanced" types, so the unbalancing nature of the explosions was fine with us. Made for some loud shouting when a DN would blow up and the owner had its consorts in too close.

I haven't had much chance to test this notion out, but a tweak that really appeals to me is changing the shield transfer limit from a constant 5 to something like 1.5 times the number of undamaged (or maybe even charged) batteries.

5 points is huge to a frigate and meaningless (usually) to a dreadnaught.

This would yield for the Feds (Squadron)
FF limit 3 or 1/6 of front shield
CA limit 6, 1/5 of front shield
DN limit 9, 1/5 of front shield

but that's cherry picking good examples, counter cases
CL limit 6, 1/3 of front shield
NCL limit 3, 1/10 of front shield
which is a pretty extreme swing considering how related they are. But I'm not sure I object to this result.

Worse however, a starbase and Seltorian battlewagon could transfer a full shield which is way too strong. So I think this rule also needs an 'alternative maximum' formula of some sort.

Still I definitely like the idea of toning down shield transfers a little bit for small ships and making it meaningful for the big boys.

Interesting idea. How about basing the amount of damage transfer upon a ship's move cost? Keep cruisers (Move cost 1) at five points and adjust upward or downward for larger or smaller ships. Could prove interesting.

Arguably one of the best house rules is Enveloping Plasma Torpedoes

- Can only make G/S/R torpedoes enveloping.
- Cost to make a warhead enveloping is the same as the last turn of arming. This energy is applied at the point of launch. This can be done to a held torpedo.
- Warhead strength is doubled.
- Damage is applied as evenly as possible to all of opponent's shields. Defender applies points (and so chooses where the "odd points" go).
- Each shield (or PA bank) is indeed a separate volley. Units without shields just take full damage.

I think it is 5 points because in SFB ships of any size, when shields are set to minimum, are 5 points. It does make sense that more shields should have more to shift though. However, basing it on the changing value of remaining shield points makes for annoying recalculations every time a shield is hit.

Base it on the average of the shields. Like a Fed CA in FC has, I think, 30 on shield 1 and 24 on the others (may be wrong, but you'll get it). So it has an average of 25 per shield. Divide the average by 5 to get the amount to shift.

In this case, the Klingon B10 with 48.8 shield boxes per shield could shift 10 boxes instead..

While it wold need to be calculated, it would only have to be calculated once.

The shield shifting could be real simple. Just multiply the movement cost times 5 to get how many shield boxes may be shifted (round fractions up).

Battleships: 2 x 5 = 10
Dreadnoughts: 1.5 x 5 = 8
Heavy cruisers: 1 x 5 = 5
Light cruisers: 0.75 x 5 = 4
Destroyers: 0.5 x 5 = 3
Frigates: 0.33 x 5 = 2

Smaller ships will go "Pop!" even faster and larger ships will have an extra capability and last longer.

I know this is discussed elsewhere, but we're experimenting with increasing the speed of plasmas to 40. So far, we haven't noticed any real advantage, but it's still early. We're also toying with the idea of strengthening the plasma bolt chart to get to-hit numbers, damage numbers, and power-to-damage numbers in the ballpark with a spread of overloaded photons. I haven't done the actual math, so I have no idea how close they were to begin with. I do know that nobody in our group wants to play as a plasma race because they're tired of never getting in a good shot.

What's wrong with plasmas?

Speed 40 plasma is very unbalancing, it makes plasma incredibly to strong. We have tried using enveloping plasma and that has seemed to work well.

I just played a game of Romulans vs Gorns. I had the Romulans. We reduced the point values of the Romulan ships by 10% on the grounds that the cloaking device is useless against Gorns. It was actually a close game, and I won it more on die rolls than anything else. It could have gone either way, but my opponent had truly wretched luck with some bolted S torps, missing with three out of three shots at range four.

We wouldn't have done this in a game where cloaking was more of a viable proposition.

Monty wrote:What's wrong with plasmas?

It really depends on the skill of the players. The existing plasma rules are probably okay for the casual "average" player that FC seems targeted at.

The frustration occurs when veteran players with a strong understanding of plasma tactics play each other. Too often then the battle boils down to whether not not the plasma player gets lucky with bolts.

And, so as not to derail this topic, let's take any further plasma tactics to the Tactics section, please. Thanks.

Seems like a rule problem rather than a tactics.

Would the rule forum be a better fit?

Monty wrote:Seems like a rule problem rather than a tactics.

Would the rule forum be a better fit?

It seemed to me that Tactics would be a better fit, as discussing potential solutions before explaining the problem seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

But, whichever it is, this discussion is not the right spot.