Federation Commander

MJWest's plan sounds good. It would make for larger BOOMS than mine. I also like how civilian ships would not give as much bang when they go pop.

Question: Do exploding ships affect adjacent hexes in SFB?

The latest ruleset I have is Commander's and it's been a long time since I've checked.

Mike wrote:Question: Do exploding ships affect adjacent hexes in SFB?

In SFB, if an explosion is 9 points or less, it is confined to its hex. If it is 10 or more, it will spread to the surrounding hexes, too. I confined it to the single hex no matter what because it is less fiddly that way, and because it will still accomplish the desired goal: spread the ships out a bit.

Since no version of this rule will likely ever be added to FC, do it how you want. All I am doing is giving suggestions.

Simple enough, I might give it a try sometime.

It really borders on madness.

This looks like it might be a good candidate for a BoM inclusion.

Mike wrote:This looks like it might be a good candidate for a BoM inclusion.

I wouldn't count on it. Steve doesn't seem to like ship explosions too much, as they end of radically altering player tactics. When you turn your ship into an effective weapon, you will get players intent on using that weapon. Removing explosions as an offensive force makes the players use the ships the way they were intended.

I don't make the decisions. But, given what I have seen of Steve's actions in the past, I wouldn't expect to ever see ship explosions ever published for Federation Commander, whether in the base game or in Borders of Madness.

Speaking of explosions, do Juggernaut Empire ships blow up in Federation Commander? (They do have those infamously high explosion values in SFB, but I wasn't sure if it was irrelevant to them in FC.)

To the best of my knowledge, no, they do not blow up with spectacular damage. Now, they may still have a visually spectacular explosion, but it doesn't cause damage.

Steve doesn't seem to like ship explosions too much, as they end of radically altering player tactics. When you turn your ship into an effective weapon, you will get players intent on using that weapon. Removing explosions as an offensive force makes the players use the ships the way they were intended.

But in this case there are two factors that would not allow exploding ships to be used as weapons. First, the explosion would be limited to only the hex the ship is in. This would keep a ship explosion from starting a domino effect much as the Romulan dreadnought did in SFB. Second, according to (3E3), a player may not self-destruct a ship unless all of its crew has evacuated. To my knowledge, in Federation Commander the Romulans do not have the ability to self-destruct their ships any differently than the other empires.

Using a simple ship explosion rule would force ships to spread out a little more. There would be that additional unintended benefit for players who use miniatures (though that is not my intent at all for this).

I can see where the addition of a rule like this in BoM might lead some to use it as a "foot in the door" for mines. That would not necessarily be a good thing. But it just might allow Federation Commander BoM players to have the ability to port over some of those SFB base attack scenarios that feature minefields.

I never had a problem with mines, it was the transporter bombs that were ridiculous and illogical.

Mike wrote:Second, according to (3E3), a player may not self-destruct a ship unless all of its crew has evacuated. To my knowledge, in Federation Commander the Romulans do not have the ability to self-destruct their ships any differently than the other empires.

I have seen many attempts to dodge the "No Self Destruct" rule for SFB over the years. The best (worst?) was the guy that dropped his shields and pulled an HET onto three S-torps and four F-torps. The opposing player tried desperately to fire his own phasers for an impulse to drop the damage on his own torpedoes, but it was not enough.

Of course that was using a slightly less insane version of the old SFB explosion rules. Keeping the explosion to the same hex, and the explosion strength small would mostly remove the above tactic.

One of the early explosion tactics was to take a Battlehawk with 2 x S, Space Mine etc ---

Envelope both Ss, shields down, uncloak next to a base (as stated, the early explosion rules would come in at over 50 pts for an explosion) ---

One of the few decent radical changes in Captain's was the move to fixed Explosion Strengths. Sufficient to discourage stacking up, not so strong as to clear the board... normally... I lost an ISC frigate/PF line, tho, from a powerful opponent explosion and overstacking the line. I still won... but it wasn't happy. Between his ship and my range 0 frigate, the PF's all popped (they were at range 0 and had eaten a shotgun S amongst the flotilla).
And it was simple - a fixed number.

I've been running into crowding issues while play testing my convention game. 2 solutions that may help a bit:

1) I've started using the small base stands for Frigates, which seems to help a little. They do seem to fall over more often though.

2) I may in future try increasing weapons and movement distances by 50%, ie ships move 18", and Phaser-1s have a range 13.5/27 (12" killzone). This requires a larger playing area though.