Federation Commander

So you miss the things that made seeking weapons better and don't miss the things that balanced that?

Sounds like an unbalanced game that won't play.

And that's where the 'magic' comes in.

I was going to claim the "genius of the game designer" but I'll settle for "the game designer dumb lucked into something that worked; be grateful and don't mess with it."

Mike West wrote:

1) Crew quality/legendary officers break games. The granularity of the odds for most weapons is simply 1 out of 6 (i.e. a d6 is being used). Any +1 or -1 will adjust the odds by a little more than 16%. That is a *huge* difference. That is why every Fed who ever lived has always wanted a legendary weapons officer and why no one ever lets them have one.

An excellent point. A +1 shift is going to be a huge issue. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Could a +1 shift due to stealth effects or what have you get the Andros up off the floor? They appear to need some help, and that help can't involve printing new cards.

This could of course be objectionable for reasons I haven't thought of. I certainly haven't tried it in a game.

Klingon of Gor wrote: An excellent point. A +1 shift is going to be a huge issue. But let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Could a +1 shift due to stealth effects or what have you get the Andros up off the floor? They appear to need some help, and that help can't involve printing new cards.

This could of course be objectionable for reasons I haven't thought of. I certainly haven't tried it in a game.

I proposed something like this somewhere (maybe in one of my campaign threads).

It is very objectionable if it affects smaller fights. Andros are really good at the one vs one (or rather one vs an equal points of enemy) and any boost in such a game would be nasty. It is only where they have multi ships that Andro start to suffer.

Now someone somewhere (maybe on another forum, can't remember) said that in SFB Andros were very good at the ECM/sensor aspects, largely due to the way battery power worked in that game from what I understood.

Therefore what I proposed was that Andro scout channels give out a +2 rather than +1 on jamming.

This largely meets the need to not overly boosting Andros in small games (or 1 vs 1) as they will not have a scout in such a game, a lone scout may be tough to take out but it isn't going to win either! But it will provide some boost at the larger games where scouts tend to be pretty much a must have ship anyway. It also makes the Conq and Intruder variants (Infestor and some other name that eludes me) more worth the points that they would be if ported to FC. It is also easy to explain as superior Andro Tech, and from what I read about SFB sort of replicates that ECM advantage they had in SFB (albeit via scouts rather than general ECM).

" what I proposed was that Andro scout channels give out a +2 rather than +1 on jamming. "

From the Algonquin Indian Book of Fate: Notta gonna happa.

I'm pretty ambivalent, but out of interest is there any particular reason - do you have some other idea to make andro a bit better in multi ship fights (which is what FC is about to a large extent)?

I'm not talking about fights where they exceed their 2 mothership + sat limit as that allows a pretty large 2000pt force. They have an issue though in pretty much any fight where they turn up with more than 1 ship, the more ships the worse they get.