Federation Commander

I was running this scenario the other day and had a question about how to destroy the amoeba with a tractor beam. The rule says that you must hold the amoeba in a tractor beam for 8 consecutive impulses. My questions are as follows:

1. What happens to your turn mode and speed when you tractor it? It is moving speed 8, but there isn't any information about its relative 'mass'. I would assume it's like tractoring a ship with twice your movement cost, you slow down by two baseline speeds and use that turn mode.

2. Since the amoeba moves randomly, if you are at range 1 and the die roll forces it to move to range 2, is your ship dragged along? Is the tractor beam broken? Does the amoeba not move? Do you roll again?

This scenario was tough in a Fed NCL since there are only 4 lab and for some reason, every time I would roll for damage (quite often since you need to get close enough to effectively use you labs and some damage will leak through your shields), I would roll a 3 or 4 which damaged one of my lab boxes, reducing my overall lab points gained for that turn. It was scary when I got to turn 13 and had to roll for how to kill the amoeba. I was dreading getting the result of gathering more information and then rolling again. If you're unlucky enough, you could conceivably keep rolling that result until the scenario time limit hits. A very disappointing way to lose a solitaire scenario.

OGOPTIMUS wrote:This scenario was tough in a Fed NCL since there are only 4 lab

Just as an aside, note that this is actually the normal number of lab boxes for pretty much every heavy cruiser (i.e. the next hull size up) except for the Fed CA.

junior wrote:

OGOPTIMUS wrote:This scenario was tough in a Fed NCL since there are only 4 lab

Just as an aside, note that this is actually the normal number of lab boxes for pretty much every heavy cruiser (i.e. the next hull size up) except for the Fed CA.

Ah, yes, I forgot about that. That helps to put things in perspective.

I say that:
1) It counts as more than double your movement cost, with the resulting restrictions. I don't think you should be able to accelerate or decelerate, either.

2) You override its movement. When under a tractor (for the purposes of killing it, which is the only time you may use a tractor on the Space Amoeba) the Space Amoeba does not move.

That seems to be the simplest solution to the questions that doesn't also raise more questions than were answered.

Remember that you have a probe launcher which will get you 20 lab points/turn, speeding things up significantly.

If you're REALLY in a hurry, use the Federation Galactic Survey Cruiser. With 10 lab and 4 special sensors that's effectively 14 lab boxes, plus two probe launchers (up to 180 lab points per turn!!). You should be rolling to kill the thing in 3 turns if you are aggressive.

terryoc wrote:Remember that you have a probe launcher which will get you 20 lab points/turn, speeding things up significantly.

Just remember not to use up all of your probe ammunition gathering information...

You can always reload the probe, but that would of course cost you a game-turn....

mjwest wrote:I say that:
1) It counts as more than double your movement cost, with the resulting restrictions. I don't think you should be able to accelerate or decelerate, either.

2) You override its movement. When under a tractor (for the purposes of killing it, which is the only time you may use a tractor on the Space Amoeba) the Space Amoeba does not move.

That seems to be the simplest solution to the questions that doesn't also raise more questions than were answered.

Thanks Mike. Makes things easy and crystal clear.

terryoc wrote:Remember that you have a probe launcher which will get you 20 lab points/turn, speeding things up significantly.

Ah yes. I forgot about that.

The Fed NCL has more lads than the "new" ships of other races. The feds always have twice as many labs when comparing to the equvilant class.

The Feds do usually have more labs than most people, but I think on the "new" ships especially this can be expected as generally "new" or "war" ships are built simply to pack as much firepower into as cheap a hull as possible, thereby skimping on labs and other non-essentials for combat.

The Federation in general has more of an emphasis on exploration than other empires who are more interested in fighting or at least policing their territory (the Klingons and Lyrans typify this), presumably hence why the Fed ships tend to have more lab. The Kzintis also have relatively good labs with 6 on the BC, and the CM (which is effectively the Kzintis' war cruiser) actually has as much lab as the Fed NCL.