Federation Commander

For the future or if a 2nd edition of FC ever gets published, I would like to make a request.

On ship cards, I would like a line stating the total number of internal boxes on the ship, and the number of internal boxes needed to cripple the ship.

I realize that it's something fairly easy to calculate, but it would be very convenient to see it actually on the ship card and there shouldn't be any problem finding a good place to place it on the card.

This would be especially useful for those scenarios which require ships to retire if crippled.

I proposed this years ago and it was evaluated and then decided against. The main reason was that it was one more thing that could be missed/error-on/etc. during card-checks.

I went ahead and did it on my own cards, but, as it turns out, I screwed quite a few of them up (kept forgetting to count the probe on Fleet scale ships, etc.) so the decision was probably a good one.

djdood wrote:The main reason was that it was one more thing that could be missed/error-on/etc. during card-checks.

As one of the card checkers who begged not to do this, 'dood is absolutely correct. I could sit there and count the same card three times in a row and come up with three different answers. It would have taken a huge amount of time to get those numbers right and there would have always been wrong ones.

So, while it is an "easy" request, human frailty makes it impractical.

I'm with Mike here. I have a loooonnng checklist of items to check whenever new cards are being reviewed, and even with a chekclist - I still miss items.

I, too was against the idea of adding those two line items to the cards for most of the same reasons.
And it usually isn't an issue. Most of the time, there is no doubt as to the crippled/not crippled status of a ship and in the few borderline instances where it does become an issue, in doesn't really take that long to count the actual boxes on teh card.

How about changing the rule on crippling a ship to taking out 1/2 of total control, power, and weapon boxes? These are much easier to count and these are generally the more important systems for a ship.

Since "crippled" in SFB means 50% of the ships boxes destroyed...
and a crippled ship in F&E is reduced to 50% of it's uncrippled combat values...

I'd say the current designation of "crippled" will pretty stand as is; although I'm not SVC and I neither designed the game nor own the company that produces it - so it's not a total impossiblity. Just highly unlikely to change.

To take out half the total control, power, and weapon boxes usually requires shooting out all the hull and labs anyway, so that would actually make it harder to cripple a ship.

terryoc wrote:To take out half the total control, power, and weapon boxes usually requires shooting out all the hull and labs anyway, so that would actually make it harder to cripple a ship.

Not necessarily, depending on whether the other side has the opportunity to target weapons or power.

It might be more "realistic". There would be a huge difference in a Captain's mind about staying to fight if he has 3 photons and 5 PH1 left vs 1 Photon and 2 Ph1, even if a bunch of labs and hull were destroyed. Plus it's fairly easy to pull a ship from the brink of being crippled by repairing hull as the rules are currently stated.

It might be most "realistic" to base it on 1/2 the total repair points needed to fix the ship completely (if a ship needs 150 repair points worth of boxes to fix completely, then 75 would cripple it). However this would be a total accounting nightmare.