Federation Commander

First I would like to say hello to everyone here. I've been reading and lurking for a good while but finally got around to becomming a member.

I picked up Federation Commander a while back and have gone through the rules book a few times trying to take it all in. I've been a fan of classic Star Trek from when I was a kid and was searching for a ship type game to play and this seemed my best bet as I already like the fiction and have some knowledge going in.

Now to be honest I am not that big into board games and knew full well from all the research that this was a board game but was attracted to it due to the idea of using the miniatures rules. After reading through the rules it seems to me that it would be far more easy to play using measurements and no hexes, though that just be due to many years of mini wargames behind me.

The only game I've played that was a board game that even seemed like this was the old Battletech system. However I did get a very small taste of Starfleet battles about ... 20ish years or so ago if I remember right. It seemed to me very complicated at the time.

There are a few things I don't understand though. In the rules book section (1F3) Combat, the second paragraph confuses me.

If I am understanding right, you pick a distance that can be in inches if you like and make that equal to one hex. The sellection you make is what is being talked about in that section of the book. If that is right then also that measurement affects your movement as well and also your turning movement as well.

I've downloaded the turning guides and have been looking them over. So using one scale or the other is just what feels better to the player then if I understand and if I'm going to use them I should set my imaginayr hex size to the same scale as one of the guages?

Also anyone here play this with the miniatures rules? I would very much like to hear how that has been going for you. What size play space do you feel gives you an area with enough movement and what scale in inches are you playing at?

Thanks for the reading.

JP

I believe the gauges are set to 1" per hex.

I don't play with miniatures, though I would like to. I think the free movement version is actually better.

I think a standard 6'x4' table would give you plenty of room, that would be 72" x 48", a fair bit bigger (taking scale into account) than the standard 42x30 hexmap, but you could go 4'x3' and have a map about the right "size".

Maneuver precedence seems to be more important with the minis, and things like plasma torpedoes and drones are deadlier. Which is always a good thing. Hee hee.

Okay well I've gotten everything pretty well set up to run with miniatures. Now I do understand that this is a board game but I believe it can be an awsome miniatures game.

There is just no miniatures game that fills the kind or role this game could and that is really what has attracted our group to try it out.

However I find there are a few things that don't directly translate over real well and am looking to maybe adopt a few house rules.

Is there anyone out there playing this as a miniatures game, if so I would very much like to hear how you are doing it.

A few of the things that have caused me some bother are as follows.

When shooting at someone I either miss or hit the mark right where Iwanted it seems. So for example I can fire out of my front arc into an enemy ship and his whole left arc is there in front of me I have to pick my target as his left front or left rear, or if that same ship were tunred just a bit where part of the front arc were in my fire arc then pick from front and both left arcs as my target. What I feel I miss here is the chance to miss my mark and hit one of the other arcs on a moving target. Maybe that sounds silly or it just comes from so many years of playing battletech but still it seems like it would be fun for a miniatures version. We are kind of playing around with a away to make that happen.

Also the other thing we are toying with is turning, acceleration and deceleration. The idea to try and make movement more fluid for miniatures we have been throwing around is maybe a bit odd and I would like some imput on this (well on anything I've wrote about here really)

We are using the turning arcs for our turns as listed in the book. So when a ship spends energy to speed up or slow down we have been allowing for a bit of change in the turning arc.

That being that if a ship pays to accelerate during an impuse he will turn on one arc higher that impluse should he wish to turn during that impluse. Sort of turning while stepping on the gas. After that impuse is over he would use the normal turning arc for his baseline speed unless he changed his movement again.

For deceleration it is a bit different, because a ship could stop all its momement and then turn in the hex it is in, to try and adapt that into miniatures format we are using the suggestion in the book with a small change in line with what was liste above.

When A ship pays to decelerate if its next physical movement is turning it can do so on the next lower arc for the first movement of the Physical movement of turning. However the more times in a row it decelerates without physically moving add up. So if you were turning on arc 5 with a baseline speed of 16 and you decelerated 2 times this impluse and your first move of the next impluse was to turn your ship you could do so on arc 3 for that rather than arc 5, but only for that movement. If your next movement was to physically turn your ship then it would be on arc 5 as normal.

So when a ship decelerates to the point of dropping speed to what would be turning arc 1 when there is no turning arc 1 is where we use the rule listed about rotating the base. Now I understand the rules say you can never turn on smaller arc than your baseline speed but it just did not seem to play out well on table top that way.

Also we have went to two inch scale, it does require a bit more room but seems to work better with movement.