Federation Commander

I just wanted to take a moment to say hi to everyone. I have recently picked up Federation Commander and, while I have not yet played a game of it, I am looking forward to playing.

I have a long history with SFU. In 1979, while living in Austin, Texas, a friend of mine introduced me to SFB in the little plastic baggie. I played several duels with the D7 vs the FED CA and getting thoroughly destroyed. I did not see the game again until 1990 when I got out of the Army and moved to Gainesville, Georgia. I met up with a group of gamers there and one of the games of choice was Star Fleet Battles. I played it for years during the 90s, but eventually drifted away for lack of opponents (I moved around quite a bit, was busy starting a family and lived in areas with no real gaming community). For a while I was on BattleForce Compuserve and played and ran some games there as well as helped work out the PBEM rules we used. But eventually I was not able to stay involved and had to give up on my SFB/SFU involvement.

Now, I am back in a position to enjoy my favorite old game. I am still hard pressed for face to face engagements, but I am working on virtual sessions and PBEM.

I chose Federation Commander because it will allow me the same white-knuckled excitement without the overwhelming commitment of time and money. Plus, after really reading the rules. looking at reviews, etc, it trimmed out most of the time consuming but ultimately not beneficial/important rules. Plus, there is plenty of room for house rules to allow some of the missing elements if my group chooses.

Anyway, didn't mean to write a book. Just happy to be playing again and glad we are at the state of technology where it is easier to find players, stay involved and enjoy games.

Cheers for now...good luck and good hunting!

-Blammo (a.k.a. Robert)

Blammo, welcome aboard!

Sounds like I'm in a similar boat (or starship) as you. I have zero local players near me, so I've been exclusively using FCOL (FedCom On-Line) for the last year or two. It is certainly a good alternative if you don't have local players. Plus, I've been able to meet and play with a bunch of folks that I never would have had the opportunity to meet.

Look forward to playing a game sometime,

Garrett

Hello, Blammo. FC is my SFU game of choice now, too.

My group back in the 1990's actually played SFB in a similar fashion as the way the game system is set up for FC. We had four big mega-impulses per Turn with only four firing opportunities. For movement we took the number of hexes to be moved in the entire Turn, divided by four (rounding to the nearest whole number), and that was a ship's target speed per mega-impulse. A player could deviate from that by either 1 hex higher or lower per mega-impulse, but the total had to be used by the end of the fourth mega-impulse or a breakdown would occur. Just those two house rules sped up games tremendously.

Anyway, FC takes care of all of that now.

One note that I've seen here on the forum that is quite good when teaching someone new to the game is referring to speed in terms of hexes moved per impulse instead of total hexes for the entire Turn. It is easier for many newbies to think of the impulses as "mini-turns" with actions like firing weapons and generating new energy as things that are done only after 8 of these "mini-turns" take place.

I think for people not familiar with SFB, the baseline speeds dont make much sense. When I teach noobs, I concentrate on movement per impulse. I call it warp 0, warp 1, warp 2, or warp 3, indicating hexes per impulse, not hexes per turn. It makes it much less confusing to them, especially with acceleration.