Federation Commander

Just messing around and thinking about the rules and I was wondering: is there a specific reason that the defensive fire step does not happen at each movement sub-pulse? My only though was that this was done to put all "fire" decisions on one step per impulse and thus maintain simplicity, but I was looking at this and was thinking, "why not have the defensive fire at the end of each sub-pulse?"

Putting defense fire all in the same location in the impulse sequence does not reduce the number of rolls, but it does introduce a sort of counter-intuitive idea that a seeking weapon can impact, but there be no effect for up to three more sub-pulses.

Don't get me wrong, I love FC just like I love SFB, but was really curious about this.

Was it ever play-tested with having the defensive fire step happen at the end of each movement in sub-pulse? In this way the owner of the target vessel would have to decide right then to take some sort of action rather than down the line. Also, the results of that action would directly determine what the next movement might be. If it was tested that way, was it determined that this slowed down and complicated the game?

Again, just curious.

It's because they wanted to simplify the game by reducing the number of fire-decision steps.

My own take on the Defensive Fire phase is that it's supposed to simulate what the defensive actions of the ship would have been during the movement phase. This is why the defensive weapons fire as if they are at range 1, not range 0 - the weapons are firing 'all the way in'.

Blammo wrote:Just messing around and thinking about the rules and I was wondering: is there a specific reason that the defensive fire step does not happen at each movement sub-pulse? My only though was that this was done to put all "fire" decisions on one step per impulse and thus maintain simplicity, but I was looking at this and was thinking, "why not have the defensive fire at the end of each sub-pulse?"

It's an abstraction.

I find that I have fallen right in line with the fire-every-4-impulses style of FC instead of the fire every impulse with secret allocations in SFB.

There were some subtleties in SFB fire decisions (some mandated by the DAC) that are gone in FC, but FC has introduced it's own subtleties.

For example it is more difficult to maneuver for perfect firing solutions in FC than it was in SFB--meaning that if you are really good at maneuver you have a huge advantage in FC.