Federation Commander

Bit of a discussion on the Mongoose boards about overloading. According to one playtester (IIRC Clanger), firing overloads has the following restrictions:

- Target must be within 6"
- Ship may move only 6"
- Ship suffers energy drain restrictions IN ADDITION TO only moving 6".

This seems nuts. Taken literally, you'd have two restrictions: only moving 6", and having to choose between only moving 6", firing only one weapon system, or only firing phasers. You could not (or at least, should not) be able to select only moving 6", and only firing phasers makes no sense, so you'd be stuck with only firing the overloaded heavy weapons. That loses you a lot of firepower from the phasers, within Kill Zone range no less.

I suspect that this is confusion - the move only 6" is from an earlier draft and it got replaced by Energy Drain. Can any playtesters with the latest rules confirm/deny this? Because otherwise it's going to be a real problem.

Terry: Matthew has clarified this. The Energy Drain aspect of Overload Weapons is going away in the next draft of the rules and will be replaced by "may only move 6 inches".

For game simplicity I can understand just saying that overloading bleeds speed but a counter point just to be conciderer is energy drain may be the better way to go. When andros come out there maybe times when disruptor armed vessels may perfer to move at full speed unload overloaded disruptirs and skip firing phasers. Same may apply to shield or web crackers.

Dal Downing wrote:For game simplicity I can understand just saying that overloading bleeds speed but a counter point just to be conciderer is energy drain may be the better way to go. When andros come out there maybe times when disruptor armed vessels may perfer to move at full speed unload overloaded disruptirs and skip firing phasers. Same may apply to shield or web crackers.

Dal: I spoke to Matthew about this.
I have to admit, I agree with his reasoning.
I thought Energy Drain was the way to go also since it provided much more flexibility. Then Matthew pointed out that the typical map is 48 inches across.
And that some deployment areas allows ships to set-up well forward of the table edge.
This means that if your Klingon ship advances 12 inches during movement of Turn 1... it's possible for an entire fleet of Federation ships to swoop in during their portion of Turn 1 and destory / cripple much of hte opposing fleet.

and while that won't happen often, there are enough players out there who'd take advantage of it...
and as long as we're talking... most of the time (probably 95% or more), a player will choose the 6" movement option to retain the ability to fire overloaded torps and phasers. And if it's going to happen that often anyway, why not make it the rule and simplify things?

Tony, thanks.

6" move is what would be chosen most often, anyway.

Exactly.
In playtesting, we probably chose the 6" movement option 99.4 % of the time.