Federation Commander

Is there any information on what Andro ships would be included in group?

For example,

What Andro ships might make up a small scouting party?

A Strike group, (i.e. the Andros are on routine patrol and are prepared for encountering light cruisers, heavy cruisers and battle cruisers)

A Fleet engagement (i.e. the Andros want to take control over a sector to spread their dominance)

Right now I am practicing with 1 ship against another based on point comparison. I would like to run a multi-ship encounter.

Has anyone worked up a FedCom tournament fleet for the Andros?

Andro fleet construction is pretty easy. You have two main rules:
- Any ship in a scenario has to be transported there by a displacement device. (Either its own device, or carried on a ship with a device.)
- You may only have two ships with displacement devices present in a scenario.
(Yes, this glosses over a couple exceptions (like base defense), but it works well enough.)

So, the smallest group you can run into is a single Python or Recon Cobra by itself.

The smallest with a true mothership is a Conquistador with or without a Cobra.

The largest group is a pair of fully loaded Dominators.

But, basically, the idea is to take one or two ships with a displacement device and load them up with satellite ships.

I thought more than two dis dev ships could be present, just no more than two could use their dis dev in a single battle. Also, their ships have regular warp, right? Could you say a galleon or caravel dropped off a bunch of of the satellite ships and then the group just used regular warp to come in?

I'm not up to speed on all of the Andro info, so i apologize if I am way off on this stuff.

As I said, my "two rule" gloss over some exceptions. Yes, you could ferry extra satellite ships in. Yes, you could have more than two displacement device ships pop in close, but still far enough away, then travel the rest of the way by normal warp. And, of course, with bases, who knows what you might find. But all of those are exceptions and special cases that don't happen very often at all, and when they do they were extremely hard to put together.

For the most part, and for the vast majority of battles not at a base, the "two rules" I outlined will let you construct a "standard" Andromedan fleet.

I've always played them as mwest says above, even in the campaign we played where I played the Andros we kept the above limit per battle, so whilst I might have 4 motherships and 15 satellites in the region the battle would be 2 motherships and what they could carry.

The largest battle I got with them before the Gorn won the campaign was 1 Dom, 1 Int and 12 vipers. The smallest was a lone python.

I don't think the rules actually limit the satellites you can bring to a fight like it does the disdev ships. It is sort of implied in the blurb, but doesn't actually rule on it.

Well, (5V1a) does heavily imply that satellite ships must be carried to battle. It does say that satellite ships have no strategic mobility (out side the Python and Recon Cobra) and are incapable of interstellar travel. So, while not specifically and outright stated, it is an obvious conclusion that for a "generic battle", the satellite ships have to be carried there.

It is very similar to how shuttles/fighters work. In theory, you can construct situations where shuttles/fighters show up on their own or there are more than the number shuttle boxes present. But, in the standard situation, you have to bring the shuttles/fighters on ships, and there can be no more present than those ships can carry.

the only way to have extra ships is to bring them there ahead of time. That cannot work on anything but defending an Andro base.

If you pick a spot for an open space battle and bring in extra ships ahead of time, the galactic guys will just move the battle over there and leave them behind.

If you want to attack a galactic base/planet and bring in one load of ships then go back for the second, the first will be detected and defeated before the second can arrive.

This might be getting a little off topic, but do Andro satellite ships just act like gunboats? Such as they do have warp, but can only warp short distances at a time. Or do they have no warp at all?

I had always assumed all of their ships have warp, they just warp really slow. I'm just trying to meld the SFU fluff with gameplay rules in my head and it just seems like a certain people who own an entire galaxy would have more hull types that could actually warp around by themselves.

It is kind of hard to make good comparisons like that.

In the context of a scenario battle, satellite ships use normal warp engines that behave just like warp engines on any other standard ship. They don't have the damage issues of gunboats. They operate just like normal warp engines in every way. From a tactical point of view, satellite ships use standard warp engines.

However, from a strategic point of view (i.e. outside the scope of Federation Commander or SFB), satellite ships effectively have no strategic range. In fact, gunboats actually have a much larger strategic range than satellite ships. Satellite ships cannot travel interstellar distances. They can't go from star system to star ships. Gunboats can. Gunboats have a very short strategic range, but they do have a strategic range; satellite ships do not.

Andromedans are just weird.

I think the main difference is that, in F&E terms, Andromedan ships (be they satellite ships or motherships) that have a Displacement Device installed can elect to use both operational (cruise) or streategic (dash) speeds, but that either type of ship can only use operational movement if they have no DisDev installed.

In F&E, operational movement represents a ship moving at "normal" cruising speed over the course of a six-month turn. Strategic movement represents using "dash" warp to try and race from one side of an empire's supply grid to the other, but can only work if the ship is moving along a pre-set array of strategic movement nodes (starbases, planets, etc). The trick with the Andros is that their "dash" warp is super fast compared to that of an Alpha empire's starships due to the RTN, but they pay the price of having a slower "cruise" speed when the network isn't there (or if they don't have the DisDev needed to move along it).

It hasn't been specified just yet exactly how fast an Andro ship can cruise at operationally, but it is likely to be able to cover less than the six hexes per six months a "modern" Alpha Octant ship can carry (or the seven hexes a fast ship or first-generation X-ship can cover in the same period of time).

In SFB, there is a mini-campaign in Module C2 that shows a group of satellite ships trying to make it to a pick-up point with a Dominator, after their original mothership ran into some difficulties. Also, Module R11 shows a pair of Andromedan Monitors: motherships with their disdevs taken out, and used to protect key locations (such as the battlestations at the terminus of each RTN link from the Milky Way down to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud).

As it happens, according to Module C5, the LMC empires are said to be no faster operationally than the Andromedans, so they had to deal with the problem of the Andros concentrating force off the RTN more commonly than the empires in Alpha had to worry about. (It's not clear yet how fast an Omega or Triangulum ship can "cruise" at in the same scale.)


Also, the closest thing the Andros have to gunboats (well, interceptors) are called mobile weapons platforms. Those are small attrition units which the Andros use in certain situations, such as to boost the combat power of one of their monitors. But, MWPs are not in Federation Commander (and may well be Borders of Madness material in any event).

Actually there are published scenarios of Andro satellite ships without their mothership moving from star to star in a slow road home.