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Post by captainquirk on Mar 30, 2018 8:13:06 GMT -5
I'm pretty sure that most of the members of the CBF board are inactive now. But just in case there's anyone looking for a game - anyone in London UK either as an existing player of CBF, or who wants to give it a try?
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Post by captainquirk on Feb 23, 2018 12:09:56 GMT -5
I playtested a campaign draft for another tactical rules set back in 2011; it's never been released because it was never finished. I also know of two other tactical rules sets that were going to get the same campaign project, and neither of those happened either.
In all honesty, Harry, we would be better off if you could find any time to work on a CBF campaign rulebook yourself. Then it is more like to have nice clean design lines like CBF itself.
I don't think clutter and a thousand options are really needed. I'm open to correction, but I suspect that most of us would just like something which gives a wider context to CBF tactical games, and which give us a reason for actually having those tactical encounters, and which also gives them a bit more shape.
And the rules for over-sized ships and Orbital Weapons Platforms belong in a CBF supplement anyway as they are needed at the tactical level.
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Post by captainquirk on Jan 1, 2018 7:10:31 GMT -5
I'd still like to see some tactical and construction rules for OWPs, star fortresses and for over-sized ships. Especially as the partnership campaign system has stalled. I'd also prefer to see some simple campaign rules that are more in the spirit and elegance of CBF than an out-sourced solution.
Anyway... happy new year to all...
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Post by captainquirk on Jul 7, 2015 12:27:45 GMT -5
Hi Harry, any fruit from your thoughts as yet?
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Post by captainquirk on Jun 14, 2015 11:00:37 GMT -5
Hi Harry,
Would there be any possibility of some construction and tactical rules for Orbital Weapons Platforms and Asteroid Star Fortresses at the CBF level? And perhaps for over-sized ships too?
They may feature in the VBAM campaign rules eventually. But I'd really like to see the construction rules for within CBF. And of course the applicable tactical rules for them being a part of a CBF game. Suspect that I'm not the only person!
I'd really like to see rules for those. And by extension, an additional set of CBF scenarios using them. Not as a campaign pack, but simply as an extension of the core tactical rules.
What do you think?
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Post by captainquirk on Jun 3, 2015 15:33:22 GMT -5
You're welcome The guy I play against tends to like the biggest possible ships with the most armour and heavy railguns that he can cram into the hull. For some reason he seems to resent spending much capacity on delta, and upon stuff like PDFs. Now THOSE kind of ships are simply bricks in space, and are sitting ducks for missiles, and I'll admit that I've shredded him several times. He can't turn or burn to get away from a missile attack, and he's given himself virtually no capacity to pick them off and stop them impacting either. And of course he doesn't touch me with all those heavy railguns if I can make sure that there is a wave of missiles inbound which stop him closing. Plus because he likes to take the biggest possible ships, there aren't many of them so it becomes easier to concentrate on one ship as a target. There's a whole world within the CBF design system. There are lots of trade-offs, and it is pretty much impossible to build the absolute 'perfect ship' as there are always compromises which have to be made between weapons, protection, and speed. It's one of the best things about CBF. So if you find that your ships are especially vulnerable to one particular form of attack then you might want to review the designs and see if you need to make some adjustments. It may not be the weapon the other guy is using being over-powerful; it might be that your ships are just very vulnerable and open to that particular weapon. It's also not just the individual ships which matter, but the way various ship types interact within a task force. My friend might get away with the bricks in space if he gave them some effective escorts. But if he skimps on those too and doesn't have capability to intercept some of the missiles further out as a zone defence, then yeah, the missiles will truly be ship killers. Conversely though... if/when he DOES get through to my missile ships, they suffer! As Harry pointed out, a substantial salvo missile capacity really takes up space. So the missile ships are eggshells armed with sledgehammers. Which is a good illustration of how what appears to be a strength suddenly turns in to a vulnerability when the circumstances change.
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Post by captainquirk on Jun 3, 2015 14:08:22 GMT -5
There is a thread somewhere on the CBF section of the forum with some rough ideas.
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Post by captainquirk on Jun 3, 2015 14:06:54 GMT -5
Most of the CBF weapons have some form of counter to them. As Harry says, you need more than delta 1 to stand any decent chance of moving out of their way. You should maybe also consider deploying some ships with counter-missile cluster missiles to defend the task force. Escorts with the Screen role can also assist with PDF systems on other friendly ships.
Missiles aren't actually the ship killers they are sometimes perceived to be. Sometimes they only serve to make you get out of the area they are in. However, if you don't have a reasonable delta to get out of the way, then they will kill you if there are enough of them.
EDIT: Oops, Harry posted much the same thing while I was still writing! Only rather more clearly and eloquently!
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Post by captainquirk on Mar 16, 2015 14:53:15 GMT -5
Perhaps a decent rules set would spark a miniatures range. Dunno. Old Crow make a mini sub and a small boomer type. I just acquired an old metal miniature of Stingray and a Terror Fish, though they are a pretty niche kind of submarine. I've been looking at some of the War Rocket and old SW Starship Battles stuff to supplement Stingray.
However it would be more fun to have a less kid's TV future naval wars game. Maybe akin to the Dragon in the Sea novel by Frank Herbert
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Post by captainquirk on Mar 15, 2015 5:11:45 GMT -5
There are a few alternative modern naval rules to Harpoon and Shipwreck. I don't think I've seen any naval rules for the future though, and I still think that a scifi naval rules set would be interesting at some stage. Various possibilities. Maybe it is all undersea warfare. Maybe all air is by drone. Maybe massive climate change has affected the whole air-surface-submarine balance and things are very different from today.
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 4, 2014 4:00:45 GMT -5
That's quite a hefty modifier.
Let us know how it works out?
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 1, 2014 16:13:13 GMT -5
Regarding grapeshot... is it autonomous or must a FC point be spent to fire it? Pretty sure that that question has come up before. However, haven't spotted the answer yet! You could try using the search command at the top of the page with a keyword "grapeshot" -- maybe your eyes are better than mine and you'll spot the answer before I do!
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 1, 2014 16:10:43 GMT -5
I don't have the rules in front of me. . . but I believe grape shot does not destroy missiles. Missiles have their own shields and point defense systems. Not enough grapeshot would hit a single missile to take it out of the fight. From an earlier discussion, grapeshot does not affect missiles: steeldreadnought.proboards.com/thread/751/grape-shot-missiles
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 1, 2014 15:48:36 GMT -5
Agree with you that escorts can be pretty fragile in CBF. I guess you could house rule a hit penalty when firing at them from range?
Grapeshot isn't going to be a serious shipkiller against the heavy capital ships. But it can soften them up by ripping the shields away so that another heavy CAN kill them. It's also pretty brutal to smaller ships.
I understand what you are saying about the potential for a design war. The best I can suggest is to play a few more games and try out some of the other weapons to get a feel for them. Then get people to design a range of ships. But encourage them thinking of the designs as a being individuals within a cohesive whole... the different ships with different jobs within the task force. Once a games series/campaign starts, there should be little opportunity to redesign everything.
There are some ideas if you look through the scenario chapter... using something like that puts restrictions on the new classes that can be introduced.
I am very much in favour of either campaign games, or scenario missions. Real world navies seldom fight solely for the sake of fighting. They are there to achieve something (albeit that at times that something actually is to destroy the opposing force). Much of the time though, there is something that one or other force wants to accomplish - protect/destroy a convoy, secure an area, bombard or protect from bombardment. This is an approach which helps a lot against people designing a heavy like the one you described and making that king - because it really can't do everything. In fact in some of the scenarios, it couldn't even be on the board, because I think there is one scenario in which only RDF ships can be chosen.
Hmm, off the top of my head I'm not too sure how big our game surface usually is. We often play with the larger hexes of the Federation Commander hex boards. Roughly from memory we would have been using a 4 x 3 board layout on a large coffee table, I think. But using those boards does allow us to float the map a bit if necessary.
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 1, 2014 3:58:09 GMT -5
Some of the options could be:
An 800 mass BB with even more mag cannons...
Missile it! It's what missiles are for...
Strip the shields off it with grapeshot...
Be behind it, not in front of it...
Confuse it because it can't be in two places at once...
It's not necessarily a question of a constant design-redesign. CBF works well with a task force comprising a number of ships with different specialist roles, working as a team. This is quite different in my experience to FT, in which there really isn't any specific difference between battleline and escorts, or any limitations other than player agreement to prevent swarm fleets, superfighter nightmare carrier fleets and any of the other excesses of FT. FT doesn't really make escorts do a different job; they are just smaller ships. CBF does do that.
I don't know how well it all balances out doing a straight conversion of FT factions to CBF; I haven't tried it. The CBF factions that I have designed contain a mix of ships with different capabilities - battleline, RDF, area saturation, missile defence, anti-escort, minelaying, and so on. In a scenarios, I pick from those designed types according to the mission and the ships I think my opponent is going to field. Most of my thought didn't go into building a supership that would destroy everything it met. I thought of a fleet which had a ship for every need...or at least all the ones I could envisage.
Pretty much like a USN carrier group has a counter for submarine attacks, a counter for air attacks, a counter for surface attacks, a counter for small close-in surface attacks, and presumably a counter for land salvo attacks too - along with a capability to attack in several ways, including standoff and old-fashioned iron bombs. But if the carrier was by itself, it would very probably get taken down.
I'd only very rarely deploy a task force that didn't have more than one primary weapon type. My favourite faction generally utilises mag cannon and missiles to reach out and touch someone, and gatling lasers and grapeshot for flyswatting. My opponent tends to favour the heaviest railguns and armour rather than mag cannons.
Generally I'd be trying to whittle down his task force with long range missile attacks and not close with him at all until I'd done that. One of my mag cannon and missile task forces can probably launch three decent missile salvoes, and so far I have not only scared my opponent from closing, but have also pretty reliably obtained kills from long range fire (and I'm talking well beyond railgun or mag cannon range). I try not to trade broadside-to-broadside stuff with him until I outnumber his gunline. It's slightly easier in many of our games because that particular opponent also likes to deploy the biggest possible BB - so he often doesn't have much to spend on other ships after taking a 900 mass behemoth, and if I kill the others then his BB is all alone in the dark...
That 700 mass BB may be doing OK right now. But CBF also works well with scenarios. And if your scenario is, for example, "defend against planetary bombardment", then it isn't going to do so great against three smaller ships approaching the planet from radically different directions and all of them pumping out mag cannon slugs at the planet. The BB can probably only catch one of them, so it is goodbye planet. It may be the toughest and meanest ship around. But it isn't good at the mission.
Assuming you are playing task forces and not single ship duels, if you are simply going to go gunline to gunline head-on, then a lot is just going to come down to how many weapons bear, throw weight, and who has the luckiest dice. Which I think is what you are describing.
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Post by captainquirk on Oct 31, 2014 17:43:52 GMT -5
I have an opponent who always tries to build the heaviest possible battlewagons with the heaviest armour he can use, and the heaviest railgun weapon throw weight. I've trashed his task forces several times by using missile BCs and cruisers, mainly because he consistently fails to fit adequate point defences or deploy escorts to handle the missiles. Several times I've managed to use those fast ships to put down so many missiles in so many flightpath angles that he really has had no chance whatsoever to manouevre out of the way of all of them. In most of those games, he hasn't even got a shot off with the railguns because I've had several salvoes of 20-30 missiles in between his ships and mine.
The missile ships run out of ammo, but that doesn't matter if they've overwhelmed the targets anyway.
Once he figures out how to deal with them, I'll change my approach and deploy something else
Mind you, we also had a game (which I soundly lost) where he took out two of my heaviest gun-carrying battleline vessels with reactor criticals. In fact, the only reactor criticals we've ever had in all of our CBF games, and the jammy ***** rolled one, and then got the second crit on the next ship with the very next roll of the dice.
There's a lesson there too... no matter how big and spectacular the ship, it can still explode! At least, mine can...
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Post by captainquirk on Oct 29, 2014 13:29:20 GMT -5
There are a lot of different posisbiltiies in CBF.
One might be that the fast RDF BC carries a mainly missile loadout, for example. Missiles can be used to try to obtain direct kills. Or they can be used to saturate a part of the battle area, deny it to your opponent, and herd him somewhere else. So the battlecruiser could get into a position quickly, salvo a spread of missiles, and then bug out. Could be useful in something like a convoy scenario where you might want to put a large number of missiles between an enemy and the freighters to push the hostiles away from a direct approach.
So far I have never found an "ultimate killer weapon" or an "ultimate killer ship" in CBF. But I'm still finding interesting combinations, it's a rich game :-)
Though the ultrafast SDT ship I mentioned in another thread is a pretty nasty customer! It just doesn't have much stamina once it has volleyed the SDTs.
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Post by captainquirk on Oct 27, 2014 3:47:22 GMT -5
We only ever used SDTs as part of the Scourge-like fleet - an alien weapon system that IS quite unbalanced. In fact, the Scourge designs that I came up with are so powerful that the main aim of a game involving them is just to see how long you can survive as an opponent. Death is virtually inevitable if you remain in engagement. And I haven't yet found a workable strategy to deal with a Scourge flotilla as a human task force.
I went with Dreadnought's idea of a race dedicated to extinguishing others, and then designed the nastiest ships that I possibly could. Probably the most vicious is a light battlecruiser with a speed of 10 and the capacity to lay down six SDTs (2 x 3). Comes in fast, hits like a hammer, and is gone. Like in all of CBF, there is no individual genuine super ship design. But two or three of these can do a lot of damage in a single turn that quite outweighs their class.
I wouldn't regard them as balanced designs in the slightest. I'm not sure the SDTs are a balanced weapon for normal play. We treat them as a terror weapon.
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Post by captainquirk on Aug 23, 2014 8:00:26 GMT -5
Were you intending this in relation to fleet engagements? Or at the RPG level?
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Post by captainquirk on Jul 21, 2014 14:44:21 GMT -5
Kind of. But in as much as there is any real continuity in Trek, collimated arrays were mounted on the Enterprise C. And on at least some of the Excelsior class. Not sure if this included the Enterprise B. And on some of the Miranda/Soyuz class. But it does point to them being developed in the "inter series era". And of course some people will want to play the later eras rather than original TOS.
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