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Post by captainquirk on Feb 3, 2012 3:17:13 GMT -5
That would put the game in the same niche as Federation Commander. Not saying that is a bad thing, just that Star Fleet Battles and Federation Commander have dominated the duel for some time. The mechanisms of both are a bit clunky and time-consuming though, so a fresh take and a new game approach would be welcome.
The old FASA game had some nice ideas too - the "job role for every bridge officer" interface with their RPG was a nice touch. Pity that the entire Starship Combat Simulator was not a terribly good system though.
I fairly recently introduced a pronounced Trekkie to both Federation Commander and Colonial Battlefleet - reaction was that he felt CBF was a much better game. That's the one we continue to play.
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Post by captainquirk on Feb 1, 2012 1:29:25 GMT -5
Smashing, thank you! So a ship with a max speed of 13 isn't wholly unreasonable then, just unusual.
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Post by captainquirk on Jan 31, 2012 16:31:52 GMT -5
In the optional rules, there are maximum speeds for each ship size. And another rule which says that relativistic distortion sets in at speeds in excess of 6.
Having just designed a Scourge ship with a speed of 13, I'm now wondering what that actually represents in terms of speed. It seems to be in the area of being like the "Picard Manouvre".
What is a delta of 6+ in terms of lightspeed. Is 13 at C? Or beyond C? Or just very close to C and going so fast that no direct fire weapon is going to hit anything?
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Post by captainquirk on Jan 11, 2012 11:12:50 GMT -5
Ah. Great, thanks for clearing that up.
And thanks for the super-speedy answer!
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Post by captainquirk on Jan 11, 2012 11:11:47 GMT -5
Hmm, maybe. Should the UACS be able to build RDF battlecruisers?
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Post by captainquirk on Jan 11, 2012 10:46:39 GMT -5
I have Colonial Shipyard 2.2. Have been noticing that it isn't possible to build a battlecruiser hull and to choose an RDF role for it in this version of the shipyard. Is this correct?
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Post by captainquirk on Jan 11, 2012 10:46:12 GMT -5
Could I please ask for a little clarification about mines?
If I am designing a vessel, choose proximity mines as equipment, and elect to add two of these, the line underneath shows ammo as 8.
So, do I have enough mines to fill two hexes? Or to fill 8 hexes?
Thanks!
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Post by captainquirk on Dec 4, 2011 11:15:00 GMT -5
Go, Dolphins!
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 30, 2011 18:11:16 GMT -5
Haven't really had enough time to devote to thinking about a CBF campaign system. But if using the warp point idea, then star systems could be fairly abstracted - zones where a warp point emerges, zones where significant planets/asteroids/bases are, zones where any other warp points are. Some idea of how long it takes to move around. Can a ship move to any point within a system in the time it takes another ship to jump a warp point? Or is warp transit so fast that a ship could only move from say, Earth to Mars, in the time it takes another ship to jump between warp points?
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 30, 2011 14:14:26 GMT -5
Playtested a variant that was going to be for Federation Commander for a while. It was capable of producing lots of detail. But it felt cluttered for me too.
Pretty much what I'm looking for is a strategic movement system, something to manage development and resources, something to manage where those resources are used. Some stuff around repair. Interface and planetary invasion/defence.
Would be nice if there was something about planetary political stability and some espionage/rebellion aspects.
But really the campaign is there to give a reason to fight (and sometimes a reason to run and fight another day). I don't really want the campaign to be the game, I want it to set things up for games of CBF with a meaning behind them.
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 11, 2011 1:46:50 GMT -5
The saucer and secondary hull are quite different to the ones used interchangeably on the CA, DD, SC and tug miniatures. Fine for conversions in your own universe, of course.
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 3, 2011 14:57:49 GMT -5
Was wondering about the idea of a sci-fi submarine game...maybe adapted from CB?
Would be nice if it had depths/"altitudes", some ability to spoof sensors or to decoy and jam, seeking weapons. And being sci-fi, maybe some direct fire energy weapons for close range.
Demon-4 and Dragon In The Sea are a couple of the books covering this as a genre.
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 3, 2011 13:58:35 GMT -5
Oh dear.... was it something I said? It's all gone really quiet again!
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Post by captainquirk on Nov 2, 2011 4:14:40 GMT -5
Isn't it odd that a thread about how dead it is here gets a lot of replies? This ain't no forum discussion... this is the living dead.... (Fortunately all my CB ship designs include anti-zed boarding defences)
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Post by captainquirk on Oct 17, 2011 12:36:07 GMT -5
If you have a battleship carrying all of that lot and therefore using up 2 or 3 of its available weapon mounts with grape, I don't see how it can outfight another battleship of equivalent size which is using all of its own weapon mounts for armour-crunching capital ship killing weapons. So if you design and deploy something which is completely optimised as a small ship killer, then the logical counter is to deploy big ships capable of outfighting your battleships one on one. But I did try it. That is why I made this post. I played two games last night both of which had a bb with at least 2 banks of 5 grapeshot launchers each. They obliterated my CLs from a range where it would require way more tonnage of other weapons to kill. It's not like they were purpose built to erase light ships either. It was just a supplemental weapon I took to knock down shields on the cheap.
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Post by captainquirk on Oct 16, 2011 15:23:26 GMT -5
Personally I'd just deploy a fleet with armour 6> against you. With all your grapeshot launchers taking up mass, I'd have a significant advantage in throw weight of other weapons.
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Post by captainquirk on Aug 15, 2011 15:17:32 GMT -5
Played this scenario both ways over the weekend.
In game one, I was defending. My opponent made some fairly bizarre choices in ships. Usually he takes ships with a high mix of railguns. Just when they were really important for the scenario he deployed a carrier. Wasn't very effective, and his fighters made very very little difference to the game. I have to agree with postings elsewhere saying that fighters in the core rules are very weak. He never managed to get into position for a clear shot at the planet at all.
The second game was more interesting. He defended with a couple of moderate sized battleships, and a rapid deployment force of three battlecruisers and a light cruiser.
My attackers consisted of a battleship, two battlecruisers, one of which was optimised for area denial using ASGMs, plus two heavy cruisers and an escort destroyer.
My force came out of the warp point, split into two groups with the battlecruisers going down the right, and the remaining ships going to the left, and accelerated away. The ASGM battlecruiser started lobbing out its missiles in hunter mode (16 of them per turn), while the intention was for the battleship and destroyer to split from the heavy cruisers to give the defender three separate groups to face, all of which being capable of planetary bombardment.
His battlecruisers came out of the warp point and elected to pursue my larger group of ships. He soon closed on the stern of the heavy cruisers, opened fire... and scored TWO reactor explosions! Unbelievable, the jammy ***!! The only reactor hits we've had occur in all of our CB games so far, and he gets them one after the other in the same turn!
That somewhat put a damper on my attack. On the other wing, the battlecruisers traded off with the battleships, one of my ships taking a bridge hit. I had enough ASGMs running by that time though to nail him with a dozen missile attacks on each ship, causing a lot of hurt. My battlecruisers also managed to launch 28 points of bombardment damage before they succumbed.
The poor destroyer on my left flank died quickly. My battleship almost managed to break away and lined up on the planet, but with battleship delta it simply couldn't accelerate enough to outpace the enemy battlecruisers. A shame, because it only needed two turns of firing to have met the victory criteria for bombarding the planet.
Was a wonderfully tense and close game. Might have gone differently if it hadn't been for those spectacular critical hits, but hey, these things happen. I guess next time I might forego the battleship in favour of something which has higher delta.
Sorry, no pictures, didn't think of it in time. Might take some pics of the grand fleet at anchorage though when I get the camera out.
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Post by captainquirk on Aug 10, 2011 12:25:49 GMT -5
Really the grand-daddies of the boarding action game are Traveller's Ashanti High Lightning and Snapshot. Both of which used 15mm. So one reason for designing to 15mm is that it has been the "traditional" scaling for sci-fi for thirty years.
Plus there's an absolute flood of really really high quality 15mm sculpts available now with even more coming out all the time.
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Post by captainquirk on Aug 8, 2011 14:45:06 GMT -5
I'm still theorising that I might still be able to use grapeshot as a movement limiter - maybe that battleship won't want to charge right in if his front shield is already down anyway. But haven't actually tested this yet in combat.
Have certainly been through that "how did Dread allow such an awesome weapon through... Oh. He didn't" learning experience too.
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Post by captainquirk on Aug 8, 2011 13:51:42 GMT -5
I did the same thing in my first game with grapeshot, and only afterwards realised that I'd missed aspects of the rules - see your other thread for a link to my earlier enquiries on this.
Grapeshot hits are resolved as individual one point attacks versus armour, each one rounding to zero if it is non-penetrating. So, if your opponent fielded a fleet of RDF battlecruisers with armour 7 and a few batteries of railguns that would wipe your fleet out as fast as they could catch them.
Grapeshot penetration would be 1d6 versus 7 armour - so no penetrating hits at all - all you'd have is a shield stripper with no heavy hitter weapons in your fleet. And with railgun batteries he'd be rolling 1d10+2 penetration against your armour of 2, so every hit of his would penetrate.
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