[geeks] SFB (was Re: [rescue] Biggest drives (and SVM) in a U60?)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 @ 20:28 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:

> > I admit, it was really hard to play for long with the advanced rules,
> > but it sure was a better game if you did.
> 
> That's why we automated a lot of stuff like damage resolution.  :)  It
> saved time.

I wrote programs for Atari and other computers, and calculators.

Of course, we also came up with ways of speeding things up even by hand.

It was a necessity if you wanted to play more than a few minutes of game
time.

> > Klingon firing arcs: that was deliberate. Klingons focused on forward
> > firepower and boarding capabilities. Most of their ships have a large
> > rear blind spot. It would have been wrong for SFB to do otherwise.
> > Their construction methods were inferior to the Federation, and their
> > philosophy was expansionist and warlike.  They were belligerants.
> 
> Sure.  That's why it was so incomprehensible that their ships, as
> warship designs, were so bad, and their forward firepower so relatively
> poor compared to what it could, and should, have been with only minor
> changes to the firing arcs of the existing weapons.

I just dug mine out, and I have several Klingon SSDs that have *MASSIVE*
forward firepower and large banks of boarding pads.

A vanilla D7 isn't much, but that pretty well matches what most of them
were like.  Remember that in the "history" D7's almost always traveled
in threes.

> > By contrast, the Federation vessels were optimized for long range
> > combat, defensive shielding, minimization of internal damage, and large
> > firing arcs instead of forward firepower.  Again, it would have been
> > wrong for SFB to correct that.  The Federation's primary strengths and
> > philosophies were exploration, research, diplomacy, and expansion of the
> > UFP territory.  They were defensive by nature.
> 
> Sure, the Federation wasn't in the business of building warships.  But
> if they were as badly unbalanced as they appeared to be in SFB, the
> Klingons and Romulans would have rolled up the Federation like a rug.

Well, I didn't have a problem in most engagements. The basic game didn't
come with very many SSD's, and especially was lacking the the NCC
upgrades of later time periods.

It's also possible I have some of the newer material.  My game is the
1984 edition, but I think some of my SSDs are from a later revision.

> > However, it doesn't take into account limitations not covered by a
> > purely materialistic view of BPV.  Or at least, your description doesn't
> > appear to.  It looks like you did a pure optimization without regard to
> > wether or not such a ship could have been built.
> 
> Depends what you mean my "materialistic view of BPV".  We took into
> account just about every factor we could think of -- including firing
> arcs, torpedo overloads, damage repair capabilities etc.

That's not what I mean.

You optimized the ship as if they could build it however they wanted,
right?

That's not taking into account the faction's abilities as ship builders.

You took the BPV of a vessel, and created systems that fit in that
purely material/quantitative limit, right?

What I'm saying is that each race could not have built ships like that.
They each had limitations in what kinds of designs they could build.

You can't just lay out a ship maximizing the user of build points,
because each race had limits that would prevent that.

As far as I know, Task Force Games never created any rules that tied BPV
and build limitations together in a way that would let you design new
ships for the various races and still accurately reflect their unique
abilities and limitations.

> Even in the Commander's Ruleset (the only one we used), the only BPV
> rules provided were for minor modifications to add or upgrade a weapon
> here or there.  That's why we had to put so much work into
> reverse-engineering them.

Did you ever look at the Designers Ruleset?  I would like to get a copy.

> > Ironically it was the orignal series where you got to see more realistic
> > high speed combat that took ship design into account.  I'm thinking of
> > the meeting with the Romulans and their slow ship but powerful mauler
> > gun, or the high speed fight with the Gorn warship.  
> 
> I actually haven't seen those episodes.

The Romulan encounter was the first after 300 years, and the Gorn fight
ended up on a planet where some alien race made Kirk and the Gorn
captain fight hand-to-hand. The "Metrones", but tall pale guys... :)

> There was only about one episode that I recall which showed the
> flexibility of the Galaxy Class's phaser array, and it was against
> pretty minor targets.
> 
> Personally, I'm disappointed we never saw more of the Excelsior class.

The new computer games are not too bad.  They follow a lot of the SFB
rules and cover a lot more ships than you could ever cover using the
paper SSDs.

Unfortunately, it was hard to manage a large battle, and they balanced
the game too much, making the ships too much alike.

It would be much more interesting to have to work around the limits of
each race's ships, rather than try to equalize them.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [javalin: an unwieldy programming weapon used
to stab a software project through the heart until dead]