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Balance wrote:It seems like the older canon was also that the Enterprise-sized ship was massive and most enemies used lighter vessels... Is this true of the SFB version of the setting?

In the Starfleet Universe, Federation ships tend to have more of what are typically referred to as "padding" - i.e. things like more hull spaces and labs (jokingly refered to as "Federation Armor") than other empires do. The end result is that Federation ships can typically take more punishment than other ships of a similar size class. The only other empire that loads up on the hull for their ships are the Hydrans at the far corner of the local region of space. And since their basic tactic for many of their ships basically amounts to, "Fly up to point blank range, take their best shot, and then kill them," I think you can understand why that would be...

Enterprise was a medium ship, perhaps even on the smaller side of medium. Enterprise as a CA heavy Cruiser, about as midline as you can get in the game. size/power/firepower basically went Destroyers<Frigates><Light Cruisers><Heavy Cruisers><Battlecruisers><Dreadnoughts><Battleships, with most races having equivelants to each class. Theres a LOT of variants for these classes as well as carriers and transports and lots of "upgunned" stuff but most fall into one of those categories. This of course is very differant from actual Star Trek, where Enterprise was indeed a very large and powerful ship compared to what most races could put out there.

Balance pretty much nailed ACtA, fun and fast with enough depth to keep things interesting while easy to play without having to look too many rules or charts up, but the balance of the game totally changed edition to edition and was skewed by their "points" system, which thankfully they are dropping for actual points values.

Originally you had 5 levels of play patrol><skirmish><raid><battle><war, and each ship was a corresponding class. You picked a game size and had 5 slots to chose, ships of the same class as the battle filled 1 slot, or you could take 2 ships of a size lower than the battle, or spend 2 slots to get a larger ship etc. It works great in theory, but in practice you always had a raid class ship that was better than the other raid class ships, so you only took that one, or you had ships that were slightly too powerfl for a class that got bumped up to the next class, but weren't nearly powerful enough to be in the next class and never saw action. Also, as Balance said, it was better to spend your point spamming smaller ships than taking the big guys.

With this using real points, we shouldn't have this issue so long as they get the cost right.>

Alendrel wrote:
They have hexless miniature rules, and the scale of the ship doesn't matter. You place a shield/firing arc diagram around the base of the miniature, and everything is measured from the post.

Many starship games use a similar theory. The idea is that ships are so small in comparison to the distances that for them to be in scale with the weapon ranges, the ships would be too small to see, basically about the size of the tip on the post. Hence the reason they use the post as the measure point.

That being said...I still like my ships to be in scale with each other. It just bothers me to have a destroyer be the same size as a battleship.

I do not care to much about the particular scale used, but would like for ships to be in scale to one another. Since existing ships are already done, why not keep that scale?

Otherwise it is pretty hard to expand your fleet.

lasgunpacker wrote:Since existing ships are already done, why not keep that scale?

It's Mongoose. So the reason to not keep that scale is that they will want to sell new (their own) models. And probably because their new models will be the BEST STARSHIP MODELS EVER MADE!!1!one!!!, and will represent a revolution in gaming standards. Until they're actually released, at which point Mongoose will tell us that they intended them to be awesome, and it's not their fault that they aren't as good as promised, and so we should buy them anyway.

Mongooseland must be an exciting place to live.

Yeah, the Mongoose aspect should give anyone pause after the pre-painted miniatures thing blew up in their face.

And I think we have all been made aware recently of how resin can have production issues.

SVC did post that Mongoose pretty much insisted on the larger scale, on the basis they'd better show off the improved detail from the 3D computer sculpting and resin casting (and honestly, some of the Starline 2400 sculpts are...sub-optimal).

As noted, the Enterprise is a Federation heavy cruiser (CA). Heavy cruisers are basically the largest workhorses of a fleet. The larger classes are either introduced later in the timeline as an upgunning of the CA (the heavy battlecruiser classes), or were built in limited numbers to serve as fleet flagships (dreadnoughts). Battleships are even larger versions of dreadnoughts (a dreadnough is basically 1.5x CA, a battleship is 2x CA). However, of the core SFB races, the Klingons are the only ones to have actually built and used battleships.

The padding that Eumerin mentions amounts to maybe a 10% or so increase in damage absorption capability once taking damage through a down shield, compare to equivalent ships of that class of other empires. It doesn't sound like much, but it can make for a critical edge once the first set of internals are traded.

Mmmmm.. Lyran and Klingon resculpts. Might pick it up just for that fact.

lasgunpacker wrote:I do not care to much about the particular scale used, but would like for ships to be in scale to one another.

Thats pretty much what I was saying.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Alendrel wrote:

The padding that Eumerin mentions amounts to maybe a 10% or so increase in damage absorption capability once taking damage through a down shield, compare to equivalent ships of that class of other empires. It doesn't sound like much, but it can make for a critical edge once the first set of internals are traded.

I want my Fed CA to play a recording of Spock saying "the hull has been compromised" whenever it takes an internal.

All you had to add was MONGOOSE to keep me away from it.

I'll stick to my old school game, thank you very much. I need Them mucking it up like they did the Starship troopers, Judge Dredd, BF2 evolution, B5, and any other stuff they touch with thier reverse Midas Touch to sour my milk even more?

No thanks.

There was and is nothing wrong with the Star Trek game that needs that form of abuse.

I gave waaaayyyy too many hours of my life to SFB as a teenager, the "game that seemed really cool but actually sucked to play". My favorite memory is the 8 hour convention game in which I never got to fire my weapons at the enemy and shot them at an ally on the last turn in frustration....

I do like space games in general though and wouldn't mind playing more. If its fast paced and fun, that is.

Some of the SFB races were quite interesting from a tactical perspective - like the Tholians who spun webs across the board...

Aaaaagh! Way too much of my brain is full of this crap. I can picture the tholian Patrol Cruiser sheet - 4 phaser-I in the front, two web generators near the rear...

Original Starfire - now that was a game!

Very interested in seeing the finished works.