Hey guys. I want to know what the biggest/craziest SFB game y'all have played was. My craziest: A fed CVA and its escorts versus an Andro Dominator(one of the variants with extra hangar space) loaded with MWP's and maulers! It's been a several years since this game happened, so I don't remember all the details. I remember there was one glorious impulse where I fired, like, 20 photons at once(unfortunately, my rolls were not very glorious). Also, there was a decisive point in the battle when I got my opponent's "Battle Ball"(a whole bunch of MWP's in the same hex) to run into a T-bomb. Also, his Terminators annihilated all my escorts and chewed up my carrier pretty bad. I managed to win, but neither of us were very good at SFB at the time. It was still fun as hell though. So, what's the most ridiculous battle you've played in SFB?
If it counts, whenever I play Starfleet Command 2 or Orion Pirates, whenever I get three ships, the game triples the number of ships I have to fight whenever I do a Patrol, convoy escort, or shipyard/starbase defense missions. During one shipyard defense mission, I had a BB and two heavy cruiser escorts (I normally pick the CB, CAD, and/or the TMP-inspired CAI) and I ended up having to defend the shipyard against 9 Romulan ships (I think at least one dreadnought). I lost, badly.
I haven't played too many games yet, so the one I talked about in this thread would have to qualify. Three frigates vs a dreadnought would probably qualify as crazy. Marian
the last game i remember me and 6 friends each had a cruiser from a differant race i forget what types and we just tried to blow crap out of each other i lost but it was a good laugh
Many years ago we used to play SFB at a friends house. We would pick a number of BPV points and a race and fight with whatever you could buy. I discovered the WYN auxiliary battle cruiser, which at that time was hugely unvalued in BPV rating and way over powered for what was basically a heavy freighter. I was able to buy three of these things and proceeded to wipe everyone off the map. It was the first and last time it was allowed in our game. Later they fixed some of the issues, but went too far the other way making it pretty much useless.
Cool. Sounds like you guys have had some fun battles. Another "crazy" battle I've had was me and five friends all piloting battleships of different races in a free-for-all battle. Last battleship standing wins. We deleted the fighters and gunboats, just the BB's themselves. I was the ISC BB, and we also had Fed, Klingon, Gorn, Hydran, and Kzinti. The fight started off slow, as no one wanted to anger an opponent and get smoked first. But there was tons of political manuevering, alliances being formed and broken. Eventually I lost out to my opportunistic ally, who stood by my side just long enough to get me to trust him, then rammed a million plasma torps up my rear when my back was turned! (Sneaky bastard!) It was extremely fun. Since we were playing battleships, huge amounts of firepower were being hurled around. Ships were ripped asunder in short order. The Hydran ended up winning that one, which was ironic, because he was the only one that didn't attempt to ally with anyone. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere, but I don't wanna learn it! LOL Damn Hydrans.
I love SFB and have recently begun playing again. Played lots of games back in the 80s. One I remember was a classic cruiser duel, a Fed CA Constitution Class and a Klingon D-7 Battlecruiser duking it out. I was the Fed captain and he was the Klingon skipper. This brutal game saw both ships mauling the hell out of each other, until C's D-7 lost it's last weapon. Now, running is anethema to the Klingon mind, but with nothing to shoot at me, what else could he do? Besides, I still had firepower, one torpedo tube. ONE torpedo tube with one fully overloaded photon torpedo. If I could hit him with it, it would be enough to shatter his ship. Problem with it, is that overloaded photons are unstable, drastically shortening their range. As his ship slowly turn around and began to accelerate away, I saw my dilemma. To pursue him, I'd have to use the energy holding my torpedo to kick in what's left of my engines. But at that point, there would be no point, as I'd have nothing with which to shoot. So I threw a few "P'tach!"s at him, but he wouldn't take the bait. So as my ship began to limp it's way back to base, I went to my quarters to begin composing a log about the one that got away...
This was close to 20 years ago, but it was "Assault on a Starbase", the GM swore this was a no-win scenario. One of our group said she could take it. So we played Gorn attack group vs. Romulan starbase. We set it up straight out of the rules and ran the 32 implulse chart. The GM and three players ran the Romulans. On our side our commander ran the DN and support ships. Another player ran a couple of ships, and I was in command of three Gorn ships. We were under strict orders. We entered the board and launched every missile and drone we had, wave after wave. The starbase turned a different shield to each wave but we doubled up on three sides anyway. Our ships were to harass and draw away the starbase's support ships and only fire on the starbase if we had no other targets. She moved the DN in to point blank range of the starbase and parked. All that power was allocated to shields and overloading plasma torps. The DN fired only on the starbase and ignored all others, rolling out mines and transporter bombs and tractored them toward the station. We started Friday night & played through till Wed. when we dropped a shield on our DN to beam off the crew and then re-allocated all remaining power to movement and rammed it into the starbase. He took 15 minutes to calculate the damage and threw in the towel declaring our victory. The starbase was totaled and the GM ruled that the Romulans would have to self-destruct what was left to prevent any tech from falling into Gorn hands. The remaining Romulan craft would warp-disengage and leave the board.
You mean I'm not the only girl who plays Star Fleet Battles? There goes my claim to fame... =p Marian
Two candidates: 1) Federation DD vs. Kzinti CV vs. Federation Large Freighter. The Freighter nearly won. 2) Two Klingon D6s were dispatched to rendezvous with a Romulan War Eagle to gain the secret of the cloaking device. Since the Klingons had never seen a Romulan, an Orion frigate pretended to be the contact. Meanwhile, a Gorn cruiser showed up to disrupt the deal just as the two rival Klingons blasted hell out of each other. Finally, the rightful Romulan showed up to chase the Orion away.
You highlight one of the major problems with the board game version, the time it takes to play. Specifically how long it takes to calculate damage. I wrote a damage program in BASIC to quickly allocate damage and keep the game moving. I had to keep rewriting it for different platforms as time went on. I imagine someone has come up with a pretty kickass Visual Basic version by now.
Sure, the damage system for SFB is a little cumbersome, but it's a detail crunching game, intended for those with longer attention spans. That, the social aspect and just sheer starship porn goodness are why I play the game. Don't really cotton to computer assistance. Though I will say Babylon 5 Wars is an even better starship combat game. Vector based, with a damage system that is quicker, yet just as crunchy. Both games have minis that complement each other, btw... Oh, girls commanding starships? Awesome!
Rolling damage brings the game to a dead stop when a bunch of players are involved. If you cause a alot of damage everything else stops while the two players involved roll damage and mark the SSD. Everyone else is bored waiting for it to end. Then everyone has to refocus on the situation and remember what their plans were. Plus there is the "shit, which impulse was it again" syndrome.
If there was a program where you could just enter the type of ship, enter the damage amount, and get back a list of which boxes to mark off, I'd use it. Marian
One of the best features of FedCom is the damage allocation system. It's a little less random but it goes, way, way faster.
That's the way my program worked. You did need to enter the SSD for each ship one time and save to disc. I have no idea if I still have a copy on a floppy someplace...