Is Star Fleet Battles officially dead?

[StarCruiser]

Yep - I wish I could remember where that was but, it was quite a few years back (late 90's?). I'm not sure if they were using any of the ol' standard game systems or it was something new/experimental. I believe the support rods were setup to allow height to be adjusted for a semi-3D effect.

 

[Sgt_G]

Sounds like something Ken Burnside was working on with his Attack Vector: Tactical 3d space-combat game (by Ad Astra Games).

 

[ChallengerHK]

I think what Starcruiser is saying is that they could be raised and lowered. I bought Ken's starter pack (still haven't played it), but if I recall correctly his system allows a ship to roll but doesn't have any altitude delta.

 

[StarCruiser]

^ What he said!

Roll pitch and yaw control in a game -MIGHT- be interesting but, it's easy enough to allow for the effect that those maneuvers would create without adding that complexity to the game. Even altitude differences are probably actually unneeded in a game (despite Spock's comment in ST2 about "2 dimensional thinking").

In an air combat game, all of those are extremely important since different fighters (for example) would have different performance envelopes and that would effect the nature of an engagement.

I used to play a LOT of older flight combat sims on PC (classic Red Baron, Aces over Europe etc...) and you definitely needed to understand the difference between two aircraft to use them correctly. Example - never try to turn inside of a Fokker Dr.1 or Mitsubishi Zero! Use your speed advantage...

In space combat, reorienting the ship without a vector change would compensate for any significant firing arc issues... The way Star Trek ships are portrayed in classic Star Trek (ignore the newer crap) the range of weapons is such that all you would need to do is point the ship and shoot.

 

[Sgt_G]

No, if I recall, he has stackable riser blocks for altitude. He said the game could be adapted to the adjustable stands.

 

[ChallengerHK]

Huh. Either that's not in the starter pack, or I just never got that far. I remember thinking that what he did was a cool idea but didn't go far enough, and assumed that that was a choice made to keep it from being too complex. I might have been wrong.

 

[trynda1701]

Here's some people playing SFB!

http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=509908

 

[ChallengerHK]

What are the plastic pieces under the minis?

 

[StarCruiser]

Might be better to give the original link:

https://skisgames.blogspot.com/2019/02/rapiercon-2019-saturday-2-star-fleet.html

 

[ChallengerHK]

Savannah. Well, it's good to see people playing, and maybe I need to try cons again. When I go into a store looking to play a game, they say "Oh, do you want Warhammer or Magic?" :-)

 

[Sgt_G]

@ChallengerHK ... I just checked the AV:T tutorial PDF. Search for "stacking tile". (A5.111) says "White stacking tiles are one altitude level, light blue are 4, dark blue are 16, and black is a minus sign."

 

[ChallengerHK]

Have you had a chance to play the game? If so, what are your thoughts on it?

 

[trynda1701]

Might be better to give the original link:

https://skisgames.blogspot.com/2019/02/rapiercon-2019-saturday-2-star-fleet.html

Yeah, that 's a good idea! In fact, here's more SFB games from that same blog!

https://skisgames.blogspot.com/search/label/Star Fleet Battles

 

[Sgt_G]

No, I have not played it. I did see it in action two or three times. i appeared to go smoother than I expected, given its complexity rating.

 

[ChallengerHK]

Good to hear that it looked smooth. I went in to a local store which had just opened about a year ago, and I took the starter pack, as well as Speed Circuit, Gettysburg, and the Gondor mini game from SPI's Lord of the Rings. No interest in any of it, but as I said before, at least for the half dozen or so stores which are local to me, people go in to play Magic and Warhammer.

 

[Sgt_G]

FYI: Captain's Log # 53 is now available on the ADB store web site.

 

[ChallengerHK]

It's hard for me to imagine the situation that would induce me to give money to Steve Cole

 

[publiusr]

I doubt you've played the "Star Fleet Battle Manual" (Lou Zocchi's game from the early 70's).
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3667/star-fleet-battle-manual

Nice TTA looking ship on the back cover. I never knew about this--just the mini's--which are very good.

 

[ChallengerHK]

Looks like they're retooling the tournament system. Remains to be seen how well this will do.

The system being replaced had people signing up for free, but frequently real life would get in the way and games would stretch out over weeks or even months. The new system has people pay to sign up, with the caveat that, should they not be available to play, they forfeit. Sounds simple and workable, but the issue I see is that, if real life got in the way before, it will continue to get in the way; real life tends to consider entry fees irrelevant. If people forfeit their entry fees, they're far more likely to decide that it might not be worth while to sign up again.

I might well be wrong. I predicted that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was too stupid an idea to ever succeed. But I just don't see this solving the problem. My guess is that they'll go through 2 or 3 iterations of this, and they'll have few people signing up.

 

[StarCruiser]

Yep - TMNT was NOT something I expected to last that long yet...they're still around (in one form or another).

The Jury's still out on any pay to play tournament system...