SFBness

[dmaze]

Back in high school, I was really into Star Fleet Battles (not that I ever particularly had people to play with). Now that I'm not a hosed little undergrad anymore and know other people who know the game, I asked my parents to ship me all of my bits. UPS received the package on December 6; it hasn't been seen since.

So now my parents got me the Captain's Edition, which is a step up from all of my old stuff. (What? ADB revised the game in the early 90's? Oh, yeah.) I taught one of my housemates the basics of the game. It was fun, if somewhat slow; we were fighting two battle groups against each other, and one of his cruisers was all but totalled in exchange for a little internal damage (right, plus four downed shields, enh) on my dreadnought.

I started reading through the rulebook this morning to see what details I had forgotten and if I'd notice anything changing. Some things did in fact disagree with my memory (I thought when I'd played recently that faster ships moved first, but the rules clearly say slower first). Two interesting observations:

It's not that the rules are complicated so much as exhaustive. Well, okay, so the rules are complicated too. But I did get a strong sense that SFB got playtested enough by nitpickers that most of the corner cases do get covered, and there are useful cross-references everywhere. Shield facing, for example, is usually simple, but if the direct line from the firing ship to the target is exactly along the line between two hexes then there's an algorithm to figure it out. I couldn't immediately find the definition of a crippled ship, but I remembered that crippled ships could use emergency life support and found the reference to (S4.2) I was looking for in the power allocation section.

Backwards compatibility leads to bit rot. A design goal of the Captain's Edition was apparently to interoperate with the old Commander's Edition. So if a rule was introduced in Volume III of the Commander's Edition, it would have a high rule number, but then if they thought it was fundamental, it made it into the Captain's Edition Basic Set with the original rule number. The result is that the rule numbering makes no sense at all, apart from the high-level organization, because in between two sections in the same rulebook might be rules from three different expansions.

Comments

[visage.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if there's one thing to be said for SFB it's that it's been playtested thoroughly.

Btw, ADB is working on a simplified version of SFB (called "Federation Commander"), with only 8 impulses per turn, pay-as-you-go energy, and various other simplifications (but using the SFB ship sheets). I expect it'll really speed up the game.

[dcltdw]

That might even the game worth playing. :)

The cost of learning the game just seemed too high: you had to play a lot to learn conventions ("I should start charging now, because I'll be in range in 2 turns"). I think this is why I never got into dippy ("Oh, I just spent 4 days, only to be blown away by an opening move everyone except me knows?")

[dmaze]

I don't claim to be particularly good at it, just to have a good familiarity with the rules. I've played maybe 3-4 times in the past year? So we should make plans sometime.