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Post by finarvyn on Jan 29, 2010 9:39:13 GMT -5
Okay, not technically a Star Trek ship combat game, but hear me out.... 1. It was published by Task Force Games, the same dudes who gave us Star Fleet Battles. 2. It was published as Microgame #1 and SFB was Microgame #4, so it's a similar era of game design. What I'm thinking is this: SFB is a pretty complex game but has some really neat ideas. The strength of SFB to me is the SSD sheets for each ship, so you can check off boxes as you lose shields, transporters, engines, or whatever. SFB can be as realistic as you like, but only simplifies so much. Starfire has a different approach. (I'll have to dust off the rules for some details because I haven't played it in 20 years, but here is the essence....). When you get a starship it is rated somewhat the same as in SFB, but the damage is taken in a more pre-determined order rather than at random from the SFB damage chart. A ship might look like this: Enterprise HHEEPSS -- totally made up. What this could mean is two hull (H), two engine (E), a phaser (P), and two shields (S). So if the ship took 3 hits I think it would lose its shields and its phaser, assuming that hits are crossed off right to left. There may also have been a rule about a "critical" hit jumping over shields and directly hitting a ship's system, but it's been too long for me to recall for certain. Anyway, I was thinking that it would be pretty easy to create a template for each type of Star Trek ship. A lot easier than making an SSD, I'm thinking. Anyone play this? Does it sound like a good system for Star Trek? Thoughts or comments?
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Post by Falconer on Jan 29, 2010 9:50:20 GMT -5
I was just thinking about this and wondering how it played! I’d like to hear anyone’s experiences or any further info that might be out there.
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Post by finarvyn on Jan 29, 2010 9:52:58 GMT -5
I was just thinking about this and wondering how it played! I’d like to hear anyone’s experiences or any further info that might be out there. Oh, great. I may have to hit the xerox machine again.
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Post by finarvyn on Jan 29, 2010 10:08:11 GMT -5
I have Starfire I, II, and III at home and haven't looked at them for a long time, but here are a few more details that I remember off the top of my head...
Starfire was Microgame #1, which means it was a small booklet in a plastic bag along with ship counters and such. Starfire was a basic starship combat system where I think you got to design your own ship. In other words, with the example I gave in my OP I could have moved around the hits so that I lost my engines and phasers first and lost my shields at the end. I think there were some rules about where to place hull hits, and clearly you wanted your shields far to the right of the list, but otherwise I think you had a lot of control over how you arranged your hits. (If I do a Star Trek conversion, I would probably make up a template instead of self-design.)
Starfire II was also a small booklet. I don't recall much about it other than the fact that it expanded on the earlier rules set. (Probably more ship systems and teh like. I really don't remember.) :-(
Starfire III was another small booklet. This one was designed to bring campaign rules into the game. I think it brought in an economic system, research, exploration, and similar topics. I didn't use it much, either.
I know that Starfire has been re-issued several times since 1980, but I haven't seen any of those versions and have no idea how much the system evolved. What I do know is that the original 1979 Starfire minigame was pretty slick and simple to play. I'll look for my booklets and give more details if anyone is interested.
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Post by finarvyn on Jan 29, 2010 10:18:01 GMT -5
I found a Wikipedia article about Starfire and it has a lot more information than my earlier post. I also noticed that there were some Starfire books published and that one of the authors is ... ... wait for it ... ... David Weber. (The Honor Harrington guy. Vulcanridr will be haunting used bookstores looking for these, I'll bet!)
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Post by Ronin84 on Jan 29, 2010 10:25:50 GMT -5
I found a Wikipedia article about Starfire and it has a lot more information than my earlier post. I also noticed that there were some Starfire books published and that one of the authors is ... ... wait for it ... ... David Weber. (The Honor Harrington guy. Vulcanridr will be haunting used bookstores looking for these, I'll bet!) Played that a couple of times after school with some friends, we enjoyed it well enough!
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Post by blackbat242 on Jan 31, 2010 0:20:48 GMT -5
I found a Wikipedia article about Starfire and it has a lot more information than my earlier post. I also noticed that there were some Starfire books published and that one of the authors is ... ... wait for it ... ... David Weber. (The Honor Harrington guy. Vulcanridr will be haunting used bookstores looking for these, I'll bet!) I've got the first 4 of those Weber books (have since they came out)... even though I never played the game.
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Post by putraack on Feb 2, 2010 12:28:05 GMT -5
Oh, yeah, if you've played this, you can see where Weber's Honorverse came from. The tech-of-the week and heavy missile environments appear early in that game.
I played a lot of this in the 80s, as well as SFB. It's designed so that you can play fleets, and build fleets, too. I played the pocket game edition, the box-set edition, and playtested the version that SDS later released. I have or had everything printed for it, up to about 1995, including all of Nexus magazine.
The ship-systems line ran from left to right, BTW. Shields, then armor, then however you arranged things. (Hint: put the life support systems-- code Lh-- next to last!)
As for Star Trek, the tactical game would be just fine, especially if you like designing your own ships. You'd have to change the names on the weapons (to phasers, disruptors, etc.), but that's no biggie. There are a lot of different weapons and systems, and most of them are somewhat unique in their effects. There's fighters, small gunboats, bases and planetary forts, minefields, super-missiles and counter-missiles, jamming, fire-control, datalink, and on and on and on.
The strategic level game would need some work on the part of a referee-- it's fantastic for rolling up star systems and empires, but the game relies on "warp points" or wormholes to zip from system to system. A gamemaster will have to cobble up his own warp-speed rules and map of how far from system 001 to system 002, and so on. Campaigns sometimes broke down when one side would fortify the snot out of its warp points, and the enemy had to shove ships through one at a time, hoping they all wouldn't die right away. As an adjunct to a role-playing game, it would be useful for zipping through battles pretty quick, but the players wouldn't have much to do, unless they are playing different ships/forces in each side.
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Post by aramis on Feb 3, 2010 20:53:43 GMT -5
Okay, not technically a Star Trek ship combat game, but hear me out.... 1. It was published by Task Force Games, the same dudes who gave us Star Fleet Battles. 2. It was published as Microgame #1 and SFB was Microgame #4, so it's a similar era of game design. What I'm thinking is this: SFB is a pretty complex game but has some really neat ideas. The strength of SFB to me is the SSD sheets for each ship, so you can check off boxes as you lose shields, transporters, engines, or whatever. SFB can be as realistic as you like, but only simplifies so much. Starfire has a different approach. (I'll have to dust off the rules for some details because I haven't played it in 20 years, but here is the essence....). When you get a starship it is rated somewhat the same as in SFB, but the damage is taken in a more pre-determined order rather than at random from the SFB damage chart. A ship might look like this: Enterprise HHEEPSS -- totally made up. What this could mean is two hull (H), two engine (E), a phaser (P), and two shields (S). So if the ship took 3 hits I think it would lose its shields and its phaser, assuming that hits are crossed off right to left. There may also have been a rule about a "critical" hit jumping over shields and directly hitting a ship's system, but it's been too long for me to recall for certain. Anyway, I was thinking that it would be pretty easy to create a template for each type of Star Trek ship. A lot easier than making an SSD, I'm thinking. Anyone play this? Does it sound like a good system for Star Trek? Thoughts or comments? 1) your example is backwards; Starfire, for very good damage taking reasons, lists left to right Shields, Armor, then internals. SSEEHH Starfire's line developer was, for some time, Mr. David Webber... the novels were an offshoot of his writing the second ed backstory. He and Todd W. Crump seem to have driven the game ell away from SVC's "simple game" that you "can use every counter in the game in one battle"... GSF, BTW, is incompatible with all prior editions. Marvin, who holds the rights at the moment, didn't seem happy when I suggested a 1.5E... 1E rules, but 3rd ed style dice mechanics...
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Post by finarvyn on Feb 3, 2010 21:19:42 GMT -5
I just discovered a pre-1E Starfire rules set on e-bay. (1E is supposed to be a 1979 game and this one is dated 1975. The publisher is "Eagle Games, Ltd." and it would appear that Steven Cole put this together as part of a game-design challenge or something.
I'll let you know when I get it. :-)
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Post by theredpriest on Feb 3, 2010 21:34:45 GMT -5
Starfire rocks. I like the way it used escalating scenarios to teach the rules.
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Post by finarvyn on Feb 9, 2010 10:08:06 GMT -5
I'll let you know when I get it. :-) It came in yesterday and is certainly a lot shorter than the pocket game Starfire I. Rules are in somewhat small font on a single side of a sheet of legal-sized green paper. I'll probably type it up (so I can have a copy with larger font size) for me to use when I play and I can report how many regular-sized pages it turns into at that point.
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