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Star Fleet Battles Online?
Kulthos
Member Posts: 89
This is one game I would love to see hit the market. Spaceship games today lack depth in their combat systems. I would love to see something that has firing arcs, directional damage, power management, and similar features. The death penalty issue would be low, as each empire has tons of ships. Heck, they are on the Enterprise "R" or something in the movies.
Comments
I miss that game! A turn based multiplayer game might be kind of fun. Like the old Victory series of games from Atomic.
Didn't they make a Star Fleet battles based single player game with some online play? I know it is out there and while not exactly like the board/miniatures game it was close. SFB is a "monster" game that takes lots of time to learn and even more time to master, but in an MMO it might work for the hardcore players.
""But Coyote, you could learn! You only prefer keyboard and mouse because that's all you've ever known!" You might say right before you hug a rainforest and walk in sandals to your drum circle where you're trying to raise group consciousness of ladybugs or whatever it is you dirty goddamn hippies do when you're not busy smoking pot and smelling bad."
Coyote's Howling: Death of the Computer
Have you tried EVE?
www.sfbonline.com/index.jsp
Actually they have done this, not to the MMO status but they have made a "Starfleet Battles" style of game and it was VERY good. Go pick up Starfleet command, and Starfleet command 2, probably the 2 best out there. The first one stuck with the original rules more, and the secone one they did a bit of tweaking for balance which is what hurt them from that point on. All are very good pace and the ability to join multiplayer battles is there. Highly recommend this game, as for a MMO replicating Starfleet Battles, I dont' think it would fly. The whole point of the game was to overcome your own ships tacticle dissadvantages, balance is not something you can do in that game. As soon as balance starts to come into focus for the developers the game now loses its original appeal.
You are right though the game was great and still is, I have a few friends that still play it, talk about a TRUE hard core Paper and pencil game...LOL.
Have you tried EVE?
EVE is a good game but does it use firing arcs and energy balancing? One of the big appeals of SFBs is that you only had so much energy your ship produced which had to be effectively allocated to various systems like you weapons and engine. So on some ships if you wanted to fire all you weapons you had to take a cut in speed for example. Also, once you started to take damage to your power producing systems you could get to a siuation of deciding to either move or shoot. The firing arcs also timited what weapons you could fire so if you powered a phaser and the enemy moved out of its arc you basically wasted the power for that turn.
""But Coyote, you could learn! You only prefer keyboard and mouse because that's all you've ever known!" You might say right before you hug a rainforest and walk in sandals to your drum circle where you're trying to raise group consciousness of ladybugs or whatever it is you dirty goddamn hippies do when you're not busy smoking pot and smelling bad."
Coyote's Howling: Death of the Computer
The nice thing about existing pen and paper mechanics is that you could add that system very neatly to any existing space based MMO. Or use it for the ship combat in any Star Trek MMO.
It would be nice however if the marines or saboteurs you teleported over could actually play out their roles if they chose rather than be just a dice role. Make it into more of a team game.
I definitely played a PC game conversion of this Star Trek system before, a long time ago. Can't remember what it was called. Single player job.
Have you tried EVE?
EVE is a good game but does it use firing arcs and energy balancing? One of the big appeals of SFBs is that you only had so much energy your ship produced which had to be effectively allocated to various systems like you weapons and engine. So on some ships if you wanted to fire all you weapons you had to take a cut in speed for example. Also, once you started to take damage to your power producing systems you could get to a siuation of deciding to either move or shoot. The firing arcs also timited what weapons you could fire so if you powered a phaser and the enemy moved out of its arc you basically wasted the power for that turn.
It has a similar setup, I think there is a 14 day free trial to play if you want to see for yourself what the ship combat mechanics are like.
An SFB MMO could work as part of a Star Trek MMO. Something Spaceship only could be a bit limited for most people likely. SFB is a hard core PnP game, in that it takes forever to resolve fights. With Starfleet Command I was cheering that a computer was quickly doing all of the calculations.
As for EVE, it is really simplistic compared to SFB. I would love more depth. I am annoyed at the lack of firing arcs, the lack of timing required, and the fact that a ship with 1% structure left has the same energy output and firepower as a ship right out of the docks.
I liked Battlefleet Gothic too, which was simplified for big PnP fleet battles. For one-on-one fighting SFB was great, for fleets BFG was a lot easier.