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Star Fleet Battles Basic Set.| Part of the article series on Star Fleet Universe |
|---|
| Games |
| Star Fleet Battles |
| Federation Commander |
| Federation and Empire |
| Prime Directive (role-playing game) |
| Star Fleet Battle Force |
| Star Trek: Starfleet Command |
| Star Trek: Starfleet Command II: Empires at War |
| Star Trek: Starfleet Command: Orion Pirates |
| Captain's Log |
Star Fleet Battles (SFB) is a tactical board wargame set in an offshoot of the Star Trek setting called the Star Fleet Universe. Originally created in 1979 by Stephen V. Cole, it has had four major editions. The current edition is published by Amarillo Design Bureau Inc. as Star Fleet Battles, Captain's Edition. Star Fleet Battles was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming, Arts, & Design Hall of Fame in 2005 where they stated that "Star Fleet Battles literally defined the genre of spaceship combat games in the early 1980s, and was the first game that combined a major license with 'high re-playability'." In his 2007 essay, Bruce Nesmith stated "No other game in hobby game history so completely captures the feel of ship-to-ship combat in space than Star Fleet Battles. The fact that it does so in the Star Fleet Universe is icing on the cake."
Star Fleet Battles is a ship-to-ship warfare simulation game, which uses cardboard counters to represent the ships, shuttles, seeking weapons, terrain, and information on a hexagonal map. It is not simply a game, but rather a detailed game system for two or more players (there are some solitaire scenarios). Typically, a player will have one ship in a game, though he can control an entire fleet, if he can keep track of the paperwork and options involved; multiple players can play as teams, with each team splitting up the work of running a squadron or fleet, or a 'free-for-all' fight can be run. Ships represented in the game are typically starships from such classic Star Trek powers as the Federation, Romulan Star Empire, Klingon Empire, or purely Star Fleet Universe creations such as the Hydran Kingdom or Interstellar Concordium.
The game system uses an impulse-based turn system, which is a departure from the traditional I-Go You-Go alternating system used by most wargames. A ship's speed determines how often and when it can move based on a 32 impulse movement chart. Generally, a unit only moves one hex at a time, making 32 the maximum 'speed' in the game. Similar systems are used in games such as Steve Jackson's Car Wars (which uses a 5 phase system) and is designed to more realistically simulate unit movement in an environment where the units can move a great distance in the time needed for non-movement functions (like weapons fire) to occur.
Star Fleet Battles was based on the Star Trek universe as of 1979 and includes elements of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Animated Series. Federation elements were heavily based on concepts from The Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual. Unlike the mainstream Star Trek universe, Star Fleet Battles seems to consider some, but not all of The Animated Series, as being a canon material source, thus leading to the inclusion of aliens such as the Kzinti.
Since the first publication of the game, Star Fleet Battles and the Star Trek universe have diverged considerably as the authors of the game and those of the films and television series have basically ignored each other. The resulting divergent world of Star Fleet Battles is known as the "Star Fleet Universe".
There are several notable games set in this universe, including the video game series Starfleet Command (which combines parts of SFU with parts of canon Star Trek), the role-playing game setting Prime Directive, (currently available for the GURPS and d20 systems), the card game Star Fleet Battle Force, and the strategy game Federation and Empire, as well as the recently released Federation Commander.
Another note is that the license Star Fleet Battles operates under does not allow for direct reference to the characters and detailed events of the Original Series. As such, official material does not include references to Kirk, Spock or use the USS Enterprise directly, though the latter is included in ship listings. This has not prevented oblique references, such as a comment about the first Gorn-Federation meeting as involving “two young captains who fired first, and faced embarrassing questions later.” Other references are monster scenarios loosely based on the planet killer from The Doomsday Machine and the space amoeba from The Immunity Syndrome.
Star Fleet Battles was originally published as a 'pocket-game' in a ziplock bag as "Task Force Game #4" by Task Force Games in 1979. Steve Cole later recalled:
The design of Star Fleet Battles began during 1975... Jim Brown... and I were playing a lot of Jutland.... One afternoon I was studying the Jutland battle that was in progress on my floor (left from the previous evening) when the [Star Trek] re-run of the day came on. I began to consider the possibility of doing a space game on the Jutland system. JagdPanther was in operation at the time, and I had vague thoughts that I could somehow get a license for the game.
By the time Jim came by to collect me for dinner, I had a Federation CA and a Klingon D7 fighting it out. In the brief space of an hour long re-run, I had two SSD's, the proportional movement system, and the charts for phasers and disruptor bolts. All were to change drastically within a week and were to continue evolving for five years, but the start was made.
The company JagdPanther closed down before SFB was finished, but the game was not forgotten, and when Steve Cole and Allen Eldridge decided to start a new company (Task Force Games) Star Fleet Battles was one of several half-finished designs proposed to be published by them.
While the initial format was small, and the number of ships limited, the game was still not simple. This was dictated in part by a desire to do the "definitive Star Fleet game". This meant that it included as much detail as possible from all the source material available. In the mid-70s, this meant the original two series and a number of fan publications. Except for The Original Series itself, none of these materials are considered canon today, but at the time, they were all considered fairly authoritative, especially the Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph, which had originally been blessed by Gene Roddenberry, and from whom Steve Cole got the license to do a Star Trek game.
Elements of these almost forgotten fan productions shaped many aspects of the game. The Technical Manual itself decided the main functions of the Federation Heavy Cruiser, and what other Federation ships looked like. A set of blueprints (probably those drawn by Michael McMaster in 1975) showed the Klingon D7 as having more phasers than the Heavy Cruiser, and disruptors mounted on the engines. The latter became a common feature of Klingon shipbuilding, and the former led to the idea of less powerful phasers for the Klingons. The same blueprints also stated that an older, slightly inferior version of the D7, the D6, was what was sold to the Romulans, and the D7/D6 dichotomy has been at the heart of the Klingon fleet in the game ever since. Two of the novels gave mention of a phaser being mounted on shuttlecraft. This was included, as much to give a reason to use shuttles as anything else. This proved to be the wedge that allowed the introduction of fighters to the game; a feature popular with many players, but also led many to believe that Star Fleet Battles was no longer Star Trek.
Later in 1979, Star Fleet Battles was re-released in a boxed set known as the Designer's Edition. The original plan had been to produce "three interlocking games, all to be published in the 'pocket' format. When 'completed' this trilogy would cover the entire system."
However, the real reason for this plan was that it had been impossible to acquire boxes at an affordable price. When a source of boxes was found, it was decided to do a revised, expanded version instead. The box contained about twice as many ships and scenarios as the original Pocket Edition, and was expanded upon itself by three expansions in the same zip-lock format as the original (named Expansion #1, Expansion #2, and Expansion #3).
These expansions rapidly added many new ships and concepts to the system which are parts of it to this day: The Hydrans, Andromedans and Lyrans were introduced as new empires. 'War cruisers', cheap ships almost, but not quite, as powerful as the heavy cruisers the game was based on. 'Pseudo-fighters' (later renamed 'fast patrol' ships; but retaining the 'PF' designation) were designed to be about as small as a ship could be and still fit in the system. 'X-ships' or 'up-rated cruisers', which were based on the new versions of the Enterprise and Klingon ships seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. However, many things were being re-written, and each expansion included new elements that impacted how previous rules worked, making the entire system something of a jumble. "It was clear that issuing yet another 'expansion kit' that devoted half of its space to correcting previous products was not the answer."
Commander's Edition LogoCommander's Edition was, effectively, a ground-up rewrite of the rules. The old rule-number system was discarded in favor of a completely new alpha-numeric system. The three Expansions were scrapped and re-packaged. However, other than the new (bigger) reorganized rulebook, the initial 1983 release of the boxed set was mostly unchanged from the Designer's Edition, including the box (later printings labeled it Star Fleet Battles: Volume I).
Most of the material (including the new empires) from the Expansions was reorganized and released as Volume II. The bulk of the fighter rules were in Supplement #1, X-ships (now redone not to be based on ST:TMP) were in Supplement #2, and PFs (now renamed as Fast Patrol ships) were in Supplement #3.
From there, Commander's Edition came out with new products for the next half-decade or so. Two Reinforcements packs allowed the purchase of extra counters. Volume III added the Interstellar Concordium and the Neo-Tholians, as well as new ships and new concepts (such as heavy fighters). Nexus magazine was launched as a house organ for Task Force Games, and featured a regular SFB section.
Of lasting importance was the launch of Captain's Log, a continuing semi-periodical journal dedicated to Star Fleet Battles that is still running today. Also, the 'Commander's SSD' was introduced. SSDs had just been a half-sheet diagram of the ship's systems. The new style (which did not appear in Volume I or II), took a full sheet and included extra record-keeping information, such as tracks for drone ammo and shuttles, and firing charts for all the weapons on the ship. A line of nine Commander's SSD Books were produced, the first few of which were mostly involved presenting new-style SSDs for the older ships, the last several of which had all new material.
During this entire period, there had been a constant stream of Errata, and later Addenda (which amounted to the same thing). For a long time, the vast majority of the mail received was from the top few fanatical SFB players, who constantly campaigned for new rules, rules fixes, and rules changes. This became a source of discontent for most of the rest of the players, who did not appreciate a game that changed every few months, and needed a sheaf of notes along with the voluminous rules. However, it was generally believed nearly impossible to repair the damage by properly re-writing and re-integrating such a large and complex system into a new edition before doomsday, especially without bringing the product line to a halt while only new versions of old products were released.
For a long time the 'Doomsday Edition' was a private joke amongst the staff that worked on SFB. Then it became a public one. Finally, it became an actual project in 1987, and the 'Doomsday Edition' was released as Star Fleet Battles, Captain's Edition in 1990.
The long gestation, however, did give us time to plan an all-new edition. The publisher insisted that we should reorganize the game system into entirely new products. This was necessary to present the material to an entirely new generation of gamers in a more logical format (and to make dealers notice that it was a new edition).
The changes were sweeping. There were two boxed sets (in a smaller format than former boxes), the first of which, Basic Set, was roughly the same as Volume I. The second, Advanced Missions was different in that it only introduced new rules and ship types (more ships than any other single product in fact), but stayed with the same selection of basic empires as the first box. Nearly everything else is labeled Module x, where x is a letter (and number, in a series), along with a name, and comes as a booklet of rules and a booklet of SSDs, with a sheet of counters and a color wrapper as the cover. The new empires of Volume II and III were presented in Module C1 and C2.
Captain's Log #8 spent a decent amount of room explaining exactly what the new edition meant, and how the new products would work. The release of 'Doomsday' was split into five phases:
And the biggest change was: "We'll explain everything, but we won't change anything!" Doomsday promised an end to addenda. Loopholes might be closed, new things might still be added, but no previous rule would change as a result.
The new edition was a success, but could not stop the march of time. Wargaming as a whole had been on the decline since about 1980, and Task Force Games joined the list of established gaming companies that did not survive the '90s. The decline of TFG was gradual, and SFB suffered long before the company actually folded:
Ultimately, however, the publisher was battered by market forces, a few bad decisions, and perhaps a lack of focus. The game system more or less disappeared from the market by the end of 1996 when ADB was unable to design new games without being paid for the previous ones. Two years of tedious negotiations were completed in January 1999 and Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. was born.
Since very early on, the publishing duties and design duties had actually been split, with the Amarillo Design Bureau (ADB) handling all of the product design, while TFG had published, and indicated what they wanted to produce. The end of TFG put everything under one house again, and ADB, Inc. spent some time picking up the pieces of nearly three years without SFB. The first order of business, in fact, was to reprint Basic Set and Advanced Missions which had been out of stock for about three years at this point. While they were at it, all the errata and questions were evaluated, and many sections of the rules were re-written in an effort to make the game clearer. These editions featured new cover colors and a '1999' legend at the bottom of the cover to show when they were printed.
The time period between the last products from TFG, and ADB's announcement that they had re-secured the rights to the system were not entirely without new material. Bruce Graw published Star Fleet Times as an SFB newsletter about ten times a year, mostly during what was afterward called 'The Interregnum'. Its run ended with issue 50 in 2000, as it was considered that the internet served the same purpose (a regular way for the fans to keep in touch) much more efficiently.
Since then, ADB, Inc. has gotten everything back in print, released a number of new products, and has seen the number of SFB players slowly grow again. This is in part due to the fact that it has a strong on-line community, encouraged by the company forum, and the existence of SFBOL.
Star Fleet Battles On-Line is a software client that allows a person to play SFB against other people on the internet. While it does still require a personal understanding of the rules to play, the client does contain all the record-keeping functions of the game, and provides for some easier handling of places that require 'simultaneous' decisions (which have always been difficult in normal face-to-face play). Star Fleet Battles On-Line was originally developed by Online Game Systems and is currently maintained and supported by Symbiotic Games
In the meantime, ADB continues to try to serve the SFB community with new products, and new ways to do products. Currently, they only have to go to a regular printing company for counters and color covers. These are then stockpiled, and when an order comes in, in-house (black-and-white) printers run the interiors, and other in-house machines do the binding and trimming. This 'print on demand' process allows greater freedom in product releases, and warehouse storage, and all recent products use this system.
One of the notable things about Star Fleet Battles is that it has always endeavored to keep a consistent background that all the ships and empires come from. This started out as the distillation of current Star Trek lore, but soon started adding its own touches as gaps were perceived in structure. With the rebirth of Star Trek as an active film franchise, the 'SFU' started diverging sharply from canon Star Trek, as the producers ignored anything from fan productions, and SFB's own licence did not allow them to use the new material. Due to several factors, the SFU has re-interpreted several things, and in some places only bears a passing resemblance to the show that gave it birth.
However, the structure of the history itself is sound, as most things are added with an eye to how they fit in with everything that is already known. As a result, the SFU has a history that covers (in various products) a span of about 130 years. Thanks to Steve Cole being the guiding influence from start to finish, the SFU has far fewer inconsistencies than the canon Star Trek universe.
While everything published for the SFU takes place in the same continuity (discounting some alternate timeline scenarios), there are several separate areas that have been presented that have little to no contact in the known timeline. The vast majority of products published for Star Fleet Battles is set in the 'Alpha-Octant' (sometimes called 'Alpha-Sector', but that is actually just a part of the area covered), which includes all the races known from The Original Series. Other settings include:
The Star Fleet Battles game system rests on several fundamental ideas, out of which the rest of the system grows. Part of the perceived difficulty of the game is that all of these are more complicated to explain than to use.
First, the movement system (and turn structure with it) departs from the traditional 'everyone takes a turn in order' structure used in the vast majority of games. Instead, a proportional movement system is used, where a little bit of the total movement for all players is resolved at a time, so that each can see what is happening and respond to it. This avoids the usual problems with moving long distances without any fire or reactions happening, and keeps in mind that everything is moving at the same time.
Second, it is assumed that while faster than light starships produce prodigious amounts of energy just for the needs of propulsion, there is not enough energy available to perform every possible function simultaneously. Therefore, each ship has to fill out an Energy Allocation form at the beginning of a turn, and 'pay' for all the functions (such as movement, shields and weapons) that it can then use during the turn.
And third, each ship has a display of systems (a Ship Systems Display, or SSD) that acts as a schematic diagram of a particular ship in play. Each class in the game has an individualized SSD, and most expansions revolve around providing new classes and 'variants' of ships to the game, with new SSDs. These displays consist of check-off boxes for all the ship's structure and systems (Hull damage, how much power the engines have, how many transporters there are, etc. checked off when damaged) in the general layout of the ship, along with general reference information for that ship (tracks to check off use for limited-ammo weapons, shuttles, probes, plus weapons fire range-charts, and more).
Fourth, it differs from many wargames in that each unit is not simply a set of offensive and defensive numerical ratings; rather, each ship has a variety of individual weapons and resources, each employing their own tactics and counter-tactics. Thus players are able to utilize, e.g., boarding parties, shuttles, tractor beams, electronic countermeasures, etc., and use many more tactics than in the average wargame, requiring much more documentation. It is this which allows the game to become a science-fiction experience, and puts it in concert with many literary elements of Star Trek.
Since the introduction of Commander's Edition the rules have been organized with lettered major chapters, followed by a number to indicate a major rule. Then follows a decimal, and a series of numbers indicating the breakdown into subsections. (For instance, (D6.683) is the third subsection of (D6.68) Disrupted Fire Control, which is the eighth subsection of (D6.6) Active Fire Control, which is the sixth section of (D6.0) Fire Control Systems, which is the sixth rule in (D0.0) Combat.) Chapter R is an exception; as it is a listing of every ship type in the game, the number after the decimal is a sequental number identifier. e.g., (R2.12) is the Police Cutter, the eleventh Federation ship in the game (as (R2.1) is background information). Occasionally, a chapter might have sub-chapters, which are indicated with two letters.
All of this is complicated, but is a consequence of the exceptionally wide ranging nature of the rules, and the need to identify exactly what will happen under usually-obscure circumstances. To aid in this, a fair amount of the rules are actually dedicated to cross-referencing other rules sections. As it is, the designers made an effort to ensure that there isn't any 'unaddressed interactions' between different rules, if there is a possible interaction, it is covered. The result is that many newer players can be intimidated by the sheer bulk of the rulebook.
As all the rules numbers were kept strictly intact from Commander's to Captain's Edition SFB, the presentation of rules numbers occasionally jump around in current products, as they are presented in the products that make the most sense, rather than in the order in which they were introduced in Commander's Edition.
This is a list of all products released for Captain's Edition SFB, including a few permanently out-of-print ones, but excluding ones that have been replaced by later products, with the dates of all revisions of the product.
From Module H1 - Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Gorn, Kzinti, Tholian and Orion ship counters.
From Module H1 - ISC, Andromedan, Neo-Tholian, Hydran, Lyran, Vudar, Seltorian, WYN, LDR and Jindarian ship counters.Recently, ADB has started releasing a set of 'Master' products. These are intended as a compilation of all the system into a single source, instead of needing to either constantly refer to different products, or tear them apart to integrate them by hand. Existing products are:
Also planned are the Master Ship Book, a compilation of all the Alpha-Octant ship listings; the Master SSD Book(s); and the Master Scenario Book. A full set of all these products should provided everything needed other than maps and counters.
List of mods