ENGAGE! for Matt Colville

reposted from Coda Forum
I have read the posts in your updates about Engage (by the way, they are monitored by individuals with a real fetish for starship combat games, check this website out (Starship COmbat News):

http://www.star-ranger.com/Home.htm

Have you considered (in your role of being Starship Combat designer) the possibility of Trek starship combat based on either the WizKids click model (i.e. MageKnight or Mechwarriorark Age as examples) or the modular Fleet Action 2 combat system by Agents of Gaming?
While I know these are proprietary systems from other companies, but does Decipher have leeway with this (from Paramount), provided you have interest?
The WizKids adaptation has that collectible intangible going for it. The FA2 concept has the benefit of readily playable large unit actions. I believe the designer for FA2 lurks on the TrekRPGnet boards and created designs for the original FA of over 40 TNG era canon vessels (including Prometheus, the Polarity Timeship, Species 8472).
In any event, Iam simply offering two cents... or inspiration. I want Engage to do well.

Charles

I hope that we can get away from the hexside shielding that seems to fascinate game designers. You never see ships on Trek manuevering to bring certain shields to bear. They manuever to bring weapons to bear, to reduce target aspect, and to change target vector fast enough to make target prediction difficult.

We have been experimenting with the FASA rule set using a single maximum shield number; that is the total strength of the shield. It can be raised to less than that if you want. Shield hits cause damage, of course; then if you want to repair the damage you have to add more energy or they stay in a damaged state. Better shields have a more efficient repair rate (uses the shield ratio number).

This makes the game play a lot more like the battles we have seen portrayed on TV. It also means you can;t get in with one volley. It makes many ships a little more viable, so you can have a good time playing smaller ships as well.

There is also a problem we've been cogitating about that has to do with basic ship design in the FASA rules. I'm not talking about the fact that some of the ships have to be solid blocks of metal to weigh that much. What I'm talking about is that a ship wouldn't be designed such that it couldn't at least raise its shields all the way and go full speed. Even if it couldn;t charge its weapons, any ship ought to at least be able to charge its shields all the way and flee at top speed. Duh.

It's also kinda ludicrous that any ship with energy-based weapons would be designed such that it literally could not charge all of its weapons at the same time. Yet I have seen many examples of this.

Now it is probably clear that one would want to have some balancing required; that you would want the player to have to choose between going full speed and firing everything; or perhaps that keeping the shields up to full while they are taking hits may comsume more energy than just keeping them up under no stress, and would also consume power that could be used elsewhere. But every single ship ought to be able to fire all of its weapons and raise all of its shields and still move at least a little. Otherwise we are looking at serious design flaws that logically people would not allow to happen on a ship they might have to send their son or daughter into battle on. It's just not logical.

I'm not Matt Colville, nor do I play him on TV.

A Star Trek ships Clix game would be da bomb :) But I wouldn't want Engage to be that. Engage should be a tactical space combat miniatures game that has some meat to it.

Allen

Quote:

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Originally posted by AllenS
I'm not Matt Colville, nor do I play him on TV.

A Star Trek ships Clix game would be da bomb :) But I wouldn't want Engage to be that. Engage should be a tactical space combat miniatures game that has some meat to it.

Allen

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I Totally Agree. Engage should be a tactical game.


However if a Starships Clix Game would be made that would be awsome. I Just recently got into HeroClix with the DC Version. This game Rocks!

Karg