You both make excellent points; here are some additional comments:
A true starship wargame that had modular elements in it to allow for roleplay adaptation by a gaming party's groups of characters (i.e. functioning as bridge crew at respective stations). This would be akin to the CODA rules (and even the old FASA Star Trek RPG rules),
That's what I'm thinking too. I was thinking more in terms of the actual way the FASA RPG was tied in with the wargame. In essence, the wargaming rules were integral to that specific game but a small opening was left for a RPG tie-in. But as I have mentionned I would make the PC stats more meaningful into the gaming mechanics. In the FASA system even with very good rules you only gained some marginal advantages, like 2 power pts when you already had 60 at your disposal.
I would, however, consider more "manuevers" to provide greater variation...
That I'm not sure; you see, a lot of the moves a player would normally make in a wargame were represented by the PC's abilities in the RPG system. For instance, when you play a game of Full Thrust or BFG (Battle Fleet Gothic) the actual real life player has to decide how and where he will move his ship, taking into consideration his ship's facing relative to where he thinks his enemy will move, etc. In the RPG, the maneuvers have been designed to allow the PCs to use such maneuvers but not really worrying about the 'how' and 'where' but the final effect. And the scope of the success of such a maneuver is determined by the PC's stats. For instance, the PCs may decide to come about and fire on an enemy, the helm officer's stats will determine how well they succeed, but the real life player controlling that PC has no effect on the actual action.
it should not be so filled-with-boxes that it would take an hour to kill a ship. On the other hand, each vessel (especially if their is a gaming group's crew on board), must be "crunchy" enough so as not to be vaporized by a simple laser hit.
Good point. I personally like SSDs when they are well-done like the ones for games like FT, BFG or Starmada. But on the other hand doing so for a Trek game wouldn't exactly be reinventing the wheel... both SFB and the FASA game used the 'checkbox' system, as well as Full Thrust and to some extent Starmada (who have both seen their fair share of ST conversions). I'd try to come up with something like Lightning Strike, where there is little "box-checking" and damage is done by measuring the amount against a treshold value for each component.
each vessel (especially if their is a gaming group's crew on board), must be "crunchy" enough so as not to be vaporized by a simple laser hit.
agreed; sacrificing details for the sake of simplicity will make the game bland.
Representations of weapons and equipment (sensors, etc) must have enough variation to show a tangible difference in the game. This philosophy will have an effect on some fundamental decisions such as: Range/Scale; Energy Concepts (if any, I agree with Snake that we should avoid it); Movement Mechanics, etc.
oh for sure- especially since there is now such a wide era to cover; I wouldn't expect ENT era beam weapons to be anything like those used during the Dominion War. Speaking of sensors, they are of such importance in the show that I think that they should play a very important role in a ST game. For instance, let's assume that most Starfleet ships do not have the firepower of Klingon ship BUT if we assume they have better sensor we could then say that they are more accurate. So Klingon ships on avergae hit you harder but Starfleet ships will hit you more often or more precisely.
Quite frankly, I have played around with StarmadaX rules
Starmada is an awesome game. IMVHO it almost rivals Full Thrust (and in many areas it is actually better than FT). I think that Starmada is a much better system to handle a ST conversion. The way shields are handled in Starmada screams 'Star Trek'!
all systems that rely on energy relays and emitters that could be upgraded to more advanced versions without necessarily making a huge difference to hull configuration, and saving the extra cost of constructing a new hull.
That makes a lot of sense. And that is why we could say that there are plenty of old Excelsiors and Mirandas in the TNG era. Of course the true reason is that the studios were re-using the models that were available to them to save money. And that matches my argument which is that a "stock" 2290-vintage Excelsior shouldn't be much of a threat in the TNG era. For instance, that would go as far as prefering a refitted Miranda in that era over a "stock" Exclesior. But that again is only based on my opinion. As you said if you strip an old Excelsior of its phaser banks and replace them by modern ones, you get an old ship that may not be top of the line anymore but that could still pack a surprising punch.
The system should most definitely be light on book-keeping, can I suggest aiming to fit at least 4 ship status displays (pref. more) to an A4 page? I'm a big fan of Full Thrust and as you'll know, you can pretty much get all the paperwork for a squadron onto a single page.
That's one of the things I love about FT: it is easy to manage your small fleet on a single sheet. As I said above simplicity in record-keeping would be nice.
I think involving power/energy management in some way is pretty much unavoidable - you have to be able to "Re-route auxillary power to the forward shields" to keep it Trek - but it must be kept to a low, and straightforward level.
Agreed, it is very much a part of Trek ship combat. I was thinking of not doing power management "accounting" like in the old FASA game, but rather a simplifed tier system where you could cut some power from a system to increase another. For instance, systems could be rated in 'levels' and say you have a level-4 shield grid and a level-6 phaser banks . Now say that you want to boost your shields, you could take a level away from the phasers, making them 'level-5' which would make them weaker but you'd instead 'level-5' shields which would allow the ship to increase its resiliency.
Would you break shields down into sectors? Again, it's part of the mythology, so I reckon so, even if for simplicity it's just forward and aft, or 4 quadrants. Coming back to my suggestion on shields, a 3D maneuver could permit dorsal and ventral shield facings to take damage without having to build a forest of adjustable height ship stands. Like I did for my air wargames. Ugh.
I would try to strike a balance between using the hard numbers (like ships travelling at 0.92c/sec) and some abstract concepts. It would be very hard to use only 'hard' numbers and make the game playable- you'd end up with issues like ships being able to outrun the maximum phaser range in a few seconds. Regarding shields, I'd tend to favor various quadrants and not a whole single shield for the ship. There are numerous examples of this in the shows "aft shields down, port shields at 75%, etc".
As I say, the ship primary defences are the shields, and once they're down, a look of horror crosses everyone's face, so perhaps focus on keeping shields up at all costs.
I couldn't agree more. As with the CODA system shields should be of paramount (pun intended) importance. Once they are down a ship shouldn't be able to last too long.
"No captain kicked ass, took names, outsmarted the machines, and then scored the babes like the Kirkmeister" -Liquidator Queeg
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