RE: [FT] Campaign vs Scenario Game Balance (Long) Pt1

> > A "point of view" might be helpful here.  We play
> > campaigns.	We don't play many one-offs.  Our ships
> > are all designed to handle the high number of
> > fighters
> > and SMs seen.  PDSs and ADFCs work fine for this.
> > I don't want to see fighters go away in our
> > campaign,
> > and that is what weakenning fighters and missiles
> > will do.
>
> My group has talked about campaigns, but hasn't ever
> played one.

<<Rest Snipped>>

Bear with me if you're a SFB grognard, but IIRC there are a number of
posters who aren't...

I've noticed that in many of the technical discussions that come up on
the
list much of what ends up getting discussed seems (to me at least <g>)
to
boil down into the campaign play vs. scenario play model of gaming.

Many things that balance out in a scenario don't even come close to
balancing out in a campaign (and the other way around also...)

<grimace> I stopped playing SFB a couple of years before I started
playing
FT mostly because it was way, way to complicated for (IMHO) more than
very
simple scenarios (generally no more than 2-3 ships on a side) and for
campaign play you went right up to Federation and Empire which while a
fantastic game also was highly complex.

One of the things that SFB did (IIRC) was give all it's ships an BPV
(Battle
Point Value) and an EPV (Economic Point Value) which were generally
close
but not always. The BPV is what we would generally call the Point Cost
in
FT. We have no comparative value for EPV.

Also, FT only uses the grossest of metrics to differentiate between the
cost
of a big ship vs a small ship. (basically the Point Cost/BPV) Apart from
the
mystery "EPV" there would be differences in building times, slip size,
crewing requirement, etc. that FT just doesn't take into account.

Cont. in Part 2