VBAM Games Forums

Hello,

I just had the chance to look into the VBAM rule book of a friend of mine and was really impressed. As Ilove deeply detailed campaigns my question would be what I would need to start such one?

One thing I especially missied in the VBAM Campaign Book were explizit rules for technology development and starship design rules. I just found how to calculate how much a tech leap would costs and when it could occur, but not it's benefits.

Any help will be gladly appreciated

For a better tech system, you might want to check out the Starmada Edition system, which has been adapted for non-SE play in a file which can (could?) be found in the Yahoo group's file directory. Really adds a lot to the game.

Tolwyn wrote:Hello,

I just had the chance to look into the VBAM rule book of a friend of mine and was really impressed. As Ilove deeply detailed campaigns my question would be what I would need to start such one?

Hello!

Pretty much what's in the rules - the default races are good for an introductory scenario, perhaps using one of the basic scenarios in the back of the book.

Pencil, paper, some dice and a calculator will cover everything else you need (an opponent might help too, especially while learning the rules). Some folks find a PC invaluable (with Excel of OpenOffice Calc perhaps), but it isn't necesary,

Tolwyn wrote:One thing I especially missied in the VBAM Campaign Book were explizit rules for technology development and starship design rules. I just found how to calculate how much a tech leap would costs and when it could occur, but not it's benefits.

The basic VBAM rules don't use this sort of model,

They assume a "Tech Year", and grant you access to different stuff depending upon your current tech-year (which may or may not relate to the current game-year).

The default races ship-lists all name "ISD"s [In Service Date] for all of their vessels, you cannot build a specific class of ship until your Tech Year is equal to or later than the vessels ISD (so if your Tech-Year is 3010 then you can built the Destroyer with ISD3008, but not the Cruiser with ISD3011 until your tech-year increases by one).

While not very flexible, this does keep the races "in-genre" by ensuring vessels match their racial stereotype!

The VBAM CM gives some alternative Tech systems, but again no ship-design system,

The aforementioned Starmada book does give you this ability,

All said though, there's a lot of information to take on board, and the ISD system is very simple - so you may want to start with that and "upgrade" when you are more familiar with the rules,

Thank you for the answers

I'll try to set up a small scale 3 to 4 player campaign and see how it develops.