Galaxies: Federation Border

[BroAdso]

The year is 2325, and Starfleet is stretched thin. Here, on the far edge of the Alpha Quadrant, first contact has just been made with a new and mysterious empire, and things are tenuous and worried. Though there are many new member worlds and sectors, Sol is nearly a year away at maximum warp, and the nearest large Federation world, Betazed, more than five. With help so far distant, the Council has given Starfleet and the civilian authorities out here on the frontier a great deal of leeway and autonomy in dealing with these new "Cardassians" and any other races they might encounter.



Starfleet has in the area some of its newest flagships, intended to explore and discover new worlds - the Excelsior Mk2 ships, part of a refit program for the new heavy cruisers aimed at purging the last of the transwarp legacy from the design - but also many older designs, like the sixty year old Archer exploration corvettes.


(dark blue designs have been research at the start of the campaign)

As you arrive to this exciting and dangerous command, your adjunct, Lt. Cmdr Sovan, a Vulcan who has been helping to administer the sector's Starfleet posts for years, hands the Adminstrator a summary report of the area's asset distribution.



The Administrator and his Starfleet adjuncts know that if they want support from the Federation Council or Starfleet Command, they must balance competing demands on their resources - manage peaceful relations or at least keep to a manageable level local hostilities against these "Cardassians," develop the new frontier colonies in the sector, and keep exploring new worlds and new civilizations, in keeping with Starfleet's mission.

None of them know that the next seventy years will be some of the most difficult in Federation history, and they will remain a secondary priority, a third stage on which greater dramas elsewhere in the quadrant find reflection...

[BroAdso]

Non-narrative post: this campaign will be almost entirely base Galaxies. It will also include some elements of With A Purpose (because I love those rules), and a slightly more difficult Exploration roll to make sure it'll take some time to actually explore. I'll run the Cardassians and other Non Player Empires we encounter behind the scenes. Any input from the captains and Starfleet personnel of the sector, or any questions you have for them about the sector, its politics, or the rules under which it operates, are welcome too!

[Emiricol]

Impressive campaign setup Might need more Production on Iadora and a couple minors unless Galaxies did away with the rule about Production being less than half of Census. And even a little bit of Intel... Yeah, there's never enough resources to do what needs doing, way out there on the frontier

[Emiricol]

Fantastic setup, by the way. I enjoy your writeups a lot!

[Tyrel Lohr]

I like where you have the two "player" empires there bordering each other from the start but with a well-defined frontier area that is still open for them to explore, colonize, and fight over during the game. I look forward to seeing how this turns out!

[BroAdso]

I ran nine months of this before I found several things not to my satisfaction (mostly my own fault in ship design). However, some things that worked well:

1) Intel and diplomacy. Diplomacy less so because this was a kind of "eternal war" scenario, but intel fights (we had only one real one) worked great with the model in development in the Galaxies forum.

2) Single squadron combat continues to be very appealing and effective. I had two major battles and a couple of skirmishes, and it worked well for both.

3) Simplified civilian fleets and colonization.

However, I had a hard time navigating the raider rules and getting frustrated with them is what ended this campaign (along with a total lack of free time.) However, I still think Galaxies is a great direction to be moving. Hopefully I can mock up something else in the near future using the google docs management tricks I used to let this one run more smoothly.

[BroAdso]

I may also give this campaign a restart, since I liked the map, but with some tweaked raider rules and a ship design list I'm more satisfied with.

[Tyrel Lohr]

I've been playtesting a vastly simplified set of raider rules in my "Rebirth" branch of the Galaxies rules.

You roll d10 for each system that contains a colony or convoy. Subtract 1 from the roll if the system is in rebellion or already contains pirates, and these effects are cumulative. On a 1 or less, a raider fleet enters the system. This raider fleet has 2d6 units. The fleet sits in the system and acts as a nuisance, attacking any convoys that come into the system and otherwise blockading the system (with system blockades now reducing system output have 50% rather than entirely).

To remove some of the added tedium, a system is considered fully patrolled and immune to raider attack (i.e., no raiding checks) if there are a number of ships/flights present equal to either 2 x Capacity or Capacity + Census (I'm trying to decide which one fits best, but I'm playing with the latter). For example, the Vega system (4 Capacity, 2 Census) would need 6 ships or flights to protect it.

What this has done for me is eliminate the need to do more than roll a d10 for each system, and do a simple count to determine if a raider check is required in a system or not.

I've been having ships and flights both count for those checks, but it may be better to go ships only as then there is no ambiguity.