/STG/ - Star Trek General

>youtube.com/watch?v=4TICjEsvC8o

>Lonely Island
I wonder if they should have a cameo in the new Trek series. It could be at least funny maybe.

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Which Star Trek RPG is the best, and why?

And I swear to god if anyone says Lasers and Feelings I will space them myself.

>Lasers and Feelings
But user it's a good gam.........
>Sound of an airlock blowing out in the distance

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The new one looks promising, but I've yet to try it.

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I think this why the Q let the human race live. 1) Because it's funny to watch them get into shit on a regular basic. 2) To troll the universe without having to do it themselves.

delet this, Best Girl was an innocent dysfunctional cinnabun until that episode.

It all makes so much sense now.

There was no reason for there not to be Augment/Human hybrids assuming that augments were still compatible with humans.

But what happened to them? All those old augments by DS9 era are long dead. But what of their half-breed and one-drop spawn?

Not sure what the population ratio to Basic/Aug was but after the nukes got dropped the half-Augs would have been better suited to survive and so would have been a far larger percentage of the population than they really should have been.

Then we have Col. Green. He wanted to Final Solution the mutants to protect humanity from genetic degradation in the future. Had the augment gene-spread gotten to the stage where the Bascs were feeling threatened? Or what if Col. Green was trying to cull the Basics in favour of the objectively better Aug Master Race?

So we get an even more Aug rich gene-pool.

Fast forwards a few centuries of intermingling.

The Augments were known to be brilliant but unstable. Starfleet, the engineers in particular, are all brilliant and all humans seem to be at least slightly maverick compared to everyone else.

"Pure" humanity is extinct by 24c. Everyone is at least one-drop Augment.

Although it does add a whole new layer to the hypocrisy when they found out what Bashir was.

user, Khan era Augment are so last LAST century. The Darwin Institute/Colony put those fuckers to shame. These augments can wipe out their creators with their immune systems THEIR IMMUNE SYSTEMS! at range no less. Now these fuckers of true successors to humanity, Khan augments are small time faggots in comparison.

They should have been the true successor of humanity but so few of them were created and then were isolated to protect the lesser races.

Starfleet is shit scared about genetic engineering because of their centuries dead bogeymen and any attempt to revive the branch of scientific research is met with cries of YOU R LITERULY CURNUL GREEN/HITLER!!!!!eleven!!!

The immune system should be, for an institute that made god like children, easy to fix. They could then integrate into society and live productive lives and contribute to society. Of course organizations like Starfleet won't let them join because they don't like their type but there are many other things they could do. Not that this happened. I'm guessing UFP, due to pressure from the Board of Admirals, just stuck them all in a big hermetically sealed bunker somewhere and threw away the key.

>I'm guessing UFP, due to pressure from the Board of Admirals, just stuck them all in a big hermetically sealed bunker somewhere and threw away the key.
Considering what the higher ups were afraid the children could become. It isn't that unusual precaution to take really. Hell the Feds are such two faced faggots when it comes to this. The TNG Enterprise crew was ok with a guy they picked who was going to be a god like being where his own race wanted to kill him at all costs for obvious reasons like having beings like him could destroy their civilization.
>Pic related is the UFP's worst case scenario for what next stage humanity could be.

But the thing is that Ensign Silvereyes was a low end human psychic that got exposed to special effects. In any case I don't think his abilities are anything that could be emulated by conventional means even by 25c. For one think he could create life from lifelessness by will alone.

At some point between TOS and TNG naturally occurring human psychics vanish. I find that a bit suspicious.

>At some point between TOS and TNG naturally occurring human psychics vanish. I find that a bit suspicious.
I guessing it could have been a Section 31 plot to retard the advancement of the human race as a whole. For instance, they could have covertly did gene modding of most of the general population of humanity to stop random psi potential from flaring up. And all the really strong Psi rating people they killed or separated them from others and are developing them in secret. So to have a powerful new humanity that will be under control and have the best interest of the UFP at heart maybe.

The new one, probably. It emulates the feel of the show(s) pretty well, and the rules are solid too. It also concentrates on the characters being the command crew without the rules turning into a broken, bloated mess of million skills and talents unlike in the other versions.

Of course, it's still in the alpha, and the rules do need some tweaking and editing. But the foundation is very solid.

What's your favorite interstellar state?

I like the Romulans.

I really like the Cardassians. Not that I particularly agree with their world view or their strategies, but I think they had one of the most coherent cultural identities of any Trek species. The Romulans are also pretty great, in that regard.

The Ferengi are pretty great

>Ferengi
I'm convinced that unlike other races the guys that crew spaceships are the retards of the race. And all the smart ones went into more self directed money making schemes. I really like how they fleshed out this species home life and females of their races not allowed to wear clothes. They were really out there but were actually done so well in DS9. It would have been interesting to have seen DS9 and TNG Ferengi interacting with each other.

>arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/10378433-t6-multimission-explorers!

TIER 6 GORN SHIPS, MY FUCKING DICK AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

That's nothing, DID YOU SEE THOSE RINGS? HRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRNGGGGG!!!!!!!!

And finally for those who kept on dreaming, Tier 6 Vestas!

Really digging those Romulan vessels. The rings seem like a nod to their Vulcan heritage and maybe the beginning of joint development between the Republic and Vulcan Science Institute.

>those ship prices
Is there a reasonable way to obtain them or do I have to be made of money?

Either get money to get gold account which grants you monthly 500 zen forever, or get money for the ships or grind like a motherfucker for dilithium and play the market hoping to sell your dil when dil to zen rate is low and then buy the ships during a sale.

Does the market ever fluctuate, or all that is left is to wait for one-time dumps by bored players?

A year ago it fluctuated right after the summer event ended, this time it fluctuated briefly when cryptic released boxes that gave you some really rare shit in exchange for dilithium and currently the prices seem to be sitting at 300 dil per zen.
Id say it is now at more reasonable price range than it was during last year when it went as high as 400s.

Yup. I'm totally getting my Reman in on her ancient Vulcan heritage. Next, she's gonna learn the VULCAN DEATH GRIP!

I love this. This is now my headcanon.

T 6
V E S T A S

I
K N O W
H Y P E

Speaking of STO, is it wrong that I fine their version of the Borg Queen cute and attractive? Is it just me or did they make her sexier than the movie one?

Lighting 2.0 makes combadges appear black on certain maps

I'd rather they fix that first desu

We need another intel cruiser. The stealth squid is so damn ugly.

Well, there's the Vengeance, which is actually even better, stats-wise... And even worse, looks-wise...

Argh, why can't Romulan embassy boffs wear regular Starfleet uniforms? It's fucking up my theme here.
Or is there a way for Fed Klingon boffs to wear Klingon uniforms? I could get a new theme going that way...

Only the non-Fed Fed Klingon BOffs (from the diplomacy tree) can wear KDF uniforms.

How does that work? I just started playing again recently and don't know anything about Diplomacy.

Your ship 'rescues' a group of Orion slave women, they really REALLY want to repay your crew for the kind gesture. WHAT DO?!

Throw them out the airlock.

Eject all escape pods and shuttles without warning and initiate a warp core overload. This is a Miranda-class vessel, you know the rules.

>having one fucking sci slot

>get food poisoning and miss five days of work
>IRS delaying all tax refunds until the end of the month
Whelp.

federationcommander.blogspot.com/2017/01/got-any-marketing-ideas.html

So ADB just dropped this little gem, and I'm drafting them a letter because I'm bored. I'm almost 100% sure this is a waste of time, but going over their sales and marketing practices and then explaining why they're awful is at least giving me some entertainment value.

Anything Veeky Forums thinks I should touch on in particular? Focusing mostly on the sales and marketing aspect. Problems with the way the game is written could be an entire other ordeal.

Needing sci slots for DPS

Nowadays, it's just another set of DOff missions. Grindan for WEEKS.

Eh, there's also the Uni/Temp slot.

>Not always keeping Sci Team and Hazard Emitters for debuff clearing

I think my reply would be 'stop being old men' as that basically sums up everything.

In more detail:
If they're gonna focus on something, for fucks sake make it the ACTA: SFB. It's actually a good game that is comprehensible by modern audiences who are intimidated by the old style of everything else they do (it's way worse than Battletech to try and get people to play), has decent miniatures for... probably the most part. But christ on a bike get some international distributors and get some solid starter boxes back up for those international customers in particular. Pick the best looking miniatures for each fleet, not the goofy ones. I literally cannot get people into the game because they'd have to work out a fleet before they even play and pay international shipping on it, which also puts them off just picking a few ships up with the idea of expanding later. The shipping might not even be that much but it is perceived as money that could have been going on miniatures if they could just get them locally. People would happily buy a pre-selected £60 fleet box far sooner than pay the same for a fleet of their own choosing and have shipping costs to pay even if it worked out to the same total amount.

That's a good point I hadn't much thought about, and I'll all but for sure throw it in there.

The biggest things I was going to cover were shit like pdf pricing and the fact it's impossible to ascertain what you should be buying without a fucking flowchart, in the case of SFB.

That and advising them to move shit to PoD and the like and not worry overmuch about the counter sheets and suchlike. But yeah;
>'stop being old men'
does sum it up pretty spectacularly. They're still marketing and doing business like it's the late 70's at best. That and the tone they take on product pages is monstrous. Picture extremely related.

>Needing to clean debuffs instead of tanking them

>Implying debuffs are only DoTs

Another though on starter sets: should definitely have something instantly recognisable. D7, Constitution class, classic romulan warbird/klingon ship in romulan livery... even alongside a lot of their better-looking later ships I'd throw those in. I'd ignore basically all the other 'old' ships otherwise, well for the Feds especially.

They'll need some way to get the rulebook into people's hands too. Maybe a demo version.

Noted. i feel like demo versions are anathema to Steve though. He's still freaking out over profits lost to file sharing and charging $15 for B&W scans of books from 1996.

Starter sets are a solid idea. Any game of the sort should have them, really. One ship for each of the tree core races is a solid idea, since the SFB 'thing' has always been cruiser duels.

STO's uniform restrictions are annoying the shit out of me.

>He's still freaking out over profits lost to file sharing and charging $15 for B&W scans of books from 1996.

...Let Them Die.

One ship for each race really does not work for ACTA though. And really, they should be pushing that above all else.

They're probably got all the SFB customers they ever will, because the perception is that it's a clunky, overly complex game for old men. Because the playerbase is largely old men who learned the game over 30 years ago. And if people don't think that about the game they think SFB is long dead. It probably should be.
ACTA has a proven system that's fast and simple whilst still capturing the appropriate feel. People have enjoyed it in being an easy-access naval warfare system as well as space games. They literally have nothing better or more fitting for an audience under 40. These people, if they want to play a small game with a bare handful of star trek ships are going to be playing Attack Wing, not SFB, because they can play it on club nights easily, getting more than one game even. And they can play it with their kids too. SFB as the monster that it is could not break into that market even with the best marketing. ACTA:SFB could at least catch some people wanting to do bigger battles since there's not yet a star wars Armada equivalent as far as I know.

Which ones? You can dress yourself as anything from Kirk's tunic from when Shatner demanded a unique shirt, all the way down to some green whore.

I'm a Fed. My Klingon boff can only were Federation uniforms, no Klingon things. My Romulan boff can only wear Romulan civilian clothes.
I'd like to either have both of them in Starfleet uniforms or have them both in their respective factions' uniforms.

>...Let Them Die.

I'm beginning to think this is the correct course of action. Forget the stupid letter they won't listen too and just back away slowly. I wonder if the company will ever go tits up and sell off?

Well if you've got this far you might as well throw it at them.

It's not like they can stop you playing or getting their stuff if they don't like what you say. Theoretically they're not in the worst position, since they've always been willing to licence their stuff and expand on what they have. Most companies like them would have been long dead, I mean they've not go anything like Battletech's brand resilience despite all the tie-in stuff.

So hit them with it. As long as it's worded diplomatically, it'll at least add to the impression that there's people outside their local bubble that care.
And if they do nothing, well, all good things must come to an end.

Also fair. And I'm trying to be as diplomatic and professional as I can, absolutely. if only because it's part of the exercise.

I'm a fan of the concepts and what they're trying to do with the products, but other than a copy of ACTA I havcn't actually purchased anything, because the pricepoint is absurd in this day and age. (I think I ball-parked a relatively complete set of SFB stuff, in PDF, at somewhere in the vicinity of two thousand burgerbucks. Just the rules.)

In any case, here's the very tough bit of what I've drafted so far. focusing mostly (as requested) on marketing opportunities. pastebin.com/geLknqGJ

In STO, can you stick a regular boff in a specialized boff slot (eg, a regular engineering boff in an engineering-intel slot), or do you have to wait until at least level 60 before you can really use any ships with specializations?

Yeah, you can stick an Engie with no spec in an Engie/Intel slot, or whatever. The spec slot just means that if the BOff has any spec abilities of that class, they can use them, if they're in that slot. For example, the opposite would not be true; an Engie BOff with intel abilities in an Engie slot cannot use his Override Subsystem Safeties skill.

What I'm hearing is the game is crap and way too bloated. So just buy the models and make up your goddamn system it would be better and cheaper. This is the vibe I'm getting, I'm I wrong in thinking this?

>*am I >I'm

Personally, ACTA:SF still feels excessively bloated and clunky compared to VaS and B5. Its like they completely missed the point that ACTA is supposed to be a fun beer and pretzels game. Muh hardcore space simulation.

>enjoy having SubNuke slow you down to 1 FAW every 20 minutes

Speaking of which, why don't universal slots let you use spec boffs? I get that it would need an overhaul and fuck everything up, but it kinda defeats the point of them being Universal. Imho, it'd Uni slots a lot more rare and valuable and actually makes the seating system make sense

You unlock Tal'Shiar uniform for your Rom during story, as well as the Rom republic uniform.
For Klingon uniforms on a feddie klingon i cant help you.

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Cheaper but, well Star Trek combat is not the easiest thing to write. It's like Battletech in that the established tropes are things that add a management layer to the game (heat and ablative armour) but ditch it for speed in play and it just doesn't feel right. With Star Trek it's power management, specific systems getting broken and shields.

Anything Star Trek based is probably gonna be more complex than V@S and B5 because of how the combat works in the show, let alone the density of information SFB has going on.
I think that ACTA:SFB whilst definitely clunkier than other ACTA variations is about as simple as you're gonna get and still have a game that 'feels' like the source material (whether you consider that a good thing given the material is a different thing entirely). Going full Beer&pretzels is a great way to lose all setting-specific flavour in anything but names and miniatures and become akin to Bolt Action.

They're Universal PROFESSION slots, not universal anything slots. That's why you can have, say, a Universal/Intel slot.

A lot of this yes. most of my problem with SFB is that there are elements of complexity it absolutely does not need. (A 32 phase turn is goddam insanity you could easily parse way down, for instance.)

The biggest issue though isn't the complexity of the game itself but the writing style and organization of the rulebooks. Which are...horrible. Like, more horrible than I can even begin to touch on in brief. The author wants to specify and control the rules and conventions down to levels that are playground petty. Pic Related.

Am fairly sure a lot of that kinda thing came about because of the more spergy players back in the day. Not to say it's a good way of doing things, but there's so many interactions of abilities and stuff that building all possible clarifications into the rules was probably the best thing they could do. It's basically an engineering text otherwise. But then that directly shows the people it was made by and aimed at.

Right, I'm not saying there's anything...well, I guess I am saying there's something inherently wrong with it, in this day and age.

It could use an extreme streamlining pass, but even barring that it's not the content of the rules but the style of their writing. There is a lot lot lot of extraneous and needlessly obfuscating text in this. It often takes paragraphs to explain concepts that could have been handled in a short sentence. Previous image again related.

That and I admit to being a combination of extremely amused and mildly triggered by the tone he takes about some things. Like wasting a para in module K to explain, after SFC was released, that fast patrols hips are to NEVER EVER be called 'pseudo fighters' because this is WRONG. Just, yell at people who came to your product from one of its more successful joint ventures, why don't you. If he was a clever man he'd all but have snuck 'pseudo-fighters' onto the product description so people who came in from SFC knew what they were looking at.

So yeah, it's not the real complexity of the game, so much as the author's voice that I feel like makes the game inaccessible.

>so much as the author's voice that I feel like makes the game inaccessible.

It does. As does the complexity.

>I guess I am saying there's something inherently wrong with it, in this day and age.

There kinda is. I mean it has as much right to exist as any other game but from the perspective of trying to get people to actually play it, it's 30 years out of date. The environment that allowed for a complex, technical game like that to be popular is non-existent now. That niche is gone. Vidya fills most of it due to being massively more accessible. And for things still getting the social aspect of face-to-face play, well there's a fuckton of easier-access tabletop games filling that too.

People would much rather have a detailed starship battle game in the form of a PC game today, and with good reasons in the form of time and community constraints. And still the SFC games were still impenetrable to many and that was back in an era more tolerant of complex games with nightmare interfaces of a million buttons and sliders, because the game rules are that detailed as to make for even a complex game when you're not even managing everything manually.

All that is a big part of why I think ACTA:SFB is the way forward on tabletop. Well, the only reasonable option they have.
I'd love a different star trek battle game and miniatures range to exist with the same breadth of SFB. I cannot overstate how much I'd rather that. ok yes there's fan-made systems and getting models 3D printed or garage-casts, but that shit is expensive and NOT easy-access because of the amount of legwork involved in tracking stuff down.
But with the insane cost of the licence and bullshit involved to do miniatures officially, plus the competition that already exists in the form of Attack Wing, let alone everything else... SFB is what we've got due to an absurd quirk of fate. And ACTA:SFB could have been so, so much worse as an option than it actually is. But it needs to be better.

Nothing here at all I disagree with.

ACTA is most assuredly the way forward for them I agree. Especially since I don't feel like Attack Wing is much competition among more dedicated gamers. (I've played it and the whole thing just feels so fucking *cheap.* The models especially are trash garbage, even compared to micro machines from over twenty years ago.)

I suppose my biggest lament about SFB is I can't help but look at it and feel like I could fix it, given time and the materials to work with. That's probably where most of my frustration comes from. The combination of the game's continued direction and sales practices, and the author's attitude toward it and his customers, is like watching a man bludgeon himself to death with the golden goose.

>the writing style and organization of the rulebooks

Pretty much every rulebook you're reading from before, say, 1995ish was quite literally laid out by hand. Use scissors and glue to cut and paste chunks of preformatted text. Occasionally demand a revision, which requires someone to type it out -- by this point on a word processor, but previously on an honest-to-god typewriter -- and then glue that into place. Make sure you didn't fuck up on column length or margin spacing, and if you do a shitty job you might add multiple pages to what could be a far better condensed book.

Modern digital layouts are part of what triggered the tabletop renaissance.

There's nothing wrong with that. The early editions of the game were products of their time, Good and interesting ones. But it's been nearly thirty years since the last major pass on the system, and one thinks it's high freakin time to at least bring things up to standards the modern gaming audience has any interest in. I know they've made art and balance passes, but there are far deeper issues than that. One of the game's draws is its complexity, certainly, but I am pretty confident in that being maintainable while reducing the clutter and obscene book keeping overhead.

Neat!

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we reunification now

>I can't help but look at it and feel like I could fix it, given time and the materials to work with.

I get this with a whole bunch of games/stories. So many games could be improved just by reformatting to cut down pagecount and making the rules clearer. Or just fix one really annoying bit like line of sight rules.

SFB feels like it really could be reengineered given all the mechanics are laid bare. I mean it's easy enough to add to... But so much work would be needed. Better to start fresh and make something that captures the same feel with much better, cleaner mechanics.

Not bad. Strangely so.

OK there's the bad.

Pretty much. I'm not familiar with fedcom but that's sorta what it was supposed to do, I've heard.

Still, despite needing a lot of work. There is some weird charm to the excessive complexity of SFB, to me. The sort of thing that you could make shine in its own little niche if you just figured out how to make the sonofabitch more playable.

it's a Gorn science vessel

It's a lump shaped like a handheld vacuum cleaner with warp nacelles.

>You unlock Tal'Shiar uniform for your Rom during story
Really? What mission does that?