The only real time that marines or ground combat becomes really interesting is in a campaign. It sucks when a Gorn fleet comes into your system launches hundreds of BPs all at once in Gas shuttles and a few minutes later your ground based Ph-4s stop firing 'cause they've been captured along with your colony. It Really Really sucks when next production phase you can't afford to build your dreadnought because of a lack of funds. The captured planet's bpv is now going to the enemy, and he is building a DN!

It's really amazing how priorities in fleet composition change when you put SFB in a campaign setting with low levels of bpv.

If you can only afford to build a DD or two each year (phase. .what-ever) then it is a hell of a lot less likely you’re gonna fight "to the Death” battles. Instead of building 2 heavy cruisers, you might build 3 DDs, or 4 FFs because you can cover much more territory. Or perhaps instead of a combat variant you build a scout to scan your borders or a mine-layer to shore up defenses. Or possibly even a commando ship to capture an enemy colony or retake one of yours.

One of the things I found disappointing about most of the campaigns I've seen is that they are set up for huge national fleets and megabattles. Fleets have a tendency to be thrown at each other and ships are lost to win a tactical battle, with no regard for an overall strategic framework.

Hey, if you can build 10 cruisers a turn what's the loss of three or four every turn. If, however, you reduce the bpv framework so that the loss of even an FF is sorely felt then you get much more interesting strategic and tactical play. Especially if you have players that won't sit around building up ships but taking the initiative. (the reason for upkeep)

Unfortunately with a small economy scale some odd things start happening to play balance when it comes to economic and combat bpv for FTRs and other things....A little tweaking is needed. That's why I created my own campaign rules. There is an OLD prototype version on J.Kim's site you can look at (despite several emails asking him to take it down) that has lots of loopholes, atrocious grammar, and some contradictions in it. The new version is done completely reworked and hyperlinked with graphics awaiting the Deal to be done to see if ADB is interested in doing anything with it. If they're not, it'll eventually be available somewhere somehow on the net.

I've had a couple people proofread it but could use one or two more.

Has anyone created a generic program that could be used to track a Map, economics, fleet position and movement. it doesn't need to resolve battles or anything just track stuff. Something like this could be used for lots of different types of games. Or does anyone know of a shareware or commercial product that could do this. (& no I don't program..at least not on this level.)