Newsgroups: rec.games.board
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 17:31:15 -0500 
From: William Dow Rieder <wr0k+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Federation & Empire
	<1992Dec12.021158.16201@leland.Stanford.EDU>

zimdars@leland.Stanford.EDU (David Zimdars) writes:

>Federation and Empire is one of those frustrating flawed masterpieces that
>one every so often seems to run across.  There are a lot of nifty ideas in
>F&E, but the problem is that there it is far too difficult to press the
>attack, hence there isn't really any way to win.  The defender (or player
>on the defensive) has far too many advantages.  The primary problem is that

I disagree.  See below.

>the average number of ship casualties per turn is not proportional to
the number
>of ships involved in the battle because if two large fleets meet in one
>combat hex, only a small fraction (one battleforce) can fight one round and
>then the disadvantaged player can retreat.  Because of this and the

Only by giving up whatever he is defending (world, base, capital).
I agree that open space battles are a waste of time.  One of the best
defensive tactics if you have about as many ships as the attacker
is to react in front of whatever target you are protecting, pinning
the attacker into a useless battle.  This means you can only launch
an effective attack with a larger force, or if the defender is trying to
protect several spread out targets.

>fighter "free lunch" it often turns out that only one ship is destroyed
>per battle hex on each side, even if a fleet of 200 ambushes a force
>of 40.  Thus the number of casualties is proportional to the number of
>battle hexes (not ships) so the player on the defensive can limit his
>casualties by reducing the number of fleets deployed in different hexes.

If you attack someone's capital and they run, they lose 6 turns of ship
production and most of their economy.

>Futhermore, starbases are very effective defensively because they
>effectively multiply the number of ships in your fleet since they
>add "free" COMPOT well in excess of any possible attacking fleet.  Put it

True.

>this way, even if the attacker has 3-1 odds in ships attacking a starbase,
>he most fight the battle as a series of 1-1.5 odds battles in combat
potential.
>It is a well known military maxim that an inferior force can defeat a superior
>force if the inferior force can choose each engagement so that it has
>an advantage at each battle.  This seems to be precisely the very
>advantage the structure of the F&E rules themselves are giving the defending 
>player.

It just means you need 1.5 to 2 times the defending force to take out a
defended
starbase, and you can anticipate 1.5 times the losses of the defender. 
However,
most of your additional losses will be cripples (which you can repair)
due to the
limit of 1 directed damage target per round.  It can be difficult or
impossible to
replace the starbase after it falls, and noone has very many.
	One of the keys to a winning strategy for an attacker is to only attack
targets that are lightly defended or critical to the defender.  Also, the easy
escape ability works both ways - if the defender sends reserve fleets to
a target
that was only lightly defended before, the attacker can run after 1 round.
	F & E is far from a perfect game, but it is possible to win as the attacker
- I have done so a number of times.

>-David Zimdars

					W. Dow Rieder

 	When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems
start to look like nails...