FCS (Fleet Combat System) - Imperium Wargame (musings)

[robject]

FCS as a Wargame: A variant of Imperium, starting with the ZS and the Interstellar Wars.

Differences from Imperium -

• Each battle is a hex-grid tabletop miniatures game, each side armed with a handful of BCS units.
• Battles take place in-system, around mainworlds, gas giants, or open space.
• When the ZS loses, it incorporates design improvements from the winning side.
• The ZS usually wins wars.
• Ortillery is most effective for planetary bombardment.
• Combat has layered defenses like High Guard. Battleships are hard to kill.
• Ship prices align with the OTU (e.g. MCr100 for a great fighter, BCr360 for a Tigress).

As you can tell, ship detail cards are likely to have more detail than the original Imperium tokens. How this works without killing the game speed is TO BE SEEN.

Imperium counters had a Type, Maintenance Number, Beam factor, Missile factor, and Screen factor. FCS cards are likely to have Type and Movement values, nuanced main weapons, and an organized set of attack and defense ratings. They'll probably have purchase and maintenance costs on the card as well.

 

[robject]

How An Attack Might Work

Assuming a High-Guard-like attack mechanic, you roll two dice, add the attacking weapon factor, against every applicable defense. Exceed the defense's value to defeat it and move to the next defense.

Primaries are on the top slot of the weapon stack, so they only have to penetrate the "primary" layer of defense, subject to mods based on the weapon.

Siege weapons are in the second slot; I'm not sure if they're the same as Ortillery (I don't think so).

Secondaries are in the third slot. To attack with them, you have to first defeat the secondary layer of defense, then attack the siege layer, and then the primary layer.

There's probably a point beyond which the target size is too great for a weapon to hurt it.

Weapons require specific ranges -- some are short ranged, some long. Troops are "contact" ranged.

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I suspect that capital ships require multiple hits in a turn to be rendered Out Of Action.

 

[robject]

Mapping the Tigress to BCS to Imperium

So I generalized the Tigress and made a proto-Tigress BCS ship card.
Since the Dominator-class Ziru Sirka dreadnought has its own proto-BCS card, I could compare the two.
Since Imperium has a B1 ("first gen") dreadnought in its game, I could then link the Dominator to the B1, and from there link the Tigress to Imperium counter values.

The result is attached.

The Tigress not only wipes the floor with the best available of the era, it also cannot be hit. It's a monster, even with this flawed conversion.