Am I a Star Fleet Battles Player?
StarControl Forums
I thought I'd throw this up here since I mention SFB so much. Have you been wondering if you might be a Star Fleet Battles player? Take my simple test (which many SFB players find hilarious partly because it is so true...)
As a gamer, you are certainly familiar with "power-ups". We all know what they are, you run over it... it gives you some type of bonus. There will be like 10-30 power-ups in the game. It's a thing we've all seen in many games, and it always works the same. SFB has power-ups that can optionally be added to any "beer & pretzels" scenario. We call them "canisters". At last count I knew, there were over 200 canisters, each of which provides a uniquely different type of bonus to some aspect of the ship. Here's how you retrieve a canister in SFB...
You must enter tractor beam range (3 hexes or less). Tractor the canister, spending one impulse per hex "pulling" the canister into your hex if you did not tractor at range 0. Then you must use the "shuttlecraft landing procedure" to bring the canister into the shuttle bay. This takes 8 impulses. Once aboard, you must now wait until the end of the turn. At the beginning of the next turn, you may assign deck crews to unload and install the canister. It takes 2 deck crew actions to do perform this task, meaning that 2 deck crews must now spend an entire turn at work. At the beginning of the next turn, your "power-up" will be active.
In SFB a turn is divided into 32 impulses, representing approximately 2 minutes of real time. So the entire process took about 4 minutes of "real time" to accomplish. However, a typical turn in SFB generally takes about 30 minutes here in the real world, and can take as long as 90 minutes during a turn when a lot of damage happens to both ships in a 1v1 scenario. Let's call an average turn 45 minutes. So retrieving and activating a power-up in SFB usually takes 60-90 minutes here in the real world.
If this sounds totally awesome too you, and you think you would love to play a game that has so much detail that this is what it takes to do something that in any other game is as simple as "running over a powerup"... you might be a Star Fleet Battles player. If, on the other hand, you are like 99.9% of the people in the world who would find this to be completely ridiculous, you should probably try another game.
