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'''''Star Fleet Battles''''' is a 1979 tabletop space combat game featuring ships from ''[[Star Trek]]''.
The starships are represented by tokens or miniatures on a hexgrid, and by off-board diagrams showing the systems of each ship and keeping track of how badly damaged they are. Movement is simultaneous; each "turn" is divided into 32 "impulses"; each ship moves on some of these depending on its current speed. Gameplay consists of deciding how to allocate a ship's available energy during a turn (speed, shield reinforcement, weapon arming, etc.) and then carrying out the ships' movement and attacks.
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The most common scenario played is a one-on-one dogfight of balanced ships, usually heavy cruisers. Skirmishes between small squadrons are also popular; massive fleet battles are possible but require lots of patience and paperwork.
Due in part to licensing issues and in part to the desired flavor of the game, ''Star Fleet Battles'' is based solely on ''[[Star Trek: The
The game has given birth to the greater Starfleet Universe and a number of related games: ''Federation & Empire'', allowing players to fight a strategic war across the known space; ''Prime Directive'', the [[RPG]] which started out with its own system, but was later adapted for use with ''[[GURPS]]'', ''[[
{{tropelist}}
* [[
** On the other hand, over in the Omega
* [[Adventure-Friendly World]]: You want battles with more (and larger) ships involved? Here's a general war. And two more, so we can include new technology.
* [[Alternate Continuity]]: From the rest of the ''Star Trek'' [[Expanded Universe]].
* [[Alpha Strike]]: Simultaneously firing all your weapons at a nearby enemy unit is explicitly ''[[Attack Pattern Alpha|called]]'' an "alpha strike".
* [[Arbitrary Maximum Range]]:
** The damage of phaser weapons drop as the range increases, and the hit roll is used to see how much damage is done, not if they hit at all.
** Most heavy weapons have an "overload" feature to increase the damage they produce. When a weapon is overloaded it usually is limited to an arbitrary range of 8 hexes.
** Lasers, which are light-speed weapons (as opposed to Phasers, which are explicitly FTL weapons) have a maximum range of only one hex - the distance light can travel in one turn.
** In early editions of the game, phasers had no maximum
* [[Asteroid Thicket]]: Present and accounted for. Interestingly, the asteroid counters represent dangerous concentrations of asteroids rather than single rocks.
* [[Attack Its Weak Point]]: If you can maneuver such that your weapons will hit one of your target's weaker shields, you can do a lot more damage to him. Klingon ships in particular are notorious for having "glass shields" in the rear.
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* [[Boarding Party]]: Nearly every ship in the game has at least a few, and those that don't can convert some of their crew to repel enemy boarders.
* [[The Bridge]]: All the ships have a bridge; some have as many as 4 different kinds of bridges (bridge, auxiliary control, emergency bridge, and flag bridge). Taking out all bridges can cripple a ship; taking over all bridges (with boarding parties) can seize control of a ship.
* [[Cast
* [[Catfolk]]: Lyrans and The Kzinti.
* [[Cool Starship]]: Many. The familiar Federation ''Constitution'' class, the Klingon ''D7'', and the Romulan Warbird get featured a lot in the cover artwork.
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* [[Despair Event Horizon]]: Barely avoided in the main timeline during the darkest hours of the Andromedan Invasion, but only because the ''USS Darwin'' returned from a time warp where it encountered a timeline in which there was no [[Hope Spot]], and would face a greater downturn in just a few more years.
* [[Elsewhere Fic]]: Due to licensing issues, Kirk, Spock, and the ''Enterprise'' don't appear in the game, and none of the scenarios are explicitely from the TV series, though some are similar and there are some sly references.
* [[The Empire]]: The Klingons and Romulans certainly qualify.
* [[Explosive Overclocking]]:
** Orion ships can coax their warp engines to produce double their normal power output, but each turn of doing so damages the
*** Which leads directly to a basic principle of Orion tactics: In, Out, and Way Out. Go In knowing your objective, get Out once you have it, and always be sure to have a Way Out.
** Also includes the Fusion Beam, which can be powered with over triple the base amount it needs [[For Massive Damage]], but it also explodes and deals you an extra point of damage to your own ship.
** The Mauler device can be powered by the ship's batteries, but if you need extra oomph, you can add power directly from your ship's
* [[Expy]]:
** The Kzinti were born from a single episode of the [[Star Trek: The Animated Series|Animated Series]] written by [[Larry Niven]]. In the creation and evolution of the Star Fleet Universe, they have drifted away from their [[Known Space]] origins and are now Kzinti in name only.
** Many of the earlier races are strategically similar to a real-world power. The Federation is the US/NATO, the Klingons are the Soviets (as they were in the Original Series), the Romulans are China with Roman names, the Hydrans are the UK, the Gorns are Germany (few but very good ships), and the Tholians are the Israelis.
* [[The Federation]]: Of course. Some of the other races might also qualify as [[The Federation]], particularly the Interstellar Concordium.
* [[Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon]]: Weapons fire arcs are a major part of the system, and the Mauler Device has a very restricted forward firing arc.
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* [[Hidden Elf Village]]: The WYN Cluster is one of these.
* [[Hit Points]]: While damage against starships and bases is resolved using a complicated set of [[Subsystem Damage]] rules, drones and shuttles merely take a certain number of damage points to destroy. (Shuttles become "crippled" if they lose a certain fraction of their hit points, but otherwise they play this trope straight.)
* [[Humans Are White]]: Despite being a multi-species nation, all of the Federation's ships have recognizably human names.
* [[ISO Standard Human Spaceship]]: Each race seems to build all of their ships in one basic shape unique to their race, whether they are giant battleships or tiny (disposable) fast patrol boats. The Romulans differ from the rest in having ''two'' basic shapes. Three, if you count the refitted Klingon battlecruisers. And all shuttlecraft in the galaxy are the same blocky shape, with very little difference regardless of whether they were built by an 8' Gorn or a 3' Hydran.
* [[Klingon Promotion]]: Averted by the Klingons themselves, who recognize that a good officer might be killed by a lucky upstart. Played straight in the political arena of the feline races, which is why their leaders like to keep their subordinates at each other's throats instead of their own.
* [[Lensman Arms Race]]: The Federation and Klingons introduced X-Ships, with more efficient power systems, the ability to overload phasers and a number of other technological improvements. When the other races copied this X-ship technology, the Federation introduced ''second-generation'' X-Ships with ''even more efficient'' power systems and ''even more improved'' technology.
* [[Lethal Harmless Powers]]: [[Tractor Beam|Tractor beams]] aren't exactly harmless, but often
** The rules for tractoring shuttles specify that the shuttle is destroyed if you tow it fast enough. This creates interesting tactical restrictions and options in a fighter-heavy environment.
* [[Living Ship]]: The Branthodon use controlled, cybernetically enhanced space dragons as ships.
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* [[Long Runner]]: The ''Pocket Edition'' was first published in 1979, and the game has been in print ever since save for a two year period. The current ruleset was first released in 1990.
* [[Lost Colony]]: When they released an expansion that featured races set about 30 degrees counterclockwise around the galaxy from their main play zone, they used this to insert a newly settled Federation Colony (the entire system in fact) via a [[Negative Space Wedgie]]. Later on, a Klingon penal colony receives the same treatment.
* [[Macross Missile Massacre]]:
** Using drones; The Kzinti ships are designed to do this as their primary tactic. Only rivaled by carrier groups of the Klingons and Federation, but even then, the Kzinti do it better.
** It's possible for any drone-armed ship to launch a "scatter pack"
** And then the Kzinti often use scatter packs
** This is somewhat mitigated by limits on how many seeking weapons each ship can control at once. Of course, if a fleet includes a scout ship, its "special sensors" can be used increase the allowed number of seeking weapons to truly ridiculous levels. In addition, Kzinti ships and fighters can near-universally control more drones than usual. And then there are drones with Active Terminal Guidance, which don't ''need'' a ship to control them once they get into close range.
** Abated in the ''Federation Commander'' version of the rules which reduce drones down to their most basic form. This being done to speed things up, since a full MMM can bring a SFB game to a crawl.
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* [[Min-Maxing]]: In one mailbag Q-and-A column, a player asked "Can I double the engine output of an Orion ship and then self-destruct?". (The answer was: "Yes, but it would accomplish nothing. Self-destruct damage is based on the number of undestroyed engine boxes, not the engines' current power output.")
* [[Minovsky Physics]]: All of the ship systems and weapons obey rigidly-defined consistent rules.
* [[The Mothership]]: The Andromedans have these.
* [[Negative Space Wedgie]]: The vast majority of the (optional) "terrain" chapter. Space battles too boring? How about space battles near a black hole, or space battles in an [[Asteroid Thicket]]?
** The Tholians have the Web, which functions as a sort of semi-portable [[Negative Space Wedgie]], and the Andromedans have a thing called the Temporal Elevator available for their bases that also does something of the sort. One tactics reference even recommends thinking of Tholian Web as portable friendly terrain.
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** This was the case in previous editions, but under the current rules, such explosions aren't as powerful, and there are severe limitations on when a ship can self-destruct (in imminent danger of being captured, caught in a badly lost battle, most personnel on board evacuated, etc.) on the grounds that while the ''player'' might want to use kamikaze tactics, the ''captain'' very probably wouldn't.
*** Exception: the [[Cyanide Pill|Orions]] can self-destruct [[Taking You with Me|whenever they feel like it]].
* [[Space Base]]: Starbases. "Assault the starbase" scenarios typically involve an entire fleet of 6-9 ships vs. a starbase and one puny frigate.
* [[Space Battle]]: The whole game.
* [[Space Fighter]]: Especially favored by the Kzinti and Hydran empires. Introducing these was one of the biggest breaks from [[Star Trek: The Original Series|the source material]]. Unusually, they are much slower than capital ships (at least until warp booster packs are invented) and are primarily used as semi-independent weapons platforms.
** Amusingly, all of the Federation fighters are named and obviously modled after American combat aircraft (F-14, F-18, A-10, etc.) that were in use when the game was developed.
* [[Space Mines]]: Ships can "roll a mine out a hatch" and leave it to blow up a ship pursuing them. Mines can be set to accept only certain sizes of ships as targets. Major space installations often had minefield belts protecting them. Some of the mine types available:
** The Romulans have a Nuclear Space Mine based on the ''[[Star Trek: The
** Command mines can be ordered to detonate or to activate/deactivate themselves.
** Chained mines detonate when other mines explode.
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* [[Space Whale]]: Solitaire play generally involves a single player-controlled starship studying and fighting a space monster that moves by automatic rules. These monsters include a giant space amoeba (based on the TOS episode "The Immunity Syndrome"), a giant space manta ray, a giant space dragon, a giant space moray eel, and of course a giant space Cone-Shaped Planet-Eating Thing From That One Episode. {{spoiler|[[wikipedia:The Doomsday Machine|"The Doomsday Machine"]]}}
* [[Spin-Off]]: The game proved so successful that it spun off a strategic-level wargame called ''Federation Space'' (later revised as ''Federation and Empire'').
** A [[Role
** And, of course, the already-mentioned ''[[Star Trek Starfleet Command|Starfleet Command]]'' Computer games.
* [[Standard Sci-Fi Fleet]]: Nearly all of the standard types are present. Heavy Cruisers are indeed [[Jack of All Stats]].
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** The Mauler Device is another, with the ships that carry it being literally built around the weapon.
** The Plasma-R torpedo, second only to the Mauler in terms of raw damage. There are a couple of romulan ships which consist of one such launcher (which takes a very long time to charge), engines, and a bridge. The running joke was "Congratulations! Your Plasma-R comes packaged with a small ship to move it around for you"
** In fact most heavy weapons could
* [[What If]]: The Frax are a fictional
** An entire module, called ''Fleet Training Centers'' brought the FRAX and a whole series of other (less developed) races, each with their own weird quirks and unique combat style, some of which were designed specifically to be dangerous against the race that programmed the simulations.
** Some of the simulator races do not obey some of the rules of the [[Minovsky Physics]] that otherwise rigidly controls the game. For instance, there is a race that treats three directions as equally valid 'forward' directions and has a shuttle that can move like a helicopter.
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:Science Fiction Tabletop Games]]
[[Category:Tabletop Games]]
[[Category:
▲[[Category:Tabletop Game]]
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