Ship Building

When we played a campaign with the old FT II system we had some fairly simple
shipyard rules. Each player started with four 'slipways' on his orbital
shipyard. An escort took one slip, a cruiser two and a capital ship four.
Building time then was one turn per point of mass. I ended up using graph
paper to record what was being built which worked quite well. You could
also build more slipways - and each of those had an
SSD in case someone tried a shipyard attack. One was but my two BB sized
monitors drove of the attackers though it was a close run thing.

It was possible to use a tug to move a slipway to a new system or to build one
from scratch but this was expensive and not every would was capable of doing
so.

There was some demand for being able to build ships on a planets surface but I
did not like this idea and as I wrote the campaign rules this was
'disincentivised'.

It worked but there were a few problems. On the whole the campaign rules were
too complicated, at times the game resembed an accountancy exercise when you
tried
to keep track of production points - which could be
moved by ship.

***
It worked but there were a few problems. On the whole the campaign rules were
too complicated, at times the game resembed an accountancy exercise when you
tried
to keep track of production points - which could be
moved by ship.
***

I've asked this before, but are there any groups so large that you could build
teams to handle factions? I know locally we've gamers that tend towards some
aspects of games, say board games like train games with fairly complex
accounting, and others that would rather put figs on the table and bash it
out.

They tend to do all of the above, mind you, but I think the empire builders
would be pretty happy just milking a build system for one more dread, and the
heroic warriors would love to use it to put opponents in harm's way.

I've just never figured how to work it out.

On the other hand, has anyone thought about doing an e-mail team
campaign with FTJava for combat?

Ok, it's a sick dream that will never happen...

The_Beast