>All I can say is, yikes! To wrap back around to (vaguely) the topic at
>hand, was FASA the ones who made the fiendishly complex Star Trek
>combat sim, or were there two bands of rules-crazed lunatics running
>around back then?

That, as others have said, is Star Fleet Battles (yes, two words, not one, very legally two words instead of one) and it at the very least has the virtue of being intuitive in addition to being complex; the rules flow logically into each other so at a certain point you flip over from "aaaaaaaa so many numbers to" to "oh! I see exactly how I can use these numbers to get my space murder on." It's been a called a game designed by engineers, for engineers, which means that after thirty-five years or so it's gotten pretty balanced.

I do not recommend exposing people to it raw, though. You have to gateway drug them into it, and the way it was done to me (by fellow forum dweller Croaker, in fact) was to start with Federation Commander, which uses a stripped-down and in many ways more elegant and cinematic ruleset and has nice friendly cards depicting your starship you can mark all over with dry-erase markers and other things to make play more friendly. If a person ends up taking to it, they often come to wish for more granular control over things like phaser fire, boarding parties, shield facing, etc etc. and that's when you smile and drop a copy of the SFB rules on the table.

-Merc
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