This is an interesting ship to me. In Starfleet Command 2, I never played the first, it was classed as the Federation’s dreadnought, and the Excelsior Class was listed as a battlecruiser. This implies, to me anyway that Ulysses is the bigger ship. However when you dig into the game files, the Ulysses is in the BCH folder, and the Excelsior is in the DN folder. This makes sense because the Ulysses is very similar to the BCH class from Star Fleet Battles. So it appears that the classes’ roles were reversed at some point.

This doesn’t work for me personally because the Excelsior is a huge ship compared to it’s contemporaries. I feel the Excelsior class should be the largest ships in Starfleet until the Ambassador is built. So I split the difference. I made the Ulysses twice the size of the Constitution class, making it about two thirds the size of the Excelsior. However, Ulysses is better armed, reflecting it’s role as a battleship, compared to Excelsior as an explorer. My version has 20x Type 8 phasers, and 6 torpedo launchers.