Locutus9956
Mongoose
This will be a fairly short one for reasons you will soon see.....
We decided to try out some new bits and pieces and to play 1 pt Armageddon (with the new points split I find this actually encourages people to have a bit more variety in their fleets and not just swarm... (though in retrospect it DID handicap both fleets a little as neither side REALLY wanted to take their War level choice except out of curiosity, but we both did as its still better than a battle level ship for the same points)
So we had:
EA:
Command Omega
Marathon
Chronos
Chronos
Drazi:
Fireraptor
Stormfalcon
Solarhawk
Warbird
Warbird
We were playing Space superiority and had several asteroids and a planet on the table.
The Drazi had their choice of table corner and for some reason that is beyond me decided to set up in the corner oposite the planet leaving the EA with a nice gravity well just outside their deployment zone......
The EA set up their Chronos to make a run for the Drazi fleet while the 2 larger ships deployed lined up to orbit the planet...
Turn 1
EA won initiative and saw the Drazi move their stormfalcon forward, one of the Chronos shot forward on all power to engines putting it just in range to open fire.
The Drazi then perhaps rather foolishly jumped at the chance to potentially hit a Chronos with a solar cannon and moved the Solarhawk to boresight it.... the other Chronos shot forward to get in range of the Stormfalcon too... the Omega used the planet to orbit around and CAF while boresighting the Solarhawk.
At this point and finally the Drazi moved the Fireraptor to come forward and boresight the other Chronos. And the Marathon orbited round the other side of the planet CAF boresighting the Stormfalcon. The two Warbirds went APTE and shot forward to catch up with the rest of the fleet.
And at this point in a torrent of fire both sides opened fire. The Omega opened up first and blew the fragile but dangerous Solarhawk straight to hell (I let one of the damn things fire at me once before and have made VERY certain not to reapeat that mistake ever again
).
The Drazi then fired their Fireraptor, though not its solar cannons as it was saving them for use on a more dangerous target. However its other weapons were impressively poor scoring a grand total of 6pts of damage with the beam weapon and only 1 (though it WAS a crit) of its other guns getting through the interceptors.
The Marathon opened fire with its Neutron Cannon scoring and managed to score a 6,5 crit and a plethora of other hits too crippling the stormfalcon outright..... things were not looking good for the Drazi so far....
The crippled stormfalcon fired with what it could but scored minimal damage (it wasnt boresighted). At which point the only remaining fire was from the two Chronos who promtly blasted the Stormfalcon out of the sky in a hail of pulse cannon fire.
We started playing turn 2 but by halfway through the firing the Drazi had managed to slightly damage 1 Chronos and had lost both their Warbirds (1 to a beam shot from the Marathon the other to the Omegas Lasers) and were left with 1 Warship with mainly boresighted weaponry facing off against more or less an intact EA fleet with 2 nice initiative sinks to let the 2 Big EA ships overshoot and aft boresight it for the next few turns relatively easily.... so we called it there....
So it was an overwhelming victory for the EA.
In the Drazi players defence he hadn't played the game for quite a while (and was ill too so hardly thinking straight anyway) leading to what I think were the following HUGE mistakes that more or less handed me the game:
Mistake 1: Despite having the choice of deployment zones, he GAVE the EA the planet by theirs. For a fleet with long range boresight weaponry a planet is a HUGE advantage allowing you to CAF while turning to boreight by orbiting it.
Mistake 2: Despite being hugely outranged the Drazi did not try to take advantage of the asteroids to hide their ships from the deadly beams of the Omega and Marathon.
Mistake 3: The Drazi did not fire their solar cannons as soon as they had the chance. Just because theres a more dangerous target on the board is not a reason to 'save' your slow loading shot. Removing one of the Chronos would have had HUGE implications in temrs of initiative and allowing me to boresight the targets I wanted to. (And Chronos are very dangerous in their own right if left to run riot)
Mistake 4: This is the big one that frankly won me the game in turn 1. The Drazi moved the Solarhawk BEFORE I had moved my boresighted ships. Despite haveing 2 weaker ships that werent going to be in range to boresight anyway the solarhawk moved to boresight me as soon as Id moved a single ship in range, thus leaving it easily targetable by the Omega (which was almost guarenteed to take it out in one shot). In that fleet the Solarhawk should have been the last ship to move every turn. Sure the Stormfalcon and Fireraptor have more firepower but neither of those ships is likely to die in one hit..... Hell even the Chronos could probably have taken down the Solarhawk in a single volley, and given its potential firepower I would have fired EVERYHTING at it till it was destroyed.
All in all though I was pleasantly surprised by the Command Omega and its command bonus did actually prove to be incredibly useful.
The Marathon didnt really get a proper try out as it only really did one thing and it rolle a huge crit for that so doesnt really help judge how good the ship actually is normally (though it seemed pretty good)
The Fireaptors didnt really get tried out at all and the only firing it did was hampered by terrible dice luck so maybe next time....
We decided to try out some new bits and pieces and to play 1 pt Armageddon (with the new points split I find this actually encourages people to have a bit more variety in their fleets and not just swarm... (though in retrospect it DID handicap both fleets a little as neither side REALLY wanted to take their War level choice except out of curiosity, but we both did as its still better than a battle level ship for the same points)
So we had:
EA:
Command Omega
Marathon
Chronos
Chronos
Drazi:
Fireraptor
Stormfalcon
Solarhawk
Warbird
Warbird
We were playing Space superiority and had several asteroids and a planet on the table.
The Drazi had their choice of table corner and for some reason that is beyond me decided to set up in the corner oposite the planet leaving the EA with a nice gravity well just outside their deployment zone......
The EA set up their Chronos to make a run for the Drazi fleet while the 2 larger ships deployed lined up to orbit the planet...
Turn 1
EA won initiative and saw the Drazi move their stormfalcon forward, one of the Chronos shot forward on all power to engines putting it just in range to open fire.
The Drazi then perhaps rather foolishly jumped at the chance to potentially hit a Chronos with a solar cannon and moved the Solarhawk to boresight it.... the other Chronos shot forward to get in range of the Stormfalcon too... the Omega used the planet to orbit around and CAF while boresighting the Solarhawk.
At this point and finally the Drazi moved the Fireraptor to come forward and boresight the other Chronos. And the Marathon orbited round the other side of the planet CAF boresighting the Stormfalcon. The two Warbirds went APTE and shot forward to catch up with the rest of the fleet.
And at this point in a torrent of fire both sides opened fire. The Omega opened up first and blew the fragile but dangerous Solarhawk straight to hell (I let one of the damn things fire at me once before and have made VERY certain not to reapeat that mistake ever again
).The Drazi then fired their Fireraptor, though not its solar cannons as it was saving them for use on a more dangerous target. However its other weapons were impressively poor scoring a grand total of 6pts of damage with the beam weapon and only 1 (though it WAS a crit) of its other guns getting through the interceptors.
The Marathon opened fire with its Neutron Cannon scoring and managed to score a 6,5 crit and a plethora of other hits too crippling the stormfalcon outright..... things were not looking good for the Drazi so far....
The crippled stormfalcon fired with what it could but scored minimal damage (it wasnt boresighted). At which point the only remaining fire was from the two Chronos who promtly blasted the Stormfalcon out of the sky in a hail of pulse cannon fire.
We started playing turn 2 but by halfway through the firing the Drazi had managed to slightly damage 1 Chronos and had lost both their Warbirds (1 to a beam shot from the Marathon the other to the Omegas Lasers) and were left with 1 Warship with mainly boresighted weaponry facing off against more or less an intact EA fleet with 2 nice initiative sinks to let the 2 Big EA ships overshoot and aft boresight it for the next few turns relatively easily.... so we called it there....
So it was an overwhelming victory for the EA.
In the Drazi players defence he hadn't played the game for quite a while (and was ill too so hardly thinking straight anyway) leading to what I think were the following HUGE mistakes that more or less handed me the game:
Mistake 1: Despite having the choice of deployment zones, he GAVE the EA the planet by theirs. For a fleet with long range boresight weaponry a planet is a HUGE advantage allowing you to CAF while turning to boreight by orbiting it.
Mistake 2: Despite being hugely outranged the Drazi did not try to take advantage of the asteroids to hide their ships from the deadly beams of the Omega and Marathon.
Mistake 3: The Drazi did not fire their solar cannons as soon as they had the chance. Just because theres a more dangerous target on the board is not a reason to 'save' your slow loading shot. Removing one of the Chronos would have had HUGE implications in temrs of initiative and allowing me to boresight the targets I wanted to. (And Chronos are very dangerous in their own right if left to run riot)
Mistake 4: This is the big one that frankly won me the game in turn 1. The Drazi moved the Solarhawk BEFORE I had moved my boresighted ships. Despite haveing 2 weaker ships that werent going to be in range to boresight anyway the solarhawk moved to boresight me as soon as Id moved a single ship in range, thus leaving it easily targetable by the Omega (which was almost guarenteed to take it out in one shot). In that fleet the Solarhawk should have been the last ship to move every turn. Sure the Stormfalcon and Fireraptor have more firepower but neither of those ships is likely to die in one hit..... Hell even the Chronos could probably have taken down the Solarhawk in a single volley, and given its potential firepower I would have fired EVERYHTING at it till it was destroyed.
All in all though I was pleasantly surprised by the Command Omega and its command bonus did actually prove to be incredibly useful.
The Marathon didnt really get a proper try out as it only really did one thing and it rolle a huge crit for that so doesnt really help judge how good the ship actually is normally (though it seemed pretty good
)The Fireaptors didnt really get tried out at all and the only firing it did was hampered by terrible dice luck so maybe next time....
