Federation and Empire Scenario #43 Gorn vs Rom

[gunner41c]

So we played the next fight for a BATS in Hex 4310. This is the Gorns turn on 2B. Three of my Gorn fleets went on a rampage. The first battle was a clear beating, the second was a retreat and this is the third and last fight of the turn. The first 2 turns were just maneuvering around the black hole on Gorn side of the map. This caused a change in my initial attack plan. Two turns of all power to engines and let the fight begin.

Romulans came in with a KRC, SP x2, WE, K5R, SKH x2, SNB and a BATS.
Gorns came in with a CC, CL x4, HD x2, BD x2, DD, SC

The F&E game has command limits and we followed that for determining fleet size in any fight. Gorn had 11 ships and Romulan had 8 and the BATS.

The other change we are using is the 4 box shield idea. Both of us have found it to be a good idea with a very small amount of bookkeeping. It added better tactics and returned more of the flavor of Star Trek to an excellent game system.

 

[gunner41c]

Turn 3 = The battle starts. The black hole is messing my carefully arranged fleet/squadron setup. It keeps pulling my ships into a heap towards itself. The Romulans are amused and wait with loaded plasmas. Tactical surprise from Finlos, he drops suicide shuttles out of all his ships. OH OH, this isn't good!

 

[gunner41c]

Turn 3 results. Rom's had the initiative, nailed my CL (south), HD (north) and a BD (south). The Gorns killed a SK (south) and a K5R (middle) and all the suicide shuttles. Mind you they died with my HD exploding, not a recommended way of doing it. The CL and HD exploded on turn 4.

 

[gunner41c]

Another view of Turn 3

 

[gunner41c]

We have concentric rings of thread laid out for the gravity effect of the black hole. The Gorn fleet is experiencing problems in maintaining fleet formations and position on the board

 

[gunner41c]

Turn 4, In a way the black hole helped, I started to re-angle my ships to use the black hole effect for my facing advantage. The turn 3 exploding ships are messing with any assault attempt by the Romulans. They used up all of their plasmas and did a back 4" and reload. The Gorns are posed to assault with a CL x2 , CC, HD and readied plasmas. End of Turn 4 the BATS is dead with massive critical hits. Some damage is being caused by exploding ships but none serious.
Gorns won the initiative this turn (a rare occurrence) and I play to lose the initiative so it was a nice surprise.

 

[gunner41c]

Turn 5= The Gorns win the initiative again??? What are the dice gods doing to the Romulans? LOL
This turn the re-loaded plasmas from the CL x2 and a BD move in to kill the KRC and chew up the WE. Critical hits are plentiful and hurt the Romulans bad. KRC is smoking space dust and the WE is leaking Romulan crewmen out the vents. Alas they killed one more CL from concentrated fire of the SP and WE.

 

[gunner41c]

Turn 6= The Gorns are ecstatic, they won the initiative again. Must be my night.

Romulans are starting to hurt, big ships are dieing fast and the rest are thinking of running. Only 2x SP, a severely damaged WE and a SNB still in fight. The last SK already all power to engines and bailed off the map. The Romulans all head south since most of the Gorn fleet is pointing north. The CC and DD are really the only effective units facing east and able to chase them. End of turn 6 has the Romulans scared.

 

[gunner41c]

Turn 7= The Gorns deliver a Coup-de-grace to the Romulans.

The Romulan fleet runs south and the Gorn CC and DD give chase. The WE and SP nail my poor little scout who is crippled, no shields and 3 hp left. Easy meat for them. The DD unloads a plasma and phaser barrage into the WE and finishes it off easy. The CC nails the SP with all plasmas and phasers doing immense damage and critical hits cause it to explode in fine fashion.

Romulans started with around 1560 points and the Gorns with 1680. End result is about 750 points of dead Gorn and 1100 of dead Romulans including the BATS.

 

[gunner41c]

The final tally is:
Turn 1A -Battle 1- Gorn lost DD, BD x2, HD and a BATS.
Romulan lost KR, WE, SP
Romulan victory
-Battle 2- Romulan retreat
-Battle 3- Gorn lost BC x2, CL, BD,DD and a BATS
Romulan lost KR, WE x2, SNB x2
Romulan victory
Turn 1B -Gorns make strategic moves and no battles
Turn 2A -Battle 1- Gorn lost DN, BC x2, BD x3
Romulan lost CON, SPC, K5R x2, SK x2, WE, KE, FH
Gorn victory
-Battle 2- Gorn retreat
-Battle 3- Romulan retreat
Turn 2B
1st Battle - Gorn lost DN, BC, CL, SC
- Romulan lost CON, SP x2, WE x2, K5R, SPC, KE, SNB x2
Gorn victory
2nd Battle - Gorn survived by not engaging
3rd Battle - Gorn lost CL x2, HD, BD, SC
Romulan lost KRC, WE, SP, K5R, SK, BATS
Gorn victory

I made a mistake of engaging when outnumbered in the first battle. After that I declined bad odds. Finlos had already avoided outnumbered battles. Most of the battles have been Gorn victories at a high cost. The Romulans lost 1000 points to Gorn 750 points on average. But their economy is stronger and will probably win an attrition battle. As the Gorn player in F&E using ACTA-SFB to fight the battles I have to crush bases fast and wear the Romulan fleet down. We aren't using carriers or ships that don't exist in the ACTA system. We are going to try carrier/fighter rules we have been working on and will see if they work. Our objective is to avoid a lot of small ships and only have the patrol/frigate size and up. Will let you know how the carrier/fighter idea works after a bit of game testing. If it does the F&E will make a wonderful campaign game to run ACTA-SFB encounters.

 

[billclo]

Very interesting campaign you are doing. Please keep up the AARs.

One thing you might consider for some scenarios if you want small ships are the Armed cutters and Prime Traders. They pack enough punch to hurt you if you ignore them (bah, too small to bother shooting), and might be useful for base defense or convoy defense scenarios.

I used a couple Armed Cutters in a convoy escort scenario, along with some defending warships, and those were a couple of annoying little gnats, let me tell you.

 

[bluebirds40]

great battle report.

 

[gunner41c]

The only ships in your fleets are the ones you produce through F&E game turn production. The game starts you with only certain types of ships and limited numbers. To make extra ships you have to spend the economic points. A dreadnought is very expensive to produce when you could have 2-3 heavy/light cruisers instead. But you can include any ship in a fleet within your command limits. DN=10 CC=9 BC=8 and so on, with the 1st scout not counted and the command ship not counted. So if you have an admiral with the fleet you can put into a single battle a DN, Scout, 10 ships (any size) + 1 for the admiral for a total of 13. This gives you a choice of loading 1 fleet up with nasty big ships, or more fleets with a DN for each but larger command limits. I chose to make a strike fleet with all my dreadnoughts and a bunch of smaller fleets with CC's in command. My strategy is to hit hard and crush something each turn. If the upcoming battle isn't fair each fleet can retreat before battle. Most of my fleets have 20 ships in them and I make the largest most powerful battle fleet out of it. Also any BATS/SB also cause you to drop a ship in each hex you pass through to represent the fighters/AOE. So as you move into enemy space your fleet slowly weakens leaving a trail of ships behind it. So instead of the normal F&E combat system we use ACTA to resolve the combat. At the end of each battle we reduce the size of the fleets with lost ships. Any crippled ships are flipped over and you must repair with economic points. Most of the F&E rules are being used with minor changes for ACTA. It took a bit of research to figure out which ships are available for the yr 168-185 and not use ships that aren't in the time line yet. But it wasn't too hard. SFB was a good resource for this as the ship charts gave years of availability for each type.

 

[gunner41c]

We are working on fighters/carrier rules. Early play test for us is as follows.

I used SFB sheets to generate the number of fighters and capabilities of the carriers and fighters. Ships are relatively easy as usually they use the base hull and just drop weapons for fighter bays. The fighters weren't too hard but needed some adjustments to fit in the ACTA system more smoothly (my opinion only). Finlos and I discussed how to employ fighters without a bunch of small ship counters to slow the game down. My solution was to use on my forms a sub-divided box with the number of fighters on each ship. Each fighter deployment would only last the turn it was sent out. The distance from the carrier would be 1/2 the speed of a fighter to represent the out/return time of it. You could deploy fighters like a heavy weapon with a reload time. A fed fighter with speed of 16" would have a deployment range of 8". From there each fighter could use it's weapons out to the range of the individual weapons (ie: PH1 > 18" or Photon > 15" and so on). If you used 8 fighters with a PL F on each you would get 8x PL F shots out to 16".

Now to deploy a fighter group you would place a single fighter ship on the map at the desired range. Put a die to represent how many fighters in the group beside it. Do this at the end of the carriers movement, the carrier would be using a launch shuttle SA and be limited to a move of 6". During combat phase any ship could fire at the fighter group and any hits would remove a fighter from the group (1 hit = 1 dead fighter). Mark off the dead fighter from the carrier sheet box. After all combat firing is done the fighters can make their attacks with any weapons they have. We found that the fighters were being treated like plasma shots and became a phaser target in a hurry. Having a bunch of PH3's and photons being shot at you isn't desired. We kept the fighters simple with only PH or 1 or 2 PL/Disruptor/Photon weapons on each fighter.

We didn't use rail weapons or heavy fighters. The reload action is required to prep the fighters for another attack. Most carriers only carried 6-12 fighters so it didn't unbalance the combat too much. The the single use each time kept the number of ships on the board down and game flow smoother.

The alternative is a CAP (combat air patrol) function. This was a very nice tactic and helped the fleet out immensly. CAP worked as follows.

CAP is a SA. Works like a "launch shuttle" SA, limits movement to 6" and no other SA's allowed. CAP would use 1/2 the fighters in the group as defensive protection. Each turn the carrier would launch the other 1/2 of the group and recover/reload the first half. All fighters deployed this way can be targeted like normal by enemy weapons/fighters. The CAP fighters are protecting all ships within 8" of the carrier from incoming fighters, drones or plasma weapons. When the carrier is selected to fire the fighters may apply thier weapons to incoming targets of drones, plasmas or enemy fighters in thier range. This is also an escort trait and may assist any ships within 8" and the range of their weapons. All normal weapon use/limitations are applied to the fighters weapons.

The CAP functions like the defensive fire SA but no crew checks are required. As the fighters are lost the CAP becomes less effective. All fire directed at the CAP is measured to the center of the carriers base as they would be around the carrier.

We hope this will function well and continue to road (space) test the idea.

 

[gunner41c]

Now to cost out the carriers use the original shop cost ie: Gorn CL is 175 plus the cost of the fighters. Base cost of a fighter ended up being anywhere from 6 to 15 points depending on original cost x1.25.

A Romulan fighter yr 168 " G-F, Range 8/2=4 inch deployment, PH3 x2= 2AD, PL Dx2= 2 AD at a cost of 6 points on top of the original War Eagle cost. The War Hawk carried 5 of them so end price was around 160pnts. Any heavy weapons or phasers were grouped as 1 attack with the appropriate number of AD.

Carriers are very expensive to use and a somewhat limited attack ability since the fighters were easy to kill. But the CAP option would be very valuable in a large scale fight. Group any med carriers with 1 escort and any heavy carriers with 2 escorts. I noticed some of the assault carriers being around 500-600 points, a very expensive amount for any ship. The new BB's are also limited carriers so if fighters are ever figured out the ship charts will need updating.