I got my first two games in while demoing ACTA to a friend tonight, and the overall reaction was "great!" As 'so great you can pack your SFB books away in a box great'. Seriously, both of us loved the game and plan on demoing it to a couple mutual friends who wanted to play but were intimidated by the complexity of SFB.
We had both had the books for a while now but due to schedules tonight was the first night we both had free so we could sit down and run through the game. Most of the questions we had were answered but a couple still remain, posted after the battle reports.
The first game was extremely simple and straightforward, I had two Fed CAs and he had a pair of D7s. Our main goal for that game was to run through a couple turns and learn how it flowed. It took us two and a half to three hours to run through 6-7 turns but we did a LOT of page flipping during that time. There was a lot of maneuvering and the lesson "hang together or hang separately" (I know I'm misquoting it) certainly applies. The first few turns I had to wrap my mind around the change in movement switching from SFB to ACTA and that definitely cost me the game. He split up his ships and I thought it would be a good idea to do the same to keep both D7s engaged and he completely outmaneuvered me and turned my ships individually into so much debris.
A few points: 1) The agile trait is good, 2) big crunch weapons like photons really don't help you that much when your opponent can stay out of your F arc, 3) hit and run raids can be brutally devastating, and 4) the Klingon forward shield rule is very good as well.
For the second game we picked (and played!) our fleet of 750 points in about 90 minutes. We wanted to try dreadnoughts so he played a Kzinti fleet of DN, BCH, and BC and my fleet was Romulan condor, king eagle, and two skyhawks. It was a standard close and gun, no real tactics involved. Fortunately I was able to start the game cloaked or I just wouldn't have used the cloak option. Cloaking under threat of 15 AD worth of drones left me too vulnerable to risk it.
The game was won on turn two, really, when I uncloaked and dumped 38 AD worth of plasma plus whatever extra AD worth of phasers I didn't need to defend from drones into the port arcs of his two cruisers. He just didn't have enough phasers to stop all that plasma and the downward spiral of cascading critical hits just didn't last long enough to get ugly :shock:. He killed one of my skyhawks on turn three to extra some small amount of vengeance and then booked his DN out on turn four when all three surviving ships would have had plasmas recharged, even though they were out of arc. He had to go pick up his girlfriend so we just let it go after turn three.
Now for the questions:
A) When I score structure damage with a multihit weapon (say a disruptor) do I roll once on the attack table [one hit] or twice [two damage]?
B) When the critical hit table says 'random weapon system' does that mean one line of <weapon> or all <weapon> on the ship?
C) When a ship is stricken and a 9+ is rolled on the damage table, is the explosion AD equal to half of the starting ship structure and not the cumulative weapon AD as listed on the roster pages?
We had both had the books for a while now but due to schedules tonight was the first night we both had free so we could sit down and run through the game. Most of the questions we had were answered but a couple still remain, posted after the battle reports.
The first game was extremely simple and straightforward, I had two Fed CAs and he had a pair of D7s. Our main goal for that game was to run through a couple turns and learn how it flowed. It took us two and a half to three hours to run through 6-7 turns but we did a LOT of page flipping during that time. There was a lot of maneuvering and the lesson "hang together or hang separately" (I know I'm misquoting it) certainly applies. The first few turns I had to wrap my mind around the change in movement switching from SFB to ACTA and that definitely cost me the game. He split up his ships and I thought it would be a good idea to do the same to keep both D7s engaged and he completely outmaneuvered me and turned my ships individually into so much debris.
A few points: 1) The agile trait is good, 2) big crunch weapons like photons really don't help you that much when your opponent can stay out of your F arc, 3) hit and run raids can be brutally devastating, and 4) the Klingon forward shield rule is very good as well.
For the second game we picked (and played!) our fleet of 750 points in about 90 minutes. We wanted to try dreadnoughts so he played a Kzinti fleet of DN, BCH, and BC and my fleet was Romulan condor, king eagle, and two skyhawks. It was a standard close and gun, no real tactics involved. Fortunately I was able to start the game cloaked or I just wouldn't have used the cloak option. Cloaking under threat of 15 AD worth of drones left me too vulnerable to risk it.
The game was won on turn two, really, when I uncloaked and dumped 38 AD worth of plasma plus whatever extra AD worth of phasers I didn't need to defend from drones into the port arcs of his two cruisers. He just didn't have enough phasers to stop all that plasma and the downward spiral of cascading critical hits just didn't last long enough to get ugly :shock:. He killed one of my skyhawks on turn three to extra some small amount of vengeance and then booked his DN out on turn four when all three surviving ships would have had plasmas recharged, even though they were out of arc. He had to go pick up his girlfriend so we just let it go after turn three.
Now for the questions:
A) When I score structure damage with a multihit weapon (say a disruptor) do I roll once on the attack table [one hit] or twice [two damage]?
B) When the critical hit table says 'random weapon system' does that mean one line of <weapon> or all <weapon> on the ship?
C) When a ship is stricken and a 9+ is rolled on the damage table, is the explosion AD equal to half of the starting ship structure and not the cumulative weapon AD as listed on the roster pages?