Tomorrow's Game - what to take, what to take?

[starbreaker]

Playing my Al Malik versus Hazat tomorrow afternoon, what to test at 1000 points? We're using the S&P upgrades stuff, so I can get some decent boarding defense by taking cyber troops - not feeling aggressive enough to try the other options, not against Hazat.

Waffling between the vanilla but fairly balanced 2 destroyers, 2 galliots, 2 frigates, 2 explorers, and 50 cybers, or the highly experimental 3 carriers, frigate, 18 bombers, 6 fighters, and 15 cybers scattered around. I suspect the first is the better mix and requires no proxies, but the second would be helpful for determining if buying a light carrier pack and supporting craft is even remotely worth doing. If my opponent brings his carrier the second force gets a little more attractive, but I think the first one can stand off even a dozen bombers without integral carrier support.

Anyone else try the massed carrier thing yet?

 

[locarno24]

Waffling between the vanilla but fairly balanced 2 destroyers, 2 galliots, 2 frigates, 2 explorers, and 50 cybers, or the highly experimental 3 carriers, frigate, 18 bombers, 6 fighters, and 15 cybers scattered around.

Well just as an observation, if you're not feeling aggressive enough to go toe-to-toe with the hispanic nutcases, then the Galliots have no place in your fleet - which in turn suggests trying the second fleet. There's no real 'established rules' yet; not tried it myself, but it'd be good to see what a massed bomber wave can achieve...

I suspect if you are fielding lots of bombers then multiple carriers become very good - giving you multiple places to rearm!

 

[starbreaker]

Galliots are there for counter-boarding threat, which will in turn limit the number of troops he can afford to send off his ships for offense. The cybers are there to give me enought time (and him enough casualties) to make the threat a meaningful one.

Taking the other upgrades is too much of a gamble - the Ukari are worthless unless the enemy has two-hit troops (which I admit are suddenly quite common, with all three quality grades having it as an optioninstead of just the marauders), and the sabotage monkeys are nigh-worthless on defense, and expensive enough that they need a screen of other troops to expect to perform adequately on offense. They both seem too situational to me for their cost. Maybe if I went with an Al Malik boarding fleet sporting 7 galliots or something nutty like that I'd try them, but that's a project for another day.

 

[Clanger]

The Ukari are good vs Marauders and not to be discounted. And The Hazat Galliots come with Marauders as Standard. Also I would beef up the Hazat ships with extra Marauders which are definately worth the points.

 

[starbreaker]

Ukari are an "I think you think I think" loop-trap, though. If I expect two-hit troops (not just marauders now) I should buy ukari, but if you expect ukari you should buy elites and blur suits instead, unless you think I think you'll buy elites with blur suits and have taken cybers to delay the boarding action as long as possible, in which case you should buy marauders to accelerate things unless you think I've taken ukari because I expected marauders...

Makes my head hurt just thinking about it. :roll:

Ukari are okay, and maybe worth taking a few of on general principles against people with "free" marauders, but mostly the mere threat of them acts to discourage people from taking two-hit troops against Al Malik. Conversely, unless I'm facing Al Malik in a civil war, I know that my own cybers will absorb two hits reliably, since no one else can take ukari.

Personally, I find the best way to deal with Hazat galliots is to kill them with shooting before they unload their troops. Capturing all those light blasters is a beautiful dream, but my precious boarding resources are better spent on destroyers and any other armor 5 targets, all of which seriously degrade rocket fire even with scout assists.

 

[lastbesthope]

As a slight tangent to this multiple troop types discussion I have posted a rulesmaster query (you can also see it in the NA forum due to my mod abilities )on how to resolve combat damage when facing multiple forces, and multiple troop types within each force, how do you resolve who gets the dice assigned to them. Also applies when the ship is fired upon and takes a crew crit.

I'll be interested to see the answer, might have a bearing on your choice too.

LBH

 

[kaltorak18]

How'd it go? I'd love to hear an overview!

 

[lastbesthope]

Yeah, battle report please!?

LBH

 

[starbreaker]

How'd it go? I'd love to hear an overview!

Decided to be conservative and play the non-carrier force, won a fairly crushing victory - Hazat conceded about turn six or so in an as the attacker in an Assassination scenario. I'd lost a galliot and both my destroyers were about half-damaged (one being the scenario target), while he'd lost about half his fleet with some other ships crippled. The only boarding action was one I'd started turns before with my galliot piling into one of his two destroyers, although two of his other ships grappled only to be smashed by massed rocket fire before dumping their troops.

He'd tied up a large number of points (~160+ IIRC) in troop upgrades of various types, which was largely negated maneuvering. His galliots went down one side of the board around a central asteroid field while his other ships took the other side. I responded by taking everything away from the galliots, leaving them out of the fight for 3-4 turns while I ran up the far table edge at moderate speed. I had more ships than him (8 to 6) and exploited the scouts as initiative sinks, so it was relatively easy to get superior positions on him turn after turn, allowing me to block one of his two destroyers from shooting for two turns via a galliot boarding action. That, and the absence of the Hazat galliots' guns during the 3rd and 4th turns let me pull way ahead on scoring shooting casualties, and he just couldn't come back from it.

The scenario also hurt him some - a 36" zone between setup areas is very different than 24", and gave me more time to plink at him even with All Power To Engines being a freebie against Al Malik. His relative lack of long-range fire made it hard to concentrate a real threat on the scenario target, and when he did close he wound up facing way too many ships on Maximize Firepower orders, which are especially nasty with scout-guided rockets.

One thing I did observe, the universally available S&P cyber troops have made previously strong Hazat boarding much less of a threat. Unless you've spent heavily to upgrade to high-quality troops yourself the lower rate of casualties inflicted on cybers makes it hard to win in a reasonable time period, which in turn reduces the number of shots you get to take with a prize ship. Very painful for boarding-oriented fleets - both Cybers and Armored Suits seem a little too cheap at 2 points per, although 3 points per may be too high. Ukari change that math, but only Al Malik can take them, so that's not much help.

 

[starbreaker]

Oh, and FWIW, we didn't find any problems with mixed troops and damage resolution. The troop owner allocates the losses, but we assumed you have to lose a troop if you could. No shenanigans with trying to assign one hit to each Marauder and insisting nobody dies, or sticking a single "leftover" hit on a 2-hit troop if there's a 1-hit available to take the damage instead. The Critical effects you mentioned simply never came up, and won't outside of a multiplayer game.

 

[kaltorak18]

Excellent write up! It sounds like you made some great tactical decisions which shut your opponent out, good show You've made me want to try out the Al Malik again.. Full on rockety death sounds like a fantastic way to light up the battlefield. If only their ships were a touch faster; they'd be the kings of kiting tactics, which is most likely why they aren't, lol.

 

[kaltorak18]

Oh, and FWIW, we didn't find any problems with mixed troops and damage resolution. The troop owner allocates the losses, but we assumed you have to lose a troop if you could. No shenanigans with trying to assign one hit to each Marauder and insisting nobody dies, or sticking a single "leftover" hit on a 2-hit troop if there's a 1-hit available to take the damage instead.

Ah, interesting. See the way we played it was that if it was a troop mix the if you only received one damage it was absorbed/rounded down by the 2 hit troops. Because of the way it's worded:

The player losing Troops Dice may always select which dice he will lose if he is using different troop types

Marauders: Gain a +2 bonus to their dice rolls and will lose half as many Troops Dice (rounding down) when attacked, be it from boarding, gatling lasers or critical hits.

It sounds like once the number of troops you lose is decided, if you have multiple troop types you then select a pool to lose troops from. Then you loose troops from that pool equal to the amount of troops previously decided to lose. However, if only one damage is assigned you may assign it to the 2 hit troops which will round it down to no troops lost. However, if you had 3 troops to lose you couldn't split it between the two pools, instead if you picked marauders you'd lose 1 marauder.

This might very well be wrong of course, but it's how we interpreted it

 

[starbreaker]

It was mostly terror, not tactics. Given the option to avoid Hazat galliots I will invariably do so, and my opponent knows it. His intention was to herd me with them, which they did a good job of - but he spent a little to much on troops and didn't have enough guns waiting in the trap he drove me into, especially since I was too uncooperative to position myslef where he could get both broadsides firing at once. Hugged the table edge as much as I could from turn 4 onward - and slow as Al Malik is, the poor galliots just couldn't get into position in time to help out. One did manage to make a Come About roll and plow through the asteroids around turn 3, but we greeted in with a whithering hail of fire (scout guided, no less) as it closed in and it disintegrated before it could board or fire much.

 

[starbreaker]

Re: mixed troop losses, we interpreted the key term as being the "may always select which dice he wil lose" - if you assign one hit to a 2-hit troop, it isn't being lost, so the hit isn't resolved, as such. If there's a 1-hit troop available to take the orphan hit, it should have to do so by our thinking. You can (and should, for cybers and heavy armor elites to minimize loss of damage output) assign damage to 2-hit troops before 1-hit ones, but if there's an orphan hit after you've done so, a "softie" should die as well.

As you said, it's not clear what the intent is, so we may be wrong, although it does seem to play well. I'd contend the last thing cybers need to be is any better for their cost.

 

[Stormrider]

Excellent to hear the Al Malik doing well as the wonderful postie (we have the coolest postie, dreadlocks, dyed all colours, she's a good laugh) will be bringing me their fleet boxed set and the Hazat boxed set soon (or Matt will be feeling my eyes on the back of his neck all the way from Lincoln!).

I keep looking at the list and alternating between thinking they are overpowered and underpowered. The rockets have HUGE AD numbers but very little else going for them with shorter range, inaccurate and such. I'll be looking forwards to getting the most out of them, or as Rick would put it, being a nerdy little so-and-so trying to squeeze that last 1% out of them... but he has every right to after I just about mastered the Decados within 3 games.

I do have to say though that I'm not sure I would have taken your fleet, something just screams out to me that 2 frigates isn't enough. I'm not a galliot fan (might change when I get my Hazat) and the punching power of frigs and destroyers is too much for me to pass up, but I'd take a ratio of maybe 3 frigs per destroyer, not only for the number of ships for the movement turn, but because the larger hull you go, the less hitpoints you get for your money, and the more criticals and the loss of a ship can hurt you.

That said, I'm baised... I LOVE frigates, maybe because the Mantis is hugely overpowered, but shh, don't tell anyone... 5 mantis, 500 points, working together can take out 1-2 ships per turn. I get the feeling the Al Malik may be even more dangerous but a lack of precise weapons is a shame, I'd like to see some crit-causing launchers mixed in there but that might be against the feel of Al Malik... in your face and smashing it... All I need now is a pain scheme, I don't think I can do the bright green/purple...

Guess I'll quit yakking now

 

[Rick]

I feel I have to make a slight correction or explanation -

the larger hull you go, the less hitpoints you get for your money

You get less damage points per throw weight - if you take multiple frigates with a similiar throw weight of a destroyer, you'd have more damage points - more troops, but spread over several hulls, on the other hand - destroyers can concentrate the firepower wonderfully.

 

[Stormrider]

Indeed, I can do no right

 

[starbreaker]

Al Malik frigates are a terrible choice for gunfighting with destroyers (or cruiser, or dreads). The difference between armor 4 and armor 5 is enormous when you're looking at rockets - hitting on 6 is no joy at all. Even other frigates struggle to beat destroyers 2-on-1, although Hazat's 18:8 troop ratio gives them a shot at boarding. 12:8 doesn't cut it at all, especially in the face of the troop upgrades a destroyer could afford to keep the points even. Outshooting a destroyer with any two frigates is a strain - you'll hurt it badly by the time you're done, but you'll lose a ship and half your firepower long before it goes crippled, and after that only Slow weapons are likely to push damage through to its hull.

You'll also find that without Scout guidance, rockets are mediocre at best. With it, they're deadly, but no more so than the high damage output of multihit blasters. Hazat's scariness comes in part from what a volley of 6 light blasters can do with rerolls on misses - bypassing shields with Slow barely compares.

 

[Stormrider]

Well, I wouldn't tackle a destroyer with rockets if I had a horde of frigates, I'd board it. Destroyers may have thick hulls but they don't have overwhelming crews, another reason why tying so many points up in single models is dangerous.

I'd take a 3:1 frigs:destroyers ratio any day over a 1:1.

 

[Greg Smith]

Very painful for boarding-oriented fleets - both Cybers and Armored Suits seem a little too cheap at 2 points per, although 3 points per may be too high. Ukari change that math, but only Al Malik can take them, so that's not much help.

Marauders are 5 points, for +2 to hit and 2 damage.

Elites are 2 points for +1 to hit.

Cyber & heavy armour are 2 points for 2 damage.

So elite troops with heavy armour are 4 points, for +1 and 2 damage.

If points are to balance out, cyber & heavy armour can't be more than 2 points.

I'm not sure Ukari are worth 2 points. After all, if they are fighting a mix of standard troops and marauders, the defender could elect to take the hits on the standard troops.