Archive through June 02, 2021
Star Fleet Universe Discussion Board: Star Fleet Battles: Star Fleet Battles Online:
Sapphire Series Tournaments:
Sapphire Star 8 (May 2021):
Archive through June 02, 2021
I am wondering why Andy Koch wants you to shoot Harder. I thought LT Harder was your friend?
So as I was driving to work this morning, a week after getting killed by Brian's Hydran, I thought to myself, "Self, if you had just armed a standard plasma S instead of an enveloping plasma S on the last turn, you probably would have won the game..."
I armed an enveloper on the last turn (while we were both mangled and I was at, like, 16 total power), hit him with it (as he was slow and had no weasels left), which did, like, 7 insignificant internals right before he gutted me at R0. If I had a standard S torp, I could have either:
A) Hit him directly in the face for 25 some odd internals, as he was slow and had a 2 box #1 shield than you can't really protect from a plasma hit if you are moving speed 9 and closing in.
B) Blasted down his facing #2 (if for whatever reason, I couldn't get him in the face, which is unlikely, but still), and then fired through the hole with 3xP1, 2xP3 at R1 or so with a TAC, doing 20 some odd internals before he fired at R0.
Either of those probably win me the game at that point, and A was honestly more likely even than B.
Oh, The Recriminations Phase. You go on for weeks :-)
The Recriminations Phase. :D I must remember to use that the next time I do something dumb that gets my ship blown up.
Amen Brother
SirCatWhoEatsPhotons (KLI) over Summary Judgement (GRN).
Turn 14: Klingon plots 0/4(4)/14(17). Gorn moves 12/17(12). Klingon WW's the incoming enveloper, taking the 8 collateral on the #4 shield after a wtac to face the Gorn. After the smoke clears, the Gorn puts some phasers on my #1 for some damage. I blast with 4*OL just before he leaves R8. I miss with 1 disrupter (yes, another 6), taking his #4 down 18 boxes. I hold phasers. Gorn runs, drops C torp on me (an F). I shoot it with downshifted ph-3 when it gets close, rolling 5, 6, 6, 6, 5, 4, 4 or something like that - but it still only hits for 4 damage, taking my #6 down even further.
At the end of the turn, the Gorn risks all with a 2nd HET to put his good #2 to face me with his B and D tubes facing me (which will be hot on T15). He closes. He also fires 4*ph-1 at me on imp 32, taking my #1 shield down to something like 10 boxes.
Turn 15: Klingon plots 4 all turn (my plan was to maintain WW speed, but have the flexibility to upshift speed to grab one of his bad shields). Gorn plots 12 all turn.
Impulse 1: Gorn launches a normal S torp. In my mind I give it 70% that it's a fake to draw a weasel, but personally I think it would have been a good idea to launch it real. I decide to man up and resolve not to shoot it.
Impulse 2: I launch 2 drones. Had I not unloaded my scatterpack on the 1st three turns of this battle, I would not have been able to do this as I would have been empty. This turns out to be critical, as he has now slipped closer to me - so the drones will hit before his phasers can cycle (though he has one RA+R phaser that can fire).
Impulse 3-5 - nothing.
Impulse 6: He labs the drones. Both Type IM. He elects not to tractor one, but he does shoot one down. I stare the approaching torpedo in the face and begin to second guess myself - but I elect to "man up" and take it on the chin.
Impulse 7: One drone impact. 12 damage, finding 4 reinforcement - bringing his #2 shield down to 10 boxes. S torp impacts, but is revealed to be fake. Graham thought maybe it was too obvious - but I disagree - hitting with a normal S torp would have been devastating to my 10 box #1 - killing needed weapons.
At this point I decide to fire. I don't like firing at r3 at his "strong" 10 point shield, but next impulse his phasers will cycle. I need to kill 4 of them and bag both his tractors, otherwise I think it might be game - as he will have 50 plasma plus a fastload on the A tube.
So I fire. Disrupters are 6, 6, 5, 3. Yes. I miss. Again. With two. 5*ph-1 Phasers are way below average, rolling 6, 5, 4, 4, 1. Overall, I have done almost *20* less damage than I would have expected (needed to bag phasers and to have a good chance of getting the all important second tractor) - so I figure this is game FOR GRAHAM and I ready myself for transfer to the Black Fleet.
Instead, the true irony of ironies, while my weapons fire has been HORRIBLE all game (but for like once or twice in 15 long turns), I now get amazing luck. On 24 internals I get a torp, 3 phasers, and BOTH tractors.
Again, I blink, hardly believing it. Without those tractors with only a few phasers left, and with two weasels waiting in the bay the Gorn will not be able to do enough internals to me to be able to survive the punishing turn 16 overloads that will be coming his way (I will have enough power to maintain range 8, and that speed 4 plot (instead of a 0 plot) finds itself to be useful).
Graham, seeing the writing on the wall, graciously concedes an extremely hard fought battle.
It *easily* could have gone the other way. But it didn't.
So, I go on to fight another battle against either the WBS(BB) (Majead) or the RFH (Justin) - depending on who wins that battle.
And the Recriminations Phase begins.
I blew this game on Turn 14, when I didn't take advantage of his weasel to get out of dodge and instead hung around to get pasted by repeated overloads. If I just turn on the jets and run across the map, I can reload again and keep pasting weasels.
However, Ted's writeup is spot on, and he guessed that if I was closing for the kill, I wouldn't launch the real torpedo when he could weasel it, and completely ignored my pseudo bluff.
I made another mistake early on Turn 15; I should have slipped -out- going to Range 7 and waiting for a better opportunity by circling and threatening to leave R8. He was stuck going slow all turn. But I wanted R1, and I just slipped in, which gave him a perfect drone launch opportunity before most of my phasers were cycled.
Anyway, great game by Ted, who never gave me a sliver of an opening in 15 turns.
That sounds like a very intense game, and thank you both for sharing the updates! The Victory At articles in CL have long been some of my favorite, and getting to see them in about as close to real time as they can is entertaining, educational, and inspiring.
And the recriminations phase never ends :-)
I will comment that overall I do not like Big Plasma in the tournament. This opinion is a personal preference, not some declaration on the balance of the ships. While one certainly *can* play BP very aggressively and have short games (like Peter's game against the Hydran) I've found that many BP games become a very long game that takes many hours of real life to resolve. I didn't measure exactly, but Graham and I spent something like 15 hours to get through a 15 turn game.
Tourney games would be so much faster if all of the ships were direct fire in order to avoid the interminable plasma ballet.
On the other hand, the game would lose something without BP in the field, so not even I would advocate for cutting them from the tourney field. Still, oy, it's just that I personally don't like those long plasma ballets because they are *so* long in real life.
Of course, I could have pressed the matter and gotten a lot more aggressive myself and eaten plasma on the way in. However, Graham's approach was to play the long game, and BP can really control that so long as they don't totally blow their plasma launch - you just take too much damage on the way in.
Meh. Indecisive rant over. :|
Heh, see, I don't think that most of the time, that Plasma Ballet is an optimal plan, especially for the Gorn (as it can't cloak). Launching plasma that your opponent can clearly just run away from is going to do nothing but see them run away, *unless* you then follow them into the corner and try and mug them.
Pushing someone into a corner so you can then continue to push them into another corner, and then push them into another corner later, all the while not really doing any damage should be a self correcting issue (and I'm not saying that is what was happening here, as I don't really know, but whenever I tried games of "I push you into a corner, and then push you into another corner while you run from plasma a lot", I generally died at the end)--it doesn't generally work that well, so inevitably will lead to the "Sure, it is handy to push someone into a corner with an enveloper, but then you need to go and clobber them when you know where they are going to be".
Again, I know we have had this discussion 30 times over the years, but I think the main issue with "plasma can take a long time" is "cloaks" (i.e. Romulans), not generally "plasma". Like, most of my games end inside of 7 turns one way or the other, and any games that go significantly longer than that aren't necessarily much longer in terms of actual time spent (as a lot of turns are "I just move in the other direction while you chase" and they take, like, 8 minutes to play out).
Like, I didn't see the game in question, and I don't fully know how everything shook out, but I suspect that either side had numerous situations where they could have just ended the game way earlier (in either direction) with a decisive attack at the right time (the Gorn is very vulnerable to a close range drone/phaser attack when it is low on plasma; the Klingon is very vulnerable to a close range anchor attack when it is in a corner and doesn't have drones on the map, even if it is gonna blast you with overloads at R1)
I think there is a reason why Peter wins reliably in the Gorn against good disruptor/drone players. He herds his opponent early with envelopers. He then looks for lucky internals using bolts. He (generally) isn't launching torps unless there is enough to do internals. But more important then all of that --- He plays aggressively. Peter isn't fighting a long range game using a battle plan that includes take down every shield.
He knows that the other guy can't shoot overloads, move fast, and fight or initiate an anchor at the same time. The Disruptor/Drone guy can only do about 1.5-2.0 of these 3 things. Peter will turn (or HET) and engage his opponent when the other guy doesn't expect it. He will force the issue. That is what makes him the best Gorn player that ever lived.
"Like, I didn't see the game in question, and I don't fully know how everything shook out, but I suspect that either side had numerous situations where they could have just ended the game way earlier (in either direction) with a decisive attack at the right time (the Gorn is very vulnerable to a close range drone/phaser attack when it is low on plasma; the Klingon is very vulnerable to a close range anchor attack when it is in a corner and doesn't have drones on the map, even if it is gonna blast you with overloads at R1)"
I should post the turn by turn at some point, I took pretty good notes. But this, many times this. I know for a fact I missed opportunities on Turn 2, Turn 5, and Turn 13 (?) and I think Ted probably could have mugged me back (although not early in the game as I didn't launch a lot of plasma for a few turns.)
I think Peter's description of plasma ballet's ineffectiveness is basically right... against an undamaged Klingon. B turn mode and 39 energy with nothing but disruptors to power are no joke. I should have insisted on exchanging internals early before trying to fire EPTs, and I've told myself this before (but didn't follow my own advice.)
It's hard to be disciplined when you're worrying about allowing R8 as your primary activity.
Well said to Peter and Jack.
Like I said, I don't see BP as a "problem"... especially when played like Peter does it. And you can't rule the long ballet as being non-aggressive, because it is aggressive in its own way.
In my particular game with Graham, we *both* had several opportunities to get aggressive. Graham tried once with a HET to go for an anchor, but I had room to maneuver and so decided to bug out before he could do that. I ate his first enveloper, planning to chase him into a corner - but it made more sense to evade "go away" plasma at the moment of the game. A few times I stopped and armed overloads, or tried to "get him", but then he would back off.
The thing is, at each point where one or the other of us could have said "•••• the torpedoes", we both realized that doing so would be favorable for the Gorn or the Klingon, but not both - so we ended up doing the long ballet.
Truly no fault on Graham - never wanted to imply that. It just... was what it was.
Anyway, like I said, I'm real conflicted about it emotionally speaking. Intellectually speaking I see nothing wrong with BP or either style of play... I just get frustrated with going long. However, I like winning more than I dislike being frustrated with the pace of play, so if I think it's in my best interest to play the long game, I will.
As I mentioned initially, this is all really my personal feelings - no commentary on anyone, their style of play, or the ships generally.
/me shrugs.
Graham wrote:
>>I think Peter's description of plasma ballet's ineffectiveness is basically right... against an undamaged Klingon. B turn mode and 39 energy with nothing but disruptors to power are no joke. I should have insisted on exchanging internals early before trying to fire EPTs, and I've told myself this before (but didn't follow my own advice.)>>
(And thanks for the kind words, Jack :-)
Yeah, Graham, I in no way am trying to give you a hard time here; I spent my first year as a Gorn trying plasma ballet tactics/long game tactics and the like, and it turned out that it didn't work real well in the long run, and I got killed a lot, so I fully understand the attempt :-)
Like, honestly, to Ted's point here, I suspect that this game ended up as going as long as it did 'cause Ted *missed with all those overloads*, which, well, sometimes things go bad due to bad luck (ask any Fed :-)
I suspect if Ted was hitting with average or better overloads instead of missing with 3/4 and then 2/4 when he took those shots, the game would have been way shorter; I suspect that Ted got real unlucky, resulting in Ted being very cautious (trying to not lose outright due to the terrible luck), and then Graham was being very cautious, trying not to lose the advantage that came from those lucky breaks. I suspect it was all a unlikely combination of unlikely factors. Which certainly can happen, but generally don't. Although it certainly can be frustrating when it does.
To the point of plasma being long, like, as noted, I think that cloaking devices *can* be a problem, in terms of games going long (especially with, say, Gorn vs Romulan. Yeesh. I really dislike those. The Gorn vs TKE is probably my least favorite game to play in the whole environment); the Romulan *can* get a long term advantage by launching plasmas, trying to degrade shields, and then dive under when inevitably cornered. Which can lead to very long games. But with the Gorn, if the opponent is generally willing to take some hits on a "rush him while he is low on torps", the Gorn can get mushed.
@Peter - you certainly have a point. Missing consistently certainly made the game go much longer than it would have otherwise (I probably missed with better than 50% of my disrupters, which in a Klingon is highly unusual).
I do not think the long games are caused by Big Plasma. AS much as by the tactics of the DF (direect fire) ship.
BP moves toward center of map. At end of turn or middle of turn depending on speeds, launches a envolper or a real and fake combo. Chasing the other DF ship into a corner. There the other ship then plots speed 4 and WWs the plasma. While getting the best shot it can. BP runs to the other corner to reload. Rinse and repeat...Until the other ship is out of shuttles or gets lucky and takes out more shields of the BP
Limit them to one WW a game and see what happens.
Just my thoughts of one who likes Plasma as it does not require a to hit roll.
Well, with only one weasel, the FH would dominate the tournament and it wouldn't even be hard to predict.
And I think Peter's right; if I had lost more shields early I would have been aggressive so that I could approach to close range while I still had something to hide behind. All the missed disruptors (and the early EPT gobbling) made me think I had more time than I did.
I learned a lot from this game, and one of the important lessons was that "the Gorn is not advantaged in a long game". I thought it was, due to the drone clock. But Ted unloaded his SP, was sparing with his launches, and still had 2 drones to fire at the end of the day when he needed them, 15 turns in...
I think my whole plan for fighting Klingons is wrong. 
Off to speak at the Gorn War College, where, frankly, fighting -Klingons- is an elective.
Graham wrote:
>>I learned a lot from this game, and one of the important lessons was that "the Gorn is not advantaged in a long game".>>
More or less?
I mean, one of my important rules of thumb as the Gorn is "if you can gat an extra turn, take it", which seems counterintuitive to what I have said all over this discussion, but the jist is that due to the arming cycle of plasmas, one extra turn is often the thing that makes you do well. That being said, I'm *always* looking for an opportunity to get in close and mug someone, but if I have an opportunity just to run across the map to get an extra turn of reloading without getting killed doing so, I'll take it. But also as noted above, turns like that usually play out in 8 minutes or whatever.
90% of the games I win end inside of 7 turns, and end when I end up on top of someone, usually grabbing them in an anchor (or just hitting them with a bunch of plasma they can't avoid otherwise). Like, I rarely plan on anchoring someone as an initial attack (i.e. I don't start T1 with a plan to corner and anchor as soon as possible, but that has certainly happened), but my plan is to look for that opportunity generally starting on T3 or T4 and when it shows up, take it aggressively.
I agree with that, Peter, but up until this game, I had thought that was the most important part of the analysis ("if you can get an extra turn (or gat one) take it"). I don't think that anymore.
The clock you have to worry about is the disruptor clock; unlike plasma, which they can run from and (if they are really conservative, as Ted was, and just fire standards/leave 'ruptors empty on a few turns) not take a lot of plasma damage while chipping away at the Gorn's shields. Obviously a Klingon is better than any other D&D ship at this... but I was flying against a Klingon.
Plasma Ballet (PB) is the nature of the beast. The Klingon played PB as well. If it were not for the fixed map, the plasma ships would not have a chance of winning in my opinion.
The Gorn has to overcome those nasty drones and Wild Weasels. The drones soak up phaser fire and the WW's soak up plasma. Once these things are eliminated, it is range 10 and all envelopers for the Gorn.
The Klingon is my toughest opponent when I played the Gorn. The Klingon has power, speed, maneuverability, drones, a free SP, 2 points to upgrade drones, may trade 4xType I's for 2 type IV's, and UIM with no burnout. Is it any wonder why the Gorn does not want to get within range 8?
At range 8, the Klingon generally takes down a shield per turn with OL disruptors and phasers. Range 15 is advantage Klingon, reducing a shield by half per turn. There is always the threat of the HET and charge to get a close range alpha shot while the Gorn is reloading plasma.
The infamous Gorn anchor is hard to apply. One has to be very sneaky or risk charging thru drones, phasers, and disruptors only to discover that the Klingon has more tractor power than you do and a WW. It is best to try when everything is fully armed and your opponent is near by.
Game 3.2 Romwe vs Crash set for Monday at 7:00
Game 3.2 - Romwe(Hyd) over Crash(Wax). Lots of running, avoiding, and positioning for the first 3 turns. Some exchange of fire on turn 4, resulting in a dead stinger, and most of a shield gone on the Wax. Turn 5, Crash decides to go for the overrun. In his words, "I got greedy". He holds fire with the Hydran under weasel at r0. The Hydran doesn't, and with really amazing dac/mizia, the Wax is left mostly unarmed. Both tractors got hit, and 4 of 6 drones were destroyed. It was only 13 internals, followed by 15 from the Hellbore. Absolutely brutal mizia, that hit all but 1 p3, the 2 hellbores, and 2 drone racks. John conceded at this point, since he was going to have to ED, and tac in order to fire the HB's. Which wouldn't likely get through a shield and do any internals.
Ahh yes. The 'ol R0 CL on a Hydran overrun gambit...
True, but WAX is hard to take against the Hydran. The WAX wants to overrun, but the Hydran is even better at it. My RPS in this battle favors the Hydran 7/3.
At least it was mercifully short!
Any time you have Hellbores in option mounts, you hate to face a Hydran...