Federation Commander

[NeoTanuki]

A gamer friend of mine and I tried out a ship vs. ship duel last night. We played Fleet scale, he took a Federation New Light Cruiser and I chose the Romulan War Eagle. Since this was his first time playing, we used the quick start rules (both ships at speed 16, plasma bolts only, no drones)

It was a very fun match. I started off strong, getting into a position to take down one of his shields with my phasers, and using my cloak to reduce return fire considerably.

Unfortunately, I made two mistakes...we had a close-in pass and I was ready to fire a plasma bolt...and then I realized I had not checked my firing arc carefully and he was just out of it. D'oh!

Then, during a later pass, I decided to fire phasers...and accidentally left myself just short of power to cloak. A photon torpedo strike a couple of impulses later left most of my systems out, and I conceded.

So, thoughts I took away from this match:

1. KNOW. YOUR. FIRING. ARCS! Next time, I definitely need to try a Kestrel or Hawk series next time...had I done so this match, I would at least have gotten one plasma shot off this battle with their FP arcs.

2. That said, though, I think I need to consider plasma more as a weapon of opportunity (fire it if a good chance happens to come up) rather than making plasma shots my top priority...I got a little over-eager maneuvering to set up plasma bolts and made a few key errors that way. I think relying on phaser sniping and then cloaking for defense was working much more effectively for me.

3. I was impressed with the shields and armor on the Eagle series...but better maneuverability was huge for my friend, as he always got to see where I could move. Next battle, I'd rather have better maneuverability.

4. I must remember to always check whether I have enough power to cloak before firing weapons...sometimes you need cloak in a hurry!

5. On that note, the cloak worked very effectively for me in the early game... ironically, my mistake was NOT using it at that key point in turn 3.

Overall, I really enjoyed the match. I was worried playing Romulans would slow down the pace too much and make it boring, but we were done in around an hour and a half, and the game moved at a pretty fast clip...to be honest, it moved a lot faster than I expected. Again, kudos to the designers for the clean, well-written rules, I only needed to look up one or two things very briefly in the rule book during the battle.

I'm looking forward to meeting up with a local group of FC players tomorrow and trying out the full movement rules in a battle....there were many times during this duel where I was thinking, "If only I could accelerate!" or "If only I could slow down!"