Federation Commander

[Scoutdad]

Alright:
Here's the report. Sorry for the length of the post, but a lot went on in a single game.

Battlegroup Murfreesboro: ACTA-SF play test session

Romulan versus Gorn

Romulan Fleet: SkyHawk, SkyHawk, SparrowHawk, SparrowHawk, King Eagle, FireHawk - 1000 points
Gorn Fleet: Destroyer, Destroyer, Battle Destroyer, Battle Destoryer, Light Cruiser, Light Cruiser, Heavy Battlecruiser - 1010 points

Map is 4 foot by 4 foot, no terrain.
Meeting engagemnet, no special objectives.

Game began with Romulans cloaked.
Gorn and Romulan forces deployed approximately 38 inches apart, spread across 18 linear inches of table space.

Turn 1:
Gorns gain initiative and allow Roms to move first.
All movement consists of Romulans moving 6 inches or so forward and Gorns moving 12 inches.
Manuevering was done to allow Gorns to target the King Eagle.
Romulans simply moved cloaked ships forward.

With 20 inch range, no one can fire.

Turn two:

Romulans gain initiative and charge in on the still cloaked Romulans, moving 12 inches each.
Romulans (in turn) announce "Disengage Cloak" and reverse direction, moving 4 inches in reverse. Final range, about 12 inches.

Romulans unable to fire any weapons due to cloak restrictions.
Gorn fire everything at the Firehawk and the King Eagle.
due to positioning of Gorn / Rom units, BCH and 2x CLs fire at KE. 2x BDD and 2X DD fire at FH.
8x Phaser-1 from BCH, 6x Phaser-1 from CLs, 1x Plasma S from BCH, 2x Plasma F from CL.
1 Plasma S, 1 Plasma F from BCH to FH...
2x Plasma S from CLs to KE.
Firehawk receives 6x Phaser-1s from DD, 6x Phaser-1 from BDD, 4x Plasma G.
4x Plasma F at KE.

With range penalties for phasers and energy bleed for Plasmas... 11 phasers hit the KE. 5 broke through the Stealth bonus.
No defensive fire allowed against the plasmas. 8 AD of Plasmas hit the KE. 20 points of damage from Plasmas, 12 got through the Stealth rating.
The KE takes 17 points of damage.Armor reduces that to 6. Ugh! 4 shield damage, 1 hull damage, and one plasma scored a critical hit on the crew. 1 extra damage and potential to Escalate.
4 Plasma Fs from DD/BDD hit for 4 AD. 10 points of damage. 4 break through the stealth rating. Armor reduces that to 0!

Gorn player spends countless minutes cursing Romulan armor.

Firehawk takes 11 Phaser 1 hits and all 4 Plasma Gs and both the Plasma S and F hit for 12 AD. 5 phaser hits get through the stealth. All score shield damage. The Plasmas score a grand total of 35 hits. 21 of which get through the Stealth. No armor! Yay! so the 21 plasma hits score 4 criticals, 7 hull hits and 10 more shield hits.

Two to the Impulse Drive. That's 6 additional damage (13 total), a Crew Critical, and the Ship is adrift. One critical to the Crew, that's 3 additional damage (16 total), and the final critical was a shields hit. That's 1 more damage (17 total - leaving 11 undamaged hull boxes. Just above the crippled threshold)
During the end phase, the Firehawk attempts to repair an Impulse drive critical and fails. The King Eagle succeeds in his attempt to repair a Crew critical.
Durignt he Escalte phase, the Firehawk receives an Escalation result on both the Impulse Drive critical and the Crew critical increasing them to 5 and 3, respectively. That's 5 more damage, an additional critical on the Dilithium Chamber, plus a total on -15 to the shields, a -1 on all crew quality checks, and he fails his Crew Quality check in the end phase; resulting in an additional Dilithium chamber critical. That's 1 more damage point, another -5 to the shields, and an escalate potential next turn.
Plus, the FireHawk is now crippled and under each of those restrictions.

Turn #3:
By this time, more was going on - other players had arrived and additional games were going on at the middle and other end of the table, so my notes are not as detailed.
The Gorn was out of most of his torpedes, so he wanted to run and reload (although that's hard to do when your BCH is a "lumbering" vessel).
As luck would have it, the Romulan won the initiative. He kindly allowed the Gorn to move first.
The Gorn player now chose to move in reverse with all ships except the BCH.
Due to the Gorn having one additional ship, he got to move both first and last. All ships except the BCH moved in reverse, followed by the Romulans. The Romulans selected the two CLs and moved so as to centerline them at less than 12 inches. The Gorns all used the Intensify Defensive Fire special action; except the BCH.
Once the Romulans had completed their moves, the BCH moved 8 inches forward and turned at the end of his move to place the unfired Plasma S pointed at the adrift FH.

The Romulans unloaded everything at the two Light Cruisers, startign with the smaller Romulan ships and the smaller Torpedoes. Thanks to Intensify Defensive Fire special action, much of the first few waves of incoming fire was mitigated.
The end result was two crippled CLs facing a Cripled FH. The Firehawk fired one of it's Plasma S's at a CL. All weapons had fired, so defensive fire was not possible. The Plasma torpedo was enough to destory the CL... in addition, the Stricken Ship roll resulted in an immediate explosion. This was enough to take out the adjacent crippled CL.

The Gorn player followed up by firing his Plasma S at the crippled FH along with all bearing phasers.
Buh-bye!

The Firehawk was destroyed, but thanks to good rolls on the stricken ship chart, it did not blow up - it merely went away.

During the End of Turn phase, the King Eagle managed to repair his final critical hit location.

Turn Four:
Romulan Initiative. Gorns moved first. Lumbering BCH moved a minimal distnace and turnedto facethe bulk of the Romulan fleet. The Romulans "Engaged Cloak" and moved at max speed over and away from the Gorn.
The Gorn forces moved / turned the minimum required, but were not able to turn quickly enoug hto bring a significant number of reloaded Plasmas to bear.

Fire phase was long range phasers concentrated on a single Skyhawk. Several damage points were scored against the Skyhawk and some internals... but not enough to cripple it.

Turn Five:
Gorn Initiative.
Romulans moved first. As the Gorn were in the advantageous position, they remained cloaked and moved a the maximum possible speed.

Gorn fire confined to sniping at the same SkyHawk from long range. Very little real damage scored due to cloak.

Turn Six:

The Romulans received initiative. The Gorn moved first.
The Romulans moved at max speed again and declared "Disengage Cloak"
More long range phaser fire at the same SkyHawk finally brought it to the point of being crippled.
Seems that if you fire enough phased energy beams at a cloaked target - you will eventually overcome the effects ofthe cloak.

Turn Seven:
Gorn initiative. Romulans move first.
Gorn forces try to position for maximum effect on SparrowHawks (snide comments made about frakkin' Romulan armor! Tried to indicate that was a refernce to another meleiu, but after ducking several dice - I decided to let well enough alone.)
Romulans attempt to position so as to protect SparrowHawks and target BCH.

SparrowHawks declare Intensify Defensive Fire.

Gorn forces then target King Eagle with everything. (They even send a cook out in an EVA suit to throw a #8 Griswold at the KE!)

Romulan force targets BCH with everything.

End result of fire phase is a crippled KE (and he lost his Armor trait and his cloak!)
BCH eats 4 Plasma F's and a Plasma R. Energy Bleed and range makes it 8 AD plus all phasers.
BCH is also crippled.

Turn Eight:

Romulans cloak (except KE)
Gorn forces move in on King Eagle

Romulan wins initiative, so the King Eagle at least gets to "stab at thee" and "spit his last breath at thee!" as he fires his phaser-1 at the BCH.
The King Eagle is blown to bits and some relatively ineffective phaser fire is made at the last of the SkyHawks as he's fading out.

At the end of turn eight, the Romulans now have a damaged SkyHawk and two undamaged SparrowHawks against a damaged BCH, 2 Battle Destroyers, and 2 Destroyers.

Turn Nine:

The Romulans attempt to disengage.
The Gorn fire all phasers at a cloaked SkyHawk, but the damage is negligable...
And the Romulans leave the map.
_________________
Commander, Battlegroup Murfreesboro
Department Head, ACTASF

[Scoutdad]

WOW! That was long post.

Now the important stuff.
This game involved 13 ships, cloaks, armor, and plasma torpedoes.
It went nine whole turns and lasted a little more than 60 minutes; and part of that was spent takign notes durign and after turns.

If we'd played it straight through, probably 45 minutes - from start to finish.
The new rules for Plasmas really speed up the game. There are a few complaints though. Mainly involving Defensive Fire and the near instaneous impact of Plasmas.
It's very hard to use plasma to dictate movement in this game, but they are resolved quickly.

Plasmas effect movement solely to the extent that you have to consider them before you make your move... well, that's not entirely true. You cna outrun them after they are launched, but only if they are not in your forward arc when launched.
We've yet to find a time when that was not the case, but I can see it happening. Especially on a map wher terrain was present. The need to manuever around some terrain types could easily present opportuinties for such Plasma Torpedo launch.

That being said, it was a great time and I'm still looking forward to the release of the game.
_________________
Commander, Battlegroup Murfreesboro
Department Head, ACTASF

[Scharwenka]

Excellent write up. Good to see they are well balanced, which is good considering they have honed their killing skills on each other. the BCH, along with the War Destroyer are my favorite ships to run with, so good to see the BCH can still give and take like it could in Fed Com.

When will your group run a game with Plasma Races V. Drone Races?

Also, do any of the rules mention suicide shuttles, or are those out for this game? I know in 2nd Ed Bab5 CTA they at least had shuttles for landing scenrios.

[Scoutdad]

Suicide shuttles are indeed a part of the game, and we've usedthem several times in other games.

We've already done a Kzinti versus Romulan game.
It was a massacre. The Kzinti have enough P-3s to completely neuter the Romulan Plasmas, while the Romulans can not hope to stop all the incoming drones.

Although in all fairness, that was done under a much earlier draft of the rules. Perhaps we should try it again under the new rules...
_________________
Commander, Battlegroup Murfreesboro
Department Head, ACTASF

[Garydee]

[Scoutdad]

Specifically the fact that one must use the "Intensify Defensive Fire" special action to use phaser-1s and drones in a defensive mode - and the use of this special action prevents you from firing ANY weapons at anythign other than incoming seeking weapons.

It seems incongruous that as a starship Captain, I can not task a portion of my fire control (i.e. phasers) against incoming seeking weapons while still beign able to fire my Overloaded Photons againstthe ship that launched said seekign weapons!
_________________
Commander, Battlegroup Murfreesboro
Department Head, ACTASF

[Nerroth]

Can you still bolt (or carronade) plasma, or is it seeking only?

And does cloaking help to throw off any incoming seekers, or do they retain their lock-on? (To use the Kzinti-Romulan example, could the Roms try to ditch those drones by cloaking, or would it be pointless?)
_________________
FC Omega Discussion (v3)
FC LMC Discussion

[Clanger]

Have played Romulans vs Federation.

Suicide Shuttles are hardly ever used just normal Shuttles in our games. These Shuttles are used as part of the Defensive Fire screen vs Plasma / Drones. They are very effective.

Evasive Maneuavers was used a lot by the Fed player and Intensify Defensive Fire Special Action on the small ships (POL). These are very effective layers of defense.

By the time the Romulans got into range to fire. The Feds had a nice defense screen of shuttles on each ship.

When Cloaked Seeking weapons automatically hit, but you do get Stealth saves vs each hit. This makes it nasty against Romulans as they only have Stealth defense vs weapons.


Also Scoutdad did the Gorns get to use the Plasma Carronade on those pesky Romulans?
_________________
CTA: SFU / CTA Noble Armada Mongoose Playtester

[silent bob]

admittedly cloaked ships should not even be targetable by seeking weapons.
so thats something that we need to look at.
_________________
A Call to Arms playtester

[Garydee]

[Scoutdad]

Yes. As it currently stands - you can target cloaked ships at will. All direct fire weapons can target them and seeking weapons automatically hit them.

And no defensive fire is allowed.
They do indeed get the stealth benefit, but as I stated:
"If you shoot enough weapons at a cloaked target, you will overcome the stealth!" 16.7% of all hits are going to scored damage on average. That doesn't seem like a lot, but in a big Kzinti fleet battle, you can easily have 70 drones targetted on a single ship, each one doing D6 hits. That's an average of 245 hits and if only 16.7% get through the stealth - you're still looking at 41 hits, which is typically enough to kill anything cruiser sized or smaller. And that doesn't even include the phasers and disruptors.

And Fade in/out turns are even worse. In those, fully 50% of hte hits will over ride the stealth bonus.
_________________
Commander, Battlegroup Murfreesboro
Department Head, ACTASF

[Garydee]

If Kzinti phaser threes can eliminate Romulan plasmas to the point where they are ineffectual , I think some modifications need to be done. Even this late in the game there seems to be tweaking that needs to be done. It makes me wonder if the late November release date is possible.

[Scharwenka]

I agree with ships should not be able to target cloaked vessels. That's what the carronade is for. If they are going to keep the rule, after your break stealth, roll the D6 and round the damage down to half to compensate for the drone not making a direct impact?

Maybe the rules could have target cloaked as an optional rule, or you have to have a 'scout' class ship on the field to help target them. That could create more use for them when they launch. Plus if they allow for escort vessels, they should be able to target drones/plasma's with any phaser without using a special action.

Or perhaps be able to have drones detonate in an area and not really target a specific damage, kind of how they did mines in Bab5 CTA.

I don't mind a little imbalance since drone and plasma tactics are different, I remember a scenerio where there was part of a Gorn Fleet helping Kzinti's against a Klingon attack, they should't be used to fighting each other.

[Davyj0427]

Excellent write up Scoutdad. Thank you.

[Scoutdad]