As you may recall, I recently sat down and hashed out some preliminary Terran fleet lists for the upcoming Firestorm Armada tournament at Adepticon. Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to meet with forum member Ryjak (make sure to check out his blog, the Ops Center, where he has written up his own perspective on this battle!) and try one of them out. As we shall see, the game did not go all that well for my intrepid Defenders of the Charter, but I had a lot of fun nevertheless!

Forces

Between the two lists I made, I decided to go with the Battleship-Carrier combo:

Ryjak went with a similar BB-CV combo for his Dindrenzi force that looked like this:

• Praetorian, 5 Interceptors, 3 Escorts
• RSN Carrier, 12 Wings (6 Bombers, 6 Interceptors)
• Cruiser Squadron
• Cruiser Squadron
• Frigate Squadron
• Frigate Squadron

Going into the game, my thought process was to hang back a bit and atrite the Dindrenzi forces with my long-range torpedoes, many of which I had upgraded to have Nuclear warheads. I figured this would be especially useful against Ryjak’s frigates and cruisers.

Setup

For the game, we were using a slightly modified version of the first mission from the Schamburg Prime mission pack that will be used at Adepticon. We were employing some of Ryjak’s excellent terrain templates, ensuring that we had the recommended 25% board coverage. This terrain included two planetoids and several gas clouds, debris fields, and asteroid fields.

When it came time to deploy, Ryjak and I had very different approaches. Not being overly familiar with the reserve and shunt entry rules, and not wanting to complicate my game plan too much, I decided to deploy my entire force on the table. Ryjak, in the mean time, put fully half of his squadrons into reserve; both of the Frigate squadrons and one of his cruiser squadrons. This is what the situation looked like just before we started the game:

Turn 1

In the first turn, I ended up having an activation advantage due to the fact that half of Ryjak’s fleet was not on the table yet. However, thanks to some judicious use of his Interceptors, Ryjak’s fleet was effectively impervious to my torpedo attacks. His cruiser squadron, for example, was mustering something like  18 PD dice! This came as quite the nasty surprise for me! I was able to score a single point of damage on one of the Dindrenzi cruisers using the direct fire weapons on my Battleship, though in return my battleship took two hits, partly due to some poor rolling for my shield dice. This is how the board looked at the end of Turn 1:

Turn 2

At the start of the second turn, Ryjak had still not succeeded in bringing any of his reserves in, leaving me with another significant activation advantage. Thanks to the fact that my torpedoes were effectively negated by Ryjak’s Interceptor coverage, I was compelled to move my fleet forward into the teeth of the Dindrenzi Kinetic weapons. As I continued to move my fleet up to try and get to grips with Ryjak’s forces, I managed to lose a frigate, suffer heavy damage to one of my cruisers, and take additional damage to my BB. In return, I only managed an additional hit on two Dindrenzi cruisers, as you can see in this end of turn shot:

Turn 3

At the start of this turn, Ryjak finally managed to bring in all three of his reserved squadrons. It was going to be now or never if I was going to turn the tide! Unfortunately, I had a series of rather serious misfortunes. The first was that I lost my battleship to the combined fire of the Dindrenzi frigates. Next, Ryjak’s cruisers managed to finish off my heavily damaged cruiser,  and then his BB and its escorts managed to destroy my carrier in a spectacular attack that netted him a triple critical! Just like that, my two Tier 1 squadrons were gone, and I was seriously in the hole on the Battle Log. It didn’t all go Ryjak’s way, of course. I did manage to destroy on of his frigates, damage another, and put several points of damage on his carrier. However, by the end of Turn 3 it was clear that my fleet was on borrowed time!

Turn 4

This turned out to be the final turn; the Dindrenzi forces in the center of the board easily swept aside my two remaining cruisers and my two destroyers, leaving me with just two under-strength frigate squadrons left. Before they died though, my mediums did manage to finish off one of Ryjak’s cruisers and severely damage his carrier. Still, Ryjak had managed to max out his Battle Log, so we decided to call the game at the end of the turn. This is how the board looked at the end of the game:

Hotwash

Whew! That certainly did not go as I had planned! Granted, some of my misfortune was due to some very poor dice luck on my part, compared to some very lucky rolling on Ryjak’s part (like getting 25 successes on 18 dice to one-shot my carrier!). However, during our post-game discussion Ryjak and I hit upon a few things that I could have definitely done differently that would have improved my chances.

First, I could have been more creative with my deployment, using reserves to drop a portion of my fleet onto the board closer to the enemy instead of having to close the distance. Failing in that, I could have “castled” behind some of the terrain features, and forced the Dindrenzi to cross the board and come to me. Looking back on it, it was especially bone-headed of me to sail straight at the front of the Dindrenzi ships, where the especially hurty Kinetic weapons happen to live! Second, my basic tactical plan was clearly flawed, in that I expected my torpedoes to be able and reduce Ryjak’s fleet as our forces closed. That proved to be next to impossible, thanks to the way that Ryjak was able to employ his Interceptors and Escorts to keep his key offensive units effectively torpedo-proof; I need to read up on how PD works so I can better anticipate tactics like this.

Finally, I can definitely see how I did not optimize my list in certain respects. My partial Destroyer squadron didn’t really muster enough AD to be effective, and some of the upgrades, such as the +2 PD I purchased for my BB, didn’t really play much of a part. Clearly, some list re-tooling is called for! That is a topic for another post, however.

Conclusion

So, this was obviously a tough loss for me. My own mistakes combined with some lopsided dice rolling really put the hurt on my poor Terrans! Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Ryjak was a very gallant opponent, and was constantly giving me suggestions and helping me out with rules over the course of the game. I can honestly say that I had a great time, despite the lopsided result! I definitely accomplished my main goals of re-familiarizing myself with the FSA rules, trying out one of the Adepticon scenarios, and test driving one of my Adepticon lists. From that perspective, I would call this game a great success!

Until next time…