Greetings! This time around, I have a Firestorm Armada battle report. Back on Monday, I had the opportunity to try out the first mission from the Schaumburg Prime Offensive primer pack, which was recently posted over at The Way Gate. Ryjak was kind enough to run his Aquans against my Terrans in this 900 point battle. Read on to see how it turned out!

The Scenario

This mission has some very interesting deployment requirements. Most of our fleets would be starting in reserve. To start the game, only our Admiral’s vessels would be on the table. The rest of our fleets were put in reserve and divided into two chunks that were as nearly equal in points as possible. One of those two chunks would be shunting in, and the other flanking in, using the reserve arrival rules as normal. These reservere arrivals would be confined to specific areas of the table as shown. The overall objective of the mission is to have your admiral’s vessel end the game within 12″ of a Tier 2 and a Tier 3 squadron.

The Forces

My Terran fleet was a modification of a list that I had posted here previously in one of my Adepticon prep posts:

• Admiral Group: Tyrant BB, with 3 Interceptors
• Shunt Group: Cruiser Squadron, Light Frigate Squadron
• Flanking Group: Torpedo Cruiser Squadron, Armsman Frigate Squadron

Ryjak’s Aquan fleet consisted of:

• Admiral Group: Dreadnought with 3 Escorts
• Shunt Group: 3x Assault Cruiser Squadron, Frigate Squadron
• Flank Group: Ladon Cruiser Squadron, Corvette Squadron

The Battlefield & Deployment

While the deployment zones are pretty cut and dried, there is no indication in the primer pack about how the terrain was to be layed out. Ryjak laid out the terrain using 25% table coverage, which resulted in a number of interesting tactical options. After we deployed our Admiral’s ships, this is what the table looked like. As you can see, Ryjak made full use of his ships that have the Minefield MAR to lay down minefields in both my shunting and flanking zones, in an effort to funnel my future deployments as much as possible.:

Turn 1

Given that we had only had a single activation on the board for each of us, the first turn went by pretty easily. Neither of us had the opportunity to get shots off on the other thanks to the terrain coverage.

Turn 2

On the start of the second turn, I managed to bring in both of my Tier 2s. My Torpedo Cruisers flanked in, promptly failed their disorder check, and got shifted into the minefields Ryjak laid during deployment. Meanwhile, my Cruiser squadron shunted in, but rolled a bit higher on its shunt check than is desirable, winding up with Hazard markers. For his part, Ryjak did not have any of his reserves come in for Turn 2. So, the good news is that I would have more units on the table.

My Harpoon cruisers wound up having a bit of a rough time; the mines the ran into were only Strength 6, but Ryjak had a couple of really hot rolls that wound up destroying one of them and causing a critical hit on another. Ouch! Later, he finished off the damaged torpedo cruiser with a devastating beam attack from his Dreadnought, which looked like this:

This turn saw me making a few ineffectual attacks. One of my shunted-in cruisers also took a point of damage from making contact with one of the mine fields in my deployment zone.

Turn 3

At the start of Turn 3, my light frigates arrived, along with the rest of Ryjak’s fleet. My light frigates shunted in without incident, as did Ryjak’s shunting units. However, his corvettes failed their disorder check, allowing me to shift them a few inches to a less-advantageous position. My light frigates moved up on my right flank to attack the Aquan cruiser squadron, while my cruisers and battleship tried to rendezvous near the center of the board. Ryjak’s forces were able to strip off a few damage points from my battleship, finish off my Torpedo Cruisers, and claim one of the light frigates while damaging another.

Turn 4

In Turn 4, my remaining frigates finally showed up, flanking in without incident. At this point, however, they were a bit out of position and would not really have an opportunity to impact the battle much. Ryjak was able to strip some more damage off of my battleship, and we each lost a cruiser. At this point, I was trying to form up my battleship, remaining cruiser, and light frigates in my center-right, to try and pull off the primary objective. That would be a tall order, though, since the rest of Ryjak’s fleet was in close pursuit.

Turn 5 & 6

This turn went pretty poorly for me. Ryjak was able to finish off my remaining cruiser and took out two light frigates, leaving my battleship alone on the right side of the board.

My frigates lobbed a torpedo pot-shot at Ryjak’s frigates, but they were shooting into so much PD it didn’t come to much. We only started Turn 6 to see if Ryjak could finish off my Tyrant, which he managed handily.

Hotwash

Another tough loss for my Terrans! I did have quite a few below-average rolls, while Ryjak had some fairly hot dice. However, even setting that aside it is clear looking back that I did not properly focus on the mission objectives both in terms of my deployments and my moves. I should have committed getting my battleship to either the shunt or flank areas from the start, so that it could have rendezvoused with the applicable Tier 2 and Tier 3 squadron. Instead, I dithered a bit with my battleship’s movements, wasting time with trying to set up a low-probably fixed fore shot on Ryjak’s dreadnought. Compounding that error, I used the shunting forces (which I had selected as the units to try and achieve the objective with) too aggressively, resulting in them either being shot up or caught out of position at the end of the game.

List Implications

Ryjak did a better job at tailoring his list to the scenario, where as I was trying to get a feel for new units and disregarded the scenario a bit. He was also able to execute a more effective game plan, by concentrating forces earlier. I think that taking a dreadnought as the admiral’s ship in this scenario is the way to go, as keeping the flagship alive to the end of the game is critical to achieving the major objectives of this scenario. I also could have done better with selecting tougher units and/or hardening them with appropriate upgrades, shield cruisers, and the like to give myself a better shot at achieving the main objective.

Scenario Thoughts

Here are just a few things that we noted about the scenario, which I’ve already mentioned to Spartan Linde for consideration ahead of the event:

• The deployment for this scenario is complicated, and took Ryjak and I a bit of time to figure out.
• The deployment also makes it important for both players to reach both sides of the table, which could be challenging at Adepticon, which tends to use long un-broken tables for its event rooms.
• It wasn’t clear exactly when or  how the players are supposed to break up their fleets. This may be an important consideration given that a player may attempt to assign a specific unit to their flanking force to counter a unit in their opponents shunting force, and vice versa.
• Units with the Minefield MAR are really handy in this scenario! Ryjak was able to lay no less than 6 minefields in my shunting and flanking zones, which ended up netting him three critical hits and two normal hits. Not too shabby! Ryjak had some good advice regarding mine sweeping; try and trigger them with as tough a ship as possible, and failing in that try to trigger a mine with only a single ship from a squadron.

Conclusion

We both had a lot of fun playing this scenario! I greatly appreciate Ryjak giving me a chance to practice it before the convention. If you are interested in hearing about another recent game Ryjak played, go and check out the write-up he did on his blog, the Ops Center. Until next time!