So Alex (Warhawk) and I had a little 1000pt game last night, quickly thrown together.
The RSN had:
-- Dreadnought with 2 Escorts
-- BB with 2 Escorts
-- Mixed Cruiser Squadron, 2 Spooks and 1 Cerberus
-- 2x Full Frigate Squadrons
Ba'Kash Warboys brought:
-- Assault Carrier, optimized for speed (9"!) and assault
-- 3x Heavy Cruisers
-- 3x Light Cruisers
-- 2 x full Frigates
Table had one asteroid field in mid-left from my POV. Alex used that well, flying a Frigate squad in there. With Elite, he'd need to roll all 1's and 2's on 3 dice to fail a check. The one time he did, i failed to even damage him on 7 collision dice. I could never bring enough firepower to get them while obscured. Whereas they're not impeded firing out (right?)
Overall, Stephan has a new challenger for Uber Dice-Witch. Alex seemed to be rolling 2 or more 6's on every single batch of dice he threw. A throw-away shot of 5 beam dice got a CRIT on my Battle Carrier with like 12 hits. And the king of all WTF moments, his badly damaged Cerberus throws out a ONE-die broadside to port and starboard. The ONE die to port does 6 hit to kill my damaged Hvy Cruiser, and the ONE die to Starboard does a 7 hit CRIT to kill one of my Cruisers.
Only towards the end did they seem to cool, as my Battle Carrier and 2x Heavy Cruisers ran around with one crit or hit left for a few turns.
Worst luck I've endured in many a game. In all my volleys and bomber runs, I only rolled double digit hits twice, + the very last shot of the game. The rest of the time, I was just doing a point at a time - a frustrating way to try and kill a Dread or Battleship. My one frigate squadron failed to kill his for 3 turns. And I had three boarding actions and three bomber runs that basically flubbed.
I tried flanking with my Heavy Crusiers at the start, relying on the power to Engines card. It still felt like they took too long to get there.
I think we forgot the RSN shields on the Dread and BB the whole game, so it was at least a draw. Only the tenacious stats of the Ba'Kash heavies and AC kept me in the game, along with the wonder of Weapon Shielding. Even with 7 Damage, the Battle Carrier could throw a 12 die smack around. Whereas the RSN Tier-1s went downhill rapidly with that kind of damage. In the end, the Ba'kash maneuverability also allowed them to keep guns on target, while the RSN were still turning, and they wore down the RSN tier 1's.
A close match all round. Many thanks to Alex!
