At long last!
Today, I took a trip down to
Toy Soldier Games in Amesbury, MA to meet up with MajorMcNichol and his friends Brian and Chris. I wound up pitting my Directorate fleet against Chris's Terrans. We played a very simple stand up and shoot scenario, though there was a lot more terrain on the board than I'm used to playing with!
This was our initial set-up:
As you can see, each of us had a BB, a squadron of cruisers, and a squadron of Frigates.
On the first turn, my Frigates ran into trouble when they attempted to navigate an asteroid belt and failed their navigational test! One was lost in the subsequent collision. To make matters worse, a second frigate fell to the Terran cruisers.
My Battleship then intervened, putting a point of damage on one of Chris's cruisers:
For the rest of the turn, Chris's frigates and their dreaded long-range torpedo attacks accounted for another frigate and damaged one of my cruisers!
Later, on turn 3, my cruisers attempted to retaliate against Chris's frigates. They managed to destroy one, but right after that Chris's cruisers rolled up and put a hurting on one of mine:
My battleship was not idle during this time, though. Thanks to linking my beam turrets and fore primary weapons, I managed to put a critical hit on the Terran battleship!
However, the tide had definitely turned against me. By the end of Turn 5, the only model I had left was my battleship, with 3 damage. Chris still had his battleship, a cruiser, and two frigates. We decided to call it at that point; here was our position at the end of the game:
A fun game! Many thanks to Chris for being patient enough to play a smaller game with me to help get my feet wet with the new edition, as well as putting up with all the times I tried playing the game like it's DW!
Here are some quick thoughts:
-The new terrain rules are pretty intuitive, but driving through asteroids is pretty risky. I lost a frigate, and Chris took some significant damage to his battleship due to asteroid collisions.
-The direct and indirect weapons rules make torpedoes very useful, since they do not require LOS.
-Lining up Fixed Channel arcs is just as fiddly as ever. I'll have to get some more practice at that before I'm good with it again!
-The Terrans, with their shields and long-range torpedo weapons, are just as fearsome at range as I remember.
So, there you have it. I'm definitely raring to go for my next game. I'm looking forward to trying out the new SRS rules for the fighters, bombers, interceptors, and the like. I asked Chris to leave those behind this time to give me less to think about!
While we were playing our game, Ian and Brian were playing theirs; a 1,000 point Sorylian/Directorate match-up:
It looked like an exciting game, as they were using the Escalating Engagement scenario. Unfortunately, Ian was having trouble getting his battleship on the table, which cost him dearly at the hands of the Directorate forces.
Overall, this was a great day, and I can't wait to meet up with these guys again!
