My 11 year old interest in FT--among other things--has suddenly
manifested. We played yesterday at 1000 points, then again tonight. 1300
points each side. ESU: Admiral Khristofr Iakovich Kulakov (me): 1 Nanucka II,
2 Gorshkovs and 2 Petrograds on my side, NSL: Admiral Joshua Morgen (him): 2
Maria von Burgunds, 1 Markgraf, 2 Waldburgs (1 plain, 1 M)
He started slogging along, straight down the middle. My
Petrograds went left, my others went right. I haven't got the
hang of cinematic maneuvering yet, so I turned in a little quicker than I
should, with the result that my cruisers were in his FP arc and my BBs were in
his FS arc. We exchanged fire at right around 24" range, and his Kochte Effect
came into play. Unfortunately his Teske Field also showed up. One ship, for
example, fired 2 beam 3's and 2 beam 2's at 23" for 6 dice...resulting in 13
damage.
Next round, I decided this head-on assault stuff was highly
overrated, so my Gorshkovs dropped their missiles and broke right as my
battleships broke left. All of my missiles found
targets--not much of a feat against NSL. Having a stable firing
platform must have helped their gunnery--one Maria shot down all
five incoming vampires with a single Beam 1, the other one rolled two sixes
for its first pair of PDS and knocked down the three incoming missiles. One
damage point got through on the
Walburg-M, but on the bright side, I did almost very nearly
destroy the Waldburg. Along about this point, the Admiral's chef remembered
he'd left the borscht cooking back at the base, and the Admiral was forced to
break off action before things (unspecified things) got overly cooked...
that's the story as told by the Red Star Prevaricator, anyway, so it must be
pravda. The NSL Bullenspiel tells a slightly different tale, but no one would
take any regard of that...
(Joshua has said that he is "egostatic"--a very apt
description).
> My 11 year old interest in FT--among other things--has suddenly
Well, as long as you're reporting, so will I.:)
I played two games with my bro-in-law, which was his first playing
exposure
to FB2 tech being mixed in. We rescinded our long-stand house rule
about nova cannons and wave guns not affecting fighters (because,
realistically speaking, they're not all that good any more, at least not in
our experience) in order to bring them half on par with plasma bolts. The rest
of our house rules stayed the same.
We played two games, both at our usual 5000 pointers. He was half teasing me
to bring out the Dreadplanet Roberts the first game (with a plan in mind for
what he'd do about it) so I obliged him. The final version I eventually
decided on for the DPR's design was to yank the needle beams and two Class 3's
from the prototype blueprint I posted here before and replace it with two
Class 4's and eighteen Class 1's. The rest of the ship was as given.
And he _did_ have a plan in mind for how to deal with it... he threw 52
fighters (48 norms and 4 heavies) against my 41, figuring to go for out-
fightering me for once (which he usually doesn't do), and on top of that he
went and stocked about 100 PDS on his ships to boot. I thought that the
fighters AND the PDS was probably a bad move.... because he was left
with a total of eight pulse torpedo tubes (four three-arcs and four
two-arcs)
between two front-line ships, with a smattering of Class 1's on his
dedicated carriers, and that was IT. He just plain overkilled the anti-
fighter tactics up the wazoo.
And he died by it... I lured his superior fighter force numbers into a
close-up fight and then plasma bolted the whole zoo after one round of
fire exchanged between my fighters and his first wave of 48 normals. This left
him with four heavy fighters and eight torps as his whole striking
power. He had level 2 screens and thrust-4 advanced drives on the two
front-line ships that were torpedo-armed, but that wasn't near enough...
within about a couple or three plasma barrages his heavy fighters (which had
been hoping to screen for the dreadnoughts) and his main AND FTL drives were
gone with both ships at triple threshold. The two dreadnoughts struck their
colors, his carriers (which hung back a good 70 MU away while the DPR stopped
to spin on the SDN's) split up and FTL'ed out untouched. I lost my whole
fighter contingent and took a whopping eight points of damage to the DPR (four
on armor).
Second game, I decided to pull out an older design and threw a group of
four strong-hulled, armored ultradreadnoughts with (on each) a wave gun,
two SML's, 4 fighter bays, five Class 3's, eight Class 2's, and 16 PDS. I drew
up an intel report on what I ran into... the main part of his force was five
superbattleships, armed with 2 Class 4 PBLs, 6 pulse torps, level 2 screens, 2
ADFC's and 30 PDS each. He was obviously girding up for another carrier
attack, and I violated my usual maxim of "if you're going to fly fighters or
missiles, don't futz around with it, bring a LOT of them" with
my somewhat theme-based dreadnought design, the fighters and missiles of
which were both pretty much completely useless. However, each of my ships was
about twice as resilient as each of his, and he kept a tight enough area
defense phalanx that my wave guns actually wound up doing about as much to him
(proportionately) as his plasma bolts did to me.
My fighters and missiles were useless, and with no screens against his plasma
though I was eventually worn down. It came down to two of my ships against
three of his, I decided I didn't like those odds, so I went for (and got) the
"FTL bomb". Ironically, the only survivors for either side were five and a
half squads of my (utterly useless) heavy fighters... my ships both dumped
core within 6 MU of his (individually smaller) three survivors, so now there's
this gaping hole in the lines of both sides where we took the mutual fleet
annihilation. However, he was happy enough with how that ship design came out
for him (this is the first time in quite a while that he's even managed to
make me force a draw) that he commented that he'd keep that design for the
books... so I made sure to draw up a copy of it for myself and cogitate about
what I'm going to do against it. I know that his gaming circles in Seattle
have come to really like pulse torps, and I imagine that once they get hold of
FB2 they'll probably go with plasma cannons and lots of point defense mixed in
with the pulse torps, just like he did this time... though it's half likely
that their games will have less fighter emphasis than when he plays with me.
Hard to say.
If anything needs clarifying (for all two of you that care:) let me
know...
LL, Congratulation on indoctrina...er introducing Full Thrust to another
generation. Its good to know that they learned the old Jedi Teske Field trick
too.
> on 6/20/00 2:20, stiltman@teleport.com at stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
--->8--- (snip)
> And he died by it... I lured his superior fighter force numbers into a
This
> left him with four heavy fighters and eight torps as his whole
I
> lost my whole fighter contingent and took a whopping eight points of
Just curious...did you saturate the area the fighters were in leaving no area
within 12" of the fighters open for them to dodge into with their secondary
movement? Did he try to shoot at the PBs with the fighters if they couldn't
get out of the area of effect?
> My fighters and missiles were useless, and with no screens against his
Each playing group has it's own preference on rules. However, this is one of
the reasons I hate the FTL spoilsport rule (as I call it), it makes for a lot
more suicide tactics by the person that's on the downside of the
exchange. Hmmm...there's another way to make the with the Dread Planet
Roberts quake with fear bring in a large number of FTL suicide vessels that
have a drive value of 4 or more, then FTL out near the planet killer. Half
will cause a d6 damage while the 2/3 of the remaining ones go "boom"
doing their DP in damage. Of course this depends on how your group determines
if all FTLing ships do so simultaneous or whether the kill each other before
some have the chance to FTL. I haven't done the math but I'll bet one can
purchase enough FTL suiciders in under 2500 points. What am I
suggesting here? ACK!
> on 6/20/00 2:20, stiltman@teleport.com at stiltman@teleport.com wrote:
> > And he died by it... I lured his superior fighter force numbers into
This
> > left him with four heavy fighters and eight torps as his whole
I
> > lost my whole fighter contingent and took a whopping eight points of
> Just curious...did you saturate the area the fighters were in leaving
I'm not sure what his reasoning was behind the first 48; he basically just let
me roast all the survivors from both sides after the first round of
fighter-to-fighter fire. Judging from his general requests for a
cursory scan of the DPR itself, I think he was GROSSLY overestimating how much
PDS I had on that sucker and so he let his first batch of fighters go because
he didn't expect they'd do any good anyway. Since this is literally the first
time in about two years that he's tried to out-fighter me I think he was
a little out of his element and wasn't thinking things through too carefully
about how he ought to be handling his fighters -- in particular, he's
pretty much never had a position of fighter superiority over my carriers, so
it probably didn't occur to him that I don't tend to stack both fighters
_and_
PDS in the same fleet.
In the case of the last 4, he just regarded them as expendible point defense,
again probably figuring that I had about five to ten times as much PDS as I
really did.
> My fighters and missiles were useless, and with no screens against
> Each playing group has it's own preference on rules. However, this is
Yeah... FTL bombings don't tend to be all that common in our games, though.
Usually the ships don't live long enough to get that close to each other in
enough numbers to do a lot of damage, nor is it too common that EVERY ship in
the fleet explodes like that.
> Hmmm...there's another way to make the with the Dread Planet
Half
> will cause a d6 damage while the 2/3 of the remaining ones go "boom"
doing
> their DP in damage. Of course this depends on how your group
A few comments on this (amidst a bit of respectful amusement):
1. We've thrown together a house rule that says that every ship does the
original damage points they'd have if they had _average_ hulls, in
reasoning that it's the drive size, not the hull strength, that inflicts the
damage (and that this wasn't an issue in FT because all the ships have the
same ratio of hull strength). This didn't help him, my ships are larger than
his,
but it _does_ prevent people from exploiting unclarities in the rules
and
throwing together a pile of super-hulled suicide bomber merchant ships
or something.:)
2. The number of times you're really going to get an FTL bomb to go off where
it can actually do damage isn't enough that it's really a particularly good
idea to rely on this too often as a backup tactic. You have to fly in a
straight line, you only get half your movement, and you have to land within 6"
of your opponent for there to even be a potential fuse... which basically says
that you have to make a beeline for your enemy in order to try it in the first
place. If you do that, your opponent has an easy time shredding you before you
get there.
That said... yeah, it's occured to me.:)
My 11 year old wanted another battle (and the Lafayette campaign...) so
tonight he took a Markgraf, a Richthofen and a von Burgund. vs my Bologna plus
a pair of Suffrens. I really expected to get pasted again, but my maneuvering
worked a little better this time. My fighters moved in and polished off the
Markgraf in two turns, then started gnawing at the von B. My
Bologna went left, the Suffrens right--of course he turned to
attack the Bologna, with the result that the Suffrens were able to slip in
behind the von Burgund. I had a few "Beth" missiles
in my mix, but it's hard to miss a von Burgund traveling 6-8mu
so the FSE did okay overall. The Markgraf was destroyed, the von Burgund was
badly hurt, the Richthofen was scratched; on my
side, a Suffren had taken two thresholds from Beam-3 at long
range, and my Bologna had taken 1 hull.
Lessons: 1) maneuverability is much more effective in Cinematic than in
vector. 2) speed 2 in cinematic is really lousy. 3) FB1 ships definitely need
more ADFC..
--Chris DeBoe
G'day,
Am I to take it from all this frivolity that summer holidays have arrived for
said son?;)
> Lessons:
Ohh you got that right!;)
> 2) speed 2 in cinematic is really lousy.
Its lousy everywhere, just more lousy in cinematic;)
> 3) FB1 ships definitely need more ADFC.
Yep! Question for you though, if using straight FB1 fleets have you found that
the FSE really don't need ADFC (I've found that here, but not sure if
that's an artefact of the way the guys here play the FB1 fleets - which
is rare)?
Cheers
Beth
> On 22-Jun-00 at 09:08, Beth Fulton (beth.fulton@marine.csiro.au) wrote:
That is definately not the case where I am (not that the question was directed
at me). Usually only the FSE is using SMs, but everyone is using fighters.
> Am I to take it from all this frivolity that summer holidays
Correct
> >2) speed 2 in cinematic is really lousy.
I think that Thrust 2 wouldn't be too serious in Vector if you
had sufficient ADFC/PDS support.
> Yep! Question for you though, if using straight FB1 fleets have
I haven't played much with FB1 ships (usually Islamic Fed) so no comment.
> Laserlight wrote:
> My 11 year old wanted another battle (and the Lafayette
When fighting the FSE the NSL benefit from bringing CLs (particularly
the CLE version with 5 PDSs) and CEs, and/or fighters of their own :-/
[snip]
> Lessons:
Yep.
> 2) speed 2 in cinematic is really lousy.
Yep. *Very* easy to hit with missiles.
> 3) FB1 ships definitely need more ADFC..
See above :-/
Later,
1st Battle of Lafayette
(Let's get the list's opinions: in the Lafayette campaign, do you get the
benefit of the other side's repair base if you capture it?)
Joshua took a mix of NSL, ESU and NAC ships; I used FSE (one of Indy's Fleet
List battlegroups, slightly modified) plus some ESU ships for the system
defense. We split our fleets into squadrons, agreed to use 0.5" per mu and
charged at each other. His squadrons were line abreast; I had two small
squadrons out on the flanks, and my 2 Bolognas behind my main line. Both
fleets advanced--including his battlecruiser squadron, which he
sent out to catch my flankers. He let them get too far away from his main line
though, and my battle line cut hard to port and nailed him. I then exercised
discretion and FTL's
out--almost all my fighters were gone, and most ships had fired
2 rounds of SML's. His losses: 1 Manchuria, 1 Jerez, 1
Richthofen (with 1 hull left), 1 San Miguel, and about 1/2 of
his (16) fighter squadrons. My losses: 2 Ibizas, 1 Trieste, 1 Gorshkov, plus
most of my (11) fighters. I'll go to VN549 and collect more fighters and
missiles and we'll be more evenly matched than we were to start. Of course, as
far as the capital ship count goes, that means I have a Foch, 2 Bolognas, 2
Romas and a Ypres against a Komorov, 2 Von Tegetthoffs, a Konstantin, Valley
Forge, Szent Istvan, 2 Victorias, 2 Majestics, a Maximilian and a Der
Theuerdank...I've got the advantage in cruisers and escorts, but that doesn't
make me too confident.
Lessons:
1. Using cm scale gives you a much better feel--you have enough
space for flanking maneuvers without being constrained by the table edges(or,
in this case, about 2m x 2m floorspace). Now, if we can just get Jon to
produce ships in a small enough
scale--we used markers for this game, due to the number of
ships, but regular ships would have been too closely packed anyway.
2. Keep your flanks either way out there, or close enough to your main line
for support.
3. Win initiative (which I did, every turn).
4. Despite what a British admiral once said, speed is NOT armor. However,
trudging along at velocity 8 may be thought of
as _negative_ armor--it attracts salvo missiles and fighters.
> Laserlight wrote:
> 1st Battle of Lafayette
[snip]
> I used FSE (one of Indy's Fleet List battlegroups, slightly modified)
plus >some ESU ships for the system defense.
With or without FTL drives? In the original Lafayette campaign set-up
the system defence ships are strictly sub-light, though that is much
less of an advantage with the FB design system.
> Lessons:
<g> Guess why I use it...
> Now, if we can just get Jon to produce ships in a small enough
Depends a fair bit on your basing. Many of my ships use old SFB model
bases or similar (roughly half an inch across, but metal) and/or have
base poles of different heights; this makes flying in dense formations a lot
easier than if all ships use the standard GZG or RAFM bases. That
being said, I'm usually comfortable with looser formations (2-3mu
between the ships) - though perhaps not with 10000-point fleets :-/
> 2. Keep your flanks either way out there, or close enough to
And have a reason for the flank squadrons to be where they are, too.
> 3. Win initiative (which I did, every turn).
Helps quite a bit in fighter combats, at least if you use the normal
squadron rules... not as important in an SM-vs-beam fight though.
> 4. Despite what a British admiral once said, speed is NOT
I believe the British learned this lesson the hard way when the Hood
brewed up :-/ Speed sometimes allows you to be outside the main enemy
fire arcs, but that's all.
> However, trudging along at velocity 8 may be thought of
Yep <g>
> With or without FTL drives? In the original Lafayette campaign
w/o--upgrade thrust 4 to 6
> Laserlight wrote:
> With or without FTL drives? In the original Lafayette campaign
OK, makes sense. Though... your list of losses seemed to include rather less
than 1500 points of ESU units (I've mislaid the original post, but IIRC you
only listed a Gorshkov and a Novgorod or two as being lost)?
Curious,
> OK, makes sense. Though... your list of losses seemed to
One Gorshkov, the other units I lost were FTL. He doesn't have anything both
fast enough and big enough to catch the other 5 ships, so I'd call it "waiting
on the edge of the system."
I could have dedicated another hour or two to trying to circle around behind
his battle line and hit them in the stern, but I didn't want to spend the time
right then.