[GZG ECC IV] After Con Report from Indy

GZG ECC IV - Indy's ACR

The weeks before the con were increasingly busy, both with work and getting
last-minute prep stuff finished. I managed to get just about everything
I wanted done before leaving, but not quite all. In any event, the 'not quite
all' wasn't a critical problem (mostly nuisance and annoying).

Aimed to get an early start on friday for the drive up, but one delay led to
another, and I arrived in Lancaster 20 minutes before we were to nominally
open the door. Jon did not know of Jerry's plight (Jerry called me from Canada
two nights prior to inform me of the situation) and was a little concerned
that neither he or I were there yet. But I arrived, checked in, and filled Jon
in on the Jerry situation (without going into details, suffice it to say that
he would not have been able to get past the border patrol people in a legal
fashion), and got unpacked. I spent friday evening sorting through the prizes
(since I did not have time earlier in the week), trying to match up
appropriate prizes with appropriate events, checking people in, and briefly
socializing with as many as I could (many old faces, some new ones). Met a
number of people from the list who I had never met before (Kevin Walker, Chris
Deboe, Bob 'Magic' Makowski, etc). Ted Arlauskas was back from California. Jim
Bell and Tom Barclay led down the Canadian Contingent. Many others you know
from here were there (Los, Mike Sarno, Nick Caldwell, Asron Teske, Mike
Ritchie, et al).

Friday ended up being a late night, and I didn't get to bed until 2am
(although I thought it was 3am since the hotel room clock radio was STILL
set to Daylight Savings Time - I learned this...)

Saturday morning I was to be up and meet Jon Davis and Aaron T (and Nick if he
was able to get up) for breakfast at 7am. I dragged myself out from the
depths of sleep to glance over at the clock: 6:49am - gak!!! No time to
shower, dress, and still be on time! I grabbed my watch to make sure I had
set the alarms correctly - and saw it read 5:49am. ARGH!! With not
enough sleep, I had yet half an hour to nap. Tried. Failed. Got up, showered,
joined Jon and Aaron for breakfast (not the crowd we had last year,
but...).

Saturday morning I was to play in Aaron Newman's 2-part EFSB/SGII-FMA
game. I was involved in the EFSB part of the scenario. On another table was
the
boarding party action (the SGII/FMA part of the scenario). My job was to
get the elite Earth Force boarding parties onto the new Warlock Destroyer that
Bester and crew were trying to confiscate. It was a scenario meant for 5
players, but we were 1 player shy so I ended up running both the
Earth Force navy (one Hyperion and an Omega + 'Furies) and the Q-ship
plus frieghters and assault boarding force. Arrayed around me were raiders,
Psi-Corps with a Shadow-Omega and the Psi-Corps mothership (we didn't
really know it at the time; all we knew was that it was jamming ALL
comms), and another Omega/Hyperion pair (run by Jim Bell; they were
renegade telepaths out to stop Bester, too, but I didn't know that as
the captain of my Omega). My jobs were multi-fold: stop Bester and
crew, thump the raiders, and arrest any rogue telepaths. Oh, and prevent the
Warlock from falling into enemy hands (whose ever those might have been).

Early on in the game I made a long-range shot against the Psi-Corps
mothership, scoring a threshold check. And during that threshold check, the
Psi-Corps
lost their jammer (score!), which meant comms were open again (so I could
communicate with my co-hort who was running Ivanova's security squad and
engineers on the Warlock attempting to prevent hostiles from taking it over).
On turn 1 there was a fair bit of blood between ships. Turn 2 I lost
my Hyperion to the Shadow-Omega beam weaponry (damn, it's nasty!). But
in
a few more short turns the Raiders were toasted, the Psi-Corps lost
their
mothership and had their Shadow-Omega badly damaged, and I had gotten
the elite EF boarding parties onto the Warlock. For my part of the scenario,
EarthForce was victorious (didn't know about the rogue teeps as they had
very well behaved themselves during the ship-to-ship combat). I
communicated our situation to my comrade on the Warlock and waited for the
boarding party outcome to finish. In the very end, the EarthForce troops were
victorious, which meant, according to the rules, Aaron N and Mike R owed us
drinks (they said if the EF could pull off both victories, they'd buy
us drinks). I'm still waiting for that Pepsi, Aaron! ;-)

During all this I also coordinated with people getting their entries in for
the miniatures painting contest. This was a little distracting; maybe next
year I won't play during saturday morning.

In the afternoon I was 'dragged' into playing in Mike Muller's "Clampdown"
scenario as a raider (it was another EFSB game: raiders vs EarthForce)
(originally I was going to do some administrative stuff, prep a little
for my game,and get some miniatures paining lessons from Stuart - got
one
of the three done! :). The game started with us drug-runners trying to
get some
freighters off the board w/out the EarthForce interfering. Alas, they
interfered (they didn't keep their noses where they belonged, danged
EF!).
We got out clocks *cleaned* (esp after they toasted my raider cruiser and
then *boarded* our Q-ship!!). The sides were switched and play went much
longer, but I went off to have a much desired painting seminar with Stuart
Murray. He showed me a few tricks of painting that I hope to put to practice
in the very near future (I'll never be as good as him, but if I can be better
than I currently am...  :-)

During the dinner break between the afternoon and evening games we held a
small awards ceremony to give awards/prizes to the winners of the
painting contest and a few other categories we give prizes to (such as the "He
Who
Travelled Farthest" and "He/They Who Travelled Shortest" distance
awards). This went well; I believe the winners were very pleased and happy
with their
winnings.  :-)

That evening I ran my "Siege of Sol" scenario: a Kra'Vak vs Human FT game in
Sol space. The game was filled with 12 players, but from begging I
some-
how ended up with *16* players (a number of people had no other games they
could be in, and this scenario was designed to be flexible, to
add/subtract
players as available). There was some chaos in the beginning because I had not
had time to finish organizing the shipsheets into subfleets, and the two sides
had to choose what subfleets they were going to run (each subfleet totalled
~1100 pts, give or take a few). The K'V had one brand new player (Larry E) who
had never played a GZG game before; just dropped by to check things out; Aaron
Newman thankfully took him under his wing and went over how things worked. I
had my hands full trying to maintain some semblance of organization during the
first hour of chaos.

After that first hour, though, all settled down to play. And there I found
we had *14* players - two had vanished, which meant some ships needed to
be divvyed up (there were 16 subfleets out there). This was quickly done, and
play proceeded.

The K'V were represented by the K'V, all stock ships from FB2. THe Hu'Mans
were represented by the NAC, NSL, FSE, ESU, UN, and NI. Only no one took
any NAC.  ;-)  The NSL, FSE, and ESU ships were all stock FB1 ships. The
NI were ships designed (and minis donated for the event) by Noam Izenberg. The
UN ships were designs of my own, incorporating two weapon systems that are
being discussed in the playtest group, so I'm not really at liberty to go into
details on this systems (as things could and very likely will change before
too long; these ARE in playtest mode, after all!). One
was an anti-matter torp, the other a graser 'heavy' beam weapon.
Throughout the game the players on both sides gave me a lot of feedback on the
use of these two systems, which I will be putting in a more complete AAR for
the playtest list and Jon T.

In any event, by 9:30 (after getting a half hour late start due to the awards
ceremony and an hour of organization) play commenced. Now, unlike Brian Bell's
similar scenario from earlier in the day, this was cinematic movement, and I
had the two sides starting closer together, so there was blood on turn 1! Not
much, just with the lead elements, but they were engaged. Turns 2 and 3 the
followed relatively quickly, but due to the numbers of players and ships, 3
hours had gone by before we finished turn 3. We had decided to allow ships to
fire by squadron or subfleet instead of going back and forth one ship at a
time per side. This DID speed up play, but still, there were too many ships
and players; I should have kept it down to 12 max. Oh well, hindsight!
Everyone still had fun, even if many were beat tired. In any event, at 12:30a
the K'V decided to call the game. If they had been able to continue for
another 2 turns, the situation might have been more in the K'V favor, but as
it was, most of their large ships were moderately to heavily damaged, and thay
had lost a half dozen smaller ships. The Humans had lost an NSL BDN, some
other cruisers, and had a number of their big ships (eg, the ESU SDN) with
some serious holes in them.

After clean-up and socializing with some other people (as well as
discussion of aspects of the scenario just run, feedback for the new weapons
being tested), I finally got to be again at 2am.

Sunday came early (well, I DID go to bed at 2am - technically it was
already Sunday!) and I was scheduled to play in Dan's "Sundiver" scenario.
This was fun: an ESU task force was sent to check out an FSE research station
and get whatever info they may have been developing there so close to a star.
Vector movement was the name of the game, which I admittedly am not strong in.
I was teamed with Mike and Pat Muller as the ESU. Arrayed against us were Mike
Hudak, Al Muller, and Bryan Gordon, the FSE (complete with armed research
station and 4 squadrons of fighters, in addition to 2 DDHs, 2 CA, and 2
BCs).
Our little force consisted of 1 BB, 2 CE/B, 2 CL, 3 DD, and 2 armed
transports with 4 assault shuttles. Vector movement, as mentioned above, was
affected by the proximity of the star: if within 12 of the edge of the table
(which WAS the star!), you were pulled 3 mu towards it after movement. If
within 24 mu, but more than 12, you were pulled 2 mu in. If within 36 mu you
were pulled in 1 mu. Otherwise no effect from gravity. To make a long story
short, we came in on a flank, the FSE dropped a wall of SMs on us, and we used
the sun's gravity to help swing us around the SM barrage (most of us made it;
one of Pat's DDs was vaped, though, and the rest who sucked up SMs were able
to shoot them down with help from the CEs). However, this maneuver proved to
be a bit disaterous as several of our ships had gathered up so much velocity
we could not prevent them from splashing into the hot plasma of the star. Oh
well!! Mike was able to get shuttles off, but we launched them too early; the
fighters pounced on them and had several turns to fire on each shuttle before
they could land (which meant they were all destroyed). All of Mike's ships
were evntually lost (either to FSE weapons fire or by playing in the star),
half of Pat's group was lost (he escaped with 2 ships), and my force (2 DD and
a BB) was lost (one DD to the star, one DD to massed SM fire and the BB to FSE
beam and fighter fire). Alas, I DID manage to skirt the star with the BB. Too
bad I was the sole target, too.

In the end, it's not a matter of who won/lost, but did we have fun? I
did. That's all the counted for me.

After the game (which went a little longer than anticipated) we claened up, I
packed my stuff, hung out chatting with those who were left, then was the last
out the door (we left the lights on as the hotel room building staff wanted to
get in there as quickly as possible that afternoon and reset the room for the
next event). The drive home was mostly uneventful, despite
2+
days of dire warnings of the weather. To the north it was bad. But to the
south: rain. Once home, I pretty much collapsed. Still exhausted even now,
but at least I'm getting sleep again.  :-)

Pics were taken during the whole con. It was funny: during many games people
would move their units, then everyone would back off so the half dozen or
so others who had cameras could take 'current turn' photos - I'm looking
forward to seeing these soon. If anyone who was there wants to contribute
photos to the photobalbum for next year's GZG ECC participants to see, SEND
THEM TO ME!!! 4x6 size is perfect.  ;-)

Mk