MZ Campaing Report

Another week, another skirmish:

Norwegian elite cloak cruisers waylay a PanMa group of 2 BBs and a CVL
returning to Mars.

PanMans immediately adopt a hedgehog defense -- stopping completely and
deploying panzer screen. Norwegians enter cloaked and start to circle the
prey. PanMans try to anticipate their movements and bring the heavies to

bear.

A few circlings later, one BB is critically wounded, but none of the cloak
cruisers have escaped damage. The CVL starts to disengage. The critical blow
comes when Norwegians miscalculate their cloak movement and pop out in the
firing arcs of the undamaged BB. One cruiser loses its cloaking device, which
spells its doom.

The damaged cruiser is put out of its misery, but the two remaining ones

start to pursue the CVL. Overoptimized, as PanMan designs tend to be, the
CVL has no guns and only interceptors -- it is utterly incapable of
engaging enemy ships. It executes a very wide circle while the undamaged

BB tries to come to help. Luckily, the Norwegians again miscalculate
their 6-turn cloak movement and miss the CVL, so they can only score
minor damage before the BB is in AA-battery range. Norwegians cloak
again and skip past the BB to destroy its crippled sistership.

PanMans decide to stop and form hedgehog again. Looking at the sorry shape
their ships are in, Norwegians decide to disengage, ending the battle.

Notes: This was the longest, in terms of turns, FT game I've ever played. It
went on for over 40 turns. It also spanned several gaming tables, roughly a
300"x300" area. Luckily there weren't any more ships, or this would have been
impossible to play.

This battle really made us think about switching to centimeters. I just need
to paint smaller ships... And I'm a bit worried about the extra care needed
with such a small measurement. With inches, if you knock over a mini and
replace it a base length away from the real position, it's not such a big
deal. With cm, the displacement is half the optimal range of many weapons.

The hedgehog defense is nasty. If the opponent has screen and gunnery
supremacy, it almost completely negates any maneuver advantage you might

have. Apart from the nova&wave stuff I don't allow, missiles seem the
only good way to break it -- but an attached CV with decks full of
interceptors makes short work of that idea. You'd have to have panzers of your
own, kill the panzer screen first, and then hit with the missiles.

In fact, I'm beginning to think this may be the most effective way to deploy
the Thr2 behemoths for defense.