Federation Commander

Battlegroup London met for the first time yesterday, here's what happened...

The two fleets, Federation and Romulan were exactly matched in points value with 781 each, fleets were as follows...

Fed (Drwibble): 2xCA, 2xCC, 1xBC

Rom (me): 2xKR, 1XSN, 1XKF5R, 1XBH, 2XKE

The two sides set up at opposite ends of a floating map, the Federation fleet in a pretty formation, which made the Romulan formation look very untidy indeed!

I didn't take notes during the game, so the report isn't as detailed as it may have been, and I also forgot to bring my camera

The fleets steadily headed towards each other, with the Romulans going dead straight ahead, and the Feds taking more of an oblique approach. The Federation fired first, popping off a couple of long range phaser shots as a statement of intent. The Romulans kept their powder dry, and decided to cloak for the approach. This proved to be both a good and a bad move. Good because the Romulans got right into the Federation battle line and, due to a combination of the cloak and some very unlucky dice rolls (one point blank four photon volley missed entirely) and bad because the Romulan commander kept the cloak on too long and by the time the ships were ready to fire, the Fed fleet were behind them. Lessons learnt for next time.

The superior maneuverability of the Romulan ships allowed them to swing round and get in a nice position chasing the Feds. This culminated in the Snipe and KF5R getting right behind one of the Fed CCs, firing phasers and then launching a large and nasty volley of Plasmas at the price of the Snipe taking 15 or so internals.

Time was getting on at this point, so we decided to call it a draw. Drwibble then noticed that the CC didn't have enough energy left to accelerate away from the plasmas any longer which meant that if we'd carried on the CC would have taken a large amount of internal damage thanks mostly to the diminutive Snipe.

Needless to say, upon return to Romulus, the commander of the Snipe was immediately promoted.

It was a fun day, and the game garnered a lot of interest from the other people at the games group. We did our ambassador spiel and we expect to have people joining in with the game next time.

In retrospect these were probably large forces to use in a game involving only the two of us, but part of the objective was to attract attention to Federation Commander and to try to recruit players for the future, which hopefully has worked... we will know at the meeting next month!

The Feds did pretty well at formation flying. However the advice to treat phasers as the main weapon and to go for damage by attrition seems hard to put into practice against cloaked ships. It looks like being a very long and slow attrition when only a fraction of the overall damage is scored against the targets.

As Shauneroo stated, the Romulans stayed in cloak a little too long which meant that both fleets interpenetrated and passed through each other before the Roms were ready to fire (otherwise I would probably have turned away and given them a stern chase rather than passing through). As it turned out, we had a stern chase anyway, because the Feds were keeping their speed up in case of a plasma launch, which meant that the Roms had better turn modes and could swing around to chase. The Feds could have kept the gap so there was never any point in launching a plasma, but I wouldn't have been able to risk a HET to make a head-on pass against them because I would have needed another HET to escape from the inevitable plasma launch that would have followed me reversing course.

As it was, I made a small mistake it splitting into two groups (which did actually also split the Roms into two sets of pursuers) with the intention of criss-crossing to lead at least one of the Rom groups into the forward arcs of one of the Fed groups. I'd probably have got away with that were it not for a Snipe and a K5R launching plasmas which I could easily have stayed ahead of forever - except that I made a stupid stupid basic maths error and miscalculated the power I needed to carry on acelerating to the end of the turn, coming up one short. If we had played it out, the Command Cruiser would probably have taken about 70 internals. And since I was outnumbered by rom forces anyway, the chances of salvaging the damaged ship would have been negligible, resulting in a significant loss for the Federation.

I have to confess that I hadn't looked hard at the ship diagrams for the Romulans, and as someone who used to play SFB when it was still a ziplock bag game, it was a nasty shock to discover that the upgrade ships used in FC carried so many plasma weapons. That plus not having a good set of tactics to handle multiple cloaked adversaries was difficult. The mistakes did the rest.

But hey... there's always next time!

Sounds like a good first meeting!

Nice report, and interesting to see a Snipe survive a flight in space

Good luck with the recruitment. We're having a similar thing at BG Exeter on Sunday. Who knows; maybe we'll arrange an inter-Battlegroup match one day....

That would be cool, but I think that the novice commanders of Battlegroup London will need more combat training before taking on the grizzled war veterans of Exeter.

We should certainly look to make it happen at some point though.

Neat report - gave the flavour well. Always interesting to get the viewpoint from both sides.

London, eh? Whereabouts? We're in Kingston. Might be possible to meet up sometime...?

And with the Exeter lads - are we looking at some sort of tournament, perhaps, someday....????

Shauneroo is an honourary Londoner since he is actually based off to the east. I'm in Ealing, so not too far away from Kingston. Yes, a meeting would be excelllent.

And yes, would certainly be up for a meeting with Exeter too. A UK tournament would be pretty cool as well.

We had better get some practice in beforehand though!

I'm sorry about the Snipe! I'll do my best not to let one survive again!

Ealing? Just a no 65 bus ride away!

While our campaign games don't always take place there, and there's not necessarily FC played every week, we tend to be at the regular meetings of Kingston Games Group in the Willoughby Arms. Tuesday evenings, Sunday afternoon/evenings.

Look it up on beerintheevening, or PM me for directions if you fancy popping over.