Federation Commander

I played my first SFB game in forever tonight. I was teaching to new players and had planned to teach more but the others had prior commitments.
Any way, as I was teaching I had decided to use the light cruisers, and to take a fleet I had not had a lot experience with but wanted to learn, the Romulan. My trainees took a cloaked Orion with on Fusion, one disruptor and on phaser in the CR option mounts and a Gorn CL.

We started at with phasers armed but no heavy weapons, and I made an oblique approach under cloak against the gorn. After anchoring and HET I got the R off with only his bearing ph-3s to weaken the torp. The R went right through the number 4 and did 31 internals after my phaser fire had hit the shield. But I had forgotten about his plasma-fs. After barley surviving that, I pulled away, cloaked and started reloading. Meanwhile the orion was taking potshots at long range with the disruptor and phaser. Eventually we all met uo at relatively close range with me under cloak and still arming the R and the gorn with both Ss ready. He ignored the orion, who never cloaked the whole game but began doubling like a madman at the end, and launched both Ss at me. The cloak cut one to half power, but the other went in at full strength. I self destructed after that and ran the charts while offering advice.

The Gorn player did a great job of unintentionally rotating shields to avoid more internals and planted another double S combo on the Orion after the Orion decided to use his phaser offensively. The Orion self-destructed and did more internals to the "winning" Gorn though half his ship was gone.

Near the end of the game they had started to work out their tactics, but it was still a near run thing.

He managed to lock on whilst you were under cloak? Guess that can happen at high speeds, close range and unfavourable EW conditions, but it's pretty rare!

Second game with the trainees. We played the "Starball" scenario. While we had thought there would be four of us, it turned out only the two from last time showed up. Having resonable well balanced the Destroyers, and hoping for a quick game as we had waited until quite late for the others, players selected from the destroyer list.

Player one took a Klingon F5 with full refits and four type-IF drones. I explained the concept of scatterpacks, but he chose not to use them.

Player two took a Tholian DDP with the snare refit.

Player three (me) took a LDR DD with the plus refit.

They are playing better, but some of the nuances still elude them. The LDR DD is downright deadly with the gatlings, a lessen learned by both of the other players. The klingon scored some VERY good die rolls, killing all but my Emer Bridge, and on bridge box taken out by the tholian. The tholian learned the value of photons, and the curse of their inaccuracy. And both learned that destroyers die fast, even against other destroyers. At the end of the seven turn game, the Tholian was dead and both the other ships were severly crippled.