First proper Starmada game last night - four-way free-for-all, 2000 points a piece - and it was immensely good fun!
The ACEF faced off against Dave's Russians, Mark's unnamed aliens, and Nath's from-the-back-of-the-quickstart-rules fleet 'cos his models haven't arrived yet. We had plenty of space as we were playing on 1" hexes, so Mark and I had the range advantage at the start. My plan was to hang back, pounding the enemy with rocks from a distance, while sending my minelayers and bombers forward to keep them at range...
...which FAILED. The bombers (tiny corvettes with massive virus bombs designed to cripple an enemy ship's systems) swooped off towards Mark's super-dreadnaught, only to be shot down in flames with barely an eyelid batted. Ooops. The frigates fared slightly better, getting into laser cannon range and doing some damage - although only two survived to lay their minefields, which quite frankly proved to be a bit pants. Everyone converged on the middle, Mark dominating with his insanely long-range weaponry while staying infuriatingly out of my mass drivers' reach.
Nath closed on Mark with massed fleet action, doing plenty of damage to each other - which I missed most of while shooting at Dave - while the mass drivers finally managed to do some serious damage. The ACEF's iconic weapon has had a bit of tweaking over the games, and is now where I want it to be... I managed to cripple a few ships with a single hit, including a 42-damage-dice monstrosity from my battleship. If only we'd had more than 5 d6 to hand... My boys put up a good fight, before being slaughtered by Nathan's fighter squadrons and an excellent round of short-range shooting from the Soviets. Such is the fun of playing an unbalanced force!
We had to call a halt to proceedings as it was getting pretty late, in the end it looked as though Dave was the victor despite his "concerns" about his ships' performance against the rest of us - and I was clearly last past the post with only a single crippled battleship remaining, although it did have enough firepower to level a city from orbit...
Overall - awesome! Definitely been bitten by the bug on this one.
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It was a good game last night and I still think the only way I won (if you can call surviving winning) was by blind luck and that the other fleets with those deadly long range weaponry in the game were distracted.
ReplyDeleteMark and I had a bit of chat on the way home about my Soviets performance, he agreed that I would struggle in a solo clash against his fleet, so I've tweaked the weapons and the ships of the Soviets without breaking the doctrine of the fleet and I think that they will now have more a chance.
Sounds like too much fun. I'll have to talk to the DM about this one.
ReplyDelete-Tourq
...and the refreshing thing is that we've finally found a wargame we can play with more than two players: as everything's simultaneous, there's no loss of balance from units being wiped out before they can act.
ReplyDeleteTime to play some scenarios next?
Starmada really is great fun Tourq.
ReplyDeleteGet yourself a fleet, download the rulebook, spend 10 minutes making ship stats, a few mates round and you'll have a blast.