Re: [FH] Battle report

> My 11 year old interest in FT--among other things--has suddenly
> manifested.  We played yesterday at 1000 points, then again
> tonight.

Well, as long as you're reporting, so will I.  :)

I played two games with my bro-in-law, which was his first playing
exposure
to FB2 tech being mixed in.  We rescinded our long-stand house rule
about
nova cannons and wave guns not affecting fighters (because,
realistically
speaking, they're not all that good any more, at least not in our
experience)
in order to bring them half on par with plasma bolts.  The rest of our
house
rules stayed the same.

We played two games, both at our usual 5000 pointers.  He was half
teasing
me to bring out the Dreadplanet Roberts the first game (with a plan in
mind
for what he'd do about it) so I obliged him.  The final version I
eventually
decided on for the DPR's design was to yank the needle beams and two
Class 3's
from the prototype blueprint I posted here before and replace it with
two
Class 4's and eighteen Class 1's.  The rest of the ship was as given.

And he _did_ have a plan in mind for how to deal with it... he threw 52
fighters (48 norms and 4 heavies) against my 41, figuring to go for out-
fightering me for once (which he usually doesn't do), and on top of that
he went and stocked about 100 PDS on his ships to boot.  I thought that
the fighters AND the PDS was probably a bad move.... because he was left
with a total of eight pulse torpedo tubes (four three-arcs and four
two-arcs)
between two front-line ships, with a smattering of Class 1's on his
dedicated carriers, and that was IT.  He just plain overkilled the anti-
fighter tactics up the wazoo.

And he died by it... I lured his superior fighter force numbers into a
close-up fight and then plasma bolted the whole zoo after one round of
fire exchanged between my fighters and his first wave of 48 normals. 
This
left him with four heavy fighters and eight torps as his whole striking
power.	He had level 2 screens and thrust-4 advanced drives on the two
front-line ships that were torpedo-armed, but that wasn't near enough...
within about a couple or three plasma barrages his heavy fighters (which
had been hoping to screen for the dreadnoughts) and his main AND FTL
drives
were gone with both ships at triple threshold.	The two dreadnoughts
struck
their colors, his carriers (which hung back a good 70 MU away while the
DPR stopped to spin on the SDN's) split up and FTL'ed out untouched.  I
lost my whole fighter contingent and took a whopping eight points of
damage
to the DPR (four on armor).

Second game, I decided to pull out an older design and threw a group of
four strong-hulled, armored ultradreadnoughts with (on each) a wave gun,
two SML's, 4 fighter bays, five Class 3's, eight Class 2's, and 16 PDS.
I drew up an intel report on what I ran into... the main part of his
force
was five superbattleships, armed with 2 Class 4 PBLs, 6 pulse torps,
level
2 screens, 2 ADFC's and 30 PDS each.  He was obviously girding up for
another
carrier attack, and I violated my usual maxim of "if you're going to fly
fighters or missiles, don't futz around with it, bring a LOT of them"
with
my somewhat theme-based dreadnought design, the fighters and missiles of
which
were both pretty much completely useless.  However, each of my ships was
about twice as resilient as each of his, and he kept a tight enough area
defense phalanx that my wave guns actually wound up doing about as much
to
him (proportionately) as his plasma bolts did to me.

My fighters and missiles were useless, and with no screens against his
plasma
though I was eventually worn down.  It came down to two of my ships
against
three of his, I decided I didn't like those odds, so I went for (and
got) the
"FTL bomb".  Ironically, the only survivors for either side were five
and a
half squads of my (utterly useless) heavy fighters... my ships both
dumped
core within 6 MU of his (individually smaller) three survivors, so now
there's
this gaping hole in the lines of both sides where we took the mutual
fleet
annihilation.  However, he was happy enough with how that ship design
came out
for him (this is the first time in quite a while that he's even managed
to
make me force a draw) that he commented that he'd keep that design for
the
books... so I made sure to draw up a copy of it for myself and cogitate
about
what I'm going to do against it.  I know that his gaming circles in
Seattle
have come to really like pulse torps, and I imagine that once they get
hold
of FB2 they'll probably go with plasma cannons and lots of point defense
mixed
in with the pulse torps, just like he did this time... though it's half
likely
that their games will have less fighter emphasis than when he plays with
me.
Hard to say.

If anything needs clarifying (for all two of you that care :) let me
know...
-- 
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 The Stilt Man		      stiltman@teleport.com
   http://www.teleport.com/~stiltman/stiltman.html
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