[GZG ECC IV] After Con Report from Indy

GZG ECC IV - Indy's ACR

The weeks before the con were increasingly busy, both with work and
getting
last-minute prep stuff finished. I managed to get just about everything
I
wanted done before leaving, but not quite all. In any event, the 'not
quite
all' wasn't a critical problem (mostly nuisance and annoying).

Aimed to get an early start on friday for the drive up, but one delay
led to another, and I arrived in Lancaster 20 minutes before we were
to nominally open the door. Jon did not know of Jerry's plight (Jerry
called me from Canada two nights prior to inform me of the situation)
and was a little concerned that neither he or I were there yet. But
I arrived, checked in, and filled Jon in on the Jerry situation (without
going into details, suffice it to say that he would not have been able
to get past the border patrol people in a legal fashion), and got
unpacked.
I spent friday evening sorting through the prizes (since I did not have
time earlier in the week), trying to match up appropriate prizes with
appropriate events, checking people in, and briefly socializing with
as many as I could (many old faces, some new ones). Met a number of
people from the list who I had never met before (Kevin Walker, Chris
Deboe, Bob 'Magic' Makowski, etc). Ted Arlauskas was back from
California.
Jim Bell and Tom Barclay led down the Canadian Contingent. Many others
you know from here were there (Los, Mike Sarno, Nick Caldwell, Asron
Teske, Mike Ritchie, et al).

Friday ended up being a late night, and I didn't get to bed until 2am
(although I thought it was 3am since the hotel room clock radio was
STILL
set to Daylight Savings Time - I learned this...)

Saturday morning I was to be up and meet Jon Davis and Aaron T (and Nick
if
he was able to get up) for breakfast at 7am. I dragged myself out from
the
depths of sleep to glance over at the clock: 6:49am - gak!!! No time to
shower, dress, and still be on time! I grabbed my watch to make sure I
had
set the alarms correctly - and saw it read 5:49am. ARGH!! With not
enough
sleep, I had yet half an hour to nap. Tried. Failed. Got up, showered,
joined Jon and Aaron for breakfast (not the crowd we had last year,
but...).

Saturday morning I was to play in Aaron Newman's 2-part EFSB/SGII-FMA
game.
I was involved in the EFSB part of the scenario. On another table was
the
boarding party action (the SGII/FMA part of the scenario). My job was to
get the elite Earth Force boarding parties onto the new Warlock
Destroyer
that Bester and crew were trying to confiscate. It was a scenario meant
for 5 players, but we were 1 player shy so I ended up running both the
Earth Force navy (one Hyperion and an Omega + 'Furies) and the Q-ship
plus frieghters and assault boarding force. Arrayed around me were
raiders,
Psi-Corps with a Shadow-Omega and the Psi-Corps mothership (we didn't
really know it at the time; all we knew was that it was jamming ALL
comms), and another Omega/Hyperion pair (run by Jim Bell; they were
renegade telepaths out to stop Bester, too, but I didn't know that as
the captain of my Omega). My jobs were multi-fold: stop Bester and
crew, thump the raiders, and arrest any rogue telepaths. Oh, and prevent
the Warlock from falling into enemy hands (whose ever those might have
been).

Early on in the game I made a long-range shot against the Psi-Corps
mothership,
scoring a threshold check. And during that threshold check, the
Psi-Corps
lost their jammer (score!), which meant comms were open again (so I
could
communicate with my co-hort who was running Ivanova's security squad and
engineers on the Warlock attempting to prevent hostiles from taking it
over). On turn 1 there was a fair bit of blood between ships. Turn 2 I
lost
my Hyperion to the Shadow-Omega beam weaponry (damn, it's nasty!). But
in
a few more short turns the Raiders were toasted, the Psi-Corps lost
their
mothership and had their Shadow-Omega badly damaged, and I had gotten
the
elite EF boarding parties onto the Warlock. For my part of the scenario,
EarthForce was victorious (didn't know about the rogue teeps as they had
very well behaved themselves during the ship-to-ship combat). I
communicated
our situation to my comrade on the Warlock and waited for the boarding
party outcome to finish. In the very end, the EarthForce troops were
victorious, which meant, according to the rules, Aaron N and Mike R owed
us drinks (they said if the EF could pull off both victories, they'd buy
us drinks). I'm still waiting for that Pepsi, Aaron! ;-)

During all this I also coordinated with people getting their entries in
for the miniatures painting contest. This was a little distracting;
maybe
next year I won't play during saturday morning.

In the afternoon I was 'dragged' into playing in Mike Muller's
"Clampdown"
scenario as a raider (it was another EFSB game: raiders vs EarthForce)
(originally I was going to do some administrative stuff, prep a little
for my game,and get some miniatures paining lessons from Stuart - got
one
of the three done! :). The game started with us drug-runners trying to
get some
freighters off the board w/out the EarthForce interfering. Alas, they
interfered (they didn't keep their noses where they belonged, danged
EF!).
We got out clocks *cleaned* (esp after they toasted my raider cruiser
and
then *boarded* our Q-ship!!). The sides were switched and play went much
longer, but I went off to have a much desired painting seminar with
Stuart
Murray. He showed me a few tricks of painting that I hope to put to
practice
in the very near future (I'll never be as good as him, but if I can be
better
than I currently am...	:-)

During the dinner break between the afternoon and evening games we held
a
small awards ceremony to give awards/prizes to the winners of the
painting
contest and a few other categories we give prizes to (such as the "He
Who
Travelled Farthest" and "He/They Who Travelled Shortest" distance
awards).
This went well; I believe the winners were very pleased and happy with
their
winnings.  :-)

That evening I ran my "Siege of Sol" scenario: a Kra'Vak vs Human FT
game
in Sol space. The game was filled with 12 players, but from begging I
some-
how ended up with *16* players (a number of people had no other games
they
could be in, and this scenario was designed to be flexible, to
add/subtract
players as available). There was some chaos in the beginning because I
had
not had time to finish organizing the shipsheets into subfleets, and the
two sides had to choose what subfleets they were going to run (each
subfleet
totalled ~1100 pts, give or take a few). The K'V had one brand new
player
(Larry E) who had never played a GZG game before; just dropped by to
check
things out; Aaron Newman thankfully took him under his wing and went
over
how things worked. I had my hands full trying to maintain some semblance
of
organization during the first hour of chaos.

After that first hour, though, all settled down to play. And there I
found
we had *14* players - two had vanished, which meant some ships needed to
be divvyed up (there were 16 subfleets out there). This was quickly
done,
and play proceeded.

The K'V were represented by the K'V, all stock ships from FB2. THe
Hu'Mans
were represented by the NAC, NSL, FSE, ESU, UN, and NI. Only no one took
any NAC.  ;-)  The NSL, FSE, and ESU ships were all stock FB1 ships. The
NI were ships designed (and minis donated for the event) by Noam
Izenberg.
The UN ships were designs of my own, incorporating two weapon systems
that are being discussed in the playtest group, so I'm not really at
liberty to go into details on this systems (as things could and very
likely
will change before too long; these ARE in playtest mode, after all!).
One
was an anti-matter torp, the other a graser 'heavy' beam weapon.
Throughout
the game the players on both sides gave me a lot of feedback on the use
of these two systems, which I will be putting in a more complete AAR for
the playtest list and Jon T.

In any event, by 9:30 (after getting a half hour late start due to the
awards ceremony and an hour of organization) play commenced. Now, unlike
Brian Bell's similar scenario from earlier in the day, this was
cinematic
movement, and I had the two sides starting closer together, so there was
blood on turn 1! Not much, just with the lead elements, but they were
engaged. Turns 2 and 3 the followed relatively quickly, but due to the
numbers of players and ships, 3 hours had gone by before we finished
turn 3.
We had decided to allow ships to fire by squadron or subfleet instead of
going back and forth one ship at a time per side. This DID speed up
play,
but still, there were too many ships and players; I should have kept it
down to 12 max. Oh well, hindsight! Everyone still had fun, even if many
were beat tired. In any event, at 12:30a the K'V decided to call the
game.
If they had been able to continue for another 2 turns, the situation
might
have been more in the K'V favor, but as it was, most of their large
ships
were moderately to heavily damaged, and thay had lost a half dozen
smaller
ships. The Humans had lost an NSL BDN, some other cruisers, and had a
number
of their big ships (eg, the ESU SDN) with some serious holes in them.

After clean-up and socializing with some other people (as well as
discussion
of aspects of the scenario just run, feedback for the new weapons being
tested), I finally got to be again at 2am.

Sunday came early (well, I DID go to bed at 2am - technically it was
already
Sunday!) and I was scheduled to play in Dan's "Sundiver" scenario. This
was
fun: an ESU task force was sent to check out an FSE research station and
get
whatever info they may have been developing there so close to a star.
Vector
movement was the name of the game, which I admittedly am not strong in.
I
was teamed with Mike and Pat Muller as the ESU. Arrayed against us were
Mike Hudak, Al Muller, and Bryan Gordon, the FSE (complete with armed
research
station and 4 squadrons of fighters, in addition to 2 DDHs, 2 CA, and 2
BCs).
Our little force consisted of 1 BB, 2 CE/B, 2 CL, 3 DD, and 2 armed
transports
with 4 assault shuttles. Vector movement, as mentioned above, was
affected by
the proximity of the star: if within 12 of the edge of the table (which
WAS
the star!), you were pulled 3 mu towards it after movement. If within 24
mu,
but more than 12, you were pulled 2 mu in. If within 36 mu you were
pulled in
1 mu. Otherwise no effect from gravity. To make a long story short, we
came
in on a flank, the FSE dropped a wall of SMs on us, and we used the
sun's
gravity to help swing us around the SM barrage (most of us made it; one
of
Pat's DDs was vaped, though, and the rest who sucked up SMs were able to
shoot them down with help from the CEs). However, this maneuver proved
to
be a bit disaterous as several of our ships had gathered up so much
velocity
we could not prevent them from splashing into the hot plasma of the
star.
Oh well!! Mike was able to get shuttles off, but we launched them too
early;
the fighters pounced on them and had several turns to fire on each
shuttle
before they could land (which meant they were all destroyed). All of
Mike's
ships were evntually lost (either to FSE weapons fire or by playing in
the
star), half of Pat's group was lost (he escaped with 2 ships), and my
force
(2 DD and a BB) was lost (one DD to the star, one DD to massed SM fire
and
the BB to FSE beam and fighter fire). Alas, I DID manage to skirt the
star
with the BB. Too bad I was the sole target, too.

In the end, it's not a matter of who won/lost, but did we have fun? I
did.
That's all the counted for me.

After the game (which went a little longer than anticipated) we claened
up,
I packed my stuff, hung out chatting with those who were left, then was
the
last out the door (we left the lights on as the hotel room building
staff
wanted to get in there as quickly as possible that afternoon and reset
the
room for the next event). The drive home was mostly uneventful, despite
2+
days of dire warnings of the weather. To the north it was bad. But to
the
south: rain. Once home, I pretty much collapsed. Still exhausted even
now,
but at least I'm getting sleep again.  :-)

Pics were taken during the whole con. It was funny: during many games
people
would move their units, then everyone would back off so the half dozen
or
so others who had cameras could take 'current turn' photos - I'm looking
forward to seeing these soon. If anyone who was there wants to
contribute
photos to the photobalbum for next year's GZG ECC participants to see,
SEND
THEM TO ME!!! 4x6 size is perfect.  ;-)

Mk