My friend Rick and I got together on Labor Day for a game of Fed Commander. We played the scenario “Blood Feud” from Captain’s Log #37. In this scenario, a Hydran Dragoon, Knight, and Curaisser fight a Lyran CA, DD, and FF in an asteroid field. (The original scenario calls for Kzinti and Lyran, but one of our goals was to play with races from the Distant Kingdoms module, so we replaced Kzinti with Hydrans.) After some discussion, we let the Hydrans keep all three fighters on the Dragoon, even though it tilted the point values in favor of the Hydrans (the original scenario gave the Kzintis a 30-point advantage, 323 to 289, so we were only piling 10 more points on top of that). I played the Lyrans.
We each began turn 1 with only our frigates on the board, one on each of the center panels. I elected to be aggressive and start closer to the center of the map. On turn 1 I loaded up the ESGs and moved speed 8. He had plotted a speed of zero. I managed to get him at range 6 with a +1 shift from asteroids, meaning that none of our weapons were very effective. My disruptors scratched his shield and I used my ESG to cancel his Hellbore.
On turn 2 the larger ships arrived. The price I paid for being aggressive was to be closer to his ships than to my own. My frigate moved close to and unloaded on his frigate, but didn’t come out much ahead in the process despite having heavy weapons available. Then my frigate ran back toward my other ships, but was caught by the Hydran Knight destroyer. This did a real number on the frigate, which didn’t blow up but didn’t have much left. Better for the Lyrans was that the Knight pursued my destroyer into the asteroids and unluckily took 20 points on the front shield. He chose to get out of the asteroids at that point, and unfortunately ended up facing that week front shield right at my heavy cruiser, which had not yet fired. That was the last turn for the Hydran destroyer. The Hydran Dragoon also fired at my ships but it was a bit further away and so didn’t do as much.
On turn 3, I decided to go toe-to-toe between his Dragoon and my heavy cruiser since it was the off-turn for his hellbores. This didn’t turn out to be a great decision: I missed with 2 of 3 overloaded disruptors and one normal disruptor. I actually took more damage from him than I managed to inflict, and I did not hit any of the unlaunched fighters. However, I managed to knock down a shield, and he didn’t destroy all of my transporters (somehow, I managed to get all of his), so I did hit-and-run raids which did destroy one fighter inside the bay. Over the remainder of the turn, the two remaining fighters weren’t much of a factor: I blew one up before it got the chance to fire, and the other only managed a range-2 shot with a +1 asteroid shift for little damage.
Turn 4: The remaining fighter, perhaps mortified that it had been mostly ineffective so far, flew by and finished off my frigate. Meanwhile the larger ships (my CA and DD, his CA and FF) jockeyed for position. We ended the turn 3 hexes apart and everyone unloaded. Here, Rick’s luck took a hard turn: he missed with three of four hellbores. This probably was decisive: it left me heavily damaged, but as I hit with most of my disruptors on this turn, my CA was in better shape than his. If more than one hellbore had hit, it would have gone ill with me as many of my shields were very weak.
Turn 5: we each managed to blow up the other’s heavy cruiser. My DD delivered the decisive blow to his cruiser with an ESG ram. His Dragoon and Frigate combined to get close to my cruiser and deliver kill it with phasers (the final hellbore shot from his Frigate also missed, adding insult to injury). At this point, I had a lightly damaged destroyer to his crippled frigate. He was able to get off the board, but the Lyrans had carried the day.
Comments: This seemed like a good scenario. The asteroid field gave both of us problems, though he had worse luck than I did. It’s been quite a while since I played with ESGs, and this was my first time using the new Fed Commander rules for them. I have to say that I think they’ve ported well over to this system: the choices are clear-cut and it’s much easier to use them. I wish that they had a range of greater than one, though in an asteroid field it’s not clear that it would have mattered. I continue to wonder whether the Hydran stingers really needed to be restricted to only firing one of their two fusion beams every turn, a restriction that does make them less scary than in SFB (but only a little).