Battle of First Yeltsin
Player comments
>Thunder of God makes a doubly fatal mistake & turns his throat directly towards HMS Fearless.
Just like in the book! except it ended in a close range energy duel.
As a player it was quite intense though and feels satisfying even though only 5 turns - spent many a night with ruler and protractor.
Initial salvo was off target, but after that I worked out how to get at least two on
the nose each turn. The F & A missiles were just thrown out as distractions to point
defence and to channel the
enemy ships though some actually hit.
Fearless followed Honors tactics from the book, as it was outclassed in an energy duel and decided to engage in a missile duel initially as the RMN had a PDS advantage. The RMN missiles were on target more than the PRH and that let them win the war of attrition.
I agree too many missiles I got vector fatigue and in a live game it would bog horribly, it took 2 hours to work out all the vectors and possible moves some nights, though I improved my technique.
Limit the missiles as suggested. Otherwise it felt very *real*. I don't know if the rules will scale to a large fleet engagement but they work fine for cruiser duels.
In a live game I would probably loose the autonomous missiles for normal ER SLM's with
a small seek range say 3MU.
If the wedge goes it should be an effective striking of colours. Striking the wedge is a surrender signal for this background anyway.
I'd just like to thank Brendan for a very interesting well run game with the right feel for this genre. And our opponents for a challenging match.
I think I had the Honor Harrington luck as well, always useful.
-= tim jones =-
I found the opposite effect (thought that may have also been because of the hideous work schedule I'm on (8-( ); after the first turn, when I realized I may have to track as many as 10 different vectors, I started to lose interest.
I actually thought the key wasn't to 'channel' the enemy per se, because the potential
maneuver envelope is so small. I basically thought of the same technique as SMLs --
saturate the maneuver envelope, and you'll get hits. Granted, with RMN superior point
defence, this means it's less
likely you'll get one, but given the horrible lethality of the game, all you need is one
or two, and you have a marked advantage.
The lethality was on target for HH. However, I do have two comments:
1) The biggest playability problem with the ruleset seems to be the missiles. Steering all your missiles leads to 'vector fatigue', as Tim pointed out. However, I can't think of a mechanic that enables ships to maneuver outside of missile envelopes; I came up with something for my HH set, but I don't like that mechanic either, really.
2) There's also the 'fun' problem. The rules here are pretty true to the 'feel' of the
HH universe, which means entire Task Forces can disappear in a blink of an eye. While it
leads to pretty exciting fiction, is it 'fun'? For some purists, they may find it so. For
others, like me, I dislike
high lethality -- the contest then degenerates into who gets the first shot in.
It's almost impossible to rally from mistakes, and if you have bad luck...
The above though isn't a problem with the rules, it's more a problem with the Universe; which is why I don't think we'll ever see a formal HH game at the ship to ship level; it's just too damn easy to die. (This is definately personal preference, YMMV.)
Anyways, thanks again for letting me play. It was educational, and it was fun to see how somebody else did it. (8-)
Now I have to try and avoid the lethality problem with Berserker. (8-(
Jerry Han
> Captain Simmonds may be suicidal, but even he knows his limits...
Yep, but it is going to very hard to live down for Captain Simmonds.
Anyway, a great game. It was more damage being done quicker than I orginally expected. I'll need to think about how to play using these rules.
In terms of time spent plotting, I didn't break the protractors (or use a spreadsheet) for this game, but I spent some time looking at the gif's in planning a more. That would put me between Jerry and Tim in the amount of time spent. By the fourth turn (too late) I knew that I needed to close to engery weapon range or loose the missile battle. The question is how to do so without opening up my throat to them.
Thanks for the game.
Tom Granvold
Damage was about what I expected, it was the amount of missles that threw me. As for leathality, I agree it was true to the books.
Sounds like I spent the least amount of time ploting then visualising the vectors and course changes was easy typing them out was the hard part. Admittedly as a Destroyer I didn't have many plots to track each turn as the big boys did.
As for my preference to getting into knife fighting range, well I prefer fighter ops myself and since I had no chance in a energy duel I decided to get in close and sell myself dearly for my TF commander.
Adam