Brian and I got a game of Firestorm Armada in again last night. After a strong start, schedules got in the way and it's been over a week since I was able to play a campaign game. We hit up the table and rolled for attacker/defender. Being up on him by one system, he won the dice roll and picked to attack me, invading one of my systems, no less! This meant if he won, he'd wrest control of it from me, but it also meant I could come to the table with a full fleet.
We rolled for our mission and got another battle. This is the third out of four games we've played. We're getting quite good and blowing huge holes in each others fleets.
Our mission was Fleet Engagement. We each had to review some tactics for how we felt our fleets would come at the battle, and then compare our two sets of tactics on a chart to determine what the deployment would be like. In the end, I deployed on three sides of the board and he deployed on the last one. I couldn't take full advantage of that kind of deployment, though, because my ships are better at longer range than his are, and his are better at shorter range than mine are, so I wanted to keep him far away from me.
We set up our terrain, trying out a couple of new things. We had a moon and an asteroid field, but we also deployed a nebula (which you cannot shoot into, out of, or through) and a star (which is like a planet except that you take damage if you move within 6" of it and are destroyed outright if you move within 2" of it). They both proved very interesting additions to the battle.
In our choice of fleets, we both decided it was time for our flagships to hit the table. They act like normal ships, but the advantage is that your commander is present in the battle. He gives you bonuses to your hand size, and also gives you an option of rerolls during the game. Plus, it was just cool to have them there.
Early game involved a lot of shooting across the vastness of space. My Frigates (among the best in the game) took down a squadron of his and started taking control of the activation spreads. Soon I was running around with about three or four more activations than him, so I could avoid activating my big ships until he was closer in range.
His ships were able to punch forward and do a number on my cruisers, knocking them from six down to four and then three pretty quickly. My retaliation was to take out two of his cruisers in one squadron and put four damage on one of his battleships.
His cruisers broke past my ships, dropping another cruiser on the way, but I was able to flood his mass of cruisers with three mines as my battleships opened fire on one of his, dropping it quickly to six damage, and finally destroying it after that.
When the mines went off, they destroyed two more of his crusiers, leaving him with three remaining. His second battleship repaired back up to full hull and started firing on my battleship. His rolls didn't fall his way, though, and with another round of my battleships pounding, he knew he was likely to walk away with a crippled ship. Not the way he wanted to end. So he took his losses and shunted away, leaving the system safely in the hands of the Dindrenzi fleet.
Counting up the lost points on both sides, he had lost 560 points and I had lost 500 before he left. A very close match.
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