In this particular scenario, one fleet was coming out of hyperspace and attacking a planet. However, they came out of hyperspace too close to the planet and the shield generators on the planet were able to activate, cloaking the planet in a massive defensive structure. Four satellites orbit the planet that will need to be destroyed before the assaulting marines in the transport vessels can land. On the flip side, the defending forces can drive off the attackers by destroying all the transports before the shields are dropped. So in the 1,000 point game we played, I had to destroy four shield generators before Dan destroyed my eight transports.
This was Dan's first 1,000 point game, which is another reason he wanted to try it. I had played several over the course of the last league, so I was pretty set on how they worked, but Dan wanted to get a little experience behind him. Meanwhile, I wanted a chance to try out my new escort class ships, to see how they'd work. I ended up dropping three Frigates from my usual fleet to pick up five Escorts. So I had:
Battleship
-3 Escorts
Battleship
-2 Escorts
6 Cruisers (split in two groups of 3)
9 Frigates (split in three groups of 3)
8 Transports (split in two groups of 3 and one of 2)
He was trying out an idea of a massive boarding assault, so he had only one battleship on his side, but a completely decked-out carrier.
Battleship
Carrier (with 8 Assault Boats)
8 Cruisers (split in two groups of 4)
8 Frigates (split in two groups of 4)
Additionally, he had two gun drones and a whole slew of mines in the middle of the field as his planetary defenses.
The beginning deployment worked out like this. He had one of his groups of cruisers held in reserve as part of the rules of the mission, but they managed to come on at the beginning of the second turn, so they barely missed anything. The yellow ball on the left was a sun - if I got too close to it, I ran the risk of destroying my ships. I had two asteroid pockets on either side which offered me cover for my transports, but also funneled my ships directly into the mine field. The orange ball on the right was a moon, and the planet was in the back center (I painted continents on it - it looks fun now!). The two Malifaux Sorrows just to the right of the planet were Dan's gun drones, and the three paint tubs were three more transports on my side.
In the opening moves, we mostly just moved forward, though my battleships were able to detonate a couple of early mines without taking damage and get a few shots off on one of his groups of cruisers, crippling two of them.
His response was harsh. Coming around with his new group of cruisers, he blasted at one of my flanking squadrons of cruisers, destroying one of them and playing a debris card to have the wreckage slam into the other two ships, causing some more damage. That, combined with the mines, left that squadron in a bit of hurt.
I was able to pick off his frigates, though, dropping one entire squadron, trying to keep his fastest ships from being able to reach my carriers at any time soon. With a Sorylian squadron of frigates and a battleship in front of me, I had a choice: go after the planet with my battleships or try to do a bit more damage to him. Checking my range (why don't more games allow premeasuring... is it really that much of a sin?), I decided that I wouldn't be able to get a strong enough blast off at the planet yet. Besides, that would leave his battleship at full health in front of mine, and that's not a way I wanted to go.
I lined up two shots on him, one from each battleship. The first I played a card to give me four additional dice to the attack, so I ended up rolling 20 dice on him. I was able to critical hit the battleship and knock out its turning for one round. The second one lined up and blasted, critical hitting again. This time I rolled double-ones for the critical, causing four more damage to his hull. This stacked up 6 damage on his battleship in a round of shooting and put it a couple solid hits from dead. Meanwhile, my escorts swarmed forward and shot down three of his four frigates in the lead.
At this point, we called the game. Brian had arrived and Dan and Brian had never been able to play a game, so I helped them set up a fight. In all, Dan and I found a few things that needed to be changed. The asteroid fields in the back meant he had no shots on the transports all game, which was hard to deal with. Additionally, we realized partway through the mission that under the rules as written, he could have deployed almost in my deployment zone, 6" away from the transports, and started blasting them before I was even in range of the planet.
So I'm back to make a few adjustments to the rules document. Glad we got the test in now and the issues were discovered before the campaign started. Got a couple days left...
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