Dindrenzi Fail at Raid

Last night Dan and I got in our first game in the new campaign. We didn't have a lot of time to play, so we agreed on playing a raid from the onset - the smaller of the two game types. Rolling up our mission, we had an ambush where I was coming in with a force half as large as his and trying to do more damage to him than he did to me. With all the rules tallied in, he had 500 points (two groups of three Cruisers, two groups of three Frigates and four wings) and I had 225 points (a group of two Cruisers, two groups of two Frigates and a wing). Early on, I pulled in reinforcement wings so I had four Interceptors running around trying to keep my ships alive.

The mission was this: his ships were coming through and my fleet, smaller, ambushed him. I had to do more damage to him than he did to me. I had less resources, but all I had to do was kill as much of his stuff as I had and it would be pretty good. Also, he set up first facing a single direction.



Meanwhile, my ships hit the table from any single table edge and I got the first turn. He outgunned me more than two-to-one, so I had to make my surprise action and my better positioning count. I stuck two of my squadrons behind an asteroid field to give them a little protection from counterattack while the first squadron I was going to activate took prime position.



A pair of Frigates moved out and took shots on two of his frigates, destroying one and damaging the other. I was hoping for two destroyed frigates, but it was still not bad for an opening. As long as I was able to capitalize on each of the turns like that, I should be okay.



Unfortunately, that's about as good as I did the whole game. I moved out another pair of frigates and failed to kill a single enemy ship. My cruisers came around and did manage to destroy one of his cruisers (his ships had just come through a meteor swarm on the way in and two of his cruisers were already crippled), but his fleet was fast and maneuverable and managed to swing back into position by the end of turn one. By that point, I had destroyed one of his six frigates and one of his six cruisers while he had destroyed two of my four frigates.



Now outgunned five-to-two and with Dan having twice as many activations in a turn as me, I was really hurting. By the end of turn two, he had destroyed my last two frigates and was starting to put some damage into my two cruisers.



A quick calculation on my part and I realized I would have to finish off two more cruisers and a frigate before I lost my crippled cruiser and fully fixed cruiser. The obstacle was a bit too high. I shunted my ships in the end and Dan let them go.

Conversation afterwords revolved around trying to figure out how best to change the mission to make it more competitive. Evidently Dan and Jay had played this mission before, but they had misread the mission and used even points on both sides and it made for a pretty good match. Rather than making it a straight-up fight, Dan and I came up with a few other ideas. Give the ambushing force 2/3 the points of the defenders, and have the ambush be on a fleet that is leaving a different battle, so they're all slightly damaged. The defending force would start the game with d3+3 damage tokens spread out among their fleet for every 500 points (or part thereof), just to keep the mission a little more unique in flavor.

Anywho, I still managed to get a couple of renown points out of the mission, even beat down as hard as I was. Both Dan and I rolled up reinforcements and our fleets are bigger now than they were when we started the mission. Not too shabby.