Ten Years Ago - October 2015

October is MOAB month, probably the second biggest wargames convention in Australia. I usually try to pop up for one or two days, and used to play in teh HOTT competition (back when there was one). 

So for this months nostalgic look at what I was up to ten years ago let's head off to MOAB 2015. I spent the day playing two games that used to be mainstays of this blog, but which you don't see any more: Munera Sine Missione and Machinas.

Anyway, let's relive the fun of a Saturday spent at MOAB 2015

Pre-MOAB DBA

A couple of our group are playing in teh DBA competition at MOAB this year, so wanted some practice games. I'm not playing, but I tagged along because DBA seemed like a good option. 

I haven't played DBA for a while now, so was a bit rusty. I also wasn't sure what armies to bring as the others would be trying out one based on the theme for the year and I had no idea what the theme was. In the end I just grabbed a few 15mm armies - my Swiss, my Mound Builders and the Maya (who share a box with the latter, so came along for the ride).

Turns out that Dave and Geoff are also a bit rusty, so I watched the first game and offered helpful rules advice from the sidelines by looking stuff up.

Then I was up. For reasons that were not entirely clear I ended up using a completely non-historical army. My Swiss share their box with my Prester John army, which is made up entirely of  figures that look perfectly at home as a DBA army. Dave suggested I use it, so I did. It's one element short though, so some Swiss mounted crossbowmen joined.

Dave ran a Chinese army with lots of chariots I forget what dynasty it was. The theme for one of the competitions is chariot armies. 

So my army was three knights (including the general), two solid blades, three solid bow, two solid warband, one light horse and one elephant. Dave's army had four heavy chariots (including the general) a couple of bow, a psiloi and three fast blades.

And here we are, set up and ready to go.

I just piled the elephant forward, treating it like the HOTT behemoth it is. Dave brought out some psiloi to take it on . And that was the elephant pretty much stuffed, since it can't destroy them or even make them flee. Eventually they would win a combat and destroy me. My only hope was to make them retreat and have them do so through a friendly element so I could attack that instead. Dave avoided that by moving thing out of the way.

Long story short - my elephant was neutralised.

Still, we had a nice fight between knights in the centre. Also my blades took on Dave's and there was a lot of shoving back and forth.

I made a bit of a breakthrough in the centre when my general destroyed the chariots opposite him. Thus allowed me to flank Dave's general. Inevitably I was unable to convert this good fortune into a game-ending kill.

On my right my warband crested the brow of a hill and found themselves able to rush down on a pair of enemy blades. They'd end up destroying both of them.

In fact Dave converted my general's recklessness into a kill instead. So we were both sat on three elements lost piece at this stage.

This quickly became four elements apiece - a tie in other words. Next goal would win, so to speak.

My blades on the left provided it, destroying one of their opposite number.

Four of my five kills were blades on the flanks (one was destroyed by archery, if you can believe that. To be fair it took a fair bit of concentrated archery to achieve it.). I lost two knight and an elephant.

So Prester John picked up a rare win, even if it was via being a non-standard DBA army.

Starfire

I had a brief discussion the other day on Reddit with someone who was chatting about the old Starfire spaceship game from Task Force Games. I remembered that I had a copy of this at one stage and wondered if it was still in my old games pile.

And it was. 

This was a pretty good game back in teh day. I don't recall that we played it a lot, but it was something we dragged out from tome to time. But I don't think I've had it out of the ziplock bag in 40 years. On Saturday I set it up and had another go.

The scenarios are quite well done (up to a point) in that they tell a continuing story of the first war between the Terrans (who are beginning to expand into space via the discovery of wormholes called Warp Points) and teh Khanate of Orion, the first hostile race they have come across. As the war continues the game introduces new weapons and new classes of ship and the battles get bigger. A third force joins in so the final scenario is a gigantic three-way fight using every counter.

However the first scenario is a simple first contact between a Terran exploration vessel (which the ever pragmatic Terrans have still ensured is armed) against a small Khanate escort vessel. The Terrans have popped through a wormhole and must scan both the enemy vessel and a planet before escaping. The Khanate is trying to stop them.

In this scenario the Terran vessel had a gun (literally a weapon firing an explosive shell) and some lasers, whilst the Khanate vessel has a gun and some missiles. Guns and missiles score low damage. Guns are effective at close range whilst missiles are better at long range. Laser (and other beam weapons) have variable ranges depending on how powerful they are, hit better at closer ranges and also score more damage at close ranges.

The key to Starfire is obviously engaging the enemy at the optimal range for your weapons. In this first scenario, for example, the Khanate can stand off and shoot missiles. However the Terran vessel is bigger and also faster, so can close the range to where its lasers can score some real damage. And, obviously, the victory conditions require a close approach in order to use the scan.

The damage system is pretty nice. Each ship is made up of a number of systems (shield, armour, weapons, engines and so forth). These are represented by a code letter, and listed in the order in which they will take damage. Shields are always first, then armour and then internal systems. A hit crosses off systems from the left (although some weapons systems modify this - lasers ignore Shields, for example)

So in the first scenario the Khanate ship is listed as: SSAIGIRII (4) 2

S is Shields, A is Armour, G is the Gun, R the Missile Launcher and I the Engines. Each undestroyed engine give 1 movement point, so this ship has a move of 4. The final number is based on hull size and is how many movement points must be expended between each turn.

It's a neat system.

Less good is movement which is pretty clunky. Player rolls for initiative. The side with initiative moves second and fires first. When it's your turn to move you have to expend 1 movement point for each of your ships. Then the other side does the same. And you alternate expending points for ships until all ships have expended all of their points. It's fiddly, but not unplayable. However since there's a minimum distance you have to move between turns, you have to remember how far each ship in play has moved when you want to turn. And you're allowed to carry over movement from the previous turn as well. This is really difficult to do with lots of ships in play. 

There is an optional rule for pre-plotted movement, and that really seems the only viable way to play, since you have a record of points expended from turn to turn.

Firing works OK. Players alternate firing ships until both run out. Any damage scored counts immediately, so you can take out weapons on an enemy before it can shoot back.

Anyway, I played that first scenario and the Khanate lost. Twice. It's really unbalanced. I can't see how the Terrans can't always win. They have a bigger ship that's as well armed as their opponent's and it's faster so it can close the range to bring its better weapons to bear.

Still, it got me back into the game.

I then tried the second scenario. In this the Terrans have beefed up some ships and returned to the system they had their first encounter. They have three ships, armed with a new weapons system, the Gun/Missile Launcher (you can choose whether to fire it as a Gun or Missile depending on the range).

The Khanate are waiting with a static armed base, three small ships and a light cruiser. 

This is a straight 'destroy the enemy' scenario, although you get VPs for damaging enemy ships. The Khanate outgun the Terrans, although not at long range. They got into close range and wiped the Terrans out.

Interestingly you get VPs for simply scoring damage, so a viable Terran strategy is to drop in via the Warp Point, fire off a load of missiles until you score some hits and then run away. You can outshoot the Khanate at long range, so should have more VPs, and can then end the scenario.

Anyway, I played a few games and it wasn't horrible, but somehow it didn't seem as good as I remember it. 

One other selling point it has is that it's possible to play a campaign in which you design and build your own ships. That would certainly be a way to play that offsets the imbalance of the scenarios provided. The ship-building system is really nice, although I haven't explored it a great deal.

Bantam Revisited

June requested a game of Galleys & Galleons this week and specifically asked for sailing ships. So I had a quick look through my past games and thought that it would be fun to revisit my cut-down version of the Battle of Bantam from a few years ago. This was an action between Dutch and Portuguese ships fought off teh north coat of Java in 1601. There were a lot more vessels involved in the actual battle; I just scaled the numbers down.

It's more of an 'inspired by' really.

Anyway, the forces are:

Portuguese - Four Carracks (Sao Salvador (flag), Santa Cruz, Sao Simeao, Nazare), two Fustas (Domas, Serang)

Dutch - Three Cromsters (Gelderland (Flag), Utrecht, Zeelandia) plus a Jacht (Wachter)

All ships were lifted straight from the book aside from the Fustas which I rated as Q2 C1 with Galley, Shallow Draft and Yare. Domas and Wachter both had the Relay trait which extends the flagship's command radius. Both sides come to about 220 points.

I took the Portuguese, who mostly have ships that are big and powerful, but cumbersome.

June's Dutch force was smaller, but the ships are more easily controlled and a lot more nimble.

Early approaches saw an attempt to form a ragged line. The Portuguese fustas got left behind as their movement relied on me not rolling activation failures.

The Sao Simeo fired the first shot of the game, damaging the Utrecht. 

Return fire from the Dutch raked the Sao Simeo and started a fire.

More fire from the Dutch saw the Sao Simeo badly damaged. Rakes will do that

The Portuguese flag Sao Salvador ran aboard Utrecht and grappled it. The Dutch suffered badly in the ensuing melee.

June's enthusiasm for raking hadn't taken into account that the Portuguese ship on the receiving end would be so busy fighting fires that turning away from a collision would not be an option. Sao Simeo crashed into the Dutch flag, Gelderland. And set it on fire.

Utrecht cut grapples and escaped from being boarded by Sao Salvador, but in the confusion collided with Nazare, and ended up damaged.

Plenty of action. Sao Simeo was now burning brightly with multiple fires and would take no further part in teh action (despite some valiant firefighting activity by the crew). The Dutch flag was also ablaze. To the right of the picture the Jacht Wachter was boldly engaging the two fustas.

The hapless Utrecht collided with Serang. It was too much damage for the Dutch ship, which sank.

Wachter fired away at the two Portuguese galleys and inflicted damage on both of them. But it was suffering damage as well; its tiller was damaged and it had lost rigging.

Serang caught fire and exploded!

Meanwhile Santa Cruz and Zeelandia were locked in a duel which saw both ships battered. Nazare was coming up in support. And (not pictured) the fire on the Gelderland got out of control and the crew abandoned ship.

The plucky little Wachter finally struck.

This left June with just one ship. The Zeelandia fired one more broadside and fled the field of battle.

Dutch losses were the Utrecht sunk, the Wachter struck and the Gelderland burned to the waterline. The Portuguese lost the Sao Simeo burned, and the Serang to an explosion. Most of their ships were fairly beaten up as well, but a victory is a victory.

This was a lively action which saw a lot of ships on fire (four of them at one point). Thanks to June for a fun game.

More Small Boats

I took Torpedoes & Tides to the club last night and played a couple of games against Daniel. 

We started with a basic fight scenario, with three British MGBs taking on a couple of larger and faster S-boats. I played the Germans and Daniel took the British. The night was moonless and most encounters were down to boats bumping into each other. This exchange of fire saw both boats lightly damaged.

More firing as other boats emerged from the darkness. Daniel kept scoring hits that suppressed rather than damaged the S-boats , but it meant that I was removing suppressions rather than shooting back.

Oh no! A couple of boats from both sides bumped into a minefield! Fortunately neither of them struck a mine and everyone studiously avoided that area for the rest of the game.

Boats studiously avoiding a minefield.

A long-range shot from one of Daniel's boats inflicted hits on one of mine. This was considered an outrage.

Meanwhile since my boats were constantly suppressed I was struggling to inflict hits back. 

One of Daniel's boats had been badly shot-up in those initial exchanges, and he opted to have it run for home. And one of teh S-boats decided it had had enough after its fellow fired a few shots at it by accident. This left one S-boat against two British boats.

The lone German put up a decent fight bit eventually its commander also decided that he'd had enough and he fled. So a win for teh British. 

No boats were lost by either side, although one British boat was crippled.

With time in hand we set up a convoy attack. Daniel took three S-boats against a British east coast convoy of three freighters, two launches and an armed trawler.

He struck out of a patch on mist on a moonless night.

Some blundering about in the dark by both sides saw a minor collision that damaged the lead British launch.

Daniel cut in between the convoy and the land, hiding his small boats against the coast. His first torpedo salvo missed.

The trawler opened up with its Big Gun giving Daniel a few scares. Owing to activation failures the trawler was pretty much doing all of the work for the British. It did manage a hit that knocked out a gun on one of the S-boats.

Daniel fired off more torpedoes and continued to miss. His boats sheered off so some of them might reload. At that point the trawler scored another hit, damaging an S-boat's engines.

All three S-boats were stalking one freighter now, but the British escorts were beginning to get their act together.

Not so the Germans, who managed a collision in the darkness that damaged one of their boats so badly that it sank!

Daniel's last salvo ...

... scored a hit!

With the escorts closing in Daniel decided not to pursue the other freighters and decided to head for home. The escorts tried to take on the S-boat with engine damage, but couldn't finish it off.

Despite their blundering this was very much a win for the British who got two freighters off their edge of the table and didn't lose a single escort. The Germans did get a freighter but at the cost of one boat sunk and another badly damaged.

Anyway, both games ran smoothly with lots of entertaining incidents, chaos and unpredictability.

Thanks to Daniel for an entertaining evening!

Some photos from Daniel