One of our players who has suffered the demise of Specialist Games, and with it Battle Fleet Gothic, has begun converting his Space Marine fleet over to Full thrust. After some discussion abt ship size vs mass and what weapons he should have access to etc, he came up with a draft set of SSDs that, of course needing playtesting. So, without further adoooo…..
The Space Marine fleet 1500 points
Brigade Models American Republic fleet. 1500 points. Stands by Corsec Engineering
Opening moves:
Turn one saw the AMR winning the initiative, something they would do all game. The Marines had teleporters (transporters) that would need to defended against so i used some extra points for my own marine units to defend against his.
The AMR CVL launched the first wave of fighters. Strangely the Marines chose to hold their launch.
The AMR Heavy Battleship opened fire on one Gladius with everything and hit with 3 out of four pulse torps. The ship was reduced to only a single hull box.
The space marines return fire the whole turn was directed solely at the heavy battleship and was largely ineffective. The AMR heavy cruiser fired is full compliment of weapons and destroyed the Gladius.
The next turn things started getting ugly. I sent my two wasp destroyers on a wide sweep around one of the asteroid fields hoping to catch his fleet from behind.
He accelerated his fleet while I put the brakes on mine hoping to keep the range somewhat open allowing me to keep the heavy battleship in a good firing position. I also launched the rest of my fighters and sent them on a coordinated strike against one of his 'strike cruisers'.
The marines had the initiative and one strike cruiser fired on the heavy battleship again. This time he was able to get one marine boarding party over however. They would need to be dealt with they starting doing any real damage.
I assumed the heavy battleship could take more pounding than the heavy cruiser so i elected to have him fire first and the results were spectacular. The cruiser captain targeted the center Gladius with everything he had doing massive damage with his beam weapons. A single shot from the pulse torpedo finished the ship off and sent the wreck spinning into the nearby asteroid field.
The rest of the space marine fire was directed at the carrier and with a series of fairly lucky rolls left it badly damaged and out of control. No amount of damage control efforts would restore recover the ship before the end of the game.
The condition of the heavy battleship
Finally the fighters go streaking in (we use the Warlord sequence of play where fighters go after ships). Only a few fighters were shot down and the remaining groups simply tore the strike cruiser to pieces.
The next turn the marines finally launched their thunder hawks (Heavy attack fighters) and they were subsequently pounced upon by the AMR fighters. Both fleets flew past each other and began maneuvering to bring each other into optimum firing postures.
Some fire was exchanged but this turn most of it was in the marines favor with the AMR cruiser taking a pounding.
The marine fighters though took several casualties.
The last turn was decisive. The marine ships turned hard to port just as the AMR ships began to swing around. The result was the marine ships were almost in the perfect 'kill zone' for the Americans. To make things worse two groups of American fighters were chasing down the wounded strike cruiser. And if things couldn't get any worse the two Wasp Destroyers had finally completed their wide sweep and coming in from behind, although at quite a distance.
The marines fired first at the heavy battleship and got another marine boarding party on it. All they forund was the strewn bodies of their brothers from the previous attempt.
The Amr cruiser opened fire on the strike cruiser that hadnt fired yet. It was wounded but still in the fight.
The strike cruiser returned fire but the damage was negligible.
The heavy battleship then opened fire and destroyed the strike cruiser with relative ease.
The remaining fighters swooped in on the strike cruiser they were trailing loosing quite of few of their own number in the process. They inflicted on a few hits but the cruiser was so badly damaged at this point that everything hurt.
Next the Wasp destroyers fired at long range and actually hit causing even more damage.
At this point we called the game. The last marine boarding party managed to put up a fight but died anyway.
All in all i like where he's going with the marine designs tho i think the ships need to be downsized some so he could get more of them on the table. Also having thunder hawks as both heavy and attack craft is a big 'point sink' even tho it may be fairly accurate how the things should work.
He's going back to the drawing board so maybe next game will be a little less one sided.
As always- ANY and ALL comments welcome!
