An After Action Report from the Squadron Strike Virtual Map
You can learn more about the virtual map here:
vtt.mikezekim.com/learn
(No purchase necessary, we will make time to teach you to play!)
This was a TinyFleets 4-way "free for all" of 120 point fleets, laid out in a tetrahedron at range 15 from the center hex of the map. TinyFleets are ships designed to be … tiny. A battleship might mount 20 weapons in a full-scale design, but only 4 in a TinyFleets design. Of course, the battleship would only be able to take 1/5 of the damage of the full-scale design. The idea is to speed play by making combat faster. The designs also have an array of equal-points weapons that you can plug into the mounts on the ships. You can put together very different ships in minutes.
Players scored VPs for damaging ships, and destroying ships as normal.
Appearing randomly at some altitude above or below the map is a spacetime anomaly; it would appear at the start of the turn, and stick around for two turns, and then vanish.
Whoever got the most lab points at two turns got 10 bonus VPs; if two people got the *same* lab point total as the highest amount, nobody got the bonus VPs.
On any turn that the anomaly absorbed 15 points of weapon damage, it detonated as a radius 5 explosion using a 4d10 Devastating attack. If that attack destroyed ships, they gave half their point value to all non-owning players.
At the start of the scenario, there were 17 ships on the map.
On turn 1, missiles were flung.
On turn 2, the Saucer fleet (Bob Slaughter) lost the Ahz 2, after nukes peeled off the normally nigh indestructible armor, and the Mustard fleet (Brian Trotter) followed up with lasers and plasma carronades at medium range. The Azh 1 got badly damaged, while the Mustard fleet's Clark cruiser got thumped, but not too badly.
On turn 3, the space time anomaly appeared in the center hex at altitude 3; the Saucer fleet's ships closed to beam range with the Mustard fleet, and the Neon fleet (Ken Watanabe) threw missiles and started firing the Meson Beams, carving into some of Brian's ships as they slid by underneath them. Bob lost the Ahz 1, and he and the Neon fleet concentrated fire on Brian's Santiago DD, with a few potshots on the Clark. Admiral Tom Jordan of the Gray fleet finally realized that playing "let's you and him fight" wasn't getting him points for damaging enemy ships.
The game ended due to time (we started at 6 PM, and really got to moving ships at 8 PM as people sorted out tech issues). Brian got the most successes in using Labs on the space time anomaly, and had solo killed the Ahz 2, and got the bulk of the points for killing the Ahz 1.
Final scores: Tom 0 Bob 30.63157895 Ken 10.42105263 Brian 79.47368421
100 points wins you the game, and Brian probably could've scored 10 points off of Bob or Ken and gotten the second turn of the anomaly's points.
The plan was to run this again the next Sunday, hopefully setting the game up before the start of play to get the full four hours to play rather than 2.5, and with 90 points per side for a smaller, more manageable fight.
Mostly, this scenario is there to get people comfortable with the TinyFleets weapons (and secondarily the ships).
