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TinyFleets
Thursday, 21 May, 7:30 PM EDT
This was going to be a RocketPunk alpha test; unfortunately, RocketPunk lead designer Will Minsinger had a work emergency.
So, Brian, Ken and JD played a three way fight with BBs and CAs in TinyFleets -- there were a few more runs with the troublesome Capital Shockwave Gun. With two quirks:
All Crew Rates were 8+, and they were in a box defined by a tournament barrier. Much chaotic fun was had by all; the game changes radically when everyone's Crew Rate only works 30% of the time! (This was done in response to JD and Sue playing games between themselves and deciding to always take crews of 3+ or 2+…) JD made significant improvements on my fire allocator spreadsheet, and it's now much faster to allocate fire.
Diaspora: Typhoon
Friday, 22 May, 5:30 PM EDT
We got Phil back, and JD overslept due to the timeless nature of the pandemic. We started out seeing what would happen with Nutcracker, and I have notes for what to fix (Reinforcements arrive on a blackjack hand of 17-21, add back more defensive troops to the Kilkea station, give the Kilkea a Boone in attendance at the start)
After waiting for JD to show up, Phil and Tau started a second instance of the Tyhoon scenario that Tau is tinkering with. In a nutshell, Phil's Japanese force murdered Tau's Commonwealth ships through walking the fine line of aggression and using the Japanese ship's shields. We had a brief diversion finding the fighter ramming rules to rule out an Obvious Tactic that, well, the rules make useless.
Tau's got adjustment notes for the scenario, and he and JD will try and talk about what their instance of Typhoon will be before the festivities begin on Friday the 29th.
On Friday, Will Minsinger will be observing as players play an actual RocketPunk scenario.
(As this has been written, Will and I have gone through four tweaks to the SSDs he turned in on Friday evening.)
From last week: JD is coming out ahead, Tau is trying an envelopment run, and is worried about defeat in detail. They'll be resuming on the 22nd.
The Four TinyFleets Games
Sunday, 24 May, 12:00 PM EDT
So, the Sunday morning slot, next to multiple instances of Traveller games, has been consistently our best attended overflow game, and evening slot usually gets 3-5 players as well. I handed off the Activities Director job to Ken Watanabe, and he rose to the task!
We had four one-v-one TinyFleets games, three of them starting at 12:15 or so.
I (Ken Burnside) flew against Sue Davis, Ken Watanabe flew against JD Aldrey (their game started at 1:45), Elliot Goddard flew against Mike Zebrowski, and Phil Purl flew against Cory Phillips (who learned the ships last week).
In Mike's game against Elliott, both failed to see the list of what weapons the other side had; Mike and Elliot launched nukes at range 20; Mike charged in, and discovered that Elliott had Fusion Catalyzers and Gravity Rams. What decided the match was Mike's dice being worse than Elliotts when it came to the Nukes. Losing armor to nukes prior to Gravity Rams smashing in at range 10 was…kissing a buzz saw.
In Phil's game against Cory, Phil had the Capital Shockwave Gun and Antimatter Missiles; the threat of area effect carnage caused Cory to spread his forces out on divergent vectors…which meant that Phil was able to concentrate fire and Cory kept having one ship out of range or facing the wrong direction. Phil groused considerably about the Capital Shockwave Gun.
In Ken's game against JD, JD also had the Capital Shockwave Gun; he never got a shot with more than one of Ken's ships in arc. In the end, that game went fairly evenly, and Ken was declared the victor, but both ships were flaming wrecks -- somewhat literally as JD is a fan of the Proton Beam, with the Burning 6+ and Murderous traits.
In my game against Sue, Sue played the "Let him do all the maneuver" strategy. This gave her a first nuclear missile salvo against me before I got into range, but it made her maneuver comparatively predictable after turn two. On turn 3, having built the vectors I wanted for a close-range pass, I cut thrust -- just in time for her nukes to lose the benefit of Thrust-Seeking.On turn four, my forces were going to reach range 12 from her (mostly immmobile force) AND I made my Aggression checks on all three ships; I applied thrust four with both CAs to get them to range 10 from her BB, which was two hexes ahead of her cruisers. Four Heavy Meson Beams focused on her BB, along with some nukes. Nukes all missed, one Meson Beam hit for 0 damage (a 1 in 100 chance) and one Meson Beam missed. The other two Meson Beams hit for 9 damage (with AP 2) and 12 damage (with AP 2). These cut a swath through her ship…and were followed up by four Capital Plasma Carronades. Her BB was a flaming hulk, and at the start of the turn 5 she started her FTL drives up. My BB took very light damage, but lost all but one Bottom armor due to nuclear blasts.
Unfortunately for Sue, my vectors let me do a follow-on strike on her BB at range 6, with Light Plasma Carronades and Light Gravity Rams from the CAs. The BBs's secondary guns were held in reserve to shoot at one of her CAs, doing moderate damage. She rolled her FTL Crew Rate check, and her wounded ship would disengage the following turn, and her undamaged ship got nothing.
At that point, we talked out the next two turns, and the fact that her wounded ship was going to be at very short range from four Captial Plasma Carronades, and her unwounded ship was going to eat four Heavy Meson Beams. Sue conceded.
(This pictures are captioned for the wrong game--they're Ken Burnside vs. Sue Davis
All four TinyFleets games were done in 2.5 to 3 hours, tops.
After the games, I had an idea to fix the not-anywhere-nearly-worth taking Capital Shockwave Gun, and we'll try them the next time we do TinyFleets.
Mike Zebrowki is concerned that the Nuclear Missiles are too good for TinyFleets; they're not game-overwhelming, but strategically, the ability to remove armor means that nobody would ever swap Nuclear Missiles for something else.
Starfighters! Romance of the Seven Realms Grand MeleeSunday, 24 May, 6:00 PM EDT
We ran a Romance of the Seven Realms Grand Melee to put the fighters that *aren't* the Excalibur and Cockatrices through their paces. JD took the Cockatrices anyway because he loved their maneuverability, Ken took the Gram because he wanted to see what the Knights light fighter flew like and Brian Trotter took the Watatsume.
The rules for the scenario are simple: You get 2 points for killing a fighter, +1 point if the fighter was larger than yours, and -1 point if it was from the same side as your (Hegemony versus Knights Orbitale). You could spend 2 points to completely remove all damage on a wounded fighter, or, after losing two fighters at the same time, spend 3 points to come back in a different pair of fighters from the same faction.
We got to see the Anti-Fighter Missile launched in anger, and got to see everyone decide that maneuvering to make it miss (Avoidable trait) was definitely better than letting it hit -- Splash is a terrifying trait on a 3/7 damage weapon when you're flying fighters with SI 1, 2, 3 or 4….
After the initial turns of chucking missiles and dodging them, people started running out of missiles, and it was Ken's Grams versus Brian's Watatsume. JD's Cockatrices circled to play vulture at the fringe of the battle.
A Gram survived a missile hit and was finished off by the followup blaster shots from one of Brian's Watatsume, then the battle turned into a circling fight, while JD started doing high speed slashing passes taking pot shots at whomever was in arc and in range. JD and Ken forced one of the Watatsume's to disengage with 1 SI box left. Ken spent the points on getting a replacement ship, then the Brian and Ken killed the Cockatrices. JD came in with two Tiamats, and Ken's second Gram had to disengage, and Ken's replacement Gram ate a missile on a down shield, and its return fire on the Tiamat missed.
The Tiamats and Brian's remaining Watatsume are still flying as I type this at 11:30 PM, and they've gone through 22 turns. After explaining the scenario, this is 23 turns in 5 and a half hours with 3 players…at the time Ken Watanabe got eliminated, it was 17 turns; when it got down to two Tiamats versus one Watatsume, the pace picked up fast.
Final Score was Brian 3, JD at 0, and Ken at -3.
Because of the high speeds and lower pivots to make things feel more like fighters, there are a lot of "pure maneuver" turns where you're trying to line up your shot. Managing your shots takes a different set of skills that are needed for TinyFleets.
There are two new features on the Virtual Map: There's a small repeater window showing the Firing Arcs tab, which makes it a little bit less likely that you'll screw up a maneuver in the plotting phase -- and it cuts down on the time needed to choose your maneuver because you can see the impact on the predicted firing bearing instantly. It was buggy on the first run on Thursday, got two updates, and seems to be working well now.
The other feature is that when you select the Erase tool on the SSD tab, and have your mouse over something, the thing your mouse is over will get a highlight if you're positioned correctly to erase it. Like most good user interface tweaks, it's completely invisible and went unnoticed by the users. :)
Upcoming Games If you'd like to be invited to future games, reply to this post, or email me at design@adastragames.com for the games on Thursdays and Fridays, or email Ken Watanabe for the games on Sundays. You can also use
vtt.mikezekim.com/learn to sign up for a game. Please tell either myself or Ken Watanabe which of these time slots you'd like to try:
Thursday afternoons are Traveller at 1 PM Eastern (all the players so far are Brits, and they're playtesting ships and scenario seeds from an upcoming Traveller product). Traveller teaching games also happen in this slot, usually concurrently with a playtest game running in the other audio channel.
Thursday evenings are at 7:30 Eastern for some players in Colorado -- sometimes including Starmada designer Dan Kast -- and we alpha test or late beta new ships from upcoming products to see if we've uncovered something that needs fixing.
Friday evenings are at 5:30 Eastern, and we playtest scenarios from upcoming products that are closer to completion; this is generally my "local" crew and has replaced our "go to the gamestore to test" sessions during the pandemic.
On Sundays, there are two time slots -- noon Eastern and 6 PM eastern. These are overflow games and specifically *not* products under scenario or analytic pressure. Sometimes, one of the Sunday slots is a teaching game to accomodate new players. Ken Watanabe (watank@gmail.com) coordinates what gets played in each slot (thank you, Ken!)
For this Sunday, the early slot will be TinyFleets or Axanar, depending on what people give input on -- the default is TinyFleets unless there's a demand for Axanar.
The afternoon slot is likely to be Romance of the Seven Realms, using the fighters that aren't the iconic Cockatrice or Excalibur. It would be very easy to turn the 6 PM slot into a teaching game using the Romance of the Seven Realms ship if people would like it.
If none of those regularly recurring games work for you, please schedule a virtual map teaching game:
vtt.mikezekim.com/events
You can select the teacher, a setting (Romance of the Seven Realms, Axanar, Traveller, Empire-Directorate War) and the time. If you're agnostic about a setting, pick Romance of the Seven Realms.
We use the Discord app for audio, we use the Virtual Map for the shared game play environment. You'll need a headset for Discord and you'll want a monitor that's at least 1920x1080 or so for the widescreen aspect ratio. All the Virtual Map software is browser-based so it's cross platform.