For our monthly "Schild & Vriend Revival Game Series", we had a very nice Full Thrust game this week, at Frank's completely new wargaming facilities. We used to play FT quite a lot over the years, and it was nice to play a system again after so many years. It still felt very familiar.
Now, some people say FT does not have a lot of tactical depth. I do agree in some sense, since once you have mastered the movement rules, it all comes down to selecting what weapon type to fire first. However, when space is littered with planets and asteroids, things become interesting.
The first scenario we tried was a classic Space Academy asteroid belt run: steer your ship as fast as possible around the table without crashing into any big space object. Phil won this Space Race without too much trouble and was promoted to Space Cadet of the Year.
Now that everyone had the movement rules mastered, it was time for a more interesting scenario. Frank, Koen and Phil had a cruiser each, and their mission was to intercept an enemy fleet of 4 ships (Bart and Eddy), before these were able to check a suspicious radar blip on their screens. The tactical plan of Frank, Koen and phil worked brilliantly: send a cruiser on each flank, turn around the asteroid belt, and end up smack in the aft-arc of the main ship of the enemy. This all worked very well, so well even that Eddy's two ships were just obliterated in the process. Not to worry, Bart gave one of his commands to Eddy, so the game could continue.
With all ships converging on the same location, and the big one effectively standing still, the game to a small shootout. Eddy lost another ship, and after some shooting, the last big ship of the BartEddy alliance exploded in space.
So, the overall effect was that Frank, Koen and Phil had won the game (although we admit we had some lucky dice rolls on crucial shots), and that the intruders lost 4 ships, 3 of which that were under Eddy's control. After the court-martial it was decided he had to spend at least 5 years frozen in the Jive Cubes on Sigma Alpha X . Bart was sentenced to one week of forced labour in the Cobalt Mines on Pegasus III. Frank, Koen and Phil all won a free cruise to the Pleasure Palace of the Batuvian Demon Whores on Andromeda IV.
So far the Full Thrust game! On to the next dice-rolling fest!
_Update_: (robartes) [Some pictures](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robartes/sets/72157594284291860/) of this game are now up on Flickr.
What Phil conveniently forgets to mention is that the big BartEddy ship took out two of the three enemy cruisers before succumbing to fire itself. :)
ReplyDeleteI would have gotten the third as well, were it not for some fancy maneuvring at speed through an asteroid belt of Phil's and some wise tactical decisions of his, combined with a mistake by myself resulting in Phil getting two turns of 8 dice fire into the flank on which I no longer had any functioning weaponry. Nasty, that.
Good game, in all.
Well, I typed a review of my own before coming in here - here goes :
ReplyDeleteFull Thrust
A short summary of what happened last Tuesday at Frank’s place
Present : Frank, Koen, Bart, Phil, Eddy
Game : Full Thrust – space battles
First game up : A straight race. The first one to race around 4 planets and make it back to the starting line is the winner.
Now, this might seem very simple and straightforward to the casual observer but it takes a genius as Phil to actually comprehend it : it’s a race. This means you need to go as fast as you can and finish first. The rest of the bunch cheerfully ignored all this and started to go looking for trouble i.e. swing inwards and pick a fight. The only thing our ships ever saw of Phil was a streak of light passing by at 36 kiloparsecs/lightyear or something like that and a great sonic boom (hey, it’s space with cinematic effects). To put it into perspective : when Phil finished the others weren’t even halfway.
Second game up : Koen, Frank and Phil in 3 medium sized cruisers against Bart and me in a dreadnought, a destroyer, a frigate and a craptastic scout ship. Our mission : investigate a funny radar contact and report back. Their mission : stop us.
Lesson #1 : don’t go picking a 1-on-1 fight with a cruiser if your ship is a destroyer, a frigate or a scout ship. A lesson I was taught 3 times before it dawned on me.
A more verbose version would be : our plan : the dreadnought and scout ship in the centre to act as a firing base – the scout to quickly pierce the center if the opportunity arose. Both medium ships on the flanks, advance and be ready to either swing inwards or rush to the radar contact. All went well until the first battle contact : my frigate against Phil’s cruiser. Frigate was toast in like 30 seconds. I didn’t even have to roll a die. With our left flank vapourized the enemy fleet (Phil, Koen) was thus giving free reign and turned left behind the asteroid belt to come up aft of the dreadnought. Beautifully executed move, so far we were outgunned and outmaneuvered.
Meanwhile on our right flank my destroyer met up with Frank’s cruiser. Very short battle again, but this time I did manage to score a couple of minor hits before being vapourized again. To recap : what’s left of our proud fleet is a dreadnought and a single scout ship coming up through the center. Our final hope was to slow down the dreadnought and hope it would attract all 3 enemy cruisers and take them all on, while the scout ship rushed ahead to our radar target.
Of course this didn’t work : Frank deftly maneuvered his cruiser in such a way that he took out my scout in a single blast while it was parked near the radar target. Meanwhile Koen and Phil were having a tough time attacking Bart’s dreadnought – they were getting pretty beaten up and the dreadnought didn’t show any signs of weakening. Koen stayed aft while Phil swayed right and executed a 360 degree turn through an asteroid belt - I’ll repeat : through an asteroid belt - finest piece of piloting all night – to come up on the flank of the dreadnought. Meanwhile Frank raced back to help but met-up with torpedoes that did enough damage to kill him 4 times over so he joined me as spectator.
All the while Phil was offering surrender deals to Bart but while at first the terms got tougher they quickly got toned down again because it looked more and more likely that Bart would actually win the fight. When Koen’s ship finally went down it even became the classic showdown : a dreadnought that was nearly finished, a wounded, but not yet dead behemoth against a cruiser in which a lot of systems had been knocked out and repaired. It could have gone either way, but it turned out to be Phil’s night and now we’ll never know what that strange radar contact was.
Aftermath & evaluation : 1-on-1 fights only work for ships of equivalent classes. Firepower kills. It’s a dice game.
Greetz,
Eddy Sterckx
Nice FT report.
ReplyDeleteI sent in a comment a few days ago but have not seen it yet.Wanted to let everyone know I am in the middle of finishing up putting together a scenario using the Xirin background as the setting (have been playing solo in this background as I have found it to be an interesting setting.)
This scenario is the result of the UP having issued a letter of marquee to a raider group enlisting their aid against the Xirin.This raider group is willing to accept the letter of marquee in exchange for a full pardon after the war plus a chance of revenge against the Xirin,whom have stated publicly all raiders+pirates will be given no quarter.The raider group has seen the Xirin resolve against them fully demonstarted against one of their bases which housed many family members of the raider group;the base was completely destroyed with few survivors.Now the raiders are out for blood.....
Can send along the map,SSD's and writeup of the beta version of this scenario to all interested parties.Just need to test it further to hammer out victory conditions.Only played it solo but your group is welcome to look it over.
Thanks,
Mark
Mark,
ReplyDeleteit's great that you are taking the Human - Xirin campaign further! Feel free to send in the scenario, and we'll have a go at it (along with publishing it here, of course :) ).
I have to finish writing up Victory Conditions for this scenario as I have tried a couple of different ones,just not sure what to go with on it--maybe your group would have asuggestion for VC???
ReplyDeleteWill email it to you when finished,hopefully this weekend.
Thanks,
Mark
Bart,
ReplyDeleteSent the scenario stuff to you last weekend.Realized I need to add a tender to the raider force as they enter from FTL and 4 of the raider ships do not have FTL drive.Will put in a tender design and send it along to you.
Mark