Sunday Starships (cont'd): second Starfleet Wars game

After our first Starfleet Wars game of the day on Saturday, I was familiar with the fighter and starbomber rules, but I wanted to try them out with more ships on each side.  Since Chris was here now, I relinquished my player's hat and oversaw the game as a referee.  As you can see, I decided to use wisps from cotton balls to mark ships that had been hit.

The scenario I pulled out of my ass carefully put together involved the Carnivorans defending a moon against an incursion by the Avarians.  The birdies' goal was to get their ships into orbit around the satellite; the kitties' job was to stop them.

The Carnies got pretty much my entire cat fleet: a Den-class galactic attack carrier, Lion-class galactic battlecruiser, two Panther-class stellar cruisers, a Cheetah-class stellar destroyer, three Kitten-class star armored pursuit ships, and three Snarl-class starbombers.

The Avarians were fewer in number, but the ships were more powerful and included a Nest-class GAC, an Eagle-class GB, a Screech Owl-class stellar destroyer leader, and three Hawk-class SDs.

I quickly realized the birds were outnumbered, so I had some transports (repurposed pirate frigates from Star Frontiers) enter on the following turn.  If they could get to the moon, that would be good for the Avarians.

It took a couple of turns with no firing before the two fleets got into range.  Long story short: the Carnivores concentrated all their fire onto the Avarian DL and vaporized it in a single turn (68 points of damage to a ship that starts with just 36 power units).  The cats also launched fighters for two turns, so they had twice as many on the board as the birds, who just launched once.  Avarian lasers quickly took out most of the Carnie SBs and SAPS.

All but one Avarian fighter was shot down, while the Carns had several survive to launch their high velocity implosion weapons at the Av ships.  More deadly, however, were the high velocity implosion weapons on the larger ships--Carnivorans have a terrific rate of fire for their missiles, and their barrage overwhelmed the Avarian battlecruiser, even though it was twice as powerful as its cat counterpart.  The birds did take out the enemy destroyer in return.  

The Avarian carrier had kept out of the fight and escorted the transports into orbit around their objective.  With two-thirds of its fighters remaining (and the Carnivorans missing more than half of their starfighters), the birds still posed a threat.  It was about time to call it quits.  I declared the game a tie. 

This play experience taught me a couple of lessons about the rules.  First, take care of all fighter/anti-fighter combat and get casualties off the board before allowing fighters to launch their missiles (but still apply fighter missile damage simultaneously at the end of the turn along with damage from ships' missiles and lasers).  Second, even though the sides were about evenly matched in terms of total power units, numbers matter when it comes to defending against fighters.  Since each ship gets 10 CIDS rolls (even if the percentage to hit is low), the more vessels you have to shoot down enemy planes, the better. 

I'm grateful to Chris and Joe for coming over to play, and I apologize for not having a more balanced scenario--Joe had a lot less to work with than he needed.  Thanks, guys, for being such good sports.