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Well, finally got Patch and Mark over and we finished off our game of Onward Christian Soldiers today.

It… did not go so well for me. My position at the end of the previous session (too long ago), was not bad, but the Crusaders, seeing the end of the game looming (we only had three turns left to go) assaulted a few cities and took them.

I figured out a little while later that I’d been misunderstanding the assault rules all this time. (Gets a little complicated….) And at least some of them should have held out, but it was way to late to fix it by the time I figured it out.

In the mean time, I was trying much the same thing in the north, to retake a few early cities while the Crusaders congregated around Jerusalem. But my rolls were pitifully poor, and I couldn’t make any headway. Out of three cities I attempted to (re)take, I only got close on one, and even there my army was melting away alarmingly fast. Seems to be Kerbogha’s lot in life….

I also attempted to cause some sort of loss to the Crusading forces with the garrison in Jerusalem before the city fell and automatically eliminated them. That was a disaster. I lost the entire army in the fight, and didn’t even hurt the Crusaders.

In the end, my VP (an average of all the factions you controlled) was 2. Mark got 12.5 and Patch won at 14.5. Not the results we expected a couple months ago.

That went fast enough for a late lunch, and another game. We did a small SFB squadron battle, basically a step up from the FF battle we did a while back.

Y152

Mark		Patch		Rindis
Federation		Klingon		Gorn
CL	98	F5C	89	CL	92
FF	71	F5	71	DD	68
FF	71	F5	71	DD	68
Total:	240		231		228

The force totals were actually designed around the Klingon squadron, as that’s a very typical deployment for them, and I wanted Patch to have a chance to see what the basic tactical unit of the Klingons really is.

I took the Gorns to be different and because the Hydrans don’t have a good way to put a force in this BPV range, and the only way I could get a Kzinti force to work was with two CLs, which I wasn’t keen on. I contemplated a Lyran force, but wasn’t set up for it.

We put a black hole in the center, like in the FF battle, and as they tend to do, it dominated the thinking.

I initially swung around wide, looking for a good opportunity. With three turn arming weapons, and two other sides, I wanted to be cautious. Mark and Patch tangled first, and Mark managed to just knock down a shield on an F5, but got no internals, in return for much the same.

As he swung closer to the black hole, he ended up in front of me as I went screaming by it myself. I fired a couple Gs at him to convince him to turn off, but no such luck and we did a range 0(!) pass. He had empty tubes, I wanted to hold the rest of my torpedoes for the Klingons. However, one torp hit a FF for 15, phasers really hurt it, and I got through the shields and armor of the CL for a little damage.

After that, the Patch did a nice sharp turn at speed 12 (that should have warned me) and got an overloaded disruptor volley into my rear shields at good disruptor range. Didn’t do too much, but it still hurt.

We had to call it about there for time, and since it was just to have fun with, we won’t be continuing, which is a pity, because it was going to be real interesting to see if I could turn around enough to put the main guns to bear on the Klingons. I’d already put one of the CL’s torps into arc, but I needed a turn and a bit more arc for the DDs plasmas to be able to tell again. Against Klingons, that’s a tough order, and I’m happy I got the left arc on him.

Going purely off of internals done, the game goes to me, but the next turn would have been really tricky. How to sacrifice a shield or two and sucker Patch in for a real Gorn overrun (no holding back on that one…).

Anyway, next month we’re planning on playing Selected Attack from C1. I get to play the Hydrans taking on a Klingon base station!