The Four Vassal War Alliance Turn 2

by on September 30, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Four Vassal War

Crossposted from the SFU blog on BGG.

For the Alliance half of turn 2, the war continues to expand into the Four Powers War, with the Hydrans able to attack the Klingons in support of the Kzinti.

The Kzinti repaired the damage to their SB, while the Hydrans repaired a number of frigates.

Builds:
Kzinti: DNE, CS, 2xCL, CLD, 3xFF, MB, Convoy, CS->CD
Hydran: TEM, RN, 2xLN, SA, 2xHN, Convoy, MB

Bel concentrated his raids against the Klingons, and disrupted two provinces at the cost of a crippled LN.

The Hydrans kept up pressure on the Lyrans, putting much of their navy into Lyran space for a second assault on the Enemy’s Blood SB, and sent a strong force forward to kill the BS at 0109. Meanwhile, the 1st Fleet crossed the Klingon border and attacked the two border stations near the rim of the galaxy.

The Kzintis also counterattacked, hitting four border stations, the NZ planet, and the planet in 1407.


Hydran occupation of Lyran space.


Kzinti counterattack.


Supporting the Hegemony.

Combat:
0411: Hydran: dest RN, SC, crip SA, 2xHN; Lyran: crip 2xCC, 2xCL, 4xDD
0109: Lyran: dest BS, POL
0512: Hydran: crip HN; Lyran: crip FF
0312: SSC: Hydran: crip CU; Lyran: crip DD, retreat
0412: Lyran: dest DD
1419: Hydran: dest SC, crip HN; Klingon: crip D6, F5L
1417: Hydran: dest 2xCU; Klingon: crip F5, 2xE3
1004: SSC: Kzinti: crip FF, retreat; Klingon: crip F5, retreat
1305: SSC: Klingon: dest E3
1505: SSC: Klingon: dest F5
1606: SSC: Klingon retreat
1506: Kzinti: crip 3xFF; Klingon: crip 2xF5
1507: Kzinti: dest CL, crip 2xCL, CLG; Klingon: crip D7, D6, E4
0906: Kzinti: dest CL
1005: SSC: Klingon: dest F5
1107: Refused approach, retreat
1307: Kzinti: dest DF, crip SF; Klingon: crip D6
1407: Kzinti: dest CLD, SF, SAS, FTS, crip CL; Klingon: crip 2xD7C, D6, TGB, F5, E4

The SB battle was impressive, with the Lyrans getting 114 ComPot even while dialing the SB EW up to 4. The Hydrans went for a heavy line, and got up to 118, but were looking at a -2 shift, and then I destroyed the only scout so I could dial the EW back a little. After killing a RN on the second round, he retreated out, as I still had a pretty deep reserve even with all the cripples I was taking.

The cost of all the mayhem in Lyran space is that the Hyran forces facing the Klingons are completely inadequate. He attacked two bases, and after the reserves showed up, didn’t have nearly the firepower of the Klingons at either.

The SSC in 1004 should have been a kill for Bel, as it was 3xFF vs an F5. But a low roll on his part just did two casualties, allowing it to retreat out. Better, a ’12’ from me caused one of the FFs to cripple as the Kzinti retreated out. I’d promote the captain to a D6 command, but the F5 was overrun and destroyed by forces retreating out of the 0906 battle.

The main action on the Kzinti border was an attack on my minor planet in 1407. I was able to retreat 1307 into the battle, which sadly moved some cripples away from repair, but made sure I could drive him off. He’d even brought in a couple auxiliaries, but they had no chance to do anything in the one round before retreat.

The Hydrans still have substantial forces in Lyran space, which really puts the onus on the Klingons to be active on that front to try and force him to redeploy. Not a pleasant prospect in the face of good ships, bases with fighters, and the BIR adjustment against hellbore-armed ships, though so far everything there is fusion-armed.

Thanks mostly to a good number of ship kills, the Coalition total is up to 41.45 VPs. The Alliance is starting to gain VPs for occupying Lyran provinces and a large number of cripples, and is up to 71.2 VPs for a Major Victory (at this moment).

└ Tags: , , ,
 Comment 

On the Front

by on September 27, 2015 at 10:50 am
Posted In: Boardgaming

Patch came over yesterday for a second day of Up Front. It’s been a while, and neither of us had gotten much chance to read up on it before hand, so we started off a bit slow.

We started with a couple rounds of “City Fight”; I went down pretty hard in the first game with my Germans getting slaughtered by the Russians, and conceded before the first deck was done. The second game went much better, with my Americans in three groups, and two of them got into forward buildings. At one point, I had to pull a group back to get out of demo charge range, but that didn’t last long. On the other flank, my force was a little forward on a hill, and got slowly taken out by infiltration and close combat.

While the initial stages of that went solidly in Patch’s favor, I still had a good central firebase that kept disrupting him, even if it wouldn’t last long enough for me to do much else, but then close combat started going a little more even, and Patch’s force steadily eroded, until he had to concede near the end of the game.

Then we did a round of “Elite Troops on the Attack”, with my SS versus Patch’s Russian conscripts. It began about as well as you could ever hope: I placed a stream on his center group in the opening setup, and then discarded a sniper on that group on the first turn, which killed his light machine gunner, with the LMG sinking into the river….

Things continued well after that, with me tearing up a couple of his groups and causing a number of casualties. As I got closer though, Patch started getting some effective fire, and finally took out a member of my squad. After that, things came apart fast, with me getting ground down, unable to advance, or shake his remaining troops much. I dropped to three people (making a win impossible) somewhere in the third deck, loosing without even managing to go to the second round.

Finally, we tried “Surprise Attack” from Banzai. We’d been looking at other scenarios, but they kept wanting to add more rules than we were looking for right then. This one however just uses fairly basic squads. Patch had the defending Germans, who start all pinned except one rifleman, and he can’t rally until he either takes a fire attack, or manages to make one with his lone man. All buildings are discarded except the ones the defenders start in, and my attacking British had to occupy at least as many buildings as the defenders (which means kill/rout the defenders or capture buildings through close combat…).

We cycled through two thirds of the initial deck before things began in earnest. I naturally wanted to get close before starting things, hopefully from some form of cover. But movement cards just weren’t showing up, and I was still at around relative range 3 that far through the deck when Patch got a shot off to start the actual fighting. By that point, Patch had everything else he needed, and rallied everyone on the next turn. I got a force on a hill, and the firepower bonus from there, combined with a lot of good fire cards started causing him lots of problems. Meanwhile, my other group got stuck at a river, and took forever to get out (still no movement cards…).

As Patch’s position came apart, I did slowly get into motion again. Patch evacuated the last two guys from one group to the main one in a -3 building. This also got his firepower concentrated just as my streak of fire cards came to an end, and my position came apart hard and fast. Notably, as he swept up my flank force, he got a very strong attack on my main force as it got to range 5. I forget just what he attacked at, (12?), but one of the results was a 16! I don’t think we’ll ever see a higher total in Up Front.

As an 8+ is a kill, I ended up with my squad leader pinned and nothing else left, and five Germans still in the last building. Patch infiltrated a man into my position, close combat… and the SL shoots the hun! Patch got a second man in, close combat, he gets another kill! At this point, I finally got a rally card, and managed to infiltrate the German position, killing one of the defenders.

Sadly, after reducing the odds from 5-1 against to 2-1 against, the third deck ran out, ending the game on time, with a loss to me. Still, a great end to what was a surprisingly good scenario!

└ Tags: ,
 Comment 

Straight Down the Middle

by on September 21, 2015 at 1:00 am
Posted In: F&E

Crossposted from the SFU blog on BGG.

Federation & Empire is about the big 18-year General War centerpiece of the Star Fleet Universe timeline. Fighter Operations, as a descendant of the first expansion to it, mostly deals with some enhancements to the main system (with salvage and a few other things), as well as enhancing the number of options available for carriers, which are a major focus in F&E.

But, it also comes with a scenario for the last major war before the General War, the Four Powers War, which is considered as kind of the end of the ‘Middle Era’ of the timeline, when all the familiar technology has developed (setting it apart from the Early Years), and before all complications of fighters, maulers, war cruisers, and more, familiar from the General War era  have been developed.

The new version of Fighter Operations just coming out focuses more on this era, providing counters for about twenty different ship types that had passed, or nearly so, by the start of the General War. This turns the Four Powers War scenario from just a mini-version of the General War with all the funny ships taken out, into something with a little more character.

In addition, there’s a few modifications to the standard General War setup for the new ships. Most notably, the Klingons get several of their diminutive E4s and E4A escorts replaced with even smaller E3s. Yes, the Klingons are the new record-holder for the smallest regular-service ship in the game, with the 3/2 E3 being smaller than the Hydran 3-4/2 Hunter. They’re placed so as not to cause much actual change in the game, and they all get removed on turn 10 (given to the police), but it does still make the Klingon early-game dismal escort situation slightly worse.

At the same time, the Kzinti have one FF replaced by a FH, an early, not very successful, attempt to upgrade the FF, and the Hydrans have two of their Crusader frigate leaders replaced by the older all-fusion beam Saracen frigate leader. The Lyrans get the option to replace a couple small ships with slightly better versions that can’t be converted into anything else. Since there’s always more FFs and DDs around than ability/desire to turn them into anything else, I can’t imagine the Lyran player will often pass this up (especially the HFF, which is an efficient 5/3 ship).

It’s nice to see the first F&E expansion getting updated for the 2010 edition, but it’s even nicer to see the earlier period getting some attention.

└ Tags: ,
 Comment 

Levelling in MMOs

by on September 13, 2015 at 3:36 pm
Posted In: MMO

There was a time when hitting level 10 was a big deal. It was time to consider settling down, establishing a keep, and retiring from active adventuring.

2015-09-12_00001My main character in Guild Wars 2 gained 5 levels yesterday.

Now, I will point out that it makes a lot of sense for computer games to have a lot more levels in their structure than any RPG. Gaining a level is something of an accounting exercise, and with the computer handling the numbers, more accounting is not a large burden.

However, MMOs are supposed to be a group activity, and the end game (where levels are no longer important) is where it is easiest to find a large pool of people with the same level of capability. Before that point, unless you are purposefully staying in-step with a friend it can be very difficult to find appropriate content for two people. This helps feed into a ‘must get through everything now’ mentality, that causes developers to warp the design by promoting faster leveling than the content is designed for. This feeds everyone into the ‘end content’, even though that tends to be one of the most tedious parts of the game, and is characterized by extremely slow, incremental gains in ability, instead of constant sense of growth from the main part of the game.

The emerging answer to the underlying problem is level-scaling, first seen in City of Heroes, with the sidekick system. Neverwinter has this for some of their more recent content, but… I can’t say it works. I don’t know what they’re doing when they reduce a character in effective level, but it doesn’t make much difference, with a high-level character tearing through the lower-level monsters. Guild Wars 2 has a much more extensive system, where every section of the world has its own maximum level that you are reduced to. It does have an effect, but while not as pronounced as in Neverwinter, over-level characters are still more effective than ones just at the maximum level.

The most effective, and most annoying, version I’ve seen is in Final Fantasy XIV, which will disable abilities that are too high level for your current effective level. Considering that it has the usual ‘arrange your own ability bar’ style design, having your hand-crafted ability set disrupted gets frustrating.

Back to yesterday’s adventures, the main annoyance I’m feeling is that I’ve been spending a lot of time in the alternate low-level areas (because of map-completion achievements, and a need for low-level crafting materials). Normally, this means extremely slow experience gain, as it gets scaled down for being ‘too easy’. But it seems like Guild Wars 2 does not do this, leading to much faster level advancement than I’m really looking for at the moment. Lunysa is now around level 40, and has yet to see any content past about level 22. I’d really prefer that the level advancement be slower, so I don’t feel like I’m rushing towards an end goal that is not part of what I’m currently doing.

└ Tags: ,
3 Comments

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History

by on September 9, 2015 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

You could easily write a recursive book about the influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History upon history. Mahan wanted to show that navies decided wars, even between land powers, and many powerful and influential people listened. In the list of influential works on strategy it is probably number four, behind The Art of War, The Prince, and On War.

There’s actually a few interrelated theses here. The primary one is the assertion that naval power is a deciding factor for everyone but the most land-locked of countries. The secondary one is not so clearly stated, but quite evident in the later parts of the book, that the proper goal of military operations is the reduction of organized enemy forces in the field. The later parts of the book particularly talk about this, showing that the French government and navy held to theory that saw the taking of objectives while preserving force, and that it time and again failed to gain results, while the British habit of forcing battles inevitably put their opponents into a worse position over time. Lastly, he considers the pursuit of interrupting merchant shipping to be a mistaken strategy, as British trade increased even during wars where the French captured large numbers of British merchants. (The Battle of the Atlantic might be seen as a condemnation of this rule, but I imagine Mahan might argue that the failure to actually hamper the British—and American—navies gave them the ability to find a way to destroy U-Boats and end “The Happy Time”.)

Mahan covers the most of height of the Age of Sail in his book, from the Restoration of Charles II to the end of the Revolutionary War, after an extended chapter that looks at naval power throughout history. This is definitely a preferred era for him, but he considers that while tactics must change over time, with new technology, it is still possible to find strategic truths that always apply, and I think he did so very well. His narrative gets steadily more detailed as it goes on, with the last couple chapters looking at actions in India and the Caribbean from 1781-1783 in great detail. As his descriptions get more detailed, so too do the conclusions that he draws from them. This is decidedly Nineteenth Century writing, and technical in nature to boot, with overly long-winded sentences and paragraphs by today’s standards (thankfully, the page-long paragraph is a thing of the past), but it still retains a high degree of readability.

My copy of the book is an OCR Pyrrhus Press ebook, which is in decent shape. I started noticing errors about a third of the way through, and they slowly become more common as the book went on, but never got to the levels I’ve seen in other books. On the other hand, the tactical description of battles is reliant on a number of maps that are directly referenced in the text, but are not included in this copy. I could generally follow along, but it takes a fair amount of effort it shouldn’t, and the details are lost.

└ Tags: , , ,
2 Comments