Combat Patrol

by on October 19, 2013 at 10:19 am
Posted In: SFB

It’s been entirely too long since our group has managed any Star Fleet Battles, so Patch and I started a game on-line a while ago. Our current play-date is concurrent with the short Gorn-Federation War, so we used the excuse to actually use the Gorns and fast seeking weapons. We tend to prefer battles with more than just one ship per side, so the Gorns got a CA and CL (a good pair), while I came up with a few possibilities for the Feds. Either a CA and DD or CA or CL would about right, BPV-wise, but both the CL and DD are somewhat odd ships. The last possibility was a CC and FF, which would leave quite a gap in sizes, but are both solid Federation ships.

Patch took the Gorns, which left me to choose which set to take, and I settled on the CA+DD. I’ve always like the DD, and I had no compunctions about keeping a couple photon tubes empty to speed it up. We set up in the standard Patrol scenario locations, and rolled randomly for Weapon Status. Zero. That hurt both of us, since Patch was going to need three turns to get his heavy weapons ready, and I didn’t have anything pre-loaded, including overload energy. The CA started warming up a wild weasel and suicide shuttle while the DD just kept up at speed 16. Patch only went speed 8, despite having plenty of power, with the plasmas on the cheap turns and no phasers to arm.

I reduced speed to 12 for the second turn as I struggled to get a pair of photons overloaded, and loaded a second pair as proxes. Patch had ECM up, and I missed through a +2 shift. We began turn 3 at a minimum range of 13, and headed in for our first firing pass. I boosted slightly to speed 14, while the Gorns split at 12 (CA) and CL (15). His extra power and moderate speeds added up to heavier EW than I could afford.

Combat Patrol 1
The first two and a half turns.
↓ Read the rest of this entry…

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Frederick the Good Game

by on October 15, 2013 at 10:23 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Mark made it over last Saturday for a little FtF time. It was his pick, and he wanted to try out Frederick the Great, which both of us have been interested in since we started seeing some interesting reviews of it a few years ago.

I didn’t have any real knowledge of the game going in, and Mark had to leave a couple hours early, but we still finished off the initial 1756 scenario quite handily. Mark took Frederick, while I fumbled around with the Austrians. Both of us had trouble getting anywhere, thanks to the fact that it just takes a long time to set up a siege, and had to set up depots to extend supply range before we could even get to that point.

Frederick himself begins just outside of Saxony, with a very large force. However, the closest Saxon fortress is six hexes away from his supply sources (supply range is five…), so he had to spend a couple turns creating a depot, before starting the siege, which also takes a couple turns (since you go through the ‘create a depot’ to do that).

Meanwhile, the Austrians have some local superiority to the east, and I slipped one army through the Carpathians before realizing that my goal was out of supply range, and the army wasn’t large enough to create a depot. The other (bigger, better led) army hesitantly moved forward and camped in the Carpathans. Since this was a learning game, Mark attacked it in the defensive terrain with his local army, and lost fairly handily. Worse, his available leader wasn’t very inspiring, and the Prussian army stayed under a demoralized marker for the rest of the game (rolled three different ‘5’s when he needed a ‘6’ though…). I set up a depot there, and moved north, kicking his army out of a depot it had created, and back into a fortress.

Frederick finished his siege and moved east to repair the situation. I gathered my available forces together to force him into a poor results column, and Mark thankfully did not roll very well, with 3 to 2 losses. As it turns out, the winner of a battle is determined by comparing each side’s commander’s initiative plus the enemy’s losses. Since my leader only had one initiative less than Fredrick’s, and he took one more loss, the battle was tied. The two armies stayed there for the next couple turns, attacking each other, and grinding down in a number of tied battles. Eventually, winter kicked in and we went into winter quarters, finishing the game.

Thanks to the relative losses, and the prisoners I had taken in the early battles, I had a decent lead and managed to pull out an Austrian win (I forget what exact level).

It’s a fairly nice system, though it does get a little gamey in a couple places. My main concern/question is with sieges. The chart goes from 0 to 6 (with ‘2’ listed twice), and the labeling on the chart says there should be modifiers, but we couldn’t find them in the rules. Our guess is that you’re supposed to compare leader initiatives. There’s no errata for the chart either, though I wonder if it supposed to go from 0 to 7 (allowing modifiers both ways), though since the top few entries are identical, it wouldn’t make a difference.

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Forgotten Reams—The Beginning

by on October 12, 2013 at 9:11 am
Posted In: D&D

Since playing Neverwinter, I’ve been thinking of the Realms again, and just got through re-reading the original box set I got back in ’87.

This served as the introduction to a new setting for the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. One booklet held general geographical and cultural information on the Realms, and the other was oriented to use by Dungeon Masters. Two of the maps joined together to give an overview of the setting as a whole (an area about twice as large as the United States), while the other two joined together to give a more detailed look at the main area of the setting. Many further ‘FR’ series modules included more maps as the reduced scale that would fit with the pair here.

Forgotten Realms was far from the first RPG setting produced, and not even the first from TSR, but it set a new bar in presentation. The two-booklet, multiple-map box set would be re-used several times by TSR. This is marred by some poor editing with typoes and mistaken word choices abounding and some missing illustrations in the second booklet. One gets the sense that this was rushed through editing and proofing in a big hurry.

But the real value comes from the Cyclopedia of the Realms (the first booklet), which lists scores of places in the Realms and gives some description of them. Unlike the earlier Greyhawk set, which tended to be dryly biographical, the Cyclopedia helped instill a sense of the lore and history of the Realms with descriptions that often give a bit of history and some of the important people. While some of the book can go into a bit more detail than a player should probably know, it is still pretty safe for a player to read through, and will not spoil any big secrets that the DM may wish to keep.

The DM’s Sourcebook of the Realms (the second booklet) is a little more disappointing, with about half the book taken up by descriptions of various spellbooks known to be wandering around the Realms where adventurers might come across them (this is actually a good idea, and helps add some more flavor, especially with the histories provided, but a quarter of the available page count in the introductory product is a bit much). Important sections include two years of ‘rumors and events’ (tavern talk), which help give a sense of recent events and the Realms as a place where things are happening, and fuller descriptions of several NPCs already met in the first book. Rounding it out are some DM advice, and a couple small sample adventures (one merely okay, and one with some real possibilities).

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Empires of the Sea

by on October 5, 2013 at 1:15 pm
Posted In: Books

Roger Crowley tackles the sixteenth-century clash between East and West in the Mediterranean as a grand epic story in this book. Over fifty years of history is his canvas for a tale of peoples and cultures, which he does a wonderful job with. From start to finish, it is history, and a tale to be told, and Crowley tells it very well.

He starts with the siege of Rhodes (1521), as a prelude to the action in the rest of the book, as several key players later on were there. The centerpiece of the book is the siege of Malta (1565), which gets far more attention than any other subject in the book. Of course, it is the most dramatic, and lasted several months. The end of the book details the Battle of Lepanto (1571). In between, he covers the important personalities, raids, and politics.

The only way I can’t recommend this book is if you are already well familiar with the 16th century, and even then it can still be a fun read. Otherwise, I recommend this book as an excellently written overview of warfare  in the Mediterranean. My only real concern is that it is less sympathetic to the Turks than the West, though that is also part of the nature of the tale. Personally, I am now eager to pick up Crowley’s 1453, and City of Fortune.

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White Crown of York

by on August 26, 2013 at 9:10 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

After something of a dearth of FtF wargaming lately, Mark made it over this last Saturday, and I finally got a chance to test-drive Crown of Roses. It’s a card-driven block game on the Wars of the Roses that technically started as a Kingmaker rewrite, but is decidedly a bit heavier and longer (pity that).

Neither of us had really had any chance to go through the rules beforehand, and I had for gotten anything I’d read when I first got the rules and stickered the blocks. I went for the second scenario, which is a short two-player one, and had worked out a decent amount of the setup before Mark arrived (but not all).

Mark decided to take Lancaster, who have a somewhat weaker position in the scenario. Mark actually drew Affairs of State, and played it in the second impulse, which blew all my half-formed plans for the turn. One problem with the Yorkist position is that they don’t have a minor heir out at the beginning of the game, and I hadn’t done anything to fix that yet, and lost some popular support.

Moving on to electing the King, we found the weakness of the game in two-player mode (not surprising). I had the influence to win the vote (the scenario starts with a Yorkist lead), and Mark wasn’t able to trick his way into winning any of the big offices, tieing at best, with the King (me) deciding the tie. He ended up with the Admiralty and the Captain of Calais. I also ended up with a couple economic victory points by happenstance (I had a block on Lancastrian land in Wales).

The campaigning season for the next turn got pretty exciting. There was a fairly notable battle in Essex (four blocks, including the King, to two), a minor battle in the North Marches, and a fairly desperate one in West Riding (or thereabouts). I generally got the better of him with the dice, though Mark managed to steal an Ally I had gotten out to generate an extra blue (5) die before I could use it. Edward Lancaster had been part of the three-block force in West Riding, and was cut down to a single step (along with everyone else), and the rest of the turn revolved around my efforts to bring him to a second battle. My forces in the east had ended up in Norfolk, and crossed The Wash (with only one loss) but he evaded me twice to stay out of trouble.

However, the influence situation was even more dire for him this turn, and the short scenarios only have a limit of one side being voted King for two turns to declare a victor, so I won in the later segments of the turn.

The game system worked pretty well, once we’d worked through most of the rules, and being able to have an actual finish was a pleasant surprise. I hope we can introduce it at a group day before we forget everything again.

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