The Battle of the Long Claws

by on May 13, 2006 at 6:09 pm
Posted In: SFB

Arch Duke Fikrohn and King Rakhzan were alarmed. The political structure of the Empire relied on playing one count against another to keep the dukes from gaining too much power. If Larkhan was able to put his (presumably loyal) son on the throne of a subordinate county, his position would be much stronger, and he would become a threat to the King. If the [Democratic Dark Star County] was attached to the Foremost Duchy, or even granted a special status independent of any duke, Larkhan’s power would be reduced. When the DDSC urgently appealed for help, Fikrohn’s fleet (supported by Silver Moon County) was already en route.

The three usual suspects, me, Mark, and Patch played this SFB scenario from S2 today, but not in our usual roles. Since this is a Lyran civil war, all three sides involved are Lyrans. It was very educational, for many reasons.

As the most experienced SFBer, I got the largest fleet: Duke Larkhan trying to re-exert control over the Dark Star County; Mark (as the regular Lyran player) got the second-biggest, the DDSC forces; and Patch got the Arch Duke’s squadron. The last two are allies, and combined are tougher than my fleet. However, if I shoot up the Arch Duke, he’ll go neutral, and go home. But the only way for me to win is to defeat the DDSC.

So my plan? Avoid the Arch Duke, and go straight for the main course before the Arch Duke (Patch) can give me too many headaches in the form of an extra fleet running around. The obvious plan for them is to link up and fight as a single fleet.

Neither plan was accompanied with a look at the actual set up. It turns out that me and Patch start out at moderate range and headed towards each other, and Mark is some distance away on a different bearing. I pretty much scrapped that plan right there. So, do a passing engagement, trade a couple ships and hope I can hold it together against the DDSC…. Not good.

Then, I found out not only was my fleet speed was higher than either of theirs, I was going nearly twice as fast as Patch’s force (20 vs. 12). So, back to the first plan: turn towards Mark, and leave Patch to snipe at my rear as Mark faces my front.

This… went far better than I ever anticipated. Patch had expected a point-blank shootout and went slow to overload everything. Purely by accident (I wish I could take deliberate credit for it!), I stayed out of range 8, scraping by range 9 for a few impulses, which meant that Patch never got a shot at me.

As the range started getting closer to the DDSC, I started turning parts of the fleet to get directly into his path. He immediately turned to go the opposite way, putting my heavy hitters headed off into empty space. As it turned out, I had enough room to clear my turn mode and get back at him without being too far off. Mark had figured he’d get by me. I surprised us all by how quickly I got it sorted out and turned around. So, the end of turn 1 was a collision between the two main forces. As would be expected, Mark came out much worse. Two of my heavier ships took some moderate damage versus two of his lighter ones being disabled/destroyed.

The next turn it was pretty obvious that everyone else would be adapting to my higher fleet speed. I also got a harsh lesson in how much power a Lyran ship can drain down when reloading weapons. They’re real nice ships, the CA and CC have more power than anything else in their class. With all the excellent phaser coverage, it’s not enough. So I maintained speed and recharged phasers as I could.

We actually called it not long afterward, after destroying another ship it was obvious that I was going to be able to defeat in detail anything that came my way and we called it a bit early. Of course, historically, it was a DDSC win, and I don’t get to actually change history here… so that isn’t the end of this little story line…

That actually took slightly longer to play than to tell, so we spent some time figuring out what we wanted to do next, and they got to see some of my library. Which was nice, since we usually don’t get to just hang out too much since we get together for a game, and then want to spend out time finishing the game…. ^_^

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Into the Rings

by on May 10, 2006 at 7:37 pm
Posted In: SFB

The Klingons dispatched an F5S scout-frigate to the ringed gas giant Wyskoon to see if the Hydrans had set up a base there. The frigate launched probe drones toward the planet, but departed (to avoid contact with a Hydran patrol) before it received their transmissions. The probe drones collected the information and ejected their memory canisters at various pre-selected locations for later pickup….

As luck would have it, a Hydran freighter, visiting the the system to scoop gas from the giant’s atmosphere, detected the approach of the Orion ship and summoned the local police patrol.

Patch and I have been playing this unusual SFB scenario from S1 on line for the last few weeks. An Orion Light Raider is trying to pick up three probe memory canisters while dodging a Hydran Gendarme (police ship/coast guard cutter) around a ringed gas giant. If he fires on the Hydran, he’ll get a second police ship to fight in a couple turns. The Hydran has no such compunctions.

The LR is definitely a superior ship, but not by much, as they’re effectively the same size. Also, the first Gendarme has two fighters on-board to help even things out.

The LR went straight in, grabbed the first canister, and zipped through the ring, to grab the second one (floating in the atmosphere of the gas giant) and ducked around the giant one way, while the Gendarme went the other to try to head it off. This lead to a confrontation at the end of turn 3 just outside the rings (with the Orion headed for the third canister). The Hydrans lost both fighters before they could fire (bad habit of mine), but no internals (though my #1 was gone from ring damage, the Orion had been a bit luckier). The Gendarme managed to knock down two shields and do a couple of meaningless internals.

Turn 4 was pretty quick. He dashed off after defeating my tractor attempt, grabbed the last canister, and left. I shot at him as soon as the phasers cycled, but he was already out of effective range. Everything I could throw at him generated one point. Absorbed by reinforcement.

So, the Orions win with a full set, giving him the highest level of victory. This is actually somewhat better than historically, where the LR blew apart the GEN and left before the second one arrived.

With this out of the way, the year is now Y145 and we’re all set for a big battle this weekend!

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Overdue WoW update…

by on May 7, 2006 at 9:47 am
Posted In: MMO

I haven’t written much on WoW lately, because there hasn’t been a lot to say. However, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on. Just a lack of attention and humorous anecdotes.

The big news, that got discussed elsewhere was the guild trading servers.

It could have gone better. This disrupted things somewhat, and in addition to other pressures and interests in my life, means I spent a fair amount of time with barely any WoW at all.

But recently, the guild has started getting its act together, and there’s been a string of instance runs all aimed at getting various lower level characters through some quests, and to work out some group dynamics. Smudge described the beginning of that sequence.

The day after we had a Scarlet Monastery run for a couple of mid-levels (Shrimpette & Farmishi), and some higher levels that had gone zooming past the proper area for SM in the weeks that it took to get the run going. And there’s been an improbable number of SM runs during all this.

And two weeks ago Team Band-Aid got together for a spur-of-the moment Stockades run that went fairly well. We got a wipe when we got feared into another room during a boss fight, but hey….

Last week we did a Sunken Temple run. We scheduled four up-and coming characters who are going to get some group practice in this fun instance, with Blanc tanking for them. One of them couldn’t make it, so Dunain filled in. ^_^ So two of us were over-level veterans, and Brunev’s player had been there before. So Thermidor and Noxlux were the ‘newbies’. Overall, we had the firepower to make it a very smooth run, and the main danger for much of it was getting hopelessly lost. But the point is to get the new people some practice in a group, in the higher-pressure environment of an instance. They did very well, better, I think, than the original team had done in its first several instances. We did have one wipe when I got too close to a group that we neglected to clear out before a boss fight. Eranikus was still not any sort of easy, but we got him on the first try, which is a large step up. ^_^

And yesterday we sent a Horde group into Wailing Caverns as Fickle Moos first instance run on the new server. This was mostly Horde alts (Uhgreah for Micca/Blanc; Thutt for Euphel/Dejek; Grondaq for Blondiewood/Tsula), and Malzina – my main Hordie, who I spend too little time on, considering she’s in high level range for WC, and is as old as the 40+ level characters on Moos. Anyway, this was my first time in Wailing Caverns, so all I knew were a few things from looking over Smudge’s shoulder and going “you’re still in there?”

Anyway, I find I like a lot of the low-level ‘introductory’ instances, and the Caverns are no exception. It’s very nice, and very big. Pack a lunch. We had some concerns about going in with no healing or tank (hunter, mage, and two warlocks!), so we went with the idea that the warlocks would use their voidwalkers, and we’d have three critters to share in general tanking duties (including RosePetal, Uhgreah’s pet). It actually worked out fairly well for us. We had two wipes, that I don’t think could have been avoided (well the situation could have been, but not the wipe once we had the situation). We lept down into one tunnel and got a small horde of monsters comming after the voidwalkers when they went the long way (Uhgreah, more used to stupid pet tricks, had her’s on ‘stay’); and we got a critter calling out to its friends, that managed to get a bunch from another level of the cave complex. In both cases we gave a good account of ourselves, but couldn’t make it work.

This was also my first real party instance run with Malzina, and I’m continuing to find I really like mages, though I need to practice some more on my movement control. I let myself get beaten up more than I should. ^_^

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CC Celebration!

by on April 23, 2006 at 10:05 am
Posted In: SFB

Well, after a long gap, we finally had another face-to-face SFB session yesterday. We’re up to Y143, which is when the Federation and Klingons introduce their command cruisers, so this was intended to show them off. The general idea was to have a CC, along with it’s normal CA version soandcould see the differences between the two classes. On the other hand, the two races I’m current playing don’t really work out for that. The Kzintis don’t have their CC yet, and Hydran BPV ranges are so far off from other races, that I ended up with a Ranger cruiser, and a Lancer destroyer.

Y143

Mark Patch Rindis
Federation Klingon Hydran
CC 137 D7C 131 RN 165
CA 125 D7 121 LN 99
Total: 262 252 264

In our continuing exploration of terrain types, we agreed to use an asteroid field. In the interest of simplicity, I pulled out the map that came with S1. This may have been a mistake, as that is more of an asteroid belt, than a full map field. Considering there were three of us, a two-sided belt wasn’t the best thing, and the bulk of the fighting happened on one side of it. But we all did maneuver through it, and we have a working knowledge of the rules now, which will be a definite help. (Of course, we’re getting down to some of the really dangerous environments for what we haven’t used in Basic Set now….)

After the first couple turns of maneuvering, I ended up somewhat in the middle. The Feds did a moderate range volley, crashing the #5 on the RN and doing a few internals, and then they did an HET. I swaped back and forth on targets a couple of times thanks to these antics, and I let my fighters (13 of them from my two ships) loose their ship cover. The Klingons promptly killed almost all the fighters while only taking a few hits on two front shields. It certainly showed off what the D7Cs ADD racks can do….

Unfortunately, I was also out of position for a quick return to the asteroid belt, so I ended up tangling with the Klingons some more on the next turn as the Feds stayed away and reloaded. The Ranger got a steady stream of shots through the down shield while the Lancer got crippled from a nice volley. Meanwhile, I got through a shield on the D7C, and started doing some serious damage back.

I finally reached the edge of the asteroids around when the Feds came back and pumped five overloaded photon torpedos into the D7. Or tried to. The Federation Lottery decreed that only one hit. The phaser-1 barrage still caused some good damage. However, with the two or three hits, he should have gotten the D7 could very well have been dead in space. The Klingons fired back as they went by, and got some decent hits on the CA. Meanwhile, I sniped at moderate range whenever a down shield presented itself.

After that, it was obvious that both the Hydrans and Klingons were going to have to leave in the face of the still nearly-intact Federation ships. But, he who laughed last did not last loudest, as the Feds hadn’t really done enough to pick up any victory points. So, the Klingons win, with two battered, but decent ships, and the Hydrans barely edge out second for the amount of damage they did do.

The next face-to-face meeting is to be a big three-sided historical Lyran civil war scenario. Time to read up on ESG interactions!

And as an aside note, last night,and I went to a friend’s to finally see the Narnia movie! Wow! A very good job all around, and it’s very nice to see this continuing trend in Hollywood of, you know, actually trying to tell the same story as the book?

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Future pending

by on April 18, 2006 at 8:43 am
Posted In: Life

I was driving home from work yesterday, when an ad for something like “Memprove” came on the radio. It’s supposed to be a short-term memory enhancer. Anyway, it rather pompously states, “developed by a pharmaceutical company (sic) over the last 10 years with proprietary neuro-peptides.”

0.0

I had several conflicting thoughts. ‘There’s no way I’m letting you play with my brain chemistry.’ ‘Why should I trust you when you won’t even own up to the name of the company.’ ‘I hope they paid the neuro-peptides for their work.’

A minute later I was wondering when we’d have open-souce neuro-peptides.

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