Ironhead Station

Not a day passes that I do not think of you, remembering fondly the time that we spent together on Tamsa station. I miss you more than words can describe, and I wish I could hold you in my arms again. Command School has been difficult to say the least. I feel as if I am living on the edge of exhaustion:  We are up at the earliest hours, and I find find myself awake and studying until the wee hours of the morning. At this rate I fear I will die of exhaustion long before I graduate - that is, if the horrible food doesn't kill me first!

After weeks of classes an textbooks, we have finally begun simulated fleet battles, and I had my first opportunity at command this past week. Unfortunately, it hasn't gone well. I won my first engagement, but I have been defeated twice since. The last defeat could hardly be called an error in command, as my opponent managed to rupture the reactor containment on my battleship with his opening salvo, and the resulting detonation consumed the vessel instantly. My cruiser squadrons were forced to take evasive maneuvers to avoid the distortion field left in the wake of the collapsing reactors, and within moments my carefully designed formations were left in shambles, and my fleet found itself facing down a full [CENSORED] armada without the support of a heavy capital ship.  The instructor even used me as an example to the rest of the class of how quickly things can go awry! I fear at this rate, I will find myself commanding an squadron of frigates instead of a battleship.

It was not a complete loss, as it did provide me with some insight into potentially more effective tactics to employ in future engagements. You see, Terran Alliance vessels depend on their main beam weaponry, which fires in a fixed fore arc.  This essentially means the ship needs to be pointing directly at the target it wishes to engage. Typically, this results in port and starboard broadsides lacking proper targets, as your ship is pointing directly at the enemy formation. In response, I am experimenting with the idea of deploying my heavy firepower at opposite ends of my formation, and then maneuvering those capital ships in a crossing pattern, allowing me to bring my fixed fore weaponry to bear against the opposite end of my opponents formation while still providing targets of opportunity for my port and starboard guns.

One thing is for certain, I need to develop more effective strategies quickly. Fighting in the [CENSORED] quadrant has escalated recently, and the Alliance desperately needs to move additional fleet support into that theater. Recent news suggests that our [CENSORED] allies engaged the enemy at the [CENSORED] jump point, but were crushed utterly, giving the enemy access to [CENSORED] and the systems beyond. Resources are stretched thin throughout the fleet, and rumors suggest that we may see action sooner than expected. Let's hope I'm ready.

I cannot wait until I see you again. My love always.



I played my third game of Firestorm Armada this week, this time scaling up to a 1,000 point game that included multiple cruiser squadrons, carriers and full flights of fighters. Unfortunately, the game ended up somewhat anti-climatic, as my opponent managed a critical hit on my battleship with his first shot, and then rolled boxcars on the critical table, which equals instant death. Without a battleship, I was at a huge disadvantage, and we eventually called the game as we both realized it was likely to turn into an extended game of cat-and-mouse as I tried to wear down his fleet.


I'm starting to wrap my head around the game at a meta-level and getting a better sense for proper fleet construction and some of the tactics that should pay off. While I'm still enjoying it, I do have a couple of issues with the game at this point: It is a very random game, and the dice often seeming to have more influence over win-or-lose than I would like, although I may just be jaded by the outcome of this last game. It's also tends to play somewhat long.  It may just be that we're still learning the rules, but it seems to take a while to play, and playing to eradication takes forever.  I guess you are supposed to just shunt out once you know you have lost, and then add up the VPs.  Better scenarios that allowed for quicker, objective-based games would be definitely be welcome.

I do think the game is ripe for a campaign system. Having some kind of game-to-game attrition in play would force you to make the decision of when to shunt ships out of combat - when each battle is a stand-alone, why not fight to the death? But if losses somehow carried over, weakening you... I would also be interesting to let the loser take on a defender role, giving him additional mine deployments or fixed gun emplacements to represent defended territory. If anyone has or has seen something like this, let me know.

I did order a slew of little fighters from Studio Bergstrom this week, and I'll provided pictures of those when they show up. My goal now is to get the rest of my fleet painted up (I picked up some additional cruisers and frigates), and then I really need to get back to painting my Warmachine.

Only 42 days until PAX!

Labels: Firestorm Armada, miniatures, PAX, wargaming

Warmachine has been slow down at my FLGS for the past month or so.  People are busy with other stuff, which thins out the usuals, and the Hordes players are all tired of playing off of printed paper stats (a problem that was remedied this week.)   With the Hordes cards out and the PAX Invitational qualifier coming up, I'm guessing we should see play start to pick up again.  In the mean time, a few of us decided to take advantage of the lull to try out something new...

Firestorm Armada is a space naval combat game created by Spartan Games, the UK-based company that created the fantasy naval combat game Uncharted Seas.  Firestorm Armada has been out for a while (about a year), and I bought my first fleet when it first came out, but I'm just now getting around to putting the models together and playing with them.  I'm a huge fan of Fleet Space Opera stories like David Weber's Shiva Option or Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series, so a game that let me play out those stories seemed right up my alley.


The game itself is played with nice looking resin models that mount on clear plastic flight stands, giving them a nice "flying" look.  The models are very detailed, and the designs are nice, but being resin, they occasionally have problems with warping, flash and bubbles - nothing that couldn't be easily corrected with some modeling putty, but not as clean as I would have liked.  These aren't tiny ships either - the smallest frigate and escort ships range from an inch to two inches long, while the Terran battleship is 7 or 8 inches long (and looks suspiciously like a Imperial Destroyer from Star Wars.)  The models paint up fast, and I was able to paint my entire starter fleet over the course of a couple of afternoons.

The game itself does a very nice job of capturing space combat and still keeping the rules very simple and abstract.  Some examples: a ship must move at least half of it's movement every turn unless it cuts engines (objects in motion tend to stay in motion).  Cutting engines still require 1/2 movement for one turn to decelerate, and then a full turn to spin the engines back up again.  Models don't block line of sight or movement, because it is assumed that ships pass over or under each other in the vertical axis.  Turns rates also vary by the size of the ship:  No ship can turn more than 45 degrees per inch of movement, and bigger ships must travel straight up to 2 inches in-between turns.  Unlike conventional naval combat, ramming is pretty much a suicide solution - in space, ramming will result in ruptured hulls, and ruptured hulls result in death.

Combat is resolved with lots and lots of dice.  Each weapon system has a set number of Attack Dice (AD) depending on what range band you are at (range bands are determined at 8-inch increments).  If your ship has taken hull or crew damage, you lose some dice.  Once you have calculated the right number of AD, you roll them.  A 4 or 5 is usually a hit, and a 6 is two hits and a re-roll.  (This type of re-rolling of high dice is often called an "exploding dice" mechanic.)  Depending on the type of attack being made, the defender can then roll dice equal to their Shield or Point Defense values, with each "hit" scored cancelling out one of the attacker's hits.  With that done, you tally up the number of hits that made it through, and if they exceed a ship's Damage Rating, it takes 1 hull damage.  If the hits taken exceed the Critical Rating, you score two damage and get to roll for special effects on a critical hit table.

The game has some fun rules around "linked fire," allowing ships to combine their attack power.  This means that ships that hunt in packs are far more deadly than those that hunt alone.  Fighters, bombers and interceptors are all present in the game, but they are managed with simple tokens rather than models (although I'm seriously thinking about buying a bunch of little fighters from someone like Studio Bergstrom to model mine!)  There are also boarding assaults, where teams of marines can be sent over on assault boats to capture opposing ships.


My first few games were very fun.  The game played surprisingly smoothly and combat was easy to resolve.  There is a lot of randomness in the game, thanks mostly to the big dice pools and the exploding dice mechanic.  We had once situation where my opponent's battleship scored nine hits on my tiny little frigate, which should have annihilated it, considering I only have a shield rating of one.  When I rolled my one shield die, I proceeded to roll three sixes in a row, and then a five, which means I cancelled 7 of 9 hits, and my little frigate was unscathed.  Of course the same thing can happen in the other direction as well - a tiny ship can get on a roll of sixes and decimate a larger ship.  Don't get me wrong - it's damn fun, but the dice definitely have a much stronger influence on a win or loss than they do in a game like Warmachine.

We did have a little problem in the starter box games where we would end up losing the cruiser squadrons early, setting up battleship vs. multiple frigate showdowns.  On really lucky rolls, a frigate can hurt a battleship, but they typically don't scratch the paint.  At the same time, large ships have a harder time scoring hits on small ships like frigates, so the battle can drag on as the frigates fail to damage the capital ship, and the capital ship misses the smaller vessels.  I would recommend adding a second squadron of cruisers or some heavy cruisers to early games to keep the punches flying.  I also couldn't decided if it was better to focus on taking out single ships completely (thus removing a linked fire partner and another threat) or spamming damage around to take away Attack Dice across the board.  It will take a few more games to get a good feel for that.

The factions themselves feel nicely differentiated while not wildly different.  My Terran fleet seemed to have good long-distance capability with their torpedoes, good 360-degree firing options, and shield technology to compensate for lower damage and critical ratings.  My opponent had more speed and devastating linked fire capabilities, especially at intermediate range, but more limited arcs of fire.   While most of the faction differences are just stat differences, they are enough to make them feel separate and unique.


New ships and fleet additions seem to come out slowly.  The game has been out for almost a year, and we are just now seeing the second wave of models, which covers the other two faction's starter fleets as well as heavy cruisers and escorts for each of the existing factions.  I think that is okay - there is a little meta game in fleet composition, but in general, the game plays well at medium sizes.  Huge fleet games would be fun, but just larger and longer - they wouldn't necessarily open up new options and combos the way a large game would in something like Warmachine.  Spartan Games also makes some civilian ships to be used in scenario play, and the word is that there is a large space station model on the way.  The rulebook also promises larger Leviathan and Dreadnought class ships for each fleet, which should be pretty entertaining when they finally come out.

In summary -  it's a fun game.  I think it will always be a smaller-scale, niche game rather than a full-blown hobby obsession like Warmachine.  There strategic depth isn't tremendous, but it is fun, plays smooth, and does a nice job capturing the overall feel of space naval combat.  Definitely recommended if you like that stuff, or you are just looking for a fun summer diversion.

Oh yeah - in case you haven't been paying attention:  Only 55 days until PAX!

Labels: Firestorm Armada, Hordes, miniatures, wargaming, Warmachine