Plain Sailing

Game two of Firestorm Armada at the club last night.  Again, I used my Aquan starter fleet but I was facing a Directorate fleet played by Graeme who was playing his first game of Firestorm.  In my last battle I found out that I'd got some of the rules wrong so this time I paid attention to what we were doing and got the game mechanics right; although we still left out the rules for wings and mines - we'll save those for when we're all comfortable with moving and shooting

It's clear that when your ships start taking damage, it's very hard to start putting a decent attack together and you need to position your ships correctly to get them in the most effective firing soloution to help reduce the effects of damage on your ship's guns.  Torpedoes aren't affected by the damage your ships takes - but opposing ships all get some kind of point defence to try to shoot them down before they hit.  At one point, I managed to hit Graeme's battleship with eleven points of torpedo damage which would have been enough to cause a critical hit - but that ship has a point defence of 5 which meant Graeme got to roll five dice to try to reduce the number of torpedoes getting through the defence batteries.  They shot down six torpedoes and there weren't enough hits to even damage his ship, let alone to it critical damage.

As we were still learning, the game took a couple of hours but we were both fairly comfortable with how things worked by the end - and my Aquans finally won the day by some crippling strikes on Graeme's battleship.  Next time we play. we're going to start using the rules for wings and mines - which will be important as I've got some more ships waiting to be painted for the Aquans; a carrier, six escorts, a heavy cruiser and the fantastic manta battle carrier which is a real beast of a ship.  I'm also hoping to get some planets, moons and asteroids made so we've got some scenery to steer around.