Today, I playtested Pax Stellarum again, with 2 of the fleets I recently created stats for: The Centauri and The Narn.
At 1850 points, it was an average/big game, and each side had about a dozen ships, plus multiple fighter wings.
The Centauri were trying to seize control of a Narn solar system. The capital planet was being guarded by 12 Narn Troops, which the Centauri would have to defeat to be victorious.
The Centauri fleet:
1 Octurion Battleship
1 Balvarin Carrier + 5 Sentri Fighter Wings
2 Primus Battlecruisers
3 Vorchan Cruisers
5 Haven Patrol ships
The Narn fleet:
1 Bin' Tak Battleship + 2 Frazi Fighter Wings
2 G' Quan Heavy Cruisers + 4 Frazi Fighter Wings (2 each)
2 G' Karith Destroyers
2 Var' Nic
4 Sho' Kos Patrol ships
The target planet:
The opposing fleets spent the first couple turns maneuvering closer to each other, choosing and giving flanks. Meanwhile, those ships with fighters inside began deploying them.
The Balvarin then directed its wings to the nearest enemy hull, a G' Quan, forcing the enemy squadron to redirect all its wings to intercept the sentri, thus preventing the Frazi fighters from chasing the Centauri ships.
The right flank of the table had the flagships and their respective escorts closing quarters and maneuvering to bear their best arcs against their foes. The Bin' Tak first round of fire was split between a Primus on its Prow arc and the Octurion on its Fore Starboard arc.
The massive Mag guns and lasers of the Narn Battleship crippled the Primus, reducing it to Shields 4 (from initial 6, Hull 7 (initial 11), in addition to 2 criticals: Life Support System and Power Core. That meant the crew on the Centauri ship would start dying from then on, and the ship could blow up at any time, killing anything on the surroundings.
The flagships finally get their best shooting position at turn 4. The Bin' Tak inflicts severe damage to the Octurion, while sustaining only minor damage in exchange.
The Centauri flagship now has a critical hit on its Port side weapons, as well as on its Shields generator, rendering it utterly defenseless.
Things started to look bad for the Republicans, and the cleary outclassed flagship decides to overload engines to get some extra impulse and move away from the Bin' Tak line of fire as quickly as possible.
The crippled Primus suddenly explodes, engulfing everything around it in a irresistible ball of fire, which in the end turned out to be a huge benefit for the Centauri (!), as the narns weren't careful enough to keep their distance.
The course set by the Octurion put it in place to perform a boarding attempt on a G' Quan. This was the only real contribution the battleship could still give the fleet, as it was currently critically damage on its Prow, Port and Starboard weapons, aside from still being deprived of Shields.
The Centauri invaders use their "Infiltrate" trait to try damaging a critical system on the narn vessel: their only Target Control System. This would prevent the G' Quan from firing at all, leaving only the Bin' Tak in condition of deliverng heavy fire on the enemy (the other G' Quan had already suffered a critical hit on its TCS...).
The Centauri troops fail their attempt and get almost all killed by narn troops and crew of the G' Quan, who then try to return the favor and invade the Octurion, now that it has got no troops to defend it. Unfortunatelly for the Narn, the crew of the Republican flagship were too numerous to be overcomed by the reduced troops detatchment the G' Quan had available.
On the end of the 5º turn, the Narn had already lost more than 50% of their total hull points, and had to perform a Morale Check to determine if the fleet would keep on fighting or jump into hyperspace, abandoning the system at the mercy of the enemy.
I choose to automatically lose the check, as the Narn were in no shape to go on with that battle, and therefore the game would end after the next turn.
The enemies inflicted some more damage on each other on the last turn, but nothing major, as both were maneuvering to avoid contact by now.
This is how the table looked like at the end of the 6º turn, just prior to the Narn hyperspace jump out:
On the end, it was a Centauri victory, as the fleet was now free to bomb the Narn land troops into surrendering.
Here we see in how bad shape were the only narn survivors, after the battle. One G' Quan was at Shields 4 (initial 5), Hull 1 (initial 12) and had lost its Target Control System. The other was at Shields 2, Hull 6 and had an Engines and a Bridge critical hits. The Bin' Tak was at Shields 6 (initial 8), Hull 19 (initial 23) and also had a bridge critical hit.
The Centauri had an unharmed carrier, a (completely) crippled Battleship, with criticals on Prow, Port, Starboard and Shields, aside from being under half its initial hull points, a overall intact Primus (only minor damage to Shields) and 2 Vorchans, one of them also unharmed and the other at 3 hull points (initial 4) and Shields 2 (initial 3).
Overall, it was extremely fun. I'm happy to see that the game is finally ready, no more obvious bugs showing up.
Having the terrain moving around on the table was fun, so I'll keep using this optional rule on every game I play.
The only but is that I didn't design the most effective fighters for this battle. I should had set them as heavy fighters, instead of light, but this is not a design flaw as much as a strategy error on building the fleets.
The rulebook should be completely revised by the end of the month. When this happens, I'll finnaly upload it here on my blog. Until then, expect more batreps soon!
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