Dystopian Wars - Coconut Wars Continued

Ziggy just got his Australian fleet in the mail yesterday. He texted me with a taunt which I gladly accepted. I hadn't had much opportunity to sink Aussie ships and it seemed like a good idea at the time. We played 1000 points - I used my Blazing Suns, consisting of:
1 Battleship w/ Shield Generator and one escort
1 Carrier w/ 1 escort
2 Support Cruisers (rockets-a-go-go)
3 Gunships
4 Mini Robot Subs
4 Corvettes

The Royal Australian rabble:
1 Battleship w/ 3 escorts
2 Monitors
2 Sub Tenders
3 Merlins
4 Frigates
4 Hawk Rotors (or whatever the kangaroo farmers call them)

My mission was to sink 50% of the enemy fleet including all large and massive enemy vessels. Easy! He's only got one!

Deployment. At this point, things were going really well for both of us.

 The Monitors hit a support cruiser hit off the bat, fouling its rudder.
But the Japanese rocket cruisers are not impressed and proceed to rain fire down on one of the distant sub tenders. The stuck cruiser was fortunately pointing at a target.








The sub tender was having a terrible first few minutes.

The Frigates prove that it's better to be lucky than good and crit one of my gunships, causing a Weapons Damage crit.

The big fliers ease forward. Two of the Australian frigates have been knocked out and the other submarine tender takes a crit from the gunships' rockets. The other tender that was heavily damaged earlier was finished off by the battleship's rockets.

No explanation needed.

Some torpedo bombers make it through to the carrier. Solid AA and CC, combined with some very bad rolls from the Australian player results in only one damage on the big ship.

My corvettes shoot up the side of the board and show how it's done. Another crit to the beat up monitor.

The battleship gets a good crit on one of the scout rotors.

And then the Zariganis speed forward and hose down the two rotors which failed their attempts to get back into the clouds.

Merlins cruise around looking for targets.

My two remaining gunships (towards the left) were healed by a 60-point TAC card - Battlefield Repairs I think.

Those gunships sent a volley of rockets at the damaged monitor. Crit, magazine explosion, oh shit. The corvettes were wiped out and the healthy monitor took a double-crit. Hahaha! Best shot ever, except for the own-goal on my 'vettes.

The beat-up monitor was finished off by my carrier. The Australian pocket battleship "crossed the T" and unloaded on the Kiyohime. Call it a crit and a navigation lock. Feh.

The mini squidbots jump the almost dead sub tender and send it to meet Davy Jones'.

The photographer forgot what he was doing and missed some awesomeness. The first wave of Crocs boarded the carrier and were wiped out, but the carrier was left with only one AP. The second wave boarded and whiffed badly. My single AP held up and ran off the aquatic boarders!

I think this is the start of turn 4. The scout rotors would smash up my battleship pretty good, leaving it with 2 HP, a broken shield generator and damaged weapons. Feh.

The icing on the cake. The HMAS Botany Bay sent its assault marines to capture the Lucky Dragon and they successfully Prized it for a nice 360 points. Ugh.

We called the game there. I wasn't close to killing the Aussie battleship and Zig was very close to killing mine. Final score was 770 (AUS) to 560 (EBS).

Unusually, Zig's dice rolls were very good. He had bad rolls mind you, but not at critical times - four ones in a row for instance when trying to get his scout rotors to climb into the clouds after playing a card that let them succeed on 2+. His shields were reliable for a change. He won initiative every turn. The group of four scout rotors were a major bitch to deal with and as it turned out, I completely failed to deal with them. I spent too much effort on the sub tenders and monitors and no where near enough on the battleship which was my mission. I think I was mentally defeated at the outset - usually my rockets are totally ineffective against Zig's British battleship + escorts group. Australian escorts are nowhere near as good as their British counterparts and I probably could have scored some early hits to take some starch out of the ol' PBB.

We both had a good time and I'm looking forward to another go at the Australians. Ziggy likes them and I think they suit his play-style a bit more than the Brits he's been pushing for two years. He likes getting up-close and personal and I think the British are better-suited for a mid-range torpedo and gun fight.

Comments

Popular Posts