Starting Steps with Star Navy 5150

Barry and I got together for a game today, and decided to give STAR NAVY 5150 a try. I had read through the rules twice, and Barry had never seen them, so we were starting out pretty much full Novice node. Thus, we pretty much started at the beginning and worked our way through the rules. I do need to make up a set of QRS for each faction (and rename them to my own fleets... Terran, Carnivorn, Avarian, Entomalian... and Aquarian, even though I don't have any of those).

Anyway, we decided we'd play the upstanding, control fanatic Star Navy (Barry) and the reputedly evil Hishen (Me) factions. That should have given me the Carnivoran ships and Barry the Avarians, but I screwed up my own faction crosswalk, so I did the reverse! Game One had us each play a squadron of 2 Class 3 ships and one class 4 ship each.

Star Navy 5150 uses the initial "scan results to determine how far apart the forces start, and at what orientation - a very neat, simple, and quick idea. In this case, Barry's ships (the black/red Carnivorans) entered at 45 degrees to mine.

My Class 3 ("Destroyer" type) Hishen ships were primarily armed with Missile Launchers. From our Galactic knights games a year ago, Barry had a healthy fear of missiles, so he first concentrated on pounding my Class three ships. This was very effective, as you can see the left hand ship already taking some damage in the first shot, and being blown to smithereens here. In SN, a Gun fire (which I think of as beams/phasers etc) hit that gets past any shields on the defending ship does 1 point of dam,age to a randomly determined system if the ship shooting is of lesser or equal class to the target, but damage equal to the class of the ship if the firing ship is of a higher class. As a Class 3 ship has only 4 hull points, if a Class 4 gun hits you in the hull, you're pretty much venting atmosphere regardless!

His Missile Paranoia continuing, Barry proceeded to vape my other Class 3 ship before it could close to missile range (12"). I have now returned the favor by pounding one of his two class 3 ships with my Class 4 ship's (think Cruiser) gun fire.

My Hishen Class 4 ship's superior shield strength has made it all but impervious to the fire of either of the Star Navy ships, so I am circling them as I fire away essentially uncontested. 

I start to score increasingly serious damage on the Star Navy Cruiser, and IIRC, shortly after this picture it blew up and it's consort wisely decided to "break off the fight" on it's reaction test. Smart monkey!

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Game 2 had us each play a Carrier to try out the Fighter rules; Since the Hishen Carrier (Mother Ship) was class 5, while the Star Navy's was Class 6, I gave the Hishens a  pair of  class 4 ships, in what turned out to be a largely futile attempt to redress the balance a bit. 

My Carrier prompltly launched all 4 flights of fighters from it's characters, the Hishen having won the initiative. The enemy carrier having the capacity to luanch up to SIX groups of fighters, and having a higher rep (4) than mine (3), I kept the fighters back, planning to swarm forwards with two turns worth. 

Barry's Class 6 carrier successfully deployed all six flights of fighters from his bays, keeping 4 back for defense, and sending two forwards. My Class 4 ships start to peel off, having no AA fire factors (whilst the Hishen Carrier has 4). Only one of the Hangar bays manages to launch this time, putting 4 flights on the table. Dratted Rep 3!

The Star Navy Fighters move forward, Despite my having 1 more fighter group AND some AA factors on the carrier, the best I can manage out of the exchange is he loses three groups and I lose four! Rep 5 fighters vs. ep 3 carrier and it's fighters = ugly... and he's launching more every turn!

StarNavy fighters assault both my escort cruisers... which have no AA factors, and ignore my carrier for now, which has plenty. One is blasted to kingdom come, and the other takes damage and fails a reaction test, "Breaking off the Fight" by warping out! Having failed to launch ANY more fighters, on my next turn my carrier voluntarily calls it quits as well. Cursed hairless monkey-boys!

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Finally, we started to play out a Campaign. I must confess that the scenario generation/single player campaign system was my biggest reason for wanting to explore Star Navy 5150. Getting off the ground was a bit confusing at first. How many ships do I start with? This proved to take several reads through to really understand. Once that was done, though the rest was easy, and we quickly placed the PEF's (possible Enemy Forces) on the campaign map, and short order had our first contact. Barry was playing the Star navy as the active player, contesting the planet. He started with a Cruiser squadron of three ships - 2 Heavy and one Light Cruisers. He got lucky when rolling for the ships - all were Rep 5 - the best possible crews!

The contact proved to be a Class 5 Hishen squadron with one less ships than his... this turned out to be a carrier and escorting Cruiser, armed primarily with Missile Launchers. This time my carrier was at least Rep 4 - which made a big difference. This time I launched 3 flights on the first turn, and three more on the second. How do you like them bananas, eh ape breath? Anyway, the Hishen carrier, while incorporating 4 AA batteries, included NO shields and NO guns. This meant that every single shot by the enemy that hit would do a point of damage... and with 4 guns on each Heavy cruiser, and another one on the Light Cruiser, a lot of hits were likely, especially with all of his ships being Rep 5! Indeed, I think he score 4 points of huill damage (out of 12 maximum) in the fiorst round. Ouch!

6 flights of Hishen fighters swarm the Star Navy Space Gorillas!

However, with 5 Star Navy AA batteries in play (1 each on the Heavy cruisers but a whopping three on the Light Cruiser), with their Rep of 5, every single one took down a flight, leaving only one surviving. that one's bombs scored moderate damage on one of Barry's Heavy cruisers. 

I launched more fighter flights like crazy, as his guns continued to pound my carrier unmercifully. His AA shot them all down. My cruiser finally got in range to fire some missiles, and the AA shot them down, too.  the next turn saw my carrier explode in an impressive fireball. That was enough for my cruiser which did the Shuffle off to Buffalo ("break off the Fight") on it's reaction test) before being similarly reduced to space junk. Bah, you Chimps became  Champs, and made my ships into Chumps!  One PEF resolved... three to go. 

We then rolled on the Completed Mission table (which as I think about it, was probably a mistake, as I think that only applies after the entire Patrol Mission is completed, not a single battle). This resulted in the Campaign Morale of the Hishen dropping by one, while that of the Star Navy went up one, and they gained a spanking new Class 5 Battleship for their command!

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Observations on Star Navy 5150

1) The game meets its design objectives well, I think. We played all of these games in about 3 hours total, which is very quick considering it was our first time out. Never having played a 2-Hour Wargame before, at first the method used for counting successes, testing against Rep etc seemed a bit odd, but once we grasped the concept, it worked fine. 

2)  The rules are indeed a bit generic for my tastes, which isn't surprising; they are designed to fight battles with large numbers of ships in a relatively short time, and I have little doubt they will do just that. Having said that, I'd definitely play again, probably starting a new campaign. 

3) The scenario/mission/campaign generation systems continue to look great; unlike land battles, scenarios for Naval actions, whether on land or in space, are often challenging to come up with!

4) It wasn't clear what belonged on the QRS for the game, but having played it once now I can see how those should be made up - part of it  (3/4) is generic, the remaining 1/4 specific by Faction.

Questions

1) What the heck use are Missiles, anyway? With a range of only 12" (vs 36" for Guns at full effect, and unlimited for reduced effect), fire limited to the front 180 degrees (vs 360 for Guns), countermeasures by AA fire (which can be overlapping from other ships within 2" of the target)), and even a final engine-juke evasive maneuver possible for ships which didn't use their AA for anti missile fire, they seem fairly worthless. We were sort of expecting a big effect from a hit after all those restrictions, but the effect is no different from Gun fire by the same class ship. OK, shields don't reduce the missile effects, but with all the other ways to stop them, that hardly seems to matter.

2) If you use your AA factors against fighters, can you then use them again in the Ship (Missile fire) phase of the same turn? It didn't seem there was any rule prohibiting this, so we allowed it.

3) Ships with heavy shielding are very hard to hit with guns (giving a role for Missiles, assuming they weren't so pathetic). We presumed the Shields could be used against multiple opponents firing at a ship in the same turn. Thus a ship with 4 shields is pretty much impervious to Gun fire from an unlimited number of ships, none of which carry more than 4 gun factors. Again, I get that's where Missiles would come in useful for the smaller ships... assuming there are LOTS of them!

By the way, here's the abstract Campaign Map used; the Planet being contested is the green marker in the 1,1 square. The grey shaded squares represent close orbits around the planet. The numbers are the coordinates of each of the squares, and are rolled for randomly with 2 D6 of differing colors when plkacing PEFs, etc.

  Star Navy Campaign Map

	6	5	4	3	2	1
6
5
4
3
2
1						@

As mentioned, I do think I'll proceed with a Star Navy 5150 campaign and/or a much larger battle soon!

Peter