Q'apla!

Played the second game of the Day One campaign today instead of watching the Super Bowl. Myself and sometimes Phillip were running the Klingons and Zachary the Feds. This game was anyone's game until something seemingly insignificant, a few lucky rolls at the right time, turned it in my favor. Unfortunately we didn't take pictures this time.  Forces were:

Federation Division 2:

2x Heavy Cruiser
1x New Light Cruiser
1x Old Light Cruiser

Klingon Division 2:
1x D7C Command Cruiser
2x D7 Battlecruiser
1x F5 Frigate

Zachary started by keeping his CAs in the center with lights on the flanks. Phillip and I kind of split them between us, but he scored some early lucky hits on one of the CAs. We both spent a couple turns saber dancing, but had a hard time landing hull hits, so most of the hits would just get repaired in the end phase. Finally in a position to push into overload range, Zachary moved his NCL forward and in two turns it was destroyed. The seemingly insignificant error he made was that while he did destroy the F5 that got the killing blow on his NCL (overloaded disruptors at 2 hexes). He should have split his fire and let the torpedoes finish the F5 instead of starting with phasers (which due to an untimely bad roll for him all missed, all 2's and he needed 3's) then finishing with torpedoes which generated about 10 more damage points than were needed to destroy the tiny ship. He may have gotten lucky with the phasers on a damaged D7 and taken it out along with the F5, which would have left me with a huge firepower gap. Even if he had focused on the D7 instead of the frigate he would have put me in a hurt. In the second to last turn he took out a D7, but left me in a position to destroy both CAs by turning to repair when he probably would've been better off turning about and unloading photon torpedo hell on my ships. End result was the Fed squadron only had a lightly damaged oCL remaining while I had a D7C and D7, both with hull integrity at about 50%. So, while damaged and having lost a couple ships, I still consider it a fairly big win for the Klingons that will set us up to have fairly close point values for the station assault in the last game.

The Klingons seem to have had some bad intel on the next objective though. They allocated two D7s and a D6 to engage a squadron that turned out to consist of a Command Cruiser, Heavy Cruiser, New Light Cruiser, Old Light Cruiser, and a Frigate. He'll have to destroy all three of my ships to claim victory, while I'm going to have to take out the FF, the oCL, and a third ship. If I manage a win on this one it's going to be by the skin of my teeth.