Battle Station Assault!

Finally got around to playing the final battle of the Day One campaign today. Took a lot longer than I thought it would, but that was mostly due to outside distractions.  At any rate, after replaying the third battle the two side were relatively closely matched, with the Federation having the advantage. The victory condition was destroy 900 points of enemy models. The forces were...

Federation
Battle Station
NCL
oCL
2x Frigates

Klingon
C8 Dreadnought
D7C Command Cruiser
2x D7 Battlecruiser
F5 Frigate

I controlled the Klingon cruisers, Phillip the C8 and F5 (until later when he ceded control of the F5 to me). Zachary flew the Federation.

Zachary set up the station in a corner with ships forming a defensive line three hexes in front of it.  I set up the cruisers on the near side of the station while Phil set up further out. (sorry about the fuzzy pictures, getting used to a new camera)

First turn saw Zachary dress his gun line while Phil moved forward and I did as well, but more cautiously to see if Zachary would come running out or not. Zachary hit the C8 with a couple Phaser-4s, did a couple points of hull damage but not much else.

Phil must've gotten spooked by the big guns on the station as he turned the F5 around and launched drones at the NCL. I moved forward just far enough to plink at the NCL with disruptors.

One of the D7 got hurt enough for me to pull him off the line while the other cruisers moved up to get into the edge of the Phaser-1s range. The damaged D7 only took a few points of hull damage, but his shields got chewed up pretty bad. So I figured I could make some repair rolls and have it catch up with the dreadnought. Zachary kept his gun line in place (for most of the game) and tried to score some lucky hits with proximity fused photon torpedoes. The NCL accrued damage steadily.

I decided it was go time and move the undamaged cruisers up to take out the NCL after the drones did some more damage to and Phil focused on the station. The NCL went out in a fireball, but the C8 was starting to show some stress on her hull, but systems remained largely unaffected.

With the NCL gone I was able to focus fire on the station, which was all I needed to win. The C8's shield were still holding out so I was confident in a victory even though it was down to about 5 hull at this point. managed to take out a FF with the D7 in the back, it couldn't range the station yet. The other D7 that had been the D7C's wingman was taken out by the combined firepower of the Federation ships.

And here's the end game. All but one of those blue drone tokens hit the Battlestation for the SFU version of the Macross Mega Missile attack. It left the station with 8 hull left. The C8 took it down to 3, and the D7C finished it. Unfortunately the C8 also bought it with the stations dying onslaught of Phaser-4 fire. I tried to take out the oCL before the end of the turn, but couldn't get enough hull hits.

At this point I had scored about 1040 points and Zachary had scored 893. The Klingons with the game by victory condition.  If Zachary had destroyed another ship I would still have won by points. For the campaign, having won two of the earlier games and this one the Klingons achieved a major victory. They may have lost their dreadnought, but with the station out of the way further fleets will be able to push into Federation territory freely. If Zachary had won the scenario I would still have gotten a minor victory for the Klingons.  The most he could have gotten was a minor Federation victory by winning this game with a higher victory point total than me.

The game was enjoyable despite some issues involving trying to game with an active 8 year old.  I'm debating picking up the new version of Starmada and going through and converting the SFU ships to that format, though supposedly that will be done for us. I like Starmada Admiralty edition well enough, but the new version is supposed to streamline some of the die rolling. It gets time consuming waiting for the kids to pick out the dice that were successful for the next iteration of rolls.

Next game will probably be me teaching them how to play FUBAR with either 15s or 28s.