Quickdraw and I met at Gamer's Haven today for a big Halo game. We combined most of the models in the starter boxes for a total of about 1700 points on each side. I took the UNSC, while Quickdraw took the Covenant. We played the "Ambush" scenario, and in the roll-off he took the attacking force and I took the defending force. As the attacker, he had to divide his force into one main group that would deploy at the beginning of the game, and two flanking forces that would have a chance to come in later in the game (not unlike Firestorm Armada). As the defender, I deployed all of my forces at the very beginning.
It was a LOT of models.
I won't bore you with a salvo-by-salvo accounting of the fight; I'll just hit the highlights.
The UNSC did the most damage in Turn 1, although only one element of Covenant SDV heavy corvettes was destroyed. But the Covenant did take damage across several battle groups. Quickdraw was running one specialist battlegroup consisting of four elements of SDVs, so I focused fire on that as much as possible.
He was able to deploy one of his reserve groups at the beginning of Turn 2; they got in on the flank of a couple of my battlegroups on my far left flank.
This is a problem...these ships don't move like ships in Firestorm Armada or Dystopian Wars, and given the amount of "traffic" on that side of the board, plus the nearby asteroid field, plus the fact that the board edge wasn't too far away, I felt a little squeezed.
Luckily, I was able to start putting fire on the CCS from my flagship, the UNSC
Everest.
Things were looking good until a Covenant boarding party caused a Critical Core Breach on one of my cruisers. When a Critical Core Breach occurs, you have to add up the damage track of the affected vessel (15 dice in this case), then apply that number of dice at Firepower Rating 5 to anything within 8 inches. Any Wings are automatically destroyed, and boarding vessels are expelled 4 inches away.
Unfortunately for me, the cruiser was near a whole bunch of my ships, and none of Quickdraw's.
Before (the affected cruiser is at the bottom of the picture):
And after:
The explosion destroyed one entire (healthy) battlegroup, plus half of another battlegroup, to include my cruiser
Agurzil. It was painful.
Shortly after that, also in the boarding phase of Turn 2, we had another Critical Core Breach, this time on his CCS battlecruiser. I think he lost an element of heavy corvettes, and I lost an element of frigates, and more wings were destroyed.
As Turn 3 started, my two
Epoch heavy carriers worked towards his ORS heavy cruiser, which was also his flagship. By this point, the UNSC activations outnumbered the Covenant activations, so I was starting to work my forces around to bring his ORS under MAC fire while trying to think of where his second ORS would deploy. During the turn, I was able to land 4 Pelican boarding craft on the ORS.
In the boarding phase, my Marines severely outshot his security detail, and we had our third Critical Core Breach of the game. 25 dice at Firepower Rating 5. Holy cow. My nearby
Epoch took two hits, but managed to survive. The frigates in that battlegroup did not. Fortunately, nothing else was close enough to get caught in the explosion.
We called the game at that point. The destruction of his flagship pushed me over the number of Victory Points needed to win the scenario. He still had a specialist battlegroup that combined an ORS and a CCS, but was not able to deploy them.
Some lessons learned:
1. At higher point levels like this, there really are three battle phases: the Wings phase (bombing runs and Wing-to-Wing combat); the Battlegroup phase, which is the majority of the fighting; and the Boarding phase, which really doesn't come into play until at least turn 2 due to the range of the boarding craft. The face of the battle can change drastically in the boarding phase, as noted above.
2. Counter-board any of your capital ships that have been boarded, if possible. This is one of the cool aspects of this game. If one of your ships is boarded, you can send your own boarding craft to reinforce the security detail on that ship. This is limited by the number of boarding craft slots available on the ship, however; for example, the
Marathon cruisers only have two boarding craft slots, and if both are taken up by Covenant boarding craft, you cannot counter-board to add to the onboard security detail. I missed an opportunity to do this, which led to the Critical Core Breach, which led to my losing a battlegroup and a half in the ensuing explosion.
3. UNSC wings really aren't too effective against Covenant capital ships. Unlike the UNSC's Titanium Armor, the Covenant's Defense Networks (shields, essentially) don't go away after the element takes its first damage marker. Also, damage doesn't affect Point Defense; so even if a CCS only has one hull point left, as long as it doesn't have any Vulnerable markers, UNSC bombers will have a very difficult time getting through. They're better used on damaged non-capital elements, to finish them off and allow the battlegroups focus fire on other targets. Fortunately, the Wings phase occurs before the Battlegroup phase, so it is possible to orchestrate your attacks accordingly.
That's it...thanks for reading!
