Ok, now I made this fleet a while back and have played with them many times, they were made to fit the rules I had written for an Alien race of bio-Ships, living vessels, with no real technology, just heavy chitinous armour, and basic weapons ( no lasers )
These things have no shields and no missiles, although I am thinking of doing some rules for a type of “bio-missile” soon, but even though they lack all these technological things they are very hard, they can take a lot of punishment with their extra armour and if they can hurt the enemy ships early on they can be hard to beat.
But, for the longer game they do suffer, as once their armour has gone they are in a bad way, every hit hurts them, and they can fall apart really quickly if you have a little bad luck.
Well I had a game this Monday night using a 1,000 point Alien Bio-ship force, and was going to take on a similar sized human fleet with all their dastardly techno-babbly stuff, and I felt good about the battle, my aliens were hungry for humans, and were about to make a mess of their squishy ships…
We decided that we would just do a simple meeting engagement as my opponent had never faced the aliens before, it seemed like a fair thing to do, as they can be a bit scary the first time you fight them.
For my 1,000 points I took –
1 x Alien Heavy Cruiser with extra chitinous armour, and the really nasty Bio Spitter weapon in its front weapons space.
1 x Alien Fighter Carrier carrying six bomber stands.
1 x Alien Light Cruiser.
3 x Alien Frigates.
1 x Alien Corvette.
My opponent took –
2 x Heavy Cruisers, one with extra engineers
1 x Fighter Carrier with extra engineers and carrying 3 x Fighter and 3 x Fighter Bomber stands.
4 x Frigates.
1 x Corvette.
So, the table was set, and the battle started, and very early on I started to take down his shields and started to hurt his puny human ships!!! ( I do think my opponent thought that the Alien ships were over powered and he was going to be destroyed very quickly, he looked very worried )
Turns one and two saw heavy damage across about half of his ships and with just a few points of armour lost on the alien ships, so things were going very well for me, I had actually managed to hit his Fighter Carrier with the Bio-Spitter ( which is good for me! ) but after all the excitement of actually hitting with the weapon, I only managed to inflict one point of damage and then failed to get a critical hit!!!!!!
Then I was close enough to get to one of his Heavy Cruisers with two flights of my bombers, I could feel the game was mine… his PDS took out my first stand of bombers in a deadly spray of laser fire, but that left him open for my second stand of bombers who could attack freely without fear of being destroyed… I rolled my dice and get a wonderful 8 hits, but then fail to get any critical hits, only needing 18’s, that really was an opportunity missed.
Then I hit the other Heavy Cruiser with a small break away attack force consisting of a Corvette a Frigate and my Light Cruiser, the two small ships striped the Heavy cruisers shields leaving it open for a deadly frontal attack from my Light Cruiser at almost point-blank range of 5”
I roll my dice, no hits… all two’s and threes!
Oh dear, this was not good, I should have won the game in that turn, or at the very least got enough critical hits to have crippled his force, but it was just not to be.
That I think was it, my ships just fell apart from that point on, I just couldn’t do anything, I made one final attempt at taking out one of his big ships, this time his Carrier, I managed to get a little bit of damage onto the hulking thing but not enough to make any difference to the outcome of this battle.
What was left of the Alien force slipped away into the darkness of space to lick its wounds and prepare for revenge.
It was a very tactical game, a lot of very careful maneuvering to get into good positions, but in the end, it was a combination of my poor dice rolling and my opponents good positioning and his slightly better dice rolling that gave a good victory to the humans.
We had some fun moments in the game as always, one point where my Carrier smashed into a human Frigate and fired a broadside at point blank range vaporizing it and all its crew, and then destroyed another Frigate with its forward firing weapons as well.
I still love playing with the Bio-Ships, but they can be hard to play and win with, they suffer more as the game goes on, they need to hit hard very early on and keep up the pressure and damage to win.
Next time I think I will bring along an Alien Bio Dreadnought, now that is a scary ship!