I had a little spare time today so I thought that I would get a quick game of Stars & Lasers as I haven’t had a game for a while, I thought that it would make a nice change from writing rules!
I didn’t want to just set up a few ships and have a straight fight so this time I thought I would try a simple scenario that I have been thinking about for a while, this was going to be a first run through of the scenario so I had no idea if it was going to work.
A small Bio-ship fleet are attacking a lone leviathan within a debris field, the leviathan has one of its three frigates with it and the other two will arrive at the beginning of turn three ( they have been off getting supplies for the leviathan ) hopefully the leviathan will still be there when they arrive.
The leviathan’s normal fighters are of no use against Bio-ships as they don’t use missiles and they do not have any bombers with them, so they will not be launched during this fight.
Can the leviathan survive against the aliens or will the leviathan and all its squishy life forms on board be added to the bio-ships menu?
The scenario is meant to be played on a smaller table than I normally use, this is great as I do not have access to my big table any more, I am still trying to acquire a 6×4 board to mount on my new smaller table, but for now I only have a 4’ x 2’6” table play area so this scenario should work well on it.
The starting forces are as follows, the Human fleet:
1x Leviathan with a Plasma Cannon Turret, 2x fighter and 2x fighter bomber stands
Plus its 3x Frigate escorts, one at the beginning of the battle and two more on turn three.
The Bio-fleet:
1x Bio Battleship
2x Bio Light Cruisers
3x Bio Frigates
3x Bio Corvettes
So the initial set up saw the bio-ships coming onto the table at one corner and the leviathan and its one starting frigate close to the centre of the debris field.
The three bio-corvettes raced to the left of a section of the debris field hoping to get around and behind the human leviathan, all the rest of the bio-ships turned slightly and headed straight for the leviathan.
The human frigate and the leviathan slowly turn around some debris and fired everything they could at the bio-ships, the leviathan put loads of damage onto one of the small bio-corvettes, then they both fired off a volley of missiles at the oncoming bio-ships.
Turn two and three of the human fired missiles hit their targets getting past the bio-ships chitin-casters ( PDS ) and destroying the already badly damaged bio-corvette and badly damaging one of the bio-light cruisers.
The two remaining bio-corvettes continued to race around the debris to try and get behind the enemy ships, one even fired off a couple of shots but they only managed to hit some of the debris floating around the area.
The two bio-light cruisers moved forward and fired off some shots from their electro-pulse batteries but only managed to take down a few of the huge ship’s shields.
Then the leviathan powered forward and pounded the bio-light cruisers!!
When the leviathan stopped firing the two light cruisers were no longer a threat, they spun slowly away, dead.
The remaining bio-ships reeled from the shock that those two ships dying caused… they now wanted revenge!
The bio-battleship and the three frigates moved in to hit the leviathan stripping aways the big ships shield’s and hammering the ships armour, the big ship rocked from the impacts.
Turn three and leviathan’s engineers couldn’t get its shields back up, but it two remaining frigates just arrived and are rushing to help the big ship.
The two flights of bombers moved in to attack the bio-battleship hoping to hurt the monstrous looking ship, but only managed some light damage.
Then the bio-battleship moved closer to the leviathan hitting the big ship with everything it had, ripping heavy armour from the side of the big ship, then reached out with its tentacles and pulled itself up to the leviathan and its crushing claws started to rip the big ship apart!!
Its claws ripped into a power conduit of some sort and a huge explosion ripped through the big ship causing huge amounts of damage… this wasn’t looking good for the leviathan and its crew.
Turn four leviathan’s engineers managed to get its shields back up but that will not help with bio-ship eating through its side!
Before the fighter bombers could do anything all the bio-ships that were within range hit them with their chitin-casters and only managed to take out one bomber! Oh that could be a problem for the bio-ships ( that was eight PDS shots and only one hit! )
The bombers hit the alien ship hard but didn’t manage to hurt it enough to get it to release the leviathan…
The bio-battleship continues to bite and claw into the side of the leviathan ripping huge chunks of the ship away in its anger and fury, causing more explosions on board the big ship destroying the leviathan’s engines!!
Things are not looking good for the crew, they look like they are definitely on the menu…
The leviathan had lost all its weapons from one side of its hull but it still had its turrets and the gun crews were firing with everything they had at point blank range to try and kill the bio-ship that was eating their ship.
The bio-battleship took several hits which made the big ship almost pull away, but it held on with its tentacles and ignored the pain and kept eating the human ship, it could see that the leviathan was almost finished it just had to hold on a little longer.
Two bio-corvettes and a frigate flew towards the in coming human frigates, but all they managed to do was take down a couple of shields.
The crews of the two frigates could see the damage the alien ship was doing to the leviathan and new that they had to do something now if they were to save the crew on the big ship, so they moved in at full speed and fired everything they could at the bio-battleship…
The bio-battleship suddenly stopped clawing and ripping at the leviathan, its tentacles slowly released the human ship, the thing was dead and started to slowly drift away.
Seeing this the remaining bio-ships quickly turned and left the area.
Well that was crazy! Somehow the human fleet won, I decided to call it finished when the bio-battleship was destroyed as the aliens had nothing left on the table that could hurt the leviathan, they didn’t have enough firepower to get through the big ships shields nor do they have missiles, so it was over for them.
But it was so so close, the leviathan was down to just two hull points left at the end, it had almost been destroyed by the bio-fleet.
The claws and teeth of the alien ship caused only four points of damage, but they got three critical hits and then cause a ton more damage, I did think it was going to go bang! But somehow it held on.
It really was a crazy game, with no missiles the aliens needed to take down loads of shields on the big ship and then all its armour before it did any damage to the leviathan, so getting in with the tentacles and claws was the only way they were going to destroy it.
I will try this again but with a normal human fleet and see if they can do any good against the leviathan, it could be interesting as they do have missiles and of course special weapons so it should be a slightly more even fight.
