I have been talking a lot lately about Stars & Lasers and its future, what am I going to do with the rules? How do I see the rules in the future? stuff like that, I do have some ideas about the rules and their future but that is a conversation that may happen on here possibly sometime early next year!
All that talk got me to wanting to play a quick game today and I thought it was time for two old enemies to face each other again.
So I got some bio-ships out and threw them up against a few luckless human ships, it is always a hard fight when the bio-ships are involved, we will have to see how the humans do this time around.
The forces in today’s battle are as follows –
The Alien Bio-ships
1 x Bio-Battleship + double Electro-Pulse Lasers on a turret + a front mounted Bio Spitter
1 x Bio-Light Cruiser
2 x Bio-Frigates
2 x Bio-Corvettes
3 x Bio-Bomber stands
The Human Zeta Colony ships
1 x Zeta Class Battleship + a Pulse Cannon fitted to the turret
1 x Zeta class Heavy Cruiser
1 x Zeta Class Destroyer
1 x Zeta Class Frigate
1 x Fighter stand
2 x Bomber stands
These two forces come in at just under 1,000 points each.
Set up was simple with the two forces facing each other at each end of the table, I am not sure that the Human fleet wants to engage the enemy this time!!
Turn one sees both fleets start to manoeuvre into position with the aliens being more aggressive as usual.
One or two longshots are fired off from a couple of ships on both sides, seeing one shield go down on the human battleship, and a few pieces of armour being shot away from one of the alien corvettes.
The captain on board the battleship was ordering the other ships in his force to get around him and give him support, because he knew as soon as the aliens closed in his ship would become the main target for their attacks.
Turn two and both sides bombers started to move in to get into position for their attack runs, things were going to get messy very soon!
The alien light cruiser moved in to attack the human frigate stripping away all of its shields, both alien corvettes moved in on the human battleship stripping away all of its shields and did some light damage on the big ship, already the alien ships were starting to cause the human force problems.
The human destroyer moved around to fire at the alien light cruiser, hitting it with four missiles and all its forward firing lasers!!! The alien ship reeled in pain as it was almost torn in half by the destroyer.
The Zeta colony battleship turned slowly towards the two alien frigates its captain saw there was no point trying to keep any sort of distance, he knew that the closer his ship was the more damage it was likely to do…. But there were risks associated to getting closer to the enemy and one of those risks was the big battleship would also take a lot more damage the closer it was to the aliens!
The big ship moved closer and fired off everything it had and almost vapourised one of the alien frigates and badly hurt the other one, that would make the aliens think a little before getting too close to the human ship again.
It also fired at the alien light cruiser putting that evil thing out of its misery!
The heavy cruiser turned as well following the battleships lead and flew straight at one of the alien corvettes, once the big ship had stopped firing the corvette was no longer there… the aliens were in trouble, three ships lost in a matter of a few seconds!
Turn three and in come the fighters and bombers!! The lone human frigate in amongst the alien bombers didn’t stand a chance, it fired off its PDS and only managed to take down one bomber the rest ripped it apart, the humans did get a little bit of revenge as their fighters moved in and destroyed two more of the alien bombers.
On the other side of the battle the human bombers moved in to take out the last alien corvette, the little ship was totally ripped apart!
The captain sat on the bridge of his battleship and new that he had to make the most of the aliens reeling from their losses and he ordered his ship to move in to attack the big alien battleship, he had to hit it hard and hit it now!
Well gun teams on the human battleship hit the big bio-ship with everything they had and ripped of layer after layer of chitinous armour but the big ship shrugged off the pain, they did manage to take out the last alien frigate, so now the alien battleship was on its own.
What could it do against the remaining three human ships?
We may never know… the human heavy cruiser moved in for the kill sensing that they had to do something before the big creature could either escape or turn its huge firepower against them.
It only managed to do some more light damage.
The destroyer saw its chance to make a big difference in this battle and moved in real close and fired everything it had into the side of the bio ship.
The huge bio-ship almost screamed with rage as it took huge amounts of damage, it saw that it was in a hopeless position and fired up its strange alien jump drive and left the battle… the humans had won!!
Wow! That was crazy, three turns of crazy dice rolling and huge amounts of damage hitting the alien ships, at the end of the battle the human battleship had only taken light damage the heavy cruiser had taken none and the destroyer had taken a fair bit of damage but was still flying and dishing out the damage.
The aliens this game could not shoot straight and couldn’t stop the enemy missiles, nothing they did worked, this game it felt like their normally extremely tough armour had been changed with paper!!
Their bombers only managed to take out a frigate and they struggled to do that, not a great battle for the bio-ships.
But it was still lots of fun as always, it was good to get some ships on the table again, hopefully it will not be too long before I get them out again.
