Hey folks!
Game went very well and was loads of fun. Big victory for chaos!
Alright so neither of us had played for like 3 years or so, both a bit rusty on strategy, but still a fun game. We rolled a fleet engagement, and ended up on the B deployment, (both sides kiting sideways on opposite ends of the board.) Perfect for me!
I ran the repulsive, 2 devs, 2 carnages, 2 slaughters, and 3 iconoclasts. He had an emperor, a tyrant, dominator, gothic, 2 dauntlesses, and then 2 squads of escorts. Swords and the ones with the lances I think.
Main theme of the game was very ineffective shooting phases! There were multiple occasions when we were both amazed at how little damage had happened. I once had both slaughters locked-on and at close range inflict a whopping 1 point of damage on a dauntless! Another time I braced my repulsive against what I thought would be crippling damage, only to remain entirely unscathed! Very goofy!
Anyway I got the game off to a great start. I had put the slaughters and iconoclasts in my rear deployment zone, and early enough that he took the bait and put a decent portion of his ships across from them. The main bulk of my force was in the middle, and the repulsive in front. First turn I AAF'd the slaughters/icons, and rolled crazy well and totally left that side of the board empty. The rest of my fleet raced directly for the back of his fleet, and caught the dominator and gothic out of position. I would say 2/3rds of his fleet was totally out of range to do anything productive for the first half of the battle.
First turn of shooting crippled the dominator, and then it took another TWO turns of my ENTIRE fleet shooting at it for it to die, lol. The gothic made a heroic escape with some AAF roles and rejoined the rest of his fleet. The first move worked very well, I had killed a ship, and my speedy boats were totally outmaneuvering his slow fleet which had to totally come about. I goofed a little bit and made a mistake which left my repulsive stranded. When his ships had finally come around and were a solid mass, I split my fleet in two to force him to go after only one of them. I should have had the repulsive turn faster, but it got caught and took a lot of damage over a couple of turns.
Everything worked out though, and my ships circled his from two directions and slowly whittled his forces down. My repulsive barely escaped with 2 hits left before managing to disengage. The iconoclasts failed in basically everything, wiffing all their shots and then dying to assault boats, but hey, I guess the assault boats didn't hit something more important eh? Battle culminated with the emperor exploding after 3 rounds of very concentrated fire, and it took out 3 escorts in the resulting explosion.
Very fun game! Thanks for all the tips!
