Episode V: The Jawas Strike Out
Star Wars Battle Report for 06/22/2010
Darth Sillious has discovered a startling fact, through experimentation and careful observation: the other generals in his part of the galaxy really, really like to shoot him. In fact, they like nothing better than to kick his Dork-Side keester into orbit every chance they get. So, when last night's battle on the desert planet of Tattooed Knee loomed, rather than fight the inevitable, he decided to put some spin on the ball and make things interesting.
Each of the other players (Paulaeon, RD-D2, Admiral Conan Antonio, Chewzacca, Admiral Jakebar, and Dr'xureretue) built armies with 12 stars starting and 6 in reserve; only land units were allowed. To compensate for the slower speed of the typical land unit, we set up on a single table, started with our bases quite close together, and were not allowed to blow up other players' bases.
Sillious took a different role. His "army" consisted of a Jawa sandcrawler escorted by two dewback patrols. The Jawas had been scavenging some interesting shipwrecks in the deep desert, and their sandcrawler was filled to bursting with technical secrets of all kinds. If another player hit the Jawas and announced that he was shooting at half strength, the shot would do no harm, but would so frighten the desert dwellers that they would give up one of their secrets in the hope that they wouldn't get shot again. Each secret was worth as many points as the damage the hit would have done if it was full strength.
Antonio, Dr'xureretue, and RD-D2 based their armies around a four-star heavy hitter (21st Nova Corps' UT-AT for RD-D2, AT-TE's for the other two). Paulaeon, Chewzacca, and Jakebar had nothing bigger than three stars; Chewzacca's force was more of a small-unit swarm than anything else. RD-D2, who was using borrowed units (from Sillious, no less), had very high hopes for the UT-AT, which was Sillious' favorite ground unit. Paulaeon had requested a fast force for his borrowed army, and he was heavy on Republic fighter tanks and BARC speeders, which made him go, "Woof woof!" every time he mentioned them. Every time. Every... stinking... time. Anyway, the other generals had chosen forces that were fairly well balanced. The bases were in a rough oval with less than a foot between them. Sillious' desert squad started right in the middle, a prime target for everyone. The oddsmakers on New Vegas were giving very poor odds on him surviving the battle; somebody was bound to get belligerent and hit him full force before the firing finished.
Sillious started the action by bellowing, in his best Fezzik the Giant voice, "Everybody move!" The six armies converged on each other, and the shooting started from the first turn. On the left, RD-D2, Dr'xureretue and Chewzacca formed up, advanced, and opened fire, maneuvering as necessary to keep their weapons locked on target. On the right, Antonio, Paulaeon, and Jakebar's forces mingled like fish in a barrel, even stomping on each other's base plates in their zeal to get into point-blank range, at which point they pretty much stopped moving and just pounded each other senseless. Chewzacca initially made a push for Dr'xureretue's base, until he remembered we weren't shooting bases in this battle. He clearly has a thing for blowing up people's bases; we'll have to watch that.
In the middle of all this chaos, the Jawas first headed left, which seemed to be a marginally safer place to be. Tthey had barely made their move when their steel hull rang with the first of many half-strength hits, this one from RD-D2's big UT-AT. "Here! Take this flux capacitor and leave us alone!" they begged. Another hit shook them, this one from Dr'xureretue. "Take this illudium Pu-36 explosive space modulator and leave us alone!" Their attempts at bribery didn't work. They were surrounded, and their only real hope was that the other warriors would get distracted by each other. That, and their heavy armor plating; Chewzacca's AT-AP's scored on the sandcrawler twice, but the thick armor totally negated their low-powered hits.
That's not to say that they didn't get distracted by each other to some extent. By the end of the first turn, all six generals had lost at least one unit. Most of them came back almost immediately, thanks to a generous reinforcement roll and some lucky rolling for the Airborne ability. RD-D2's AAT force slew one of Sillous' dewbacks ("my poor little lizard!" he protested); the other dewback took on half of Chewzacca's army, and they all missed each other. Admiral Jakebar was taking advantage of his clone artillery's long range to make distant strikes, but not hitting much. Several rancors in the fleets of Antonio and Chewzacca were injured, and in our approved style, they wore their damage markers on their faces, to make it look like they were blowing their noses.
Another distraction was Paulaeon's unfortunate habit of referring to everyone and everything as a "dude." He and Jakebar nearly came to blows after Paulaeon said he was shooting "Jake's tank dude" once too often. Darth Sillious finally tried a mind trick on Paulaeon — "This isn't the word you're looking for." It worked the second time, and an unseemly brawl was averted.
Chewzacca now divided his force, half behind Dr'xureretue and half behind Antonio. This wasn't a bad place to be, since very few units could shoot at him, but it also made it hard for him to concentrate his fire on the more dangerous targets. The Jawas reversed their course and went right, reasoning that anything had to be better than facing a UT-AT, an AT-TE, and a dozen smaller units. This didn't get them away from those forces, but it did bring them into range of Antonio's AT-TE, which happily joined the growing array of units that were stealing the sandcrawler's secrets. The remaining dewback fell to Antonio's small units, but not before it bit Jakebar's damaged fighter tank and destroyed it. That was the extent of Sillious' shooting for the entire battle. Dr'xureretue's Republic gunship fell to RD-D2's fire; his AT-TE absorbed multiple hits, but just wouldn't go down. Jakebar and Paulaeon were both using a Republic gunship with a nearly-unhittable defense of 11, and both watched in satisfaction as multiple shots went wide.
On the third turn of battle, the Jawas found a narrow gap between Jakebar's army and RD-D2's, and scooted through it. Well, maybe "scooted" is too strong a word for a vehicle that has trouble outrunning a sleepy snail, but it looked like a good tactical move. At sandcrawler speed, though, all it did was get away from some of the smaller units. The big ones, especially RD-D2's UT-AT, continued to hit it and extract one technological marvel after another from it. To Sillious's amazement, not once did anyone try to do real damage, even to deny all those secrets to the other players. Maybe they had just finished reading the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs, and they thought the sandcrawler looked like a Tattooed Knee desert goose, if there is such a thing.
Paulaeon was completely immersed in his knife fight with Antonio and Jakebar; he took almost no shots at the Jawas. Antonio was battling with Paulaeon, Jakebar, and Chewzacca, but he still found ways to hit the sandcrawler at least once each turn, mostly with his AT-TE, and his score was mounting up impressively. Jakebar was taking hits on the flank from RD-D2, but he was focused on Paulaeon and Antonio. RD-D2 was shooting anything that moved, but his random number generation (that means dice rolling) was about as bad as you can imagine. He switched to using Sillious' black dice, now that the Dork Lord didn't need them, and things got a lot better for him. Dr'xureretue's big AT-TE finally succumbed to multiple hits, and his whole force was so battered that, by the end of the third turn, he thought he had been eliminated. He eventually found one fighter tank that he'd forgotten about, but that unit couldn't score a hit for him. Chewzacca wasn't taking many casualties as he shot people from behind, but he wasn't hitting much, either. And that's how things stood when the twin suns of Tattooed Knee went down and the battle ended.
RD-D2's steady shooting, and the raw power of the UT-AT, propelled him into first place, in spite of very poor dice luck at the beginning. Never give up! Antonio came in second, using very similar tactics; the difference was that Antonio had spread his shots around, while RD-D2 had concentrated on scoring kills for the extra points this gave him. Actually, this is the first time in three battles that Antonio even survived, never mind scored well, so he was probably happy with his results. Paulaeon and Jakebar were back in the pack, with Dr'xureretue behind them, a victim of RD-D2's ceaseless aggression. Chewzacca was bringing up the rear, handicapped by the low Damage rating of many of his units; he had a hard time scoring against anything with Armor, and that's what many of his targets had. Sillious, of course, wasn't even in the running, but since that's what he expected, it didn't dent his fragile ego. His one hit and one kill scored him three points, compared to 48 for RD-D2.
Aftterward, Jakebar approached Sillious and wondered why his army hadn't done as well as he'd hoped. Sillious replied with a quote from an ancient text on warfare — "No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy." Jakebar pondered this and decided that it must be true. Always have a Plan B and, if that doesn't work, be ready to make it up as you go along.
This is the first time we've fought a battle as long as four turns. It helped that we're now doing simultaneous movement instead of I-go-you-go, and it also helped that our bases were close enough that we didn't have to waste a turn closing the range before the shooting started. Near the end, we tried having two players work their attacks at once; this sped things up somewhat, but became confusing at times. Another innovation, which we'll probably repeat, was that Sillious asked each general to do his own scorekeeping. In the past, he did it all himself, which left him frazzled and sometimes slowed down the action while he made battle-report notes and tallied who shot who. This way, he was free to keep track of all the action and help people without disrupting the flow of battle.
Data recorded on 20 June
Year Two Zero One Zero
by Darth Sillious
Attack of the — oooh! Shiny Object!
Star Wars Battle Report for 08/10/2010
I think there is a limit to how much peace a galaxy can hold. If enough time goes by, a war is bound to break out someplace, and that's what happened last night in the Zantac Sector. We had enjoyed peace for nearly a month, but then a Separatist droid probe discovered a huge rectangular Shiny Object in orbit around the planet Wantoothree IV. This Shiny Object contained artifacts and relics of unspeakable antiquity (that means it was real old), and it went without saying that the Confederates wanted to keep whatever was inside. But the admirals of the local factions — Paulaeon, RD-D2, Chewzacca, Admiral Jakebar, and Dr'xureretue — all said, "The heck with that! We want those secrets for ourselves!" Darth Sillious, who was investigating the Object, replied, "Over my dead body!" To which the other five answered, "Well, okay, if you insist..."
We played with fleets of ten stars starting and five in reserve. The Shiny Object in the middle of the table was a pack of Pirates of the Mysterious Islands which Darth Sillious, in his alter-ego of Cadet-Captain Mike, found lying around the house. It had four stars and a Defense of 9. Anyone who shot it did damage as though it was a normal unit; whoever scored the most total damage on it would keep it.
Sillious' role was to try to protect the Shiny Object; he brought the big Colicoid Swarm (the only 5-star in the battle) and two each of vulture droids, tri-fighters, and Geonosian fighters, or "beakies" as we call them. RD-D2 again went with a four-shuttle fleet, with a pair of TIE fighter variants as escorts. Paulaeon was impressed with the hurt dished out by the UT-AT in our last battle, so he requested that unit, with help from a mix of land and space units, including three with a Defense of 11. Jakebar took an all-space fleet centered around his favorite, the Aluminum Falcon. Sorry, that's Millenium Falcon. Chewzacca went with a mix of space and ground, using the Nebulon-B frigate Warspite. Dr'xureretue also took a mix, with the Corellian corvette Masanya as his flagship.
When the various ships began converging on the center, Sillious had only one enemy close enough to shoot at, Dr'xureretue, so he shot him. The Masanya and the Colicoid Swarm exchanged crushing blows, but the five-star ship could take it and the four-star couldn't. Dr'xureretue lost his flagship and a fighter in that first exchange, and even though he got them both back quickly on reserve rolls, he wasted no time in begging RD-D2 for help. The other admirals held their fire, even when they were close enough to land some hits on each other; they were totally hypnotized by the Shiny Object.
Chewzacca was the first to probe the Object with laser fire, and he was soon hitting it consistently. This drew the attention of Darth Sillious, whose fighters shot past Dr'xureretue and took up firing positions on Zach's fleet. Here they stayed for the next four turns, blazing away for all they were worth and hitting very little. Dr'xureretue and RD-D2 caught the damaged Colicoid Swarm in a fatal crossfire and smirked in satisfaction as the big ship fell apart. It was never able to return to the battle. Oddly, as soon as it was gone, everyone lost interest in Sillious' other ships; he lost only one other fighter for the rest of the game.
Everyone else was focused on the Shiny Object, which quickly became surrounded by a mass of spaceships blazing away for all they were worth. The slower-moving ground units took up firing positions outside this mass of firepower as soon as they could get there. The admirals took a look at the situation from ground level and were amazed; it looked like a confused, impenetrable metallic jungle, with the fins of the Imperial shuttles sticking up above it all like shark fins.
In between turns, the younger players were examining our game room's new wall posters depicting scenes from Revelation, and these posters sparked some intense discussions about the future. In particular, they were talking about loved ones they expected to see again in Heaven some day, and about friends and relatives whose spiritual state they weren't so sure about. The reality of Heaven and Hell, and people's need for salvation, was really hitting home to them. Darth Sillious was impressed by their attitudes.
Paulaeon's big, slow-moving UT-AT took forever to get in place, but when it finally began shooting, its accuracy was pretty good. RD-D2's shuttles shot well, but he was under a double handicap — it took him an extra turn to start shooting the Object because he'd headed for Sillious first, and Sillious' tri-fighters made him a #1 target and took out half his fleet before the battle ended. Dr'xureretue was also held back by Sillious' attentions, although he was bouncing back as quickly as he could. The Dork Lord couldn't hit Chewzacca worth beans until near the end, so Chewie ran up an impressive score against the Shiny Object. But even that was dwarfed by Jakebar's fleet, which single-mindedly got into position and hammered the Object with hit after hit.
Near the end of the battle, the unspoken alliances between admirals began to break down. This was mostly a matter of the big ships not wanting to waste their second shots, so they picked targets almost at random. Chewzacca's Imperial frigate was badly damaged by a long-range shot from Paulaeon's UT-AT; it probably would have exploded if the game had run one more turn. RD-D2 landed a very lucky hit on Paulaeon's Squad Seven, but the nimble V-wing fighter's Droid was able to fix it. Sillious managed to run up one more kill, Dr'xureretue's Star of Tion, just before the battle ended. Except for his five-star ship, just about every unit was still in the game, due to generous reserve rolls. We played seven turns, which is a record for us. The smaller-than-average fleets may have had something to do with this, as did the lower-than-average number of players. But time ran out on us, as it always does.
There was no question who won the Shiny Object; Admiral Jakebar's hit total was 60, Chewzacca had 46, Paulaeon landed 24, Dr'xureretue scored 18, and RD-D2 hit for 13. The ancient secrets might have been worth fighting for, after all; they included a primitive submarine (Coleoptera) and an antiquated sailing ship (Panama Sun).
In terms of who did the most damage to their opponents, Sillious might have won that title; he took out a four-star ship, three three-stars, and two smaller units, with damage to two or three others. But the real answer to the question, "Who won the battle?" is, "Who cares?" In the end, it didn't matter. Everyone got the action they were looking for, the balance of power didn't shift at all, Sillious actually survived with most of his fleet still in play, and one admiral's Pirate collection just got a little bit bigger.
Data recorded on 11 August
Year Two Zero One Zero
by Darth Sillious
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