To start with, we didn't bother balancing points, use TAC cards or have hard points or upgrades - this was a simple "put 'em down, line 'em up 'n' shoot" type of engagement, so not really exploiting much of the depth of these ships (and believe me, there's a lot to these new ships... :-) ). It also leaves some things for you all to speculate about before release....what? A tease? Me??? No!! ;-)
OK, so you all know what the ships look like (if not, you need to look at yesterday's blog post!). We played on the 4x4 Proteus demo board used at Claymore in 2014, with the Aquan's placing first after the Directorate surprisingly won initiative.
The Directorate went first, and activate the Turmoil R&D cruisers, which made a hard burn forward towards the local asteroids, and lined up the Sulis Heavy Cruisers with their experimental (and sometimes dangerous) Compressor Beam Cannon. Unfortunately being so new, the crew were obviously not used to firing with them, so they failed to hit.
In reply, the Aquan Shiva gunships dashed up the flank and laid some beam fire into the nearest Turmoil, taking a crew point and giving it a Hazard marker.
Now it was payback time from the Directorate Gunships - moving up, they fired their weapons (the same as the cannon on the Persecution Dreadnought!) into one of the Shivas.
Exceeding the CR, the gunships blew a chunk of the hull into space, along with a whole lot of fish-men. As the Gunships were packing Decimator warheads, the Shiva was forced to take an immediate disorder test, which after a spectacular failure, resulted in the disorder of the squadron!
The Aquans took revenge by toasting a Liquidator Frigate.
The Anarchist waiting until the end of the turn before making its move, and didn't make much of an impression in the first turn...biding its time, I felt...
Likewise the Sulis had a quiet early start to the game, just making a move forward.
Not wanting to go through every turn in precise detail, here are some moments through the next turns.
Liquidator frigates making a hard port turn to take out some Chimaeras.
Turmoils hiding behind an asteroid field....
The Anarchist taking fire from the Oannes...
The Anarchist takes some more damage as the two Sulis cruisers pass by in pretty bad shape.
...and here's why - the remaining Annihilation doing what it does best...unfortunately its squamate was vaporised by the Shivas.
The Oannes and Anarchist trade blows as they part ways.
The remaining Sulis trying to escape the Annihilation's attention.
The Turmoils took some more damage from the Chimaera Frigates before they dealt with them.
The end of the game as we called it - The Aquans took a beating, but the Oannes was almost undamaged, compared to the Anarchist which was quite beaten up. The Turmoils were in good shape and the remaining gunship was untouched, unlike the Sulis which was decrewed and damaged.
Of course, had we chosen hard points and upgrades, the Aquans hadn't forgotten about their bombers (!), and we'd used battle logs and TACs, the outcome may have been different. However, this was a bit of an excuse to see the new models in action, rather than be a proscriptive battle report.
Despite this, I hope you enjoyed seeing some more of the gorgeous new models coming soon in the Return of the Overseers 2-player start boxed set (Shipping from January 28th from the Spartan Store, but also generally available in stores a little in advance of that).
