Send word to the fleet...

A quick change of course today, shots of the assorted fleets - it's so rare to see them deployed at full force I thought I'd take a couple of photos to see how they look...

First up, the Federation fleet:

I'm not a massive Federation player, but arrayed like this they do look quite impressive:

Next up, the Romulans - still some of the most impressive ships in the Star Trek universe in my opinion:

My Alternate Universe fleet, led by the Regent's Flagship:

My small collection of Klingon ships, highly effective:

A mix of ships from various factions:

Finally, my personal favourites, the Dominion:

Next up some of my favourite ships from the mix above, firstly the Ferengi D'Kora:

The U.S.S. Thunderchild:

Lastly, the Koranak:

There we go... I know a lot of people will have see the majority of these ships whilst playing against people in various events, but how often do you see them all at once?

Anyway, thanks for having a look - let me know which ships your favourites are!

Sela's Warbird Review

"All that's left now is Romulan. Never doubt that."

The Klingon Civil War grand prize, Sela's Warbird is a prize that's already drawn an errata from Wizkids, greatly reducing the effectiveness of the incuded elite talent - some people will say that it was needed, others that it was just another part of the game that needed to be worked around, like fighters or Romulan cloaked mines.  Anyway, we'll get to that shortly...

So, the ship itself - very nice paintjob on this one, the subtle difference in the shades really make it stand out:

 Admiral Sela, +1 captain skill and an effect that prevents the use of battlestations and scan tokens when her ship (or the ship using the action) is attacked.  This is an excellent ability, as it negates the one thing you can use to get quality attack dice against Romulan ships - battlestations.

She doesn't have an elite talent slot however, so I'm thinking that the captain version of her would be better, with mybe Mendak acting as Admiral.

 The captain version of the card, complete with an elite talent slot and skill 7:

 Movar is the other captain and he allows you to change any slot on your ship for one of another type.  Not add, just amend.  He'll have a use somewhere, just not sure where yet...

 Sela's Warbird itself is a very nice ship, its ability allows you to perform a double sensor echo at the cost of flipping over your cloak token.  This gives you an excellent trick up your sleeve to get out of any tricky situation.  Combine it with someone like Thei who gives you a free cloak action and you could land up in a completely different area of the board after two turns.

 The first elite talent, Klingon-Romulan alliance allows you to re-roll defence dice as a discard.  There are better uses for 4 points.

 Here we go, Reverse Course.  As written, you can ignore whatever manouver is on your dial and perform a 1 or 2 reverse manouver.  That's it.  No discard, no auxiliary token, nothing.  Put this on a ship with B'etor from the Toral and any ship in your fleet can do this.  It was awesome.  It was so effective at the UK Nationals that Wizkids have already amended it, it's now a discard... so a worse version of Full Reverse, even paying for the cross faction penalty.  Ah well...

 Tachyon Pulse - disable for extra defence dice, 4 points though...

 Tokath is a nice 2 point discard that enables 2 other upgrades.  Always useful if you have the spare points.

 Lastly, the generic D'Deridex, this time with one weapon, two tech and one crew...

 A final parting shiot of the Warbird:

 So, until next time, thanks for having a look!

IKS Toral Review

Straight from the Klingon civil war - the I.K.S. Toral!

Named for the son of Duras, the Toral was the Klingon bird-of-prey used by Lursa and B'etor to destroy the Enterprise-D at Veridian III, so without further ado, here is the review:

First up, B'etor:

 The ability to allow other ships in range 1-2 to use your elite talent upgrade is huge, the options this opens up are awesome.

Next up, Lursa:

 Cloak or sensor echo as a free action? Yes please!

As an added bonus, you can use either Lursa or B'etor as a crew if the other is the captain, whilst also boosting the captain skill by +4...  Together they are truly excellent.

The named ship, the I.K.S. Toral:

 The ability to add an extra 2 defence dice when uncloaked is always nice, very situational but quite useful.

The first of the unique talents, enemy of the empire is a 5 point disable or discard depending on what you are firing at... for what it is, I think 5 points is a bit much.  Only works well against Klingon faction cards so the chances of you actually being able to use it more than once is not guaranteed.

 Next up is interrogation:

 Even though it's a 5 point discard, the +3 attack dice can come in handy.  Most of the ships flown in my usual gaming group have at least 2 upgrades on them so I'll always gain the benefit of the +3 so, I'd be happy to use it...

Kulge... hmm... disable your captain to gain the option to have a battlestations action on your action bar... no.

 Aft Shields can negate 2 damage if the attacker is out of your front arc - I quite like this, costed well and you can cancel critical hits with it before normal hits... well worth it.

 Last up, the standard B'rel class, although this one has 2 crew slots and 1 weapon slot, so a bit better than the usual tech, crew, weapon you usually get:

So to sum it up, Lursa and B'etor are awesome, Interrogation, Aft Shields and the Toral itself are good, the rest not so much.

Thanks for taking a look, next up is Sela's Warbird!

Klingon Civil War OP3

Romulans everywhere...

OP3, the final OP in the Klingon Civil War series sees the Romulans trying to sneak past the blockade sent to stop them...

I have to admit, I mis-read the rules for the event and it cost me... due to unforseen circumstances, only two participants were able to attend so this was a very quick OP and we were both guaranteed to walk away with the prize ship and the grand prize - so a plus before we started!

Anyway, onto the quick write-up...

My force for the day consisted of:

Reman Starship (Reman Warbird) [36]
- Toreth 7 (Captain) [4]
- THEI [1]
Ship Total: 41 SP

U.S.S. Voyager [30]
- Jean-Luc Picard 8 (Captain) [5]
- - William T. Riker [3]
- Cloaked Mines [4]
- Hikaru Sulu [3]
- Amat'Igan [4]
Ship Total: 49 SP

Federation Starship (Intrepid Class) [28]
- Chakotay 6 (Captain) [5]
- - Pavel Chekov [3]
- Matt Decker (Admiral) [1]
- Cloaked Mines [4]
- Dorsal Phaser Array [5]
Ship Total: 46 SP

Fleet Total: 136 SP

The idea here was, depending on the oposing force, to either use Chakotay to get close enough on turn one to start attacking or to drop off the mines at the start of turn two and then cause a bit of chaos.

So, onto round one, firstly basic setup:

 A close-up shot of the opposing fleet:

 The start of round two, I deploy my cloaked mines (Klingon variety):

 After movement, my Reman Warbird and Chakotay's Intrepid destroy the Romulan Science Vessel:

 The next few rounds saw the Romulan fleet point farming by hopping about doing the weird sensor echo manouver...

 It was one of those games that seemed to go on with nothing really happening, the odd shot landed but not doing enough damage to kill anything, on either side...

 Even with Voyager at point blank range, nothing was getting through on either side - Voyager with 7 defence dice and auto conversions of battlestations is an exceptionally defensive ship, unfortunately it can't hit anything...  In hindsight I should have found the extra point to put Picard 9 on Voyager instead of Picard 8.  The extra defence die was handy, but the auto-critical result did very little.

 A bit of hull here, a bit of hull there...

 Eventually time was called and I managed to lose purely based on the OP rules, 27-80.

So, just for fun, we carried on the game just to see what would happen!

 Voyager and the Intrepid circled in, while my Warbird went toe-to-toe with the Valdore:

 I was now starting to use Admiral Decker to start dishing out hull damage to the opposing fleet:

 My Warbird eventually fell to fire from the Valdore:

 The Haakona was eliminated by Decker, the single point of hull damage each turn was starting to take its toll:

 The Voyager finished off the Valdore:

 At point blank range the Scimitar fails to damage the Intrepid:

 At this point we called the game over, Chakotay and the Voyager would have just run circles around the Scimitar taking a hull point per turn off with Decker until it went down.

So, all in all, an interesting game, ultimately won by my opponent before we'd even placed our ships on the table - a really well thought out strategy that I couldn't have done much against in the time we had.

Next up, reviews for the IKS Toral & Sela's Warbird!

Outpost Raid!

A quick report of a 3 player friendly game that was played after our last OP event, the aim of which was to raid a space station to recover as many mission tokens as possible before time ran out!

To acquire a token your ships needed to be within range 1 of the station at the end of the activation phase...  In other words, up close and personal.

So the setup rules were quite simple - two ships of the same faction, one 20 points and one of 60 points, so a capital ship and one support vessel.

Obviously, I had to use my Dominion ships, so the list I chose was as follows:

2nd Division Cruiser [34]
- Weyoun 7 (Captain) [5]
- - Remata'Klan [3]
- - Amat'Igan [2]
- Gul Madred (Admiral) [5]
- Shroud [1]
- Phased Polaron Beam [5]
- Ikat'Ika [5]
Ship Total: 60 SP

Dominion Starship (Jem'Hadar Attack Ship) [20]
Ship Total: 20 SP

Fleet Total: 80 SP

I'd never used the named cruiser before as I'd never used the attack ship, so first time for both!  Te cruise setup is essentially the one I use for OP events, with the additions of the phased polaron beam and Ikat'Ika...

Anyway, here are the pictures and a quick run through of the game, Dominion, Federation and Romulan... who would stand and who would fall?

 The map setup, with the station in the centre and asteroids surrounding it:

 My Dominion ships deployed in their corner:

 A wide shot of the remaining forces and their deployments:

 First turn, everyone rushes for the centre and I take my time, hoping they can hurt each other before I get there:

 This did give me a disadvantage on the mission token front, but at least I managed to get a decent shot in:

Both of my ships had been hit hard, and the Prometheus having a 360 degree attack did not help matters!

This turn and the following were quite brutal, I rammed the station with the Jem'Hadar Attack Ship (in true cinematic fashion) and proceeded to destroy my own ship and damage the station, my Battlecruiser was finished off by the combined fire of the Romulan attack fighters and the Prometheus... not before Madred managed to remove Benjamin Maxwell from the Prometheus though, how many lights do you see Captain?

The Delta Flyer had also been destroyed which left the Prometheus up against the Scimitar and the Attack Fighters:

 The Prometheus ended up slamming itself into an asteroid on its move:

 A move later and the Prometheus gets an shot off at the Scimitar, not enough to destroy it though:

 Another move and the Prometheus was now at point blank range with the Scimitar:

 One exceptional dice roll later and the Scimitar was no more:

Time was called and the Romulans came away with the narrowest of victories, one mission token seperated them and the Federation fleet, although had the game gone on another few turns I have a feeling that the Prometheus may well have prevailed against the now damaged attack fighters...

My Dominion fleet was outmanouvered and outgunned by both of the opposing fleets in this one, although the cinematic ramming of the station was quite entertaining.  I was so tempted to destroy the station... maybe next time...

Hope you enjoyed this brief report, thanks for having a look!