Subject: [GZG ECC IV] After Con Report from Indy Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2001 11:19:18 -0500 From: Indy Reply-To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu GZG ECC IV - Indy's ACR The weeks before the con were increasingly busy, both with work and getting last-minute prep stuff finished. I managed to get just about everything I wanted done before leaving, but not quite all. In any event, the 'not quite all' wasn't a critical problem (mostly nuisance and annoying). Aimed to get an early start on friday for the drive up, but one delay led to another, and I arrived in Lancaster 20 minutes before we were to nominally open the door. Jon did not know of Jerry's plight (Jerry called me from Canada two nights prior to inform me of the situation) and was a little concerned that neither he or I were there yet. But I arrived, checked in, and filled Jon in on the Jerry situation (without going into details, suffice it to say that he would not have been able to get past the border patrol people in a legal fashion), and got unpacked. I spent friday evening sorting through the prizes (since I did not have time earlier in the week), trying to match up appropriate prizes with appropriate events, checking people in, and briefly socializing with as many as I could (many old faces, some new ones). Met a number of people from the list who I had never met before (Kevin Walker, Chris Deboe, Bob 'Magic' Makowski, etc). Ted Arlauskas was back from California. Jim Bell and Tom Barclay led down the Canadian Contingent. Many others you know from here were there (Los, Mike Sarno, Nick Caldwell, Asron Teske, Mike Ritchie, et al). Friday ended up being a late night, and I didn't get to bed until 2am (although I thought it was 3am since the hotel room clock radio was STILL set to Daylight Savings Time - I learned this...) Saturday morning I was to be up and meet Jon Davis and Aaron T (and Nick if he was able to get up) for breakfast at 7am. I dragged myself out from the depths of sleep to glance over at the clock: 6:49am - gak!!! No time to shower, dress, and still be on time! I grabbed my watch to make sure I had set the alarms correctly - and saw it read 5:49am. ARGH!! With not enough sleep, I had yet half an hour to nap. Tried. Failed. Got up, showered, joined Jon and Aaron for breakfast (not the crowd we had last year, but...). Saturday morning I was to play in Aaron Newman's 2-part EFSB/SGII-FMA game. I was involved in the EFSB part of the scenario. On another table was the boarding party action (the SGII/FMA part of the scenario). My job was to get the elite Earth Force boarding parties onto the new Warlock Destroyer that Bester and crew were trying to confiscate. It was a scenario meant for 5 players, but we were 1 player shy so I ended up running both the Earth Force navy (one Hyperion and an Omega + 'Furies) and the Q-ship plus frieghters and assault boarding force. Arrayed around me were raiders, Psi-Corps with a Shadow-Omega and the Psi-Corps mothership (we didn't really know it at the time; all we knew was that it was jamming ALL comms), and another Omega/Hyperion pair (run by Jim Bell; they were renegade telepaths out to stop Bester, too, but I didn't know that as the captain of my Omega). My jobs were multi-fold: stop Bester and crew, thump the raiders, and arrest any rogue telepaths. Oh, and prevent the Warlock from falling into enemy hands (whose ever those might have been). Early on in the game I made a long-range shot against the Psi-Corps mothership, scoring a threshold check. And during that threshold check, the Psi-Corps lost their jammer (score!), which meant comms were open again (so I could communicate with my co-hort who was running Ivanova's security squad and engineers on the Warlock attempting to prevent hostiles from taking it over). On turn 1 there was a fair bit of blood between ships. Turn 2 I lost my Hyperion to the Shadow-Omega beam weaponry (damn, it's nasty!). But in a few more short turns the Raiders were toasted, the Psi-Corps lost their mothership and had their Shadow-Omega badly damaged, and I had gotten the elite EF boarding parties onto the Warlock. For my part of the scenario, EarthForce was victorious (didn't know about the rogue teeps as they had very well behaved themselves during the ship-to-ship combat). I communicated our situation to my comrade on the Warlock and waited for the boarding party outcome to finish. In the very end, the EarthForce troops were victorious, which meant, according to the rules, Aaron N and Mike R owed us drinks (they said if the EF could pull off both victories, they'd buy us drinks). I'm still waiting for that Pepsi, Aaron! ;-) During all this I also coordinated with people getting their entries in for the miniatures painting contest. This was a little distracting; maybe next year I won't play during saturday morning. In the afternoon I was 'dragged' into playing in Mike Muller's "Clampdown" scenario as a raider (it was another EFSB game: raiders vs EarthForce) (originally I was going to do some administrative stuff, prep a little for my game,and get some miniatures paining lessons from Stuart - got one of the three done! :). The game started with us drug-runners trying to get some freighters off the board w/out the EarthForce interfering. Alas, they interfered (they didn't keep their noses where they belonged, danged EF!). We got out clocks *cleaned* (esp after they toasted my raider cruiser and then *boarded* our Q-ship!!). The sides were switched and play went much longer, but I went off to have a much desired painting seminar with Stuart Murray. He showed me a few tricks of painting that I hope to put to practice in the very near future (I'll never be as good as him, but if I can be better than I currently am... :-) During the dinner break between the afternoon and evening games we held a small awards ceremony to give awards/prizes to the winners of the painting contest and a few other categories we give prizes to (such as the "He Who Travelled Farthest" and "He/They Who Travelled Shortest" distance awards). This went well; I believe the winners were very pleased and happy with their winnings. :-) That evening I ran my "Siege of Sol" scenario: a Kra'Vak vs Human FT game in Sol space. The game was filled with 12 players, but from begging I some- how ended up with *16* players (a number of people had no other games they could be in, and this scenario was designed to be flexible, to add/subtract players as available). There was some chaos in the beginning because I had not had time to finish organizing the shipsheets into subfleets, and the two sides had to choose what subfleets they were going to run (each subfleet totalled ~1100 pts, give or take a few). The K'V had one brand new player (Larry E) who had never played a GZG game before; just dropped by to check things out; Aaron Newman thankfully took him under his wing and went over how things worked. I had my hands full trying to maintain some semblance of organization during the first hour of chaos. After that first hour, though, all settled down to play. And there I found we had *14* players - two had vanished, which meant some ships needed to be divvyed up (there were 16 subfleets out there). This was quickly done, and play proceeded. The K'V were represented by the K'V, all stock ships from FB2. THe Hu'Mans were represented by the NAC, NSL, FSE, ESU, UN, and NI. Only no one took any NAC. ;-) The NSL, FSE, and ESU ships were all stock FB1 ships. The NI were ships designed (and minis donated for the event) by Noam Izenberg. The UN ships were designs of my own, incorporating two weapon systems that are being discussed in the playtest group, so I'm not really at liberty to go into details on this systems (as things could and very likely will change before too long; these ARE in playtest mode, after all!). One was an anti-matter torp, the other a graser 'heavy' beam weapon. Throughout the game the players on both sides gave me a lot of feedback on the use of these two systems, which I will be putting in a more complete AAR for the playtest list and Jon T. In any event, by 9:30 (after getting a half hour late start due to the awards ceremony and an hour of organization) play commenced. Now, unlike Brian Bell's similar scenario from earlier in the day, this was cinematic movement, and I had the two sides starting closer together, so there was blood on turn 1! Not much, just with the lead elements, but they were engaged. Turns 2 and 3 the followed relatively quickly, but due to the numbers of players and ships, 3 hours had gone by before we finished turn 3. We had decided to allow ships to fire by squadron or subfleet instead of going back and forth one ship at a time per side. This DID speed up play, but still, there were too many ships and players; I should have kept it down to 12 max. Oh well, hindsight! Everyone still had fun, even if many were beat tired. In any event, at 12:30a the K'V decided to call the game. If they had been able to continue for another 2 turns, the situation might have been more in the K'V favor, but as it was, most of their large ships were moderately to heavily damaged, and thay had lost a half dozen smaller ships. The Humans had lost an NSL BDN, some other cruisers, and had a number of their big ships (eg, the ESU SDN) with some serious holes in them. After clean-up and socializing with some other people (as well as discussion of aspects of the scenario just run, feedback for the new weapons being tested), I finally got to be again at 2am. Sunday came early (well, I DID go to bed at 2am - technically it was already Sunday!) and I was scheduled to play in Dan's "Sundiver" scenario. This was fun: an ESU task force was sent to check out an FSE research station and get whatever info they may have been developing there so close to a star. Vector movement was the name of the game, which I admittedly am not strong in. I was teamed with Mike and Pat Muller as the ESU. Arrayed against us were Mike Hudak, Al Muller, and Bryan Gordon, the FSE (complete with armed research station and 4 squadrons of fighters, in addition to 2 DDHs, 2 CA, and 2 BCs). Our little force consisted of 1 BB, 2 CE/B, 2 CL, 3 DD, and 2 armed transports with 4 assault shuttles. Vector movement, as mentioned above, was affected by the proximity of the star: if within 12 of the edge of the table (which WAS the star!), you were pulled 3 mu towards it after movement. If within 24 mu, but more than 12, you were pulled 2 mu in. If within 36 mu you were pulled in 1 mu. Otherwise no effect from gravity. To make a long story short, we came in on a flank, the FSE dropped a wall of SMs on us, and we used the sun's gravity to help swing us around the SM barrage (most of us made it; one of Pat's DDs was vaped, though, and the rest who sucked up SMs were able to shoot them down with help from the CEs). However, this maneuver proved to be a bit disaterous as several of our ships had gathered up so much velocity we could not prevent them from splashing into the hot plasma of the star. Oh well!! Mike was able to get shuttles off, but we launched them too early; the fighters pounced on them and had several turns to fire on each shuttle before they could land (which meant they were all destroyed). All of Mike's ships were evntually lost (either to FSE weapons fire or by playing in the star), half of Pat's group was lost (he escaped with 2 ships), and my force (2 DD and a BB) was lost (one DD to the star, one DD to massed SM fire and the BB to FSE beam and fighter fire). Alas, I DID manage to skirt the star with the BB. Too bad I was the sole target, too. In the end, it's not a matter of who won/lost, but did we have fun? I did. That's all the counted for me. After the game (which went a little longer than anticipated) we claened up, I packed my stuff, hung out chatting with those who were left, then was the last out the door (we left the lights on as the hotel room building staff wanted to get in there as quickly as possible that afternoon and reset the room for the next event). The drive home was mostly uneventful, despite 2+ days of dire warnings of the weather. To the north it was bad. But to the south: rain. Once home, I pretty much collapsed. Still exhausted even now, but at least I'm getting sleep again. :-) Pics were taken during the whole con. It was funny: during many games people would move their units, then everyone would back off so the half dozen or so others who had cameras could take 'current turn' photos - I'm looking forward to seeing these soon. If anyone who was there wants to contribute photos to the photobalbum for next year's GZG ECC participants to see, SEND THEM TO ME!!! 4x6 size is perfect. ;-) Mk