Last saturday, I had a game of Pax Stellarum with a friend. It was a medium sized game, at 1550 points. I played the Centauri and he played the Narn.
He had initiative, so I had to deploy first. I left a good part of my forces on reserve. He deployed his entire fleet on the table, facing my flagship and its escorts through a narrow gap between 2 asteroid strips.
(my reserves)
A very important aspect of Pax Stellarum is to keep an eye on where each terrain feature is heading to, as all terrain moves around the table each turn at a pattern (speed and direction) determined previous to the beggining of the game.
This is going to influence your movement, as you have to carefully plan your tactical options, according to how the table is going to look like on the next turns.
For instance, the 2 asteroid strips seen below where slowly closing in to each other, so racing into my opponent could leave me trapped with no room to maneuver if he decided to surround me by taking to my right flank. So I choosed to divert more power to maneuvering jets so I could turn sharper, and so I headed to my right without ever putting myself between the asteroids.
As I maneuvred, the Octurion took its aim at a G`Quan, pouring fire from its strong broadsides down the Narn scum, managing to score a critical hit on its sole Target Control System, as well as reducing its Shields and Hull a bit.
Here I believe the Narn armada found itself in a crossroads. Should they they try to chase my fleet from the rear (thus risking getting caught between the asteroid strips as they advanced toward one another), or should they head for where I was heading and then fight my fleet face to face? Or perhaps they could split forces and let the small, fast ships chase me from the rear.
The Narns ended up avoiding the asteroids, too, and set course to rendezvous with the Centauri close to the terran planet on the middle of the table.
On the second turn, my reserves arrived, jumping out of Hyperspace right at the back of the Narn fleet, and began punishing it. The already damaged G`Quan didn`t last long, and the other one maneuvered to face the 2 Primus, exchanging heavy fire all the way.
The Narn redirected almost all its forces to counter my reserve detachment, leaving the Bin`Tak Battleship unescorted and alone to face my flagship and the squadron of Vorchans backing it up.
A poor ramming action costed the Narn an entire squadron of Sho`kos frigates, while only inflicting light damage on a Primus in exchange.
Meanwhile, the Bin`Tak was under heavy fire by the Octurion and its escorts, and when its Shields Generator went down, a series of critical hits where scored, leaving the enemy flagship in considerable danger of destruction.
(the crippled flagship: Shields down, Prow and Starboard weapons out of action, one Target Control System non-operational and Engines and half capacity)
The Bin`Tak maneuvered away from my flagship. I sent the vorchans at full speed to chase it down, but the enemy fleet - which had already failed its morale check for total hull loss - was prepearing to jump into hyperspace and disengaged before I had a chance to finish the Bin`Tak off.
End of game, the Centauri are victorious, in a somewhat easy battle, since my opponent was playing Pax Stellarum for the first time, so I had a huge advantage here, evidently. Hope to play more space battles soon!
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