MEK OP Game Night: Space Empires 2v2

After the previous attempt to play Space Empires: Close Encounters, I decided it would be more prudent to try team play, to avoid the "3 versus 1" dynamic that can emerge in a free-for-all. (Once one player starts to lose fleets, everyone wants to show up and snag some undefended colonies!) We played with diagonally seated teams, the more offensively-oriented of the configurations. I played with first-timer Jarrett "Sherlock" Locke (green and blue), and Kyle and Kim played as the other team (red and yellow). Empire Advantages are

• Green: +1 attack when attacking, -1 attack when attacked
• Blue: Immunity to black holes, can always use slingshot
• Yellow: Adaptive, gains better bonuses the longer combat continues
• Red: Rolls two dice for experience checks, uses better result

Opening moves saw Red take an aggressive expansion strategy, moving colony ships and the flagship along with scouts despite the risk of a black hole. The other three players took a slower approach, and Blue and Yellow focused on building up a network of pipelines for faster movement.

After two turns, Red is in the lead with 5 colonies.

Red's expansionist attitude extended into the border zone, and turned up three mineral markers. The Green side of the border was less rewarding. (I've just hit the Danger at the top and lost a scout!)

Notice two Red colonies about to build up on the border.

The lure of all those resources was enough to provoke outright hostilities. Green pushed its flagship forward into the neutral zone, staking a claim to the resources. Red, with only scouts in the region, quickly scraped together a fleet of destroyers and the flagship to challenge the claim. The battle results in a moderate victory for Green, as Red loses both destroyers in exchange for a fighter, before retreating with the flagship.

Green's reinforcing fleet is a carrier and two fighters.

Meanwhile the opposite side of the board looks like this:

Bug-infested space rocks, stay away!

At this point, Blue swung to hit Red in the exposed rear while Red tried to shut down the invasion with bases and cruisers. Rather than pulling back to regroup, Green pushed deeper into Red territory-- running into a hard line of three cruisers which quickly drove off the small invasion force. Meanwhile, a reinforcing Green group met the Red flagship with a fully loaded carrier... and lost.

Aftermath of the Green attack, retreated to cover a miner swiping those resources!

This came at the price of completely ignoring Blue, which methodically blockaded two colonies and wiped out one of them. At the conclusion of the game, the board looked like this:

That's my daughter Molly, surveying the wreckage.

If you look closely, you can see Blue's incursion into Red space, the retreating Green fleet, and two Yellow fleets about to take pressure off Red. This is where we called it, after seven turns and about five hours. I think the attack just about sufficed to remove Red's head start, but I still regard this situation as fairly balanced and able to swing both ways. Yellow has taken no losses and has a very nice Empire Advantage for long end-game battles.

Kyle and Kim are already planning for a rematch, and want a copy of the game to plot new strategies!

MEK OP Game Night - Space Empires: Close Encounters

For this weekend we played a four-way game of SE: Close Encounters, the expanded version of Space Empires: 4X. With two new players, the obvious decision was to put them both on the same team and then harshly school them in the efficiency of early offensive action! As it turned out, they pretty much figured that out on their own.

I used most of the optional rules, but without ground combat or unique ships. In particular, we used "More Aliens" to make home system exploration a little more dangerous. We used instant upgrades, which undercuts some of the authenticity of the game as an empire simulator, but feels necessary when the game needs to finish in a more limited time frame. If people know that ships upgrade even while on the offensive, I figure that makes offensive action that much more appealing.

Player teams were arranged diagonally across the table:

Red - Reba (playing something that involved extra retreating)
Yellow - me (playing Celestial Knights, double shots first round)

against

Blue - Jonathan (playing Immortals, -1 damage per round)
Green - Zach (playing Star Wolves, bonus to small vs large ships)

Initially we did all turns simultaneously. Everyone lost a scout to the planet of aliens, and I figured that would give everyone a chance to try out the combat system in a controlled environment. But as it turned out, no one but me even bothered to go after them...

First blood started on the Red vs Blue border. The Red forces had discovered a space wreck, and Blue had amassed a small CV force with fighters that we assumed was going after one of the two barren planets along the border. Instead, it skipped right past the aliens to grab the wreck, trashing the Red scout that had been left as a garrison.

At that point, Blue decided to just keep going and see how far a single carrier could get. With three new colonies on the border, there were multiple Red targets available. One of them threw up a hasty defense base, but the others had only shipyards in orbit. The fighters bypassed the base, and neatly eliminated a colony.

The second colony down the line was defended by a flagship, DD, and SY. After destroying the Red forces, at the cost of all three fighters, the Blue fleet settled in to blockade the system. Meanwhile, Green took advantage of the situation to send in a four-destroyer squadron along the other side of the Red border.

I had been tied up with some aliens, but did my best to make a run against the Blue systems with a force of 4 cruisers, 1 DD, 1 SC, and a flagship. Most of my research was poured into movement, to provide faster relief. Unfortunately, one of the two deep-space systems I moved through turned up... a Doomsday Machine! It ate my scout, destroyer, and a cruiser before being terminated. My weakened Yellow fleet pushed into Blue space and destroyed a colony. All this by the end of phase 7.

At that point time was running low. We decided to call the game after the next turn set. With a choice between pushing on toward the homeworld, and stopping to kill more colonies, I made the worse decision. The colony I decided to attack was defended by a base, and by this time Blue had +2 defense tech. When it didn't go down to the initial Celestial Knight charge attack, I knew it was over. Each subsequent round consisted of it ignoring a single point of damage from the cruisers, while slowly picking them apart. Immortals for the win!


Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, the Warhammer folks were pitting an implausible alliance of Orks and Necrons against a stilll more implausible Imperium/Chaos alliance. I dropped by between turns to witness the occasional WAAAGH! I'll let Walley describe the outcome:

We played a 2000 point battle. This is on the large side for games, Basically the largest I feel can be completed in a reasonable time.

The scenario called for each of us to have an objective placed in our deployment zone. This was the primary objective. Secondary objectives were also used in the scenario, such as killing the first squad and the enemy commander. These objectives yield victory points.

Orks and necrons went first, and the orks quickly redeployed from the slow Dark Angel Space Marines on the left flank and concentrated on the more experienced and mobile Chaos Marines on the right. This went well for the most part, but the game swung evenly back and forth. Orks lost their outriders to shooting, and a failed charge left their infantry exposed in the center of the board. Over all, the orks fought well in melee,but were unable to survive the subsequent counter-charges from the marine melee specialists. The necrons spent most of their game shooting at the heavily armored Terminators, eventually destroying them. And Robert's near-sighted Dreadnought finally landed a shot that killed the ork monster truck Battlewagon. 

the game ended after turn 4, with a difference of 1 victory point. Neither side had claimed the other's objective, and each side had killed one commander. However, the marines had killed an over-eager squad of Deff Kopta pilots, giving them first blood. Thus the Marines won a pyrric victory.

Next week I will not start this size game after 8 pm :)