Stranger in a Strange Land

Our Setup.

I had the opportunity to finally make it up to Edmonton a few weeks ago and visit my good friend Jordan. We had the opportunity to play a 1000pt naval battle of Republique of France versus the Empire of the Burning Sun.

Typically, when playing a 1000pts or less I'll play on a 4'x4' board. It tends to allow for a quicker game and there is still lots of room to perform flanks and other movement-based tactics.

The bitterest of enemies. Obviously.
Notice Jordan's Kaiju T-Shirt... Suspicious.

Which is NOT really what happened in our game! Man, I'm loving the new French! As you can see from the picture above we had a fairly large open area in the centre of the board between the two large islands. My plan was to pop my fleet just far enough out to create a kill box in that open space, knowing the EotBS would want to try to board me, All Stop and wait for him to come at me. At the same time I planned on using my Furioux Scout Ships to create an advanced minefield that the EotBS would have to go through to get at me. With strength 7 mines, they aren't something that someone is going to laugh off anytime soon.

My final strategy was to advance my new skimming battleship up onto the left most island, turn broadside
and hope I got lucky and got x4 DR damage between it's new Experimental Heat Lance and the rear Lancette.

Overall the strategy went OK. Jordan rolled #5 on his fleet orders, which was to destroy all smalls and 50% of my overall fleet value and I got lucky and rolled Destroy all Larges (#2 I think?) of which, Jordan only had one; a naval carrier.

The game was TIGHT though! Like really tight! I did manage to coax Jordan's carrier into my heat lance kill box though which was lucky because I'm pretty sure that next turn he would have killed off the last of my smalls and he was already at the 50% of my fleet being killed mark, so it was a great game!

Can't wait to get up to Edmonton again and play the guys up there. Man, the stuff they are producing is looking wicked!