As a follow-on to our previous battle report we had the aquatic zeon force in a partially submerged city fight (using our imagination for the water of course). This time against the crew of Space Battleship Yamato (2199 version). Yamato is well known for having dynamic fights and ever changing scenes, and having it fight inside of a colony, especially a submerged one seemed like it would be on brand for the venerable series.
In addition to the Aqua Zeon force from before, since Yamato is a very expensive unit, we added in a Gelgoog force and several Zaku’s all equipped with Antiship rifles. The odds were stacked against the Yamato crew.
(In this particular game we were not using Squad rules, but we did in subsequent games in the series)
A Black Tri-Star moves to the center point, while a lone Cosmo Tiger II takes the high ground, captures the CP and rains fire down below. (In this map we set a condition that you can only capture the center CP if you take the high ground, which was often a death sentence.)
Yamato does what they do best, BLAZING AHEAD FULL SPEED WITH GUNS LOADED
It uses Havoc to blow up the cover and begin attacking the Hy-Goggs who burn through Momentum. For a moment there, there was a chance that both Hy-Goggs with antiship missiles would get blown off the field.
The Cosmo Tigers begin weaving around the battlefield firing their lasers and capturing control points.
After 5 Cosmo Tigers make strafing runs one of the Black Tri Star goes down!
The Gelgoog team presses forward but the Cosmo Tigers luck their way out of being hit
Meanwhile the ship hunting Zaku team begins blasting away at Yamato.
Since we’re using the 2199 version which has a wave motion barrier, we realize that barriers in general haven’t been updated in a very long time. There’s a long talk about how we want to better reflect them but ultimately it gets put on hold for this game and later games in the test series. It’s been several months since we played this battle report, in the meantime we did update the Barrier rules which you can currently see in the core rules document.
A Cosmo Tiger in reserve ambushes and almost kills a Musai. (This is one of several examples where we realized we needed to put more limits on Reinforcements / Ambush)
A new Round, time for a Gelgoog Cannon to start unloading into the Cosmo Tigers
A Cosmo Tiger takes the high ground and tries to finish off a Gelgoog to no avail, their superior HP pool weathers the laser fire.
Yamato blazes forward, keeps the control point and blasts three amphibious units off the battlefield. In this test series we were demo’ing having [AA] weapons be free counterattacks, which was nice when dealing with superior numbers.
This was the series where we were testing updated warship reactions for increasing AA fire (+X hits on AA weapons and +X DEF vs Missiles) which also helped.
Speaking of, we got lucky on the counter attack and took out another Black Tri Star here.
A Cosmo Tiger finally takes out a Gelgoog, but it’s backside is open and it gets taken down later.
Another Cosmo Tiger finishes off a Gelgoog.
The last Tri-Star plus the Zaku Antiship team kept hammering Yamato until it finally sunk.
With Yamato lost is there any hope left?
Certainly not for Earth, it was carrying the Cosmo Reverse System!!!
Remember the Goggs? Well they decided to ambush this Round and torpedo the Cosmo Tiger on the enemy player’s home CP.
Another Gelgoog down
REVENGE! For sinking the Yamato
Cosmo Tigers unfortunately can’t handle melee
Melee death #2
Melee deaths #3
After Action Report
Overall this was a complete blowout on the Yamato forces and a bit of a shock. Yamato was king in other playtests so we weren’t expecting it to go down so easily, and relatively without a fight. Granted…..Zeon did list-tailor to be antiship focused but still.
As a result of this playtest we made several balance tweaks to Yamato, updated a few core rules for Warships to give Warships more options to increase their chance to hit with regular weapons and [AA] weapons. We also tweaked all the fighters weapons, and adjusted the speeds for jets. This test series was also prior to the Dunbine release which had a major update for all small units which make almost all of them either cheaper or with +1d10 Evade die.
As for Yamato, adjustments to the HP formula helped it a bit, and it sparked an ongoing conversation regarding Barriers. For future games in this test series, we opted for the classic Yamato (sans the Barrier) which held up better. This game in particular resulted in a lot of favorable balance changes to warships and fighters so we hope you enjoy them.
MechaStellar 