[Consim-l] Star Viking initial impressions & replay

[Markus Stumptner]

Fired up by the Grav Armor experience, I also finally got around to try
out my copy of another Arnold Hendrick game, Star Viking (I actually have
an original copy, not just a downloaded one). This is a very intriguing
game. Within the fairly rare group of games that have both space and
ground combat, it fits into the even more rare class where ground combat
can actually include movement on a planetary surface.  (At this point I
can think of three other games in that category: FASA's Prefect, GDW's
Invasion: Earth, and Avalanche's Imperium 3rd Millenium.)

SV clearly shares a lot of concepts with H.Beam Piper's novel _Space
Viking_, although there's a disclaimer floating around presumably for
legal protection. One player is in control of the military forces of
what is a frontier province of the so-called "Federation", a
starfaring civilisation in a relative period of decline. The colony
worlds in the sector cover the whole spectrum from some that have
degraded to a preindustral state ("Class D"), to others that retain
state of the art civilisation ("Class A").

The playing space in SV consists of a set of 9 or 10 tiles (drawn
randomly from 12 available to give the game some variation). Each of
these represents a complete star system through one or more "orbits"
that contain more or less habitable planets, space habitats, or
asteroid fields. Planets are usually subdivided into a few multiple
areas that units can move around in.  Interstellar ships and larger
insystem vessels (patrol boats and armed merchants) can maneuver
between orbits, smaller craft ("Fighters") have to be transported
between them.  Combat has a lot of similar principles to Grav Armor in
that all units are uniformly rated for electronic warfare, attack, and
defense.  These values range widely; for ground units from the 0-1-1
"Horde" units on Class D worlds (with a sword on the counter) over
rifle armed infantry, fighter planes and tanks, to the typical 4-5-4
or 3-6-4 Grav Armor unit, and for spaceships from 3-4-3 to the 7-7-8
Viking Cruiser unit (the strongest individual unit in the game). There
are also fortress units (tough but immobile), and starships can
purchase extra equipment (ECM, missile packs, and shields) that can
also be removed in lieu of taking a hit on the ship itself. The
federation has fairly powerful and expensive frigates, weaker escorts,
and can theoretically apply to build the massive battlecruiser, the
only unit able to take on a viking cruiser one-on-one.  (Fortunately
that is not usually needed.)  There is also a Viking home base that
has Class A technology and is beyond the reach of Federation forces.

Each system (tile) is rated for its total tax value, and various areas
in the system are rated for their plunder values.  The federation
distinguishes between federal forces (blue - this includes all
starships) and local forces (green - tied to the planets tech level).
In general, at the start of the turn, the Viking player only sees the
system tiles (and the units stationed there) where he has units of his
own. He thus is forced to raid blindly.  He can withdraw back into
space for free, but has then lost a turn for that ship.

A turn is simple: Ships can move to a different system, then all
systems that have both sides units in them have combat or withdrawals
resolved. The sequence of play for combat is: invader moves, then
units in the same area fire at each other (all damage applied
simultaneously), then the defender units move, then again both sides'
units fire. Typically units can move one area; some units can move 2
on a planet.  Combat on a tile ends once no one has fired for four
phases, so that a system can end up with units of both sides in it,
but that will happen only rarely if some units should end up badly out
of position; generally combat will run until one side is
eliminated. Then comes a random event roll that typically puts
political restrictions on the Federation player (the worst of these
being the Distant Wars event that requires him to hand over one of his
precious frigates plus whatever cargo it happens to have on board).
Then, both sides construct new units.  There are multiple units
available to choose from in each class, with subtle tradeoffs in
combat (and for ships cargo capacity) values, so the construction
decisions are also not automatic.

For the Fed side, half the tax money coming from a system can only be
spent on green (local) units in that system, which is a significant
restriction.  Also, the other half can only be spent on Federal
units. This mans that if the Viking player manages to destroy or
reduce the local forces in a system, they can only be rebuilt slowly.

During or after the combat phase, the Viking player can also plunder
areas where he has units.  If more than half the areas in a system are
plundered, its tax value for that turn plummets. (On average it is
slightly more advantageous to collect the taxes than to plunder, but
you can plunder even if you don't have political control over the
whole system - for which one needs to have control over the capital
area on the tile.)

Victory is obtained by buying victory points during the construction
phase; whoever has more at the end of the 12th turn wins. If a player
holds a 2:1 VP advantage for two consecutive turns in the second half
of the game, he wins a sudden death victory.  The Viking player gets 1
VP for one monetary unit, the Federation player 1 VP for 4 money.  (At
this point it may be appropriate to point out that the Fed player
starts with a tax base in excess of 120 versus the Viking home base's
tax value of 10).

---------------

So we started playing. The Vikings get a fixed (rather restricted)
initial budget, the Feds get a set of units to deploy across their
systems.  I bought a Viking Cruiser and a good cross section of ground
units.  I then steered for one of the Class C systems to try the
cruiser out against some initially harmless opposition.  I quickly
learnt two things. First, there was a fair number of local units on
the system's chief planet.  Second, although wealth is spread across
multiple sectors, political control of every tile rests only in the
sector capital.  That and the open-ended length of combat means there
is generally little reason for the defender to split his forces as
that will only invite defeat en detail; better to concentrate in the
capital for better defense and suffer the plundering except if
individual plunderers are actually exposed.  So we had the cruiser, a
Viking grav armor and infantry unit, and a raider detachment attacking
a Level C fortress unit together with a pile of tanks, infantry, and
aircraft.  The Vikings won, but with the Grav Armor unit and
detachment destroyed, and some hits to the infantry.  The shift in tax
base from Fed to Vikings was 8; not a lot and on turn 2, the cruiser
had to go back to the home base to restock with units for the next
raid.  For the ship deployments for turn 3, I decided that to get back
into the race I had to go for a more valuable world, preferably one
that would enable me to repair ships without going off the map.  That
requires at least a class B world. (On a class B world you can repair
the class A units, including the viking cruiser, even though at double
cost, and you can build raider detachments.)  So, I went after one of
these, and it turned out to be one that has multiple orbits, but it
was defended by a swarm of fighters and patrol boats, with one or two
Federation Escorts thrown in.

Now, there is an important aspect of being hit.  Since both your EW
and defense values drop (along with your attack value), so every hit
means two shifts against you in the next round.  As a result, even if
you fight weaker opponents, once you have a few hits, not only will
you quickly take more, but opponents' attacks will slide into the
range where they can possibly score critical hits.  And after a few
hits, thats what happened. Some patrol boat scored a critical hit on
my weakened cruiser.  This was bad enough, it would take me out of
action for another turn, but it happened after my round of movement,
so I had to weather another round of fire before I could withdraw.
And another critical hit blew my cruiser to kingdom come.  In theory I
could have built another eventually, or built a sloop first and just
attack the lower value worlds, but all bystanders agreed that that
would not get the Vikings back into the game. 

We talked things over for a bit and concluded that the outcome did not
happen because I was unlucky hitting a couple of worlds that happened
to have more than the usual garrison, but because there are a fair
number of local units for the Fed player to deploy, and so any random
world attacked will probably have enough units to cause some damage
which will seriously impair the raiding possibilities on the next
turn.  So things were looking pretty tough for the Viking player.

Rereading the rules after the game to see if I'd missed any balancing
factors I read through the comprehensive combat example for the first
time.  We'd played it correctly but the interesting thing was that the
Viking cruiser in that example didn't carry ground units but missiles and
ECM equipment; spending more of the scarce initial Viking funds on that
might indeed make the raids more survivable than on the ground units that
turned out to be not by themselves decisive. I then looked on BGG and
found that the comments are a bit ambiguous there. Someone claimed that
the Federation tended to score sudden death victories very early on; that
wasn't entirely out of the possible given our experience, but the phrasing
seemed to indicate that they might have ignored the restriction of sudden
death happening only in the second half of the game.  There was a very
clear comment suggesting that balance strongly favoured the Vikings.  So I
decided I'd do a second game solo, trying to start out with an upgunned
ship as suggested by the example of play, just to see whether there was a
chance of the Vikings winning. I'll post a replay of that soon.


Markus

Last 3 games played: Abensberg/Eckmuehl, Star Viking, WW I
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"We've got them now."  -- last dispatch to General George Crook by
General George Armstrong Custer