[Consim-l] Star Viking initial impressions & replay

[Mike NotSpecified]

Great post!  Very interesting game it sounds like, will have to look for it.

Not at all in the same class, but "Buck Rogers in the 21st Century" includes 
both movement on different planet's surface and travel between the planets. 
 Even better, the planets themselves move.  An enemy planet on the other end 
of the solar system that would have to telegraph a strike by putting their 
fleet in transit can slowly come into range where their fleet can hit your 
planet before you can react.  Not enough to make it a greet game, but an 
interesting mechanci that shows it can be done....


On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:31:52 +1030 (CST)
  Markus Stumptner <mst at cs.unisa.edu.au> wrote:
>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
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "We've got them now."  -- last dispatch to General George Crook by
> General George Armstrong Custer
> 
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