Ashes of Victory: Battle of XL-387-G: Epilogue

 

'It had been 2 weeks since the Dilgar had withdrawn their remaining forces from the system leaving the wreckage of their fleet in orbit of Ptarlack. The first teams to land on the surface had found widespread devastation. The Dilgar had not been kind, cities had been destroyed, their populations massacred in extensive, and thorough pogroms. J'Kon struggled to keep his composure as reports continued to pour in. They had managed to recover the Vin'Tak-Var, or what was left of it. The ship had been placed into a stable orbit of Ptarlack as the fleets engineers assessed the wreckage. It had initially seemed like they may be able to make temporary repairs and send the ship back to Homeworld, but the hopes had been dashed when the condition of the ships framing had been discovered. The Vin'Tak-Var would never leave this system, the same could not be said for the nightmarish images from the surface that J'Kon was sure would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life'

So, The campaign is over, and it was shorter than expected. The Dilgar received a serious beating in the final turn, and with the loss of their largest ships and the condition of the Centauri fleet we decided that The Narn Regime was victorious. 

As I was the Narn, I was quite surprised with them taking this as convincingly as they did. The Centauri are a terrifying fleet to face and the Dilgar are no slouches either. I think it was luck in having some favourable matchups, and of course, the Centauri and Dilgar gutting each others fleets early on with the Narn as observers. There is certainly more to a campaign than just fighting battles, picking them is just as important and I was fortunate to be able to, on the whole, pick mine, and get a priority level that favoured me.

What next?

Another campaign is sure to follow. hopefully with a few more participants. The current fleets look to be Brakiri, Pak'ma'ra and Earth alliance, with me piloting the Brakiri. I was tempted by the Drazi and Vree, but the new STL's by Tyrel Lohr pushed me over the edge into space capitalism, and I think I've settle on a suitable green. There will probably be some changes made to the vanilla rules to prevent a repeat of the short campaign so it is more interesting. updates as they happen!

The new fleet, with some friends

There will of course be some practice games before the next campaign, and I'll be sure to report back on them and my opinions on the various fleets. The Pak'ma'ra look quite terrifying off the bat, if a little limited in variety. 
I'm also planning on creating some of my own variants based on Babylon 5 wars ships. There has been some great work done already by Richard Bax but a lot of it seems to be for 1st edition. updating the ships should be fairly straight forward, but the priority system used in ACTA does handicap things somewhat as there is the distinct possibility a ship ends up either underpowered or overpowered. The lack of a points system is a major weakness of the system in my opinion.

Campaigns also provide you with plenty of opportunity to add character to the ships that take part. Its been very surprising as I've gone back over the games just how decisive individual ships can be, so I'm planning on some wikipediaesque articles about individual ships, starting with the unfortunate Vin'Tak-Var. 

Thanks for reading, and until next time, have a great day!

Main Picture: Model by R. Salcombe, Scene by Graham TG

Ship STL's by Tyrel Lohr and others.