After Action Report: Hot Lead warmup

David is running a game for Hot Lead and he wanted to do a test run. It was a very good thing. More on that later.

I was the Admiral of the Manticore fleet (yes, this is set in Weber's Honorverse) leading 3 BCs, 3 CAs, 3 CLs, and 3 DDs. We packed them into a tight line formation with my BCs and DDs on the left in the picture and John's cruisers on the right.

We closed on the slow-moving Peep squadron of 1 BC,  3 CAs, and 4DDs (my suspicion that there were more ships was later confirmed when 3 more BCs showed up from the backside of the moon). Here I made a slight miscalculation on how the rules work and let the 4DDs shoot at me without being able to fire back. My defenses took care of the incoming salvo with relative ease. It became apparent that the line formation of the enemy squadron was a mistake because only 3 of 4 could do linked fire.

That error was rectified on the next turn when my BCs pounded the snot out of the trailing Peep DD on the second fire phase. Not knowing the rules, I went by the general Starfire/Full Thrust principle of picking on the small ships because they have weaker defenses than the large ships. On the third fire phase, I hammered the lead Peep DD. John, commanding the cruisers, pounded one of the opposing CAs. He didn't have the firepower to destroy it, but he did knock out quite a few of its systems.

Because John and I had done a weave pattern on the attack, my BCs were in close enough position to provide plenty of point defense assistance to John's cruisers and the Peep's return fire had no effect.

At this point, we called the game. Not because of the situation but because of the rules that we used.




We were trying out Saganami Island Tactical Simulator. These rules are designed for the Honorverse and I believe have the blessing of David Weber, the author of most of its books. These rules do an excellent job of simulating the ship to ship combat that frequently occurs in the books. You have the massive broadsides of missiles, the ECM that reduces the incoming wave of missiles. After the ECM comes the counter missile fire. Finally there's point defense as a last desperate defense. If any missiles get through, you have the stabbing damage that knocks out system after system. It very much follows the book. Too many systems and the ship blows up.

And that's the problem. The rules designers were so wrapped up in simulating Honorverse they forgot they are making a game. You see all of those markers in front of the ships? They represent the beginning, middle, and end of movement. When you are resolving the final fire phase, you measure from your middle marker to the end marker of your opponent. This simulates the time delay between launch and impact. But it's a wrinkle that you need to remember and the marking of all of those points slow the game down. Then there is the fire. It takes a while to resolve with the three layers of defense. I launched 60 missiles at the trail DD. 44 got through its defenses. And these rules call for you to resolve each one individually (unless you destroy the target).

This game just does not scale. It's basically one or two ships a side and essentially one player a side. More than that and you have two people waiting for one person to figure out how many missiles get through and the other person to then figure out the damage from each one of those missiles. As a convention game, it's a complete non-starter. We suggested that David look at using a slightly modified Starfire instead.

Simulator is very accurate. Too bad the author didn't write a game.